Comment by socalgal2

Your comment actually suggests that your instincts tell you those things are not as valuable, but you might just be following habit and dopamine loops at the current moment.

Which I guess is to say that GP's "follow your instincts" can also be as difficult as "set goals and hit them", just in different ways.

I feel you. I cannot offer much more than that, but if you care for a friendly advice from someone who is still in the same situation and very much still working on it, setting goals became another way to procrastinate for me.

It is cliche, but system over goals has helped me.. or I guess you could see it as microgoals one does not need to think about much.

Write code for at least X hours per day, read a book for X amount of time, exercise X days a week.

It gives me a checkbox to tick and no overhead in thinking about what goals are achievable, what are desirable.. etc.

I am also used OPs method and it is the reason I now work in a technical job despite having studied art. I just followed my curiosity and that lead to an expert-level understanding in some fields (I later got some formal proof of said expertise).

I don't think that "follow your instinct" is good advice for everyone, but maybe you should understand it more as a "follow your instinct which productive thing you want to do next".

In your examples, writing small programs is the only truly productive thing, the others are consumptive. I learned all I know about programming (I program for a living) from such projects, some of which took weeks of my time. The trick about the instinct thing is that I trust my instincts when I should move to another productive thing that interests me more. So I may be working on a long term programming project, then my instinct tells me when I continue I will start hating it, so I go and work on a hardware project I haven't finished. Before I can switch I need to ensure a state at which I can pick up later on, so I do that before. This way I have a high number of parallel projects each of which is always left in a state where switching between them feels managable.

Of course finishing them is a goal sometimes, but since I am working on many things and always work on the thing that feels good I finish things regularly and have a good time doing it. I also abandon/trash projects, especially if my understanding of a domain has expanded and my initial idea turns out to be misguided. That is okay, I learned something from that which should be your ultimate goal anyways.

I think there's a middle ground between trying to follow a path you set for yourself and thoughtlessly wandering by gut feeling: set a direction you want to go, not a destination.

You'll find that it doesn't require much thought at decision points to choose the options (in aggregate) that push you in that direction. As they say, it's about the journey, not the destination.

With that said, it's still difficult because you have to learn to forego long term expectations and/or acquire discipline not to just "stay put" lest you fall back into the habit of stressing over end goals or the comfort of a stress coping loop (anime, video games, etc), respectively.

Does your instinct really say “watch anime for 6 hours right now”, or does your instinct say something else and you just aren’t listening to it?

Functionally, not completing goals with a long outset is the same as not setting goals. You were banking on completing those goals and not having them just be a myriad of things you've done (which, as you've said, you've already done).