Austin Scholar #77: How to use ChatGPT to break through goal paralysis
& setting my senior year goals
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: Setting my senior year goals
How to use ChatGPT to break through goal paralysis
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been reading this week
I’ve had a very busy week of doing absolutely nothing. Since it’s my last week of summer, I have been soaking up the sun in my living room while watching some awesome TV shows: Monk (intense detective show), Lie to Me (intense detective show), Gotham (intense detective show), and, of course, The Kardashians (trashy reality show). This is the last week of rest, though, so get ready for many more updates soon.
Austin’s Anecdote: Setting my senior year goals
As my summer comes to a close and the school year approaches, I’ve started to really think about what I want to accomplish in my senior year. (Wow–saying “senior year” is never going to get any less weird.) This is my last hurrah at Alpha–and my last chance to show how I’ve grown in the last eight years since I left traditional school.
There’s so much I have to balance: college applications and preparations, growing my Twitter and Substack audiences, finishing my academic courses, following the Alpha life skills curriculum, and spending as much time as I can with the people I love before I leave. I have so much going through my head, and so much nervous energy coursing through my body, that it’s really hard to think clearly about my goals.
On that note, it’s always kind of scary to set my yearly goals because there are so many unknowns: am I going to be good at this academic class? will I still have the same friends? what if I join a club? what if I fail at something? what if it all falls apart and I fail all of my classes and have no friends and have to repeat a year and then can’t graduate?
With so little life experience, it’s so easy to catastrophize and become intimidated by the length of a year, and how much can change in that time.
Plus, so much about school depends on extrinsic motivation. Basically every kid only goes to school because they’re forced to, not because they want to. (I know this is true for me.) Honestly, everything even school-adjacent is only done because kids want to get into a good college, which they see as being necessary for a better life.
This leads to kids just doing the things they're "supposed" to do, without ever stopping to think about what they actually want. So, how do we fix this? Well, it all starts with helping kids set goals that they truly value.
How to use ChatGPT to break through goal paralysis
Setting valuable yearly goals can seem basically impossible. It's hard to think about what's useful, or what's attainable, or what's actually exciting to you, not just what your parents or teachers or college admissions boards want you to work on.
If your kid is paralyzed by goal setting for this year, ChatGPT might be able to help. I used it for setting my goals this year, and it helped me get clearer on my goals than I've ever been (even with senior year overwhelm).
It's so much easier for us as teens to answer questions about what we want when they come from a computer, not from someone whose opinion we care a lot about. And because ChatGPT can give me really nuanced questions, it helps me become nuanced about my own goals.
So, here’s how you and your kid can use ChatGPT to set goals they’ll actually want to accomplish: