Hi folks!
Anyone else besides @dehowell ever do the Complice Goal Crafting Intensive?
What did you think of it?
Since I haven’t answered you yet in the book club thread, I’ll jump in!
I’ve participated in the GCI each of the last three years, although this year I wasn’t able to fully participate in the live workshop due to parenting commitments. Obviously I’m getting something out of it, because I keep coming back! The basic framework @malcolm uses has stayed consistent, but he’s been steadily improving the handbook doc describing it and recommended techniques.
Even though I couldn’t really attend, I signed up this year to get access to the updated materials. Besides, the five hour workshop is hardly enough time to both absorb the content and plan out even one goal. If you take the material seriously, you’ll need to keep putting in incremental work to check in with the goal and revise your plans. It’s a year-long commitment. It also dovetails nicely with the final section of Atomic Habits, so I’d say the GCI is a good opportunity to really put into practice related concepts.
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How much would I feel like a garbage person if I sign up now, but can’t really commit until next quarter?
Oh… and with respect to how GCI complements Beeminder: very much like how Complice does. When you identify a goal you want to pursue with GCI materials, one or more Beeminder goals will probably seem like a very natural tool to support execution. GCI suggest both hard and soft accountability and Beeminder users will typically be well-prepared for the hard accountability aspects.
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We should convince @malcolm to put the materials up on Teachable or something, for those of who end needing to do it asynchronously.
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The course materials are now on a website, and you can go through them asynchronously. We also have weekly goal-crafters community of practice meetups, where people go through the material.
So @adamwolf you could sign up now and just wait a few months then engage with the material and the meetups. The main thing you’d miss out on is the live-coaching, if you don’t come to the event.
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Alright, I’ll sign up this week! Thanks Malcolm! I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to hurt anyone on “my team” since some things like this are structured that way.
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I did GCI two years ago and found it EXTREMELY helpful. (It was part of the process of deciding to get divorced, which I swear was a good thing.) Last year I re-used the documents on my own and found it very useful. This year I… meant to reuse them again but actually haven’t done an annual review yet. (…Blocked off my weekend for this now.) Next year I’d like to do it live again, to see how the materials have updated and to have that firm commitment in my calendar.
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Is the Complice Goal Crafting Intensive still available?
I just registered an account and I’m trying to figure out how to use Complice and integrate it with Beeminder & TaskRatchet.
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@dehowell I signed up for next Sunday’s GCI.
Are you attending next weekend’s?
Is it better to focus the 5 hour workshop on 1 goal you want to achieve by next April 2022 or better yet by the end of this year?
I have a bunch of goals that are inter-related.
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I won’t be there next weekend. I went for one of the December workshops this year.
I’ve personally had better success focusing on a single goal in these workshops. Depending on the nature of your goals, you may have a different experience. I keep picking things I have a significant ugh field around, so I’ve needed a lot of time for troubleshooting. If you have goals in mind that you feel fairly matter-of-fact about and they are interrelated, multiple goals in one workshop could well be successful.
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My first GCI, I didn’t focus on any goal at all. My second GCI, I focused on a single thing. I think both were helpful, but I suspect any future GCIs I attend will be focused on either one or only a small number of things.
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I am pretty sad about this. While @zedmango’s review was harsh, we know them for posting their opinions frankly but in good faith.
I consider switching back to the basic plan because of this.
Can the person who deleted the post make a statement about their reasoning?
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For transparency, here’s the full post from zedmango that I deleted because it wasn’t made in good faith [UPDATE: caveats/corrections below]:
I definitely would not recommend that anyone do the GCI. I had a very bad experience with it. I found it poorly organized and very unhelpful.
If you struggle with akrasia, motivation, and organization, this is not the thing for you. It’s just too unstructured and too hard to make use of it in a helpful way.
Not only that, but I was promised a refund if I wasn’t satisfied, but then he didn’t want to give me one. I had to argue with him in order to get it (I finally did). The whole thing felt thrown together without much care or thought. Don’t waste your time or money.
blah blah blah
[original commentary] The bad-faith part was the last paragraph. I talked to Malcolm Ocean about it and they gave what amounted to a no-questions-asked refund when zedmango said they weren’t happy. (Also zedmango was kind of… impossible, and I don’t think their negative experience constitutes evidence that anyone else would not get value from GCI.)
just shoot me
UPDATE: I talked to zedmango on the phone about this and he was kind and sincere and I’m ready to soften my take on this (I, um, also had suspended him from the forum for an aggrieved followup post he made – first time I’ve done that). I think his review of GCI was beyond unfair and I utterly disagree with his characterization especially of the refund process BUT I’m willing to believe that zedmango was not saying it in bad faith exactly. I mean, I’m still confused about… ok, bottom line, I think zedmango was all wrong and yet not intentionally so, so that doesn’t count as bad faith. I think. Seems he was angry and so a single clarifying question from them felt like resistance to giving a refund? He and GCI were a bad match I guess. Let me also retract “impossible” since I don’t know anything about … omg why am I still talking? The full review is quoted above, everything’s fine, I’m sorry for being a little hasty in calling it bad-faith and deleting it at first, though I stand by the general reign-of-terror moderation policy. I care a lot about not accidentally being deceptive and I see how deleting a negative review is a bad look, so, I put it back the same day, and I commit to being careful about that (I’ve always erred on the side of caution about that in the case of negative Beeminder reviews) when I have a conflict of interest. Which reminds me, disclosure: Malcolm, creator of GCI, is my friend, so that was my conflict of interest here and why I should’ve been more cautious about deleting a negative review. Sorry especially for contributing to forum drama, which is the worst of all.
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Thanks for the clarification. I believe this is the right way to handle these types of situations.
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