It is precisely this preoccupation that the followers of the ‘negative path’ to happiness call into question – because it turns out that setting and then chasing after goals can often backfire in horrible ways. There is a good case to be made that many of us, and many of the organisations for which we work, would do better to spend less time on goalsetting, and, more generally, to focus with less intensity on planning for how we would like the future to turn out.
Maybe issue here is a focus on external goals (outcomes) instead of internal ones that specify the *actions* to be taken.
