Today, I live mostly without goals. Now and then I start coming up with a goal, but I’m letting them go. Living without goals hasn’t ever been an actual goal of mine … it’s just something I’m learning that I enjoy more, that is incredibly freeing, that works with the lifestyle of following my passion that I’ve developed.
The Best Goal is No Goal
Thus, begins an epic debate.
Leo Babauta has decided to live without goals. For someone who has made goals such a big part of changing your habits to using time better in work like Zen to Done, this is a change for Leo, and I admire him for it. Unfortunately, this has created disagreement from others.
David Damron writes:
This was extremely tough for me to grasp. I have led my life focused on goals and have been able to achieve much by doing so. In fact, my latest project Destination X is all about achieving a goal thus there is a concentration of focus on a goal. So, when Leo brought this topic up at WDS, I was again having inner struggles as I admire Leo for what he has accomplished, but I am unable to agree with him on such a hard and fast approach he has taken in his life.
David Damron isn't buying it. But Leo Babauta responds in a brilliant piece that I think is better than his original piece:
. . .without goals, a lot of people wouldn’t do anything — which I don’t believe is true. Freed of goals, I highly doubt that most of us would just sit around doing nothing. That would bore us — interesting, talented people want to do something. So we would — we’d get excited and create. Sure, there would be a few people who sit around doing nothing — but those people are setting goals for themselves and are sitting around not achieving those goals, and feeling guilty about it.
That’s the thing: even with goals, some people aren’t going to achieve anything, because they haven’t figured out how to motivate themselves. Goals don’t do that for you — they just make you feel guilty that you haven’t gotten them done. And even without goals, people who are motivated are people who will get excited and do stuff. They’ll accomplish something great, no matter what.
Now, here's my take on things. The reason Leo lives without goals now is because he is living the life that he always wanted. He has "arrived." He has his family. He is free from bad habits and debt. He is in awesome shape. He has reached a state of contentment. Others want to live the same way, so this way of living would be a goal for them much as it was for Leo when he didn't live this way and struggled with being a smoking, fat, stressed out, and debt burdened loser. But once these things were achieved, what was left to do?
What Leo has done is cut to something deeply philosophical. Unfortunately, it falls to the deep thinking blogger (yours truly) to unpack all of this and explain why there is such a debate on this issue of goals. For Leo, it is about being free to follow his passions, but this is not exactly precise. You can follow your passions and still have goals. In fact, someone will be clever and say that Leo really does have goals and always will. Arguing differently would amount to explaining the sound of one hand clapping. The issue is not goals. Leo messed up by using the wrong word.
The word Leo should have used is "ambition." Everywhere that I read him using goals as a term, I find that ambition fits way better. Much of the debate would be over with just by switching to that one term. A goal is simply a destination or a direction. It could be as vague as "heading West" to as precise as arriving at a specified address. In this context, we all have goals including Leo. When he sits down to craft a post for his blog, he has given himself a goal. Not living with goals in this sense is a logical impossibility. A "task" might be an even better term to use.
Ambition is different. Ambition is a desire. The thing you pick up from Leo is how influential Asian culture is on what he does and how he lives. Leo will make pains to point out that he is not exactly a Zen monk, and the title of his blog "Zen Habits" is almost accidental along with the Taoist symbol he uses. But his philosophy of life is deeply Asian. This philosophy is in conflict with the Western mindset that comes heavily from Aristotle.
Aristotle is very goal centered. He mentions again and again in his writings the concept of the telos or "the end." A telos is a purpose or a goal, and Aristotle's writings return to this concept again and again. Everything in our lives has a telos resulting in the ultimate telos of happiness. Now, you are probably wondering what the hell telos has to do with personal development bloggers, but Leo and David are simply recreating debates that are thousands of years old. Personal development is simply today's version of philosophy.
I think in terms of philosophy as a strategy for living, so I will try and explain the East/West clash of Leo and David as best I can. With Leo, the influence is Buddhist especially Zen Buddhism which stresses the absence of desire. Ambition is essentially a desire, but the desire causes us grief and pain. When you live with ambition, every day is a failure because you aren't where you want to be. Ambition is living in the future instead of the present. Because of this, your enthusiasm becomes diminished. You measure each day by that future self that has arrived at the ambition. And what happens when you do make it? You pick another ambition to pursue. You realize that ambition is a relentless taskmaster, and it sucks the enjoyment out of life.
David Damron argues, "I believe that we can achieve far greater things by establishing a plan of action towards a desired goal." David is directly from that Aristotelian school. Aristotle said that you could not judge a man's happiness until after that man was dead. This is because we cannot say that he fulfilled his end or telos until he was actually done living. The best you can say is that he was on his way to fulfilling his end. This matters because it is how we determine if someone has been a success or not. Based on Platoon and Wall Street, we would say that Charlie Sheen was on the path to becoming a serious actor. But where is he now?
Leo addresses this telos thinking brilliantly here:
A few years ago, I did a post talking about your life’s purpose: The Key to Dying Happy.
