What is the goal of a goal? Can a goal even have a goal? It’s been over half a year now since I ditched my running watch in an attempt to strip back my running. I’d grown tired of how such a primitive act became entangled with technology and the digital world, and wanted to experience running for its simplicity again. Since I’d sprained my ankle at the beginning of August, I went a few months without running to allow it to heal, only lacing up my shoes again sometime in mid-November. At the time, I had in my head that I still wanted to ‘log’ my running in some way and to have goals that I could work towards in my running. I still wished to shift from a ‘training’ mentality to simply ‘living’ and ‘running’ one. That is, running is a part of my training for life, not merely something isolated from the rest of my life. So, when I returned from my ankle sprain, I started off with a digital log - a spreadsheet with some columns along the lines of route name, how I felt, what I sensed etc. I hoped that this would integrate nicely into project joyrun, in which I hope to help others (and myself) (re)find joy in their running. However, as someone who’s trying to move away from the screens when I can, this digital log only lasted a couple of weeks at most. So, I thought I would give a written log a shot.

Even when I was training with a GPS watch, I still defaulted to logging my running in a more old-school way. After my runs, I’d populate a table on a piece of paper with the distance that I’d run and any comments about niggles etc. But this was never a standalone training log. It provided little information that was useful other than mileage, which sometimes allowed me to see whether I had cranked up my volume too quickly. However, what it did do was allow me to visualise progression and consistency in my running. Slowly, over the course of a training ‘block’, the A4 sheet of paper would fill up, and it was nice to see a visual representation of my consistency. I preferred this simple method to Strava as I could annotate it with some comments - for example, use a red pen to mark out a weekend where I was backpacking instead of running. That way, when I looked back at my ‘training’, a clear narrative could be seen. So, surely I could have just kept logging my running like this? Well, the issue now was that the only metric that I threw into this log was the distance run, which I now don’t really know. I wanted to find an analog, pen and paper way of logging my running, but let it slip away from me. As a result, for at least the past three months, I have no real log of my training. I know that I’ve been doing roughly X amount of time, but that’s about it. It’s been very freeing and liberating, but I’ve noticed that a key piece of the puzzle is missing. The reason why I’ve been finding it difficult to keep a physical log is that I’ve had no real goals to work towards with my running. It’s not that I believe that we always need to be working towards a big goal, as that way, we can start feeling lost when this isn’t the case. But I do think that goals are great things that we can use as anchors in our training and lives more generally. Aimlessness can otherwise arise.

Going forward, I’m hoping to try to find a solid analog way of logging my running, and I think that revisiting and appreciating the importance of goals is a necessary first step. That’s why I wanted to write this post - to discuss a goal’s role, touching from time to time on how it ties into our running.

Direction matters

Before I delve into things, one important point I would like to make is the following: goals can become counterproductive if you haven’t decided on your direction. Now, notice how I’ve been careful not to state anything about going in the wrong direction. This is because the right direction looks different for everyone, and it’s up to us as individuals to decide on that direction. The wrong direction, however, is never clear-cut, as there are an infinite number of levers that we could pull that don’t send us in the idealised, ‘perfect’ direction. However, I think that it’s safe to say that we must practice some caution and awareness of our direction of travel if we’re about to set a lofty goal. The difficulty is that many of us don’t have a sense of our direction of travel and are blindly caught in an inertia, meaning that we’d never be able to conclude whether a goal was aligned with the right direction. This can lead to a less meaningful life as we’re caught up in passivity and conformity, having not truly reflected and considered what we’d like to ‘do’ with our life. But we’re not to blame. It’s difficult to know what we want to do these days. There’s an infinite abundance of choice, which can sometimes lead to cloudiness and decision paralysis. So, the first step is to choose your direction.

When choosing a direction, I believe that it’s important to do so from a place of clarity and calmness. Otherwise, we may question whether the direction is right when things start to get tough. Ask yourself: what life do you want, what will help you move towards that, and what no longer serves you? These questions may seem shallow at the surface, but with great contemplation, much depth can arise from them. Like anything that’s written, the purpose of them is to kickstart an exploration into the Self and to lead to other questions. Running might fall into your idea of the life that you want. If that’s the case, then great. But if it doesn’t, I suggest that you simply accept that. Accept that maybe running is not part of the life that you want. That’s fine. Everyone doesn’t need to run.

