Fuck Goals - Why Setting Goals Limits Abundance
Photo by Bich Tran
TL;DR
Don’t set goals
Goals, success, and failure are all scarcity inviting concepts
Commit and move forward; you don’t need to know the “how” before you do
Fuck Goals
Photo by nappy
I fucking hate goals. They are a waste of time and shut down possibilities. They lock me into being the most shitty version of myself. I know this because my ability to predict the future has historically been bound by my limited imagination, even with my pretty fantastic imagination. There is no way I can come up with an imagined-future as bright, colorful, and exciting as all my actual-futures have been. The universe always one-ups me with a future that is beyond my wildest dreams.
Goals by their nature come from a place of scarcity, not abundance. They set artificial limits, upper bounds, and inspire self-limiting behaviors. They limit the amount of creativity, joy, love, and abundance I allow myself to experience in my life. When I'm on the verge of exceeding a goal, I hold back. Likewise, when an opportunity arises to deviate from a goal to something more abundant, I stay the course to the original goal. These are just some of the ways that I cockblock the universe, and I imagine you are doing the same.
“Setting goals based on comparing yourself to others is the fastest route to unhappiness and dissatisfaction.”
Setting goals is really a way to artificially limit the amount of creativity, joy, love, and abundance I experience in my life. A life well lived and aligned to my true purpose is an ever-expanding, non-linear, non-measurable experience beyond my current imagination, even when I'm already living my most amazingly imagined dream life.
By the external assessment of society, achieving a goal means that I’m successful. It means “I won.” It means that I’m doing something “right” in my life, that I’m “better” than those around me.
It’s fragile, and it’s all sourced from fear.
For me, achieving goals and being serious so that I’m “successful” falls apart pretty quickly when viewed from the lens of non-duality and abundance. I’m so easily lured into forgetting that this life is just a game. Even the word “success” brings up thoughts of good, better, best, and measurement of what everyone else is doing. What is success, really?
Comparing myself to others, or even my past self never produces any positive outcomes in my thoughts, feelings, or being. Our language is riddled with panic-inducing scarcity words that I find it hard to get away from. It’s fucking exhausting.
I recall a time when I was recovering from an accident that resulted in surgery to repair both of my wrists. My strength, mobility, flexibility, and range of motion were severely impacted by the accident and subsequent surgeries. I had no use of my hands for a couple of weeks after, and then only limited use for a couple of months more.
“One day I realized that goal setting was keeping me locked in pain. ”
One day I realized that goal setting was keeping me locked in pain. I knew the results I wanted and had laid out a plan based on a serious effort to get to where I wanted to be. I was pushing hard, ignoring pain, and masking my experience with escaping my body.
What happened, in reality, is that I was pushing too hard. On days I should rest due to pain or inflammation, I would instead push through with my regimen of physical therapy. What was happening in my body was small improvements met with significant setbacks of being unable to function. I would get sick or hurt and couldn't participate in life, much less physical therapy. It was a time of big highs and low lows.
“I decide to surrender to whatever outcome would come.”
It was not working for me. I was afraid that the doctor's prognosis of not getting full function back in my right hand/wrist, and it was driving my behavior to push harder than I should. I decide to surrender to whatever outcome would come.
When I gave up the idea of some future state of strength and function in my wrists, things started to get better. I stopped pushing so hard. I listened to my body more. I gave up trying to stick to a routine chasing a goal I may never achieve.
The outcome was that I got stronger and more flexible. My doctor was noticeably surprised at my level and quickness of healing. Today, I'm still not fully recovered, and maybe I never will be, and I'm totally okay with that. I have no end goal in sight anymore, and I'm still getting stronger and more flexible every day. I've far surpassed where my doctor thought I would get and suspect I will get back to where my body was pre-accident, but I have no goal to get there. It will be a happy surprise when I do.
Newtonian Way of Living a Limited Life
Isaac Newton was a 16th/17th century scientist who is well remembered for his three laws of motion. They are a bit wordy in their original old-style English form. These are the commonly simplified ways to state his three laws.
Isaac Newton
Every object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that state of motion unless an external force acts on it.
Force equals mass times acceleration.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The third law has been simplified in modern culture and taken on a new meaning outside of inertia, force, and movement of physical bodies. It is used to “scientifically prove” by some that there is a limited supply of love, money, attention, food, and well-being in our world.
Hmmm, I wonder…
Is there really a limited amount of energy in the universe?
Does every action really have an equal and opposite reaction? Even love?
If you have more, does that mean that I must have less?
Is it true?
Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
When you hold Newton’s third law up to inquiry, does it survive?
Subscribing to Newton’s third law and applying it to creativity, joy, love, and abundance is a surefire way to spend your life angry and miserable. It inspires the type of scarcity thinking that starts wars and murderous fits of jealous rage - and sometimes both.
There is No Pie
In business, there is a notion that if one person wins, the other person must lose. It’s a theory referred to as a zero-sum game. It is used in economics and game theory to predict outcomes. In this theory, there is literally a pie and, if one party takes more, then the other must have less. This theory resonates with the culture of scarcity that is so popular in modern society and patriarchal monotheistic religions.
Belief in the limiting theory of zero-sum games makes collaboration and conflict mediation nearly impossible. By the nature of the theory, both parties need to lose. Even if it is a 50:50 split, both parties are losing the other 50%.
Contrast this against a theory put forward by Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level that states conflict transformation, collaboration, and partnership is only possible when BOTH parties take 100% responsibility. There are two pies.
Actually, there are as many pies as needed for everyone involved!
