Apply anti-goals to relationships and collaborators

Naming the relational patterns you refuse to accept prevents you from optimising for the wrong things in who you work or live with.

Why it works

In evaluating relationships, skill and talent tend to be highly salient, while relational patterns (communication style, honesty, reliability) are harder to assess upfront and easier to discount. Relationship anti-goals — "I will not partner with someone who does X" — create a checklist that forces attention to the relationship dimensions most likely to cause suffering, rather than the dimensions most visible in a pitch or first impression.

How to do it

1. Based on past relationships (professional or personal) that were painful, identify the specific patterns you experienced.
2. Convert those patterns into anti-goal statements: "I will not work with / be with someone who ___."
3. In any new high-stakes relationship, specifically probe for those patterns early.
4. Treat early evidence of a pattern violation as a real signal, not an outlier.

Evidence

Research on relationship satisfaction shows that negative relationship qualities predict dissatisfaction more reliably than positive ones predict satisfaction — consistent with the asymmetric value of identifying relational anti-goals explicitly. (observational)

The relationship anti-goals practice is a practitioner heuristic informed by this asymmetry; the research is not specific to this technique.

Common mistake

Applying relationship anti-goals only to partners or employees, not to clients, investors, or social circles — relational toxicity is equally costly in all directions.