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This problem goes to deeper than one might think. The standard answer to it, from the proponents of goalsetting, is that these are examples of people setting the wrong goals – overly ambitious or everly narrow ones. Of course, it’s true that some goals are wiser than others. But the more profound hazard here affects virtually any form of future planning. Formulating a vision of the future requires, by definition, that you isolate some aspect or aspects of  your life, or your organisation, or your society, and focus on those at the expense of others. But problems arise thanks to the law of unintended consequences, sometimes expressed using the phrase ‘you can never change only one thing’. In any even slightly complex system, it’s extremely hard to predict how altering one variable will affect the others. ‘When we try to pick out any thing by itself,’ the naturalist and philosopher John Muir observed, ‘we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’

Excerpted from ‘The Antidote – Happiness for People who can’t stand positive thinking’ by Oliver Burkeman