> I would add: successful people navigate worlds. Children play games.
Seems kind of arrogant. I personally view goals and constraints as different kind of tools that are both helpful.
Yes, to use a very ancient example, the goal of a hunters work is meat. You get it, if succesful, or you don't.
Constraints are where and when and how you can hunt. But the goal of a hunt is the meat.
Maybe goal of the hunter is food. Meat is often end result and what they train for - but if they happen on a ripe raspberry patch they can divert to get food from that instead.
Note that I said maybe. Different cultures have different situations. Sometimes your constraint it meat and you need to walk past those easy to pick raspberries.
No hunter would choose rasperries over meat. You maybe eat some while hunting, or after the hunt failed. But collecting rasperries and hunting requires very different equipment. You wouldn't risk loosing 100kg of meat because you found 50 g of rasperries.
(Rasperries take a lot of time to collect, hard to transport in meaningful quantities and go bad very quickly. If we are talking about ancient hunter tribes - children with women would be the ones doing rasperry picking close by while the men go further away and then carry the meat back to the camp)
Hunting is also a high risk activity - you sometimes don't get anything. Thus some ancient tribes would choose to pick the raspberries - which is to say abort the hunt to bring the women and children to pick with them. Others would turn back to get the women and children and then go on with the hunt. Still others would just go on with their hunt without telling anyone.
The rasperries won't go away if you spot a good patch while following the game.
In either case, the goal would still be to get food.
a lot of hunting isn't following game, it is search for game. If you have game in site that changes the calculation again.
Yes, in ancient context it is search for game - but that means searching for fresh tracks. And when you follow fresh tracks, you don't stop for rasperries until the track turns cold. It would be distracting and like I initially said, only to be considered if the hunt failed (meaning no signs of game at all)
goals imply that achieving the goal will give you the success that the goal is meant to be a proxy of. That's why people go high into debt to obtain that degree - it's a goal, and the proxy for successful job/career. And yet, it seems to not be the case when they discover that this degree isnt the the golden ticket.
it's true that goals in games work - because it was designed to work that way. People setting goals in real life like they might be in a game (such as obtaining some sort of achievement, beating a "level" like passing school etc) might find that these goals don't actually reward them unless they're after intrinsic rewards.
If you fail a goal in games you can restart - which most of us will a few times in playing games. You cannot restart life so easially. We only get an unknown amount of years to live (statistically about 80, but up to about 120 is possible, or down to however many hours old you are right now) I've thought about going back to college several times in life, however as each year goes by the value of a different degree goes down because there is even less time I could use it. Though also as time goes by the cost of "useless degrees" goes down because I have more money saved (though it is saved for retirement).
Often if you fail to reach some goal in life it is gone for good. If you lose out in a promotion to someone else (who might or might not be good) you need to give up on that goal - either find a different promotion you can get next year, or a different job equivalent to that promotion (assuming you are worthy of the promotion)
Sure, degrees don't _guarantee_ you'll be successful. That's just a misguided expectation. You might even create constraints to help you get there.
Not all goals are misguided, and constraints can be misguided, too.
Do constraints somehow reward you more then? I've had both constraints and goals in my life, both have been rewarding and not just intrinsically.
In the US it's mostly the hope that tuition and time studying will have a positive return on investment in terms of future earning potential.