The Goal-Post

“The key to success is to focus on goals, not obstacles.”

I came across this quote today. On Google. While searching for quotes. I know! But before you slip into that black coat and start pounding that gavel, just hear me out. Or read. Whatever. So after reading this post, there are two things that you’ll come to know. One is for you to read and decide, and the other is that not all the quotes make sense.

Let me share something with you here first. So I started this blog site in 2016. I spent almost 6 hours coming up with a name for it God. One of the reasons for doing this was to get in touch with writing again. But the bigger reason was to be known by people. While thinking of creating this site, the one thing that I had in mind all the time was that I wanted to be big. Be known by a lot of people for my blog posts. And that’s a subtle description of famous. Now you can go on and pound that gavel. Basically, all the time I was thinking about the outcome of doing this. We can also call it my “goal”. So what happened there? I’m proud to say that I have a number of readers that I could count on just two fingers of my left hand.

Eventually, I came to realise that I was doing it wrong. I was more interested in the goal than in the process of it. That’s the thing here. If you are fascinated by something that you want to achieve, you’ll have to fall in love with the process of achieving it and not only that particular outcome. You’ll fail miserably otherwise. And that happens every single time. Not a single soul has achieved great things by just wanting it or being fascinated by it. Let’s take Stephen King as an example. He is one of the best thriller novel writers today. He started at a young age. Sure, at first he just wanted to make money to get out of a troubled house, but he didn’t just go blindly after a job that’d pay him more. He started off small by writing spots for newspapers and magazines. He might have had hundreds of rejection notes, yet he kept on writing every week and submitting them to the publishers. Why? Because he wanted to write. And for him, that was a bigger reason than just being published and being famous. He just wanted to make enough money to support his life and family. But he never stopped following his passion. He was in love with writing and not where his writing would take him.

Mark Manson in his book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” wrote about a guy whose mantra was to ‘never try’. Crazy, right? Not really. What he explained about this person is how he wanted to become a great writer but failed and slipped into drug addiction. After this, he used his misery to write books but never expected anything out of them. Eventually, someone found his writing interesting and published him. All he did was stop trying to go after his goal crazily and shift his focus on just writing and maybe improving himself. That’s what it is all about. If you keep on expecting an outcome, you might never get it. An outcome is a mere byproduct of the process. What you need to do is to shift your focus majorly on the process of the outcome and become better and better at it. Goals are anyway momentary. You want to achieve something, you work for it and achieve it. Then what? Setting life-defining goals will ultimately rip you off of your will to go on once you achieve them. Instead fall in love with the process, with your passion. Who knows? You might not even need a goal to do something you are doing.

Give it a thought. :)