Think Critically to Achieve Your Goals

tl;dr you don’t achieve your goals because you don’t think critically.

I’ve never seen a guy think like B. It’s just phenomenal. When you have a conversation with him, it’s like you’re having a conversation with a conscious Google / Wikipedia / Wolfram Alpha. He’ll take any idea you have, validate it against the first principles of the most relevant area of study, chew it up to spit it out, or intercept mid-air, hold it, and get to work forging it with layer upon layer of critically considered thoughts, repeatedly heating it, hammering it, constructing it, demolishing it, forming it to reveal it again fully clad in armour. At the center is still the innocent idea you let flutter from your mind. But by the time he’s done with it, its a fully built, ready to deploy, F-22 capable of supersonic expedition. Thankfully, for B, it’s a switch that he can turn on and off. But when the opportuity presents itself, he flexes that brain and practices critical thinking.

I’ll reiterate, I’ve never seen a guy like B. He really is exceptional – as in, he is the exception. For the rest of us, the best way to put it is, “we have our own strengths”. We don’t do critical thinking like B does critical thinking and it affects our ability to achieve our goals. Critical thinking is central to doing the four steps of goal achievement from the last article well; Dream, Strategize, Habitualize, Review. B practices critical thinking with ideas because they are frequent and available. But where he really uses critical thinking to his advantage is in achieving goals.

We Don’t Critically Think

In terms of achieving goals, critical thinking is objectively identifying both the goal and what needs to be done in order to acheive it. Critical thinking is hard. That’s why most of us don’t do it. We prefer the path of least resistance. B is good at it because he does it so much.

For the North East Blue Collar community that I grew up in, critical thinking was not a very important part of our jobs. So even now, we avoid it. We’re strong in getting right to work, taking action right away. Often, we end up taking action before critically thinking because it is so much easier for us. But it’s because we avoid critical thinking that we have a hard time getting to where we want to be in life – we put in a lot of effort but just go in circles. What we don’t realize is that we’re putting time and effort into things that don’t matter and while avoiding the things that do matter. This is the effect of the Employee Mindset.

Disclaimer: Before you let yourself off the hook thinking this isn’t applicable to you because you’re not one of my North East Blue Collar cousins, I’ll just mention this bad habit can be learned anywhere. It’s always easiest to follow the path of least resistance.

When we avoid critical thinking, preferring the path of least resistance, our journey does not lead us to the achievement of our goals. Action needs to be taken in order to make progress. But action taken without critical thinking is simply wasteful procrastination.

The thing is, we only have limited resources (energy, time, money, etc) to accomplish our goals. Steps taken on a path that does not lead us to face the obstacles standing in the way of what we want are wasted. We can’t get those steps back and now we have less resources with which to accomplish our goal. Maybe we didn’t know to critically think before choosing a path, or chose not to because of the required effort, but now, with less resources, we have done nothing more than procrastinate; completion of the project has been delayed. Our ability to complete future projects is diminished and timelines have been pushed back. It is a compounding problem resulting in wasted resources, less accomplishment, and less created value over the long term. All of this could have been avoided if the allocation of resources was careful considered through critical thinking at the beginning.

But critical thinking is hard. B is several decades of practice into a regular habit of frequent critical thinking which is why he is at such an advanced level. That’s what it takes for critical thinking to become relatively easy. For the rest of us, it’s just easier to avoid it. So we procrastinate critical thinking (since inevitably we’ll have to because nothing can replace it) and justify our choice with two different techniques.

We Procrastinate

The two procrastination techniques we justify are:

Processing of unnecessary tasks
Over-processing of necessary tasks

Since the actual techniques we use to procrastinate is not the focus of this article, I’ve written details about them in the fourth article of this series. Briefly:

The processing of unnecessary tasks is done by working on something adjacent to the domain of the goal but is not necessary to achieve the goal. We justify it to ourselves because it’s related to our goal.
The overprocessing of necessary tasks is done by working on a task that is already complete by definition of its requirements. We justify it to ourselves because it’s effort put toward a necessary task.

Critical Thinking Achieves Goals

Dream & Strategize

If it isn’t obvious by now, critical thinking is the solution to avoid waste and achieve your goals. Initially, during the Dream and Strategize stages from the previous article, critical thinking determines if an action, or a whole path, even leads to the achievement of the goal, thereby eliminating the path of procrastination from the beginning. Second, it chooses the most efficient path (consumes the least resources; gains the most progress) that satisfies the requirements. Third, it generates a list of prioritized actions that consumes available resources leading to the completion of the goal.

To pick a path based on efficiency, we must intimately know the quantity and value of available resources. For example, consider these three paths that have already been determined to result in accomplishment of the goal:

Path 1 may consume the most physical material.
Path 2 may consume the most money.
Path 3 may consume the most time.

And say through critical thinking we determine:

Available physical material has little value due to its abundance and current market price.
Available money has medium value due to its relative purchasing power.
Available time has significant value due to constraints related to the market.

Through critical thinking, we would look at our paths and our available resources and choose Path 1 because 1) we’ve already determined it will achieve the goal and 2) it consumes the least valuable resources, preserves the most valuable resources, and achieves the goal. From there we’d use the same critical thinking to generate a list of prioritized actions that preserves the efficiency of the path by determining each action’s constraints (timeframe, dependent actions, etc) and order them in such a way to consume the least valuable resources first and preserve the most valuable resources while achieving the goal.

That is an extremely simple example. In real life there are more variables creating more potential paths which makes it even more important to use critical thinking to: distinguish necessary requirements from nice-to-haves; quantify constraints (resources, timeline; etc); consider all risks; scrutinize each prioritized action to ensure the completion of the goal.

Use the critical thinking process during the Dream and Strategize stages to write down the goal, constraints, and requirements in that order; do this objectively. Frivolities when defining the goal, quantifying the constraints, or establishing the requirements, at best, leads to misallocation of resources (waste) while achieving the goal; at worst, the complete failure to achieve the goal. Objectively define the goal including only what is necessary to achieve. Objectively quantify constraints including only truly available resources and realistic timelines. Objectively establish requirements listing only what is needed and discarding what is wanted.

Habitualize & Review

Continue to use critical thinking beyond the first two phases. We are most at risk of procrastination after we’ve picked our path and are taking action to achieve our goal. Taking action can be arduous; “justified” procrastination at this point offers a comfortable and familiar way to avoid the difficulties of achieving our goals.

Use critical thinking during the Habitualize stage to take action with respect to the previously established requirements. Keep yourself on track by critically evaluating the necessity of your task; don’t continue working on it if it is complete; don’t work on it at all if it doesn’t make progress toward achieving your goal. Continue to use critical thinking during the Habitualize stage to determine the most efficient routine to consume the least valuable resources and make the most progress.

Use critical thinking during the Review stage to objectively re-evaluate the relevancy, execution, and proficiency of the Dream, Strategy, and Habitulized actions; all the while looking for, and eliminating, waste (consumption of resources without progress) to ensure the achievement of the goal; or to pivot when a weakness is exposed or a carefully considered advantage, vetted by objective and ruthless scrutiny, reveals itself.

Critically Think!

Become practiced in critical thinking and use it to achieve life goals. Use it to efficiently process necessary tasks. Use it to avoid procrastination. Encourage yourself to maintain the course having confidence the path determined by critical thinking is the best way to achieve your goal.

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