I find myself concluding cerebral conversations about doing things with the phrase "it depends what your goal is." It feels as though I've said it enough that it deserves a place in my hall of fame of conversation cappers.

"It depends on what your goal is" is a wondering wall. You can wander around wondering about something, lost in your thoughts, until you say a phrase like this—you hit the wall. It grounds you back in reality. What are you even trying to do?

I think this is a great thing.

Talk is cheap. Thinking is cheaper. It's much easier to think about the how and why of doing the thing than to actually do it. And talking about it with other people can often feel like you're making progress and you're getting other people involved, and all in all, it's a very indulgent thing that actually doesn't help out very much.

So if I were to, say, start rolling my stone of thinking about something, like how I might approach writing the first chapter of a novel, or maybe building a new game, I could go on and on about different ways of doing things. But as soon as I say to myself, it depends what your goal is, well, it's almost as if it puts a period at the end of a run-on sentence. Game over.

When I say this phrase, I immediately realize what my goal is, or (more commonly), abruptly see that I have no clue why I'm doing what I'm doing. Either I never had a goal, or I've lost track of it. Instead, I was meandering around in the forest of thinking—feeling quite productive, lost in the trees of my thoughts.

But there is a way out of all this—it depends on what your goal is.