There are a lot of these "try a thing for 30 days" videos on YouTube. Craig Benzine AKA WheezyWaiter is one of the more popular channels, about a year ago he mentioned an upcoming "work out every day for 30 days" video but never followed up.
Turns out he kept going after he reached his goal, and he finally released it after 350 days of working out. My big takeaway wasn't about his workouts, it was an almost throwaway line:
Forget goals.
I'm hard pressed to think of anything I've started lately that I didn't have some sort of end goal in mind. At the same time, I've seen how much I can accomplish when I focus on a habit without a goal.
When you get rid of the goal you pay less attention to the outcome and more to the action. Your focus shifts from outputs to inputs, from the bullseye to the bow. When you build habits, and build systems to reinforce those habits, the goals attain themselves. I'm not the first person to say this.
To be clear: it's good to have goals, but it's also good to remember that's not the only option. Some things benefit from goals, others from systems, and the two often work together.
A number of years ago, David Foster Wallace gave a college commencement speech called This is Water. Paraphrasing won't do it justice, so I'll just give you the story the name comes from:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
When I forget about goals and focus on consistency, I'm not thinking about how I'm doing or how much progress I'm making. I just think "it's time to pick up where I left off yesterday." I stop asking myself how the water is.
When you aren't aiming for something you barely notice the progress you're making, but one day you look back and all the work has accumulated into real accomplishments. Accomplishments you might have never even seen if you were setting goals! Habits can uncover happy accidents and hidden gems.
Meditation has taught me this too. Let me rephrase that: my wife taught me this too.
At one point I was trying to "get into meditation," whatever the heck that means, and was telling her how well it was going. Here's how I remember it:
"Meditation can't really 'go well,'" she told me. "I mean I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it, but meditation isn't about doing it well or not. There is no doing it better or worse. You just do it without judgment of how it feels."
This was a surprisingly meaningful realization for me. It put the act into perspective, but it made a lot of other things click too. What else was I bringing judgment into? What else could I just observe without trying to improve at?
So I forgot about trying to do better at meditation, I just started sitting. Years later a friend gave me a copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. The gist: you sit, and you practice, and the practice is the sitting. You're not practicing for anything, it's a practice that just goes on.
I don't practice as often as I'd like, but I'm not too harsh on myself. When we practice, we feel like we're practicing for something, and if we never get there we've failed.
Forget that. Forget goals. Just keep practicing.
