Scott Adams speaks often of his idea of Systems vs. Goals. While I don’t have any particular reason to believe Scott Adams about anything, especially given his nihilistic streak, the idea strikes a chord with me, and also makes me think of Taleb’s concept of optionality. Taleb’s optionality is the idea that it is better to have bounded loss and unbounded gains. Scott Adams’ gives the example of having improved his writing skills without any particular goal in mind resulting in him getting lucrative speaking gigs.
I have maybe one system going right now, which is to study the classics, both the languages and the texts.
One other idea from Adams’ post that corroborates with other things I’ve read is the idea of consciously training your mind in order to save willpower. It relates to some things I’ve read about Stefan Molyneux’s idea of free will, in that just becuase you might have some automatic responses that require no delibration, it doesn’t mean that you’re not responsible for those actions, since you may have consciously trained yourself to react in a certain way. This is how playing music works.
Note that the name of this piece is intentionally mispelled.