It’s still a good method, but I don’t do it anymore. That doesn’t mean the things I set out as my purpose aren’t important to me anymore — I just go about doing them differently. Let’s take a quick look at how I do that. From the post:
Leo’s Mission
He was an amazing dad.
He made his wife happy.
He was a good, compassionate person.
He made the lives of others better (especially those in need).
He was a great writer.
He was happy.
Here’s the remarkable thing — you could say those things about me right now. I mean, whether I’m a great writer or whether I make the lives of others better — those are debatable, sure. But I definitely try: I’m happy, and I do my best every day to be a good father, husband, writer and compassionate person.
So I’m not so focused on the end of my life — but on right now. Instead of setting these goals for the end of my life (which I did several years ago), I get excited about all these things, right now, and do them every day because I’m excited about them. I love being a dad, a husband, a writer, a friend. I absolutely get up excited about these things every day, and am grateful I have the chance to do them.
Leo has had a profound epiphany. Life is about the doing and not what you have done or what you are going to do. The Aristotelian influence is so heavy in the culture and among the self-development people that life is lived almost purely in future terms. The reason Leo is so popular and so different from all those other gurus is because he is slowly rejecting this Aristotelian foundation for all of this crap. Even Aristotle admitted that the feeling of happiness is experienced as a byproduct of living your life.
The predominant mantra of the personal development world is to set goals and pursue them. You have to have passion, desire, motivation, etc. Then, comes the rah-rah cheerleading that is already fading by the time you are fishing for your car keys in the parking lot. The fact that so many people fail with this strategy and keep coming back for more is evidence that this strategy is flawed.
Leo gives living proof to his strategy which runs counter to this crap. His way is almost virtually the opposite of what we learn here in society. He began with a small desire to quit smoking, and he tackled it with humility. He won. Then, he moved on to the next thing. Now, he is exactly where he wants to be. If we determine success as the completion of our desires, Leo is a success. He is rewriting the rules for success.
The conventional wisdom is that a life without ambition will make you a bum. Leo deals with this masterfully:
Goals take credit for our accomplishments, like a bad boss does in the company’s annual report. But we all know who did the work to get those accomplishments — the workers. The boss just acted as a taskmaster but mostly got in the way with a lot of pressure and asking for time-consuming reports.
Goals are the same: we give them a lot of credit for our accomplishments, but they didn’t do the work.
Our achievements are the product of work. That's it. In companies, you have these insane managers that waste all day in meetings, sending emails, having action item lists, crafting mission statements, and on and on. I know because I have lived with it my entire working life. None of it amounts to anything. When I go to work, I have one item on my task list--DO WORK. That's it. I just show up and work. Amazingly, shit gets done. Leo says the same thing applies to your life.
I've been on both sides of this debate, so I know it intimately. When I used to be very critical of Leo, I was heavy on the Aristotle thing. You want to know a secret? That Renaissance Man shit didn't do a thing for me. It was ambition, bravado, and stupidity. I was trying to be Chuck Norris when I should have been more like Bruce Lee.
I can't tell people the right path to take since I find that every philosophy or life strategy has its pluses and minuses. I can only judge them by the empirical results. The Renaissance Path as I call this Aristotelian thinking fails because it is ambitious. When I was on that path, it was the same trinity of frustration--time, money, and energy. I never had enough of these three resources to accomplish my ambitions. If you want to know what this looks like, just check out Tim Ferriss who is all about creating hacks to solve these problems of time, money, and energy. His advice is less solution and more self-delusion. This is why he comes across as a con artist. Delusion is the only way to deal with the failure because everyday is failure on this path.
I realized I had changed on this issue when I was having a convo with my brother, and he talked about the goals he had for his business. This struck me as odd. I had never thought about it before, but it seemed to me a really dumb way to think. This is because no matter what, my brother was going to do the same thing everyday regardless if he achieved his goals or not. He was going to work. Victory or defeat are meaningless when you see the enemy over the hill amassing their army. You are simply going to fight. Stopping to write down your goal of how many enemies you want to kill that day is absurd. Do you stop at that number? Or do you just fight until there is no one left to kill?
I've learned that the best thing to do is not to focus on the telos but on the process. The telos takes care of itself. Just do the work. Live in the moment. Be engrossed in what is happening right now. And do not judge. Things may work or may not work. Most successes come at the end of a string of failures. When you have no ambition, this is no big deal. With ambition, each failure brings massive anguish.
In my life, I have been stripping away at the vanities of materialism, pride, status, and now, ambition. These things are not real and often lead to self-delusion. I find myself taking this simpler and humbler path that Leo is on. And it works. My life is better now than it was before. As the Unknown Blogger would put it, "Shit works."
I will write more on this topic, but I can say that I am on Leo's side on this one. Ambition is not the same as work. Goals do not bring happiness. Doing brings happiness. Leo seems to be doing fine without ambition, and I can say that I am doing fine, too.
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