Those goals aren't exactly "win the Olympic Games", "make a contribution to P=NP?", etc.
It's good to set goals and meet them, but there are qualitative differences between the experience of completing a major project with substantial uncertainty and a lot of pressure vs. "2009: Make it to a Ruby conference".
Drawing the conclusion that "everyone's vague, important motivations are more a matter of willpower than anything else" is making some pretty major assumptions about the modesty of everyone's motivations.
I don't agree with your comment, but I get what you're saying. I think the guy should be applauded for what he did do - which is substantially more than a lot of people do! He had some goals - he achieved them.
The lesson he learned from this is likely to lead to larger and larger goals - and I'm willing to bet 10 to 1 that he ends up accomplishing a lot over the next ten years as a result of the "little" steps he has taken already.
Something I didn't include in the actual post: I don't want to say everything is easy. If one of your goals is to scale your service to a five-hundred box setup, that's probably "hard".
But everyone has those vague, important motivations in their lives that are more a matter of willpower than anything else. Those are the meaningful goals. Those are the "easy" goals.
The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them..
(Terry Pratchett, Truckers. I read this when I was 6 years old but it always stuck with me.)
I do agree in general with what you are saying. But sometimes the trouble is that the subdivision (at least a good one) is hard to find.
Often enough it is that you don't understand the problem well enough. But sometimes you just can't seem to find the proper sub-problems. I have had this experience while doing research work.
Out of them all, I'd say the 2011 goal could potentially be daunting for people. Speaking at a tech conference, you really need to know your stuff. Slightly more concrete objectives might help too. Good to have general guidelines though.
I completely and utterly agree! Nice and encouraging lines of wisdom you have there. Congrats on making a continuous progress and setting a new standard all the time. Thanks for sharing this with us, and I am pretty sure it will kick some butts to do something :)
It's good to set goals and meet them, but there are qualitative differences between the experience of completing a major project with substantial uncertainty and a lot of pressure vs. "2009: Make it to a Ruby conference".
Drawing the conclusion that "everyone's vague, important motivations are more a matter of willpower than anything else" is making some pretty major assumptions about the modesty of everyone's motivations.