Anything but a blueprint
As a motivated student and human, I often established goals for myself — along with step-by-step plans of action for reaching them — whenever I found something new to strive for. I believed heightened focus and clarity would come as a result of my preemptive planning — which in turn would theoretically better equip me to conquer the work ahead. Foolproof, right? Wrong. I’ve found these supposed blueprints for success only serve to do the opposite, wrecking both my productivity and joy via the restrictions that are inevitably part of them. So I stopped following them. Here’s why.