I tend to think an orientation around processes is more useful than an orientation around goals, but the processes still need a telos, an end, a desired fruit.
Sometimes in financial planning the analogy of growing trees is used: it takes time, it starts from a small seed, it grows even when you can’t see it, etc. And this can be helpful at a very high level to introduce ideas of patience and compounding.
But when it gets to the process level–what you need to do day-to-day and month-to-month–you need to have a more fleshed out telos. After all, if what I want is an oak tree that will be here a hundred years from now, that will lead to a very different set of processes than if I want to propagate a jazz apple tree to harvest apples from in a few years. The time horizon is much shorter for a fruit producing apple tree, there is much more activity involved in grafting and pollinating apple trees than in planting an acorn and giving it room to grow, the ultimate size of the different species is wildly different, and on and on.
The two things to remember are:
- Not everyone is trying to grow the same type of tree.
- An apple tree process doesn’t make any sense for an oak tree grower, and vice versa.
Meaningful Returns 