Do you sometimes have goals, but not enough drive and motivation to achieve them? Do you sometimes have plans, but not enough grit and perseverance to go through with them? Do you sometimes have dreams, but not enough guts and energy to make them reality? How can you get on your path and stick to it?
Know that whenever you quit or even fail to start, you didn’t want it badly enough. That’s a simple truth. So it seems that all you can do is to fatalistically accept your state of will, whatever it may be, right? No! Because you can make yourself want something more badly, and I’ll tell you how.
What you need is to build a strong will, which consists of two things: (1) the willpower to control your passions and (2) the passion that fuels your will. I used to call the second aspect ‘pride’, but the passion that drives you to do what you truly want to do is about more than just pride. It is also about being invested. To stoke the fire that makes you succeed, you need to become invested in your goal.
Everybody who sets out to do something is likely to quit. This is not because there is something inherently wrong with people. People are all right. They simply stick to things they’re highly invested in and usually give up when they’re not. It’s human nature. And being invested can actually be bad if it creates a rigid focus that leads to bigotry, ideological tribalism, and irrationality (e.g., sunk-cost fallacy). But if you know that your purpose is good, you want a rigid focus. So you want to be highly invested. The key to goal achievement, therefore, is to invest as much as you can as soon as you can.
Waiting and hesitating only motivates you to look for excuses, desperately hoping for an obstacle that gives you a reason to quit. If, however, you start to invest time, energy, money, thoughts, and emotions in your mission, you cement your commitment like nothing else can. Let me give you a personal example:
- I’ll be having my first Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu match this Saturday. A month ago I wasn’t really committed and constantly making up excuses to myself: “I can’t fight because my shin is damaged, because my shoulder and elbow hurt, because I don’t have the time, because I need to work on my business, because I’m not good enough yet to win anything, because I have nothing to prove, and because and because.”
- But then I casually decided to go on a diet to fit in the proper weight class, just for the unlikely event that I would happen to compete after all, though mostly because I wanted to go back on keto and intermittent fasting to regain my sixpack. The diet was my first investment. Then I started to have more and more thoughts about fighting (= second investment: mental). Then I decided to take a week of vacation to have more time to train (= third investment: economic). Then I really did train hard during that week (= fourth investment: energy). Then, with still little confidence that I would actually compete, I signed up for the tournament and paid the entry fee (= fifth investment: financial). Then I told my friends that I’d be competing (= sixth investment: social and emotional). Then I bought a train ticket and booked a hotel room (= seventh investment: more thoughts, time, and money).
- If I hadn’t made all these investments, I’d surely have been thrown off my path by the obstacles I had to overcome: fear, fatigue, minor injuries, missed business opportunities, losing too much muscle mass, and more. But with every additional investment, my doubts about competing grew weaker, my commitment grew stronger, and I made up less and less excuses to quit. Now I’m at the point of no return. Nothing will be able to keep me from fighting. Nothing can push me off my path.1
This is how you, too, can stay on your path and accomplish your mission: take small steps forward by gradually investing more and more in your goal.
That’s really deep & insightful
But basically, you are taking small steps and investing in the outcome of a pissing contest? Whether it’s BJJ or ballroom dancing, it’s irrelevant. Can you explain the value of taking small steps toward a meaningless goal?
Hey Mitch,
I was not investing in the contest outcome: my goal was not to win, but to do what I truly wanted to do. How can you judge that instantiation of my will as meaningless? Meaning is created through emotional investment. It’s all reciprocal causality.
I meant neither the winning nor the taking part have any meaning. The whole situation is without significance to the universe. On a universal scale, you and I are meaningless. For us to believe otherwise is laughable. Whether you are emotionally invested in something or not, it’s still a pissing content. I get the whole small steps toward something idea in a general sense. What I can never understand on an empirical level is how small steps toward something irrelevant ever gains meaning or significance. Emotional involvement doesn’t make a thing significant, meaningful or relevant.
