ROCKET Goals

“We realized that the brain’s model of the world is built using maplike reference frames. Not one reference frame, but hundreds of thousands of them. Indeed, we now understand that most of the cells in your neocortex are dedicated to creating and manipulating reference frames, which the brain uses to plan and think.”
― Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

You may have heard the phrase, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” This is used as a kind of proverb, urging you to pay close attention to small details and habits, even if they seem unimportant. New research into cognitive function is starting to confirm the profound wisdom of this approach. It turns out that, “how you learn one thing is how you learn everything”. Or, to put it in ROCKET Goal terms, “How you launch one goal is how you’ll launch all your goals.”

So what is the model that researcher Jeff Hawkins has discovered? Hawkins believes that the same cellular stack structure used to process vision, is also used to process sound, is used to process language, is used to tie your shoes etc. This reference frame model is exquisitely tuned to two important factors: where is a particular object or concept on the map - either literally or figuratively, and more importantly, what is the possibility space of predictive outcomes if you act on that map?

When you Remember Your Future Self, you are building a map of possibility from your current reference frame and making predictions about what may or may not happen. In a practical sense, your ROCKET Goal success will be built up from thousands of subtasks, each moving you a little bit closer to your larger goal. But from a learning and cognitive perspective, the mental process of goal achievement is identical at each step of the way. Imagine your goal as a fractal image or set of Russian nesting dolls, with the larger goal broken into a myriad of similar looking steps.

First Steps Set the Tone
If you immediately do the first small step towards your goal with exponential effort and a high degree of success - as in immediately after reading this post! - then you set a model in motion for how all the subsequent steps towards this goal will flow. Also - at any point in the sequence, you can start reframing how you are approaching that goal. In other words, you can accelerate and change your ROCKET Goal activity level at any point in the process flow.

Goals Can Stack on Lateral Successes
Because your mind has literally thousands of reference stacks, each learning moment is isolated towards to the particular goal or learning item you’re concentrating on. So fortunately, struggling with learning calculus or how to speak a new language will not erase your ability to tie your shoes or read a book.

But at the same time, the remarkable connections across the mind allow you to recruit additional insights to the task you are facing. This lateral thinking means that the steps that helped you learn to read, or learning to shoot a basket, can be recruited to help with learning that new item! So, whenever you are faced with learning or trying something completely new, remind yourself that this is not the first time you’ve tried something new. In fact, you have already done just that thousands of times before! When you hear Elon Musk and others talk about using “first principles” to launch a rocket, really what they are describing is a methodology to apply existing and proven mental maps to the new problem at hand. Those models are not always 100% reliable, but more often than not, they are remarkably helpful for breaking down a new challenge into discreet reference frames.

How Hard Can it Be?
When you begin to realize that all your goal related projects are just a stack of smaller goals many of which you have likely succeeded at before, then even the most daunting of challenges can begin to feel doable. Ask yourself, How Hard Can it Be? This approach does not mean that the goal will suddenly become "easy”, but rather, a vast majority of the perseverance and learning models you’ll need are already fully at hand or can be learned, just like you’ve learned thousands of other small tasks in your life up to this point.

Conclusion - Go Launch!
Go ahead and launch one small goal or project today, and pay attention to all the steps along the way. How clear was your vision at the beginning? Did you get distracted by competing goals? What level of effort was needed. Did your plans need to change along the way? Did you need help from other team members?

Remember, if you can quickly and effectively check off one small project, you are on track to checking off that giant ROCKET Goal project you’ve been working on. Your mind literally doesn’t think about them differently, and neither should you!