I don’t have goals.
I know that might seem a little crazy, but it’s true. I don’t.
There’s not a certain amount of books I’m trying to write. There’s not a certain amount of books I’m trying to sell. I don’t have a “number” that I’m trying to hit financially. There’s not a certain number of downloads I’m trying to get my podcast to or followers I want to reach.
I run every day, but I’m not training to run a marathon. I swim a lot (as we talked about recently) and bike, too, but it’s not because I want to do an Iron Man.
That’s sort of the point. What I want to do is run and swim, what I want to do is write—to me that is the win.
I don’t fault other people for having goals—if that’s what motivates you, enjoy. And obviously, companies and coaches need to set goals for their staff and for their team—this is how they evaluate and compare performance. A public company has to have revenue targets because investors demand them.
They’re just not for me.
I’m much more focused on process.
That is to say, I focus on doing the thing as opposed to achieving some particular thing.
Why?
It mostly has to do with control, that central issue for the Stoics.
Most goals are rooted in an external result that’s not in your control. Writing a book is not the goal most people have. No, their goal is hitting a bestseller list. Only you determine whether you write a book or not, but the bestseller list? That’s up to the New York Times. Winning a Grammy? That’s up for the Recording Academy. A Nobel Prize? That’s up to the folks in Stockholm. Even competitive goals like being the fastest person in a race or the richest person in the world—these depend on what your competitors do.
The fixation on external results that are not in your control carries a hidden cost. It consumes a significant amount of time and energy that would be better spent doing things that actually generate those results. A musician chasing a spot on the charts churns out derivative work, never finding their unique sound. A speaker fixated on the audience’s reaction loses their train of thought. A swimmer who glances over at the competition or up at the finish creates drag and slows down.
Over the years, I’ve worked on lots of book and product launches for people. One thing I like to find out right away is what ‘success’ might look like to them. When a person starts to talk about very specific numbers like “Success is hitting #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List” or “Success is making [$$$,$$$$$,$$$$]” or “Success is selling one million copies,” I get a little pit in my stomach for them. First, because of how random these goals tend to be. I remember asking one guy why he had chosen “two million books” as his number and his answer was because someone else he knew had done one and a half million. He’d just pulled the number out of his ass! (And of course, he never came close to this number because almost no books do).
Second, I am struck by what they didn’t say. They didn’t say “Success is making something amazing that really helps people” or “Success is creating something that I’m deeply proud of”. All they’re thinking about is some benchmark, rather than thinking about what it takes to even have a chance at hitting such a benchmark: being present, dedicated, pure-hearted, disciplined, creative, self-aware, patient. Someone who comes right out and says they’re chasing a number, competing against someone else, or needing external validation often reveals that they lack those very qualities.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive to accomplish great things or to do and be all that you’re capable of—you definitely should. It’s that in my experience, the best work comes out of just that: doing the work. Not in visualizing success. Not in trying to reverse engineer what’s working for someone else. Not in setting a “big hairy audacious goal” as some advise. But in the quiet day-to-dayness of the work. In immersing yourself in the craft, not the charts. In being process-driven, not goal-driven.
It comes from loving the process, not from thirst.
When I was chatting with Buzz Williams, the basketball coach for Texas A&M, on The Daily Stoic Podcast (listen here), he talked about the idea of being an everyday guy: “Whatever it is that you’re trying to do, are you tough enough to do that every day?” he asks. “If you’re basing it on talent, well at some point in time it might prevail, but not always. And so if you remove talent, then it comes down to consistency, discipline, and how you are spending your time.”
I’d say when you remove goals, that’s what it comes down to. Do you have the consistency and discipline to show up every day? Are you working on getting better every day?
In Discipline Is Destiny, I write about the practice of Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. Always finding some way to make a little progress. Focusing on the joys of getting a little bit better every day. This is the secret to being internally driven, to being Every Day. “Just as one person delights in improving his farm, and another his horse,” Epictetus would say, riffing, as it happens, on Socrates, “so I delight in attending to my improvement day by day.”
I like the way Sam Altman, an entrepreneur who has helped thousands of startups over the years at Y Combinator and then created Open AI, talked about this idea in an interview with Tyler Cowen. “Strive to be internally driven,” Altman said. “Driven to compete with yourself, not with other people. If you compete with other people, you end up in this mimetic trap, and you sort of play this tournament. Even if you ‘win’, you lose. But if you’re competing with yourself, and all you’re trying to do is be the best possible version you can—there’s no limit to how far that can drive someone to perform.”
And Sam has done pretty well for himself, hasn’t he?
In a way, I think getting rid of goals is actually more ambitious.
Goals, by their nature, are finite and fleeting. Once you achieve them, what then? You might experience a brief moment of pleasure and satisfaction, but soon, you’re left with two choices: either stop doing the thing altogether, having reached your destination, or realize that there is no destination, that you keep going and going and going.
You just keep looking for new ways to challenge yourself, new ways to do things, going towards the harder way, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago. You just keep showing up and getting better, wherever that leads.
This not only keeps things interesting, but it insulates you, ever so slightly, from outcomes, ego, self-doubt, and misfortune. It’s not that you don’t care about results—it’s that you have a kind of trump card. Your successes don’t go to your head because you know you’re capable of more. Your failures don’t destroy you because you are sure there wasn’t anything more you could have done.
You don’t control what happens to you, what adversity gets placed in your path, but you always control whether you show up every day and give your best or not. No one can stop you from that.
You don’t have to end up number one in your class. Or win everything, every time. In fact, winning is not particularly important. What matters is that you gave everything, because anything less is to cheat the gift.
The gift of your potential. The gift of the opportunity. The gift of the craft you’ve been introduced to. The gift of the responsibility entrusted to you.
Immerse yourself in the work, in the process, in the daily practices that make up the bulk of your life.
Forget goals.
Be process-oriented.
Be internally driven.
Be Every Day.