Meaning is inherently subjective. The universal scale is what’s really meaningless here.
Regarding the universe, I disagree. Why is this belief in the significance of any act anything other than hubris? Why is deciding to take part in BJJ, football or a marathon of any significance at all? What is your answer to the question “So what?”
I think you’re putting too much weight on the idea of significance.
Depending on the context, I would probably reject that question as a symptom of clinical depression.
The issue of significance/meaning arises from the observation that a great many people spend a huge amount of time taking small steps toward meeting SMART goals that they are actually not remotely interested in achieving. People set goals all the time, and many fail because they don’t understand how to take small steps, incremental progress toward them. Many people who have heard what you describe fail to meet a goal they have set because they get partway along and realise that goal doesn’t actually mean anything to them. Neither the journey nor the destination has significance. For many people they might get to the fourth, fifth or six investment and ask “what am I doing here? I actually have no interest in BJJ! (or running a marathon or whatever)” or go through the fight/race/whatever and wonder why they invested in it at all. In short, what makes the path itself worthwhile?
What’s happening when one realizes that his goal doesn’t mean anything to him?
(a) It’s a false realization due to a lack of discipline: an excuse to quit, to get off the path, to not overcome the obstacle of doubt.
(b) It’s a true realization due to a lack of intrinsic motivation: a gain in self-knowledge and a sharpening of his understanding of the true will.
What makes the path itself worthwhile?
(1) Emotions: experiencing positively valanced states of consciousness.
(2) Character development: fulfilling one’s role of what it means to be human.
Here’s a great perspective on the ideas of “the path” and “meaning-making” (an active process): https://youtu.be/d2IhwsTtXzA?t=66
I’ve watched this twice. I can’t see anything in this apart from “You’re going to die, accept it and move on”, which I’m on board with. The only other possibility I could see was that via a very convoluted message the guy was saying everything is meaningless, life is hard and then you die kind of thing.
Whether I want it or not, I’ll be dead some day, and at that point, actually I won’t care. My past, my legacy, so what? I’ll be dead and I will neither know nor care how I’m remembered.
The idea of “fulfilling one’s role of what it means to be human”. Presumably beyond just having the right DNA? Is this a suffering being good for the soul (old-fashioned Catholicism with self-flagellation and hairshirts) or eternal struggle/perpetual warfare a la right-wing doctrine thing? Or is it a comment on the lack of ceremonial meaning/lack of initiation rites in modern culture?
The most powerful line in that video clip, as I find and as it pertains to our discussion, is that meaning “is made by the willingness to proceed as if certain things must be” (by contrast, your question “So what?” would suggest an unwillingness or a lack of will). I should add that I understand this not as a belief in fate, but as an invitation to follow a rough blueprint of what we might call ‘the human experience’. This is what I mean by “fulfilling one’s role as a human being,” namely, actively going through the different stages of life while pursing certain abstract ‘goals’ associated with them (e.g., undergoing education as a child, slaying dragons as an adolescent and early adult, contributing to society, starting a family, passing on wisdom as an Elder, etc.).
In my case, I felt that it was necessary for me to enter a martial arts competition as the person I was half a year ago. Today, I would no longer find that as meaningful because I am now in a different phase of development and feel that I have a different mission to complete.
Your comment (as well as my blog post) are very self-centered, but individuality is only an aspect of the human experience. Your suggestions ‘old-fashioned Catholicism’, ‘eternal struggle’, and ‘ceremonial meaning’ probably all contain grains of further essential aspects. However, the whole picture is much greater than I can fathom, certainly at this point in my life.
I put my “so what” as very much a part of “proceeding as if certain things must be”. I was born and will die. So what? The universe operated before me, and will continue to operate after me. Hence, “so what”?
In this context, I find the idea of meaning difficult, especially around striving for some goal that really doesn’t matter a jot.
What do you think of my blog post on the question Where Does Meaning Come From?