A Noble Goal

“One of the key paradoxes in Buddhism is that we need goals to be inspired, to grow, and to develop, even to become enlightened, but at the same time we must not get overly fixated or attached to these aspirations. If the goal is noble, your commitment to the goal should not be contingent on your ability to attain it, and in pursuit of our goal, we must release our rigid assumptions about how we must achieve it. Peace and equanimity come from letting go of our attachment to the goal and the method. That is the essence of acceptance." — Dalai LamaWe need goals in order to have a sense of direction. If we don’t have goals, we don’t have any boundaries to base decision making, and ultimately get dragged around by the highs and lows of our environment. Life is lived in the process, not the outcome. One of the biggest problems goal settings creates is that it becomes a metric of self-worth and often times what a person attaches their identity to. This creates unnecessary noise and stress during the pursuit where a person questions their own self-worth. What if we based goals around a process that is truly fulfilling rather than the outcome itself? The way to get the most out of the goals you set is to fall in love with the process. Orient goals around a fulfilling process and you win whether or not you achieve the goal. There is no worse feeling than investing time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears into a goal and then achieving it only to be met immediately with an anticlimactic feeling of emptiness. Know when to say “fuck it” and move on to something else. “Never give up” sounds inspiring in a Rocky movie, but is wildly uninspiring in real life while in pursuit of something fundamentally meaningless to you.