I like to set sprawling, ill-defined goals for myself, and then figure out how best to accomplish them along the way.

This is a counter-intuitive approach to goal-setting, I know, but it tends to assuage some of the downsides of extremely formalized, front-loaded goal-setting.

For one, there are many unknowns involved in any pursuit, and most of the time you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re first starting out. When you assiduously plot and plan ahead of time, you’re operating from a place of relative ignorance: you haven’t gotten started, so you don’t know where the gaps in your knowledge might be hiding.

Further, absolute, intractable plans can leave us feeling incapable or incompetent if we stray from the course. After all, we established these rigid milestones and goals for a reason, right? And not accomplishing milestones and goals can feel like a very bad thing, even if we later discover that they were suboptimal and are no longer relevant.

Finally, hard-set paths meant to take you from where you are to where you’d like to be generally don’t provide wiggle-room for the pit traps and windfalls that each day may bring.

So if a better opportunity comes along, you may be unable to take advantage of it, chained to your path as you are. Similarly, if something happens that makes that path less desirable—you change, or the world changes around you—or even dangerous to pursue as planned, you’re left flat-footed, unable to riff in the moment. You’re too locked into your checklists and unchanging metrics of success to perhaps turn a misfortune into an opportunity.

Far better, in many cases, is to establish a larger, broader goal that allows you to move in a general direction but which also has a lot of give in terms of how you get there.

It’s possible to have a multitude of milestones and landmarks planned out without adhering to them dogmatically. You can keep everything beyond the next stop flexible, which allows you to immediately implement what you learn along the way. This also gives you the chance to take advantage of opportunities as they arise, or to detour around hindrances as they present themselves. It requires more frequent self-assessment and decision-making, but the effort tends to pays dividends, both in terms of the larger number of opportunities available and in terms of heightened self-awareness and decisiveness.

I like to imagine this system as a flexible framework, which gives my day, my year, my big picture goals and my smaller ambitions a legible outline. It allows me to see how the disparate pieces fit together and to imagine how they might become more than the sum of their parts, and how I might further upgrade and enable that process.

At the same time, it allows for unlimited variability within that larger framework. There are an infinite number of ways to accomplish any particular goal, and by experimenting liberally in small ways, while continuing to move in a consistent general direction, you provide yourself with the best of both worlds; of stability and malleability.

It’s possible to set goals that are only fuzzily defined while also undertaking a multitude of specific, fixed, and temporal experiments that garner well-defined, measurable, and valuable results.

Striking this balance allows you to construct an ever-evolving lifestyle that is tailored to who you are now and who you’d like to be, rather than one focused on a future that seemed like a good idea several years ago, and which was mapped out by a version of you that understood less about the world and the journey than does the you of today.