“Belief in the limiting theory of zero-sum games makes collaboration and conflict mediation nearly impossible. ”
I like to use the phrase “there is no pie” as a shortcut to the notion that there is always enough. Simply enough, enough creativity, joy, love, money, space, time; it’s all abundant. When I think I don’t have enough, I’m always out of alignment and not working towards my life’s purpose. I’m being serious and fighting against reality, often because I have some goal that I’m trying really hard to achieve. I’ve lost all play and creativity. In the words of Conscious Leadership, I’m “below the line.”
Meanwhile, I’m ignoring all the signs and signals from the universe about what I should be doing. I’m making myself miserable and often the lives of everyone around me too. This scarcity mentality breeds suffering and ends relationships.
Inviting Abundance
There is no pie. I have an outlook on my place in the world and how I fill my days that invite more abundance and less scarcity. It starts with being willing. Willing to overcome my fears, lean into risk, and take the first steps. It’s not about making a list of what I will do through sheer force and struggle. Instead, it is about being willing.
When I am willing, my actions are filled with ease and grace. The beautiful thing about being willing is that I don’t need to know how to accomplish what I’m setting out to do. I don’t even need to know what form my “doing” will manifest into! Not needing to know all the answers before I begin unblocks me and assuages my fears of failure that in the past so often left me paralyzed with indecision and stuck in the planning phase.
“I’m committing to living in my genius, and I’m committing to saying NO to anything that does not align with my genius.”
The difference between “I will” and “I’m willing” is surrender. It means letting go of my idea of how I should be in the world. It means letting go of how I think things should turn out. It means letting go of setting a far off goal and working towards it.
“We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we’re doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we’re doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves.”
It also means being okay with failure. Not just being okay with it, but embracing it. Just like how I shared above that letting go of success because it is a gateway drug to the type of goal setting that’s always abundance-limiting, letting go of failures as a zero-sum game is the same. There is just as much danger of being mired in a scarcity mentality when looking at failures as something to avoid. Instead, I invite abundance when I remember that it’s all just data about my current state. What outside forces and other people consider a failure, or a success, is just data about my current state. Data I can use to learn whatever I’m most supposed to learn right now.
What “I’m willing” does is it creates a movement in me to fully committing to the universe. In committing, I’m not committed to any specific outcome; rather, I’m actively committing to move in a direction. To move in a direction and to gather ALL my resources to propel myself in that direction. Committing is about directionality and locomotion. When I fall off course, I simply come back by recommitting and gather all my resources to move in the direction of my commitment.
My commitments are always written as “I’m committing,” not “I’m committed” or “I commit to.” In “I’m committed,” I’m very serious and rigid. There is no room for play, exploration, or change — the seriousness of “committed” limits possibilities and abundance.
Likewise, in “I commit,” it’s a one-and-done type of commitment. I commit just for right now. It requires that I know what I commit to and how I will do it. If I don’t, I can’t even start and often end up frozen. “I commit” leaves less space for exploration.
With “I’m committing,” I know I need to recommit daily. It is not just a one and done type of thing. There is room for play, change, forgiveness, failures, and successes. All of those are just data about where I currently am and not an impediment to manifesting all the abundance I need to move towards what I’m committing to.
These are some of my most personal commitments.
Ever expanding spiral of the universe
I'm committing to living in my genius, and I'm committing to saying NO to anything that does not align with my genius.
I'm committing to raising my upper limit and loving myself when my core operating system belief kicks in of believing I’m fundamentally flawed and not deserving of love.
I'm committing to grow a nervous system that enjoys abundant amounts of energy for long periods of time (borrowed from Katie Hendricks 💛).
I'm committing to dancing every week.
I’m committing to help millions of men learn to use their feminine energy.
I'm committing to forming clear agreements with others with whom I want to deepen my relationship with and are also committed to forming clear agreements; including myself.
I commit to growing into the biggest version of myself while navigating upper limits with friendly integration.
Goals as Life Hacks
Only after having completely abandoned goal setting, success, and failure can I then play with using goals again. When I am completely surrendered, I can use goals as life hacks; as a resource, I can gather up to move in the direction of my commitments. When my purpose and what I’m committing to is clear, I can play with any tool that pushes my body and brain towards my commitment.
I’ve actually been known to use all the goal-setting techniques and organizational systems out there. They are not the focus and ultimate driver of my work, but rather something I can play with and curiously observe the outcomes. Even the fact that I’m up before the sun and writing this sentence now is due to a life hacking system I use involving collecting gold stars for different tasks and cashing them in on things some of my early morning naysayer personas love.
“Whenever you set a goal, there is a price to pay.”
Beware, however, while goal setting techniques can help achieve small specific steps, there is a price to pay in the form of cultivating and encouraging both self-limiting behavior and spending more time with your ego-self in the driver’s seat. Use these techniques sparingly. They are good for getting unstuck and moving through a transition, but when used as the primary motivator, they become toxic.
I’m using an ego-gratifying goal system right now because I’m currently transitioning from a period of deep rest (being) to a period of high productivity (doing). If you have a high-achiever persona, it can be of great use when getting unstuck, and it probably loves goal setting techniques and programs!
Get on the Spiral
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi
When you stop setting goals, abandon scarcity, and surrender to your commitment - even when you have no fucking idea how you will accomplish it - you get out of the zero-sum game fighting over pie. Instead, to borrow an analogy from Gay Hendricks, you get onto the spiral. The spiral, in contrast to the pie, is an ever-expanding, upward lifting path of abundance. The longer you ride the spiral up, the wider it gets. There are no upper bounds on the spiral. The length, width, and depth are all ever-expanding.
Abundance is a state of being and a way of living where everything you need is manifested in the exact right amount at the exact right time to teach you whatever you most need to learn at this exact moment.
It all starts with surrender, not a goal.
xo
—Jason
What type of goals do you set? What happens when you don’t? Do goals help or hinder you getting into flow? Tell me what you think in the comments below ⇩.
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