You are not your goals
And other things learnt whilst running
After work, I often go running.
Whilst my mind might be all over the place when I set off, after 20 minutes or so the exhaustion becomes strong enough to draw attention to itself. I notice that if I bring my attention to that immediate feeling, it has a painkilling effect — more so than if I keep my mind off it.
They say to ‘keep your eye on the prize’, to set goals and envision yourself having achieved them. I find that with running, this doesn’t help at all. If I set out to run 10k, I am much more likely to achieve that if I just put my head down and run, and absorb myself in the task of running. I notice myself getting exhausted, but its ok. I absorb myself in that pain and it doesn’t feel half as bad as when I fixate on the finish line and try to ignore it. If I do that, the pain gets too much and I stop.
Go for a run if you can, and see what I mean. Instead of focussing on the 10k mark, focus on running the next 100m. Bring your goals closer and closer to you until what you are doing is no longer goal-oriented at all, but just a mode of being. You are running (verb) rather than ‘going for a run’ (noun). Paradoxically you’ll run further.
Since I’ve noticed this, I’ve drawn parallels in other parts of my life. I’ll always sit down to learn something, maybe I’ll be watching a lecture on Youtube, or taking a Coursera course, and I won’t really be engaged in it. I’ll intermittently switch over to Facebook or Twitter under the delusion that I’ll be able to multitask. I always thought that my attention problems were a failure of goal setting, or some character flaw of mine, but now I realise that it is a failure of ‘verb setting’.
If you commit yourself to achieve the goal of watching a lecture online, for example, then getting distracted isn’t necessarily a ‘fail’. You can still come back to it and succeed in your aim. It might take 8 hours to watch a 1 hour video, but you’ve succeeded nonetheless. If you commit yourself to learning as a mode of being, however, then distraction is indeed a fail. By committing yourself to learning (verb) rather than the state (noun) of having learnt something, you will get to that state quicker and take more in.
If someone were to ask me what a long-term life goal of mine is, I would probably describe some fantasy scenario where I am in early retirement, sitting on my own private yacht, drinking a mojito. But what am I doing to get myself there? And what would I do once I am there?
Right now, I’m in the process of building an app that helps people learn to play piano. I could motivate myself by watching ‘The Secret’ and imagine myself popping bottles of champagne having negotiated a successful IPO. I could write myself a cheque for $10m. But I find that’s not very effective. The logical connection between writing javascript code and achieving that final end state is simply too tenuous. Instead I identify a mode of being that I enjoy — problem solving — and frame my task as being engaged in that. If I do achieve some success with this project then it won’t change the fact that I enjoy problem solving. Once there I’ll probably just find a new problem to solve.
Now that’s not to say that goal setting isn’t important. I wouldn’t have even embarked on a run if I hadn’t had some vague notion of fitness to motivate me. I’m saying that you should identify modes of being that 1) you enjoy, and 2) get you to where you want to be, and commit to putting yourself in those modes.
‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives’: this seems so obvious, I’ve heard stuff like this said before.
I just needed to go for a run in order to understand it.
