It’s a common experience to set yourself a goal and look back months later and find that you haven’t made much progress at all. You feel like you’ve been trying, but it just hasn’t happened – you’ve procrastinated, felt unmotivated, gotten distracted – a ton of reasons. You realise this, resolve to try again, only to find yourself at that same point once more – you feel trapped in a cycle of failure.

Most advice in response to this observed pattern – having a long-term goal to move towards but making little progress – is to look towards behavioural solutions. To rely on discipline instead of motivation. To follow the sort of advice given in Atomic Habits or by similar productivity gurus online. Start with an easy commitment, lace your trainers up the night before a run, give yourself a reward after going to the gym and your problems will be solved.

This sort of advice isn’t necessarily bad, but the prevalence of this advice can be misleading because it gives the impression that behavioural solutions will work on all problems that look like this observed pattern. But this is not the case – in fact, there are situations where applying behavioural solutions are actively counterproductive.

I want to distinguish between two different kinds of ‘root problems’ that can result in the same symptoms (this cycle of trying to make progress on a long-term goal, failing, being unsure why, and trying again):

• Type 1: Short- vs long-term mismatch
• Type 2: Conflicting long-term values

The key issue here is that Type 1 and Type 2 problems often look the same, but have very different solutions. The point of this article is help you distinguish between these two kinds of problems, so you can better look where to solve them 

The baseline

Before jumping into these different types of problems, it’s useful to remind ourselves about what ’normal’ behaviour looks like. It’s simply – you want something, the ‘reward’ from taking the action is higher than the cost, so you do it. You’re hungry, so you go to the fridge and get some food to eat. You want to impress your manager, so you work late to finish an important project. You want to go to a concert, but you see ticket prices are too high, so you decide not to go.

Basic, rational decision making. That’s the default. So when you observe that there is some decision-making in your life that is not this simple and easy, your mental model should be that something is going wrong. And the next step is to try to understand what that something is.

Type 1: Short- vs long-term mismatches

Type 1 problems take the shape of “I have this thing that I want, but the things I need to do right now to achieve this goal are hard, and the goal is far in the future.” The classic example is exercising. You want to be healthy and look good, but exercising is hard, and it takes months of exercising consistently to see the results.

Type 1 problems occur because humans are not good at internalising the benefits from things that are far away. In behavioural economics terms this is called ‘hyperbolic discounting’ – the tendency to ‘irrationally’ overweight rewards in the short-term and underweight rewards in the long-term. 

I want to emphasise that this is different to ’not wanting it enough’. If you could theoretically pay the price of months of exercise today and by tomorrow you would be fit and healthy, you would do it. It’s the fact that you pay the cost now but the reward is far in the future that is causing the problem.

These problems are generally straightforward to fix. There are several things you can do to either better internalise the long-term ‘reward’ today or make the short-term costs less painful. This is what books like Atomic Habits are all about. There’s a ton of resources to help you, and if you manage to implement them, it’s very likely your problem will be solved.

Type 2: Conflicting long-term values

Type 2 problems are a little more nebulous. They’re primarily characterised by three things:

1. Believing you strongly want a long-term goal
2. There being parts of you that don’t want this long-term goal
3. A failure to acknowledge that these parts of you exist

I think this is best understood through a story. Imagine a first-year med student at a prestigious medical school. She wants to excel and qualify for a competitive general surgery residency. She keeps trying to study hard, but it for some reason never really works out. She gets distracted, procrastinates – generally just make slow progress. She’s tried many productivity hacks to study more effectively, to build discipline – but their effects have always been temporary. She’s stuck in a cycle of trying to try, but failing.

The source of her problem isn’t that she isn’t trying hard enough, or that she’s not capable of being a good student and studying hard. Her problem is that she doesn’t actually want to become a surgeon, but she doesn’t realise it. All her life she’s grown up with her parents and friends having expectations of her to become a surgeon, and she’s come to believe it too. It’s a narrative so entrenched in her life that she can’t look past it. So when she comes to try to study, the part of her that doesn’t want to be a surgeon pushes back. And the outcome is friction. But because she isn’t aware of this part of her, she doesn’t know where this resistance to study is coming from. She feels like a failure, unable to progress on the goals she thinks are important to her.

This story illustrates the broad shape of this kind of problem. But in reality, these conflicting values aren’t as stereotypical as your parents wanting you to become a doctor while in reality you want to do something else. They’re subtle and elusive. Other people’s values are disguised as your own and hidden among them. They can be very difficult to tell apart just through cursory introspection. Moreover, these conflicting values also don’t always fall into the camp of ‘values other people have imposed on me’ versus ‘my own true values’. Often the conflicting values are both ‘your own’ values, but for one reason or another you’re just unaware of one of them.

The problem here isn’t that you have conflicting values – we’re human, and none of us have a perfect set of consistent values. The real source of misery is being unaware of some of them. Once you have all the information, you can make an informed decision, acknowledging the trade-offs. Maybe the best decision to balance your parents wanting you to become a surgeon and you wanting to become a writer is to still become a surgeon and write as a hobby. There’s no rule for identifying the ‘intrinsically correct’ value to follow here. But you’re unlikely to make a good decision without acknowledging the different parts of yourself that exist.

If I were to summarise the fix to Type 2 problems in one phrase, it would be ‘being in touch with yourself’. There’s not really a single recipe or prescribed way to do this. Having close friends who are great listeners helps. Going to therapy. Meditation. Even psychedelics for some. People have different ways of figuring this out. I’d describe the core skill to learn as being able to ’listen to yourself’.

Some closing thoughts

Type 2 problems are a complicated, hard to articulate problem. I’ve only scratched the surface of them here. One resource that I found both illuminating (while also somehow being very obtuse) is “Slack matters more than any outcome”. It goes into depth on some of the key ideas of this topic, albeit through a very different lens.

The final thing worth mentioning is that Type 1 and Type 2 problems aren’t exhaustive. There are other possible reasons you could be failing – chronic sleep deprivation, ADHD, depression – to name a few. 

But if you’ve found yourself in this destructive cycle of trying to try and failing, and feel like you’re doing the basics right, I’d encourage you to take a step back. Consider whether your problem might be a Type 2 problem.