Anti-Goals
Design your life by naming what you hate, then engineer it out
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Anti-goals flip conventional goal-setting on its head. Instead of imagining what will make you happy, which humans predict poorly, you catalogue what reliably makes you miserable, which humans know precisely. Borrowing Charlie Munger's inversion principle, you twist each pain point around and turn it into a non-negotiable constraint. If meetings drain you, you block Tuesdays and Thursdays. If mornings ruin your day, you refuse morning meetings. If owing people stresses you, you raise capital in ways that keep you unaccountable. Wilkinson and his partner Chris built these rules explicitly after a burnout moment, and found happiness came quickly, whereas the old 'when we're rich we'll arrive' model never delivered. The mechanism is simple: misery is legible, so use it as the design input for your calendar, commitments, and financing.
Origin
Andrew Wilkinson and his business partner Chris devised anti-goals roughly five or six years before this interview, during a period of constant travel and burnout, applying Charlie Munger's inversion principle to their own working lives.
Core principles
- 01Humans are bad at predicting happiness but reliably know misery
- 02Inversion beats aspiration: ask what harms, not what helps
- 03Constraints designed around your dislikes protect the life you want
- 04Stop doing what you hate before you chase what you love
- 05Avoiding the potholes expedites success faster than chasing it
How to run it
- 1
Catalogue your misery
Write out every recurring thing that makes you unhappy at work and in life, from being over-scheduled to sleeping badly to owing people favors.
Pro tip Ask the reliable question: how would you make a happy person miserable? Answers come far easier than 'what makes you happy?'
- 2
Invert each item
Apply Munger's inversion: instead of asking how to help, ask what harms most, and let the answer point straight at a rule.
- 3
Turn dislikes into hard rules
Convert each pain point into a bright-line constraint, such as 'no morning meetings' or 'not bookable on Tuesdays and Thursdays'.
Pro tip Make the rules absolute, not aspirational, so you never have to relitigate them in the moment.
- 4
Redesign structures around the rules
Apply the constraints to your calendar, travel, and even how you raise money so you don't have to answer to people in ways you hate.
Watch out Rules that only govern your calendar but not your financing or obligations will leak; design the whole system.
- 5
Iterate as you learn
Revisit the list periodically and add anti-goals as new sources of misery surface, since self-knowledge compounds over time.
In the wild
Burned out from constant travel and Tetris-like calendars, Wilkinson and his partner listed what made them miserable. They banned being booked on Tuesdays and Thursdays, refused all morning meetings to protect sleep, and structured fundraising so they wouldn't have to answer to investors. They found they were much happier quickly, in contrast to the old 'when we're rich, then we'll be happy' model that never delivered.
→ Rapid, durable increase in happiness by removing sources of misery rather than adding achievements.
Common mistakes
Chasing 'what makes me happy' instead
Humans predict happiness poorly, so aspirational goal-setting misfires; misery is the more reliable design signal.
Making the rules soft
Treating anti-goals as preferences rather than hard constraints means you negotiate them away in the moment and the misery returns.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and high-achievers who feel overworked, over-scheduled, and burned out despite success.
Not ideal for
Type-B people who genuinely under-work and need more drive, not more constraints.
From the transcript
“people when they're choosing jobs or directions for themselves instead of trying to imagine what's going to make them happy should instead have anti-goals they…”
“we started writing out this list of all the things that make us miserable okay so we don't like being scheduled well we started saying…”
From the episode
How To Stop Feeling Like Your Success Is Never Enough - Andrew Wilkinson - #818
Andrew Wilkinson