Stuck in the middle

When setting goals it seems like the temptation is to go long-term and general ("what do I want my life to be?" "where will I be in 10 years time?" "what do I want to do before I die?"), or short-term and specific ("I want to quit smoking", "I want to get this project finished", "I want to get in shape"). But I think there are issues with both those approaches.

The abstract goals suffer because whatever you decide in the long term is hard to translate into consequences now. And your specific goals suffer because often the short-term turns out to be longer than you expect. In effect, I think both "do immediately", and "do eventually" are off the mark. Instead, I prefer to think "what would I like to be in the middle of doing?"

The reason is that being in the middle is actually where you will be the vast majority of the time. You'll only be in a position to know if you've satisfied a 10-year goal after 10 years, and in the mean time there's a lot of unknowns. Conversely, most of the immediate goals are actually part of a pattern of actions over a longer time. So instead of "getting in shape", it may be more useful to think "if I want to be the kind of person who is in shape, what would I need to be in the middle of doing often."

I think these kinds of questions encourage thinking about your life as trying to converge on a continuously optimal situation, rather than a series of discrete "win" points which, although they feel good, are fleeting and lose their flavour quite quickly.