From a personal standpoint, this concept of the right direction is something that I’ve been toying with for the best part of a couple of years. Fortunately, following a Vipassana silent meditation, I was able to gain clarity regarding the right direction for me. Importantly, I did not dwell on or get caught up in the past, and the possibility that I’d perhaps been headed in the wrong direction, because such thinking gets us nowhere. Every event in the past leads us to the present and cannot be changed. So it’s a waste of energy trying to restructure your path on the map of the past. I digress. For me, at least at present, my hope is to work on helping address some issues related to climate change. Consequently, I am trying to take small steps towards this. But it’s important to note that, firstly, this is an intentionally vague goal (more on this later), and it is also only one component of the landscape of the future. I’m using the word landscape to avoid the one-pointedness and close-mindedness that often comes back to bite us if we set explicit, lofty goals.

So, once you’ve identified a direction, or, perhaps more appropriately, a landscape to navigate through, it becomes relatively simple. Not easy, but simple. You just need to make sure that at each step of this path, you are making the right choice in the present moment. Which it always has to be and is if you think about it philosophically. Then you can live life away from the hypothetical and ‘what ifs’. What happens then is that the goal(s) become a byproduct of the means. In essence, you’re on the right map now, and can address any stiles, river crossings, or mountains as and when they arise.

Why big isn’t better

If I am no longer working towards a big goal, then how do I know what to do to head in the right direction? An example that may help to explain why this is something not to worry about is wanting to become a ‘better’ runner. This is quite a broad brush statement, but I would say that it is an element of a life that one wants to live instead of being one particular goal. I know that vagueness and lack of measurability are often said to be unhelpful when trying to make progress, but bear with me. If you’ve decided that you want to become a ‘better’ runner, then your definition of better can evolve over time. This can be both good and bad, as we risk getting caught up in the incessant pursuit of hammering down our PBs, but the flip side to the coin is that it can make it easier to accept that maybe what I once thought of as being a better runner is no longer what I believe. Maybe now being a better runner means not letting it take over your life, or enjoying connecting with nature more during your runs instead of running a sub-20 5 km. But that’s not to discredit such goals - they can be very helpful, but only when they are the means and not the overarching goal themselves. Otherwise, we can develop an unhealthy attachment and reliance on the extrinsic. The key thing to do is to allow these goals to naturally arise and disappear. In this light, a goal may look something like: this week, I want to focus on recovery, which will instigate a series of other goals, such as doing a few easy runs and getting some good sleep in. I know this may not make too much sense, but the important think to take away is that letting goals be a means of heading in the right direction is very important.

Why am I drilling this point in? It’s because big goals often have big fall-offs. I know this from personal experience. If you set one huge goal of winning a race, then there is bound to be a big crash and burnout following it - even if you win. That’s my viewpoint anyway. The reason I believe this is that big lofty goals allow us to live them out in our minds time and time again before even ‘achieving’ them, which I think generates a tremendous wastage of energy. To compound this, when we finally achieve our goals, they seem anticlimactic and superficial as we’ve lived them out a thousand times in the false reality of our psyche. These are consequences of fixating over an outcome, instead of full immersion in the process.

The truth is, however, that it’s difficult to both define and navigate our landscape these days as we’re exposed to so many others who are ‘succeeding’ in the traditional sense - the one that aligns with the status quo. Just take running as one example: whereas twenty years ago marathons were something only a rare breed did, we now all want to do an ultramarathon. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, but why do you want to do it? Do you want to do it because others are or because you genuinely love running? This is a question that we should ask ourselves about and a goal that we decide to pursue. It’s what I try to drill into people when they ask for advice on enjoying something: make sure you have intrinsic motivators, as the extrinsic will always fade away.

Suppose you do really love running, though, because of how it makes you feel and being able to explore new places. One must still be careful with setting lofty goals. Every once in a while, maybe they’re harmless in the long run, but the regular pursuit of lofty running goals can also negatively affect other parts of our lives. It may lead to us sacrificing family, friends, health, and well-being as a result of a one-pointed drive towards the big goal. I won’t go into detail here, but I would like to emphasise that the view that we see on social media platforms is distorted to say the least. Aspiring towards similar goals to others is sometimes OK, but we now live in an age where we’re flooded with a constant stream of ‘successes’ from ‘successful people’ in all facets that we’d like to improve in our own lives. I myself have certainly fallen prey to being caught up in wanting to maximally progress in various different aspects of life, which only inevitably leads to discontentment and lack of peace. This is why it’s important to carve your own path and not compare yourself to others. Things take time - often longer than we think.

Process trumps outcome

One reason why setting big lofty goals can also by itself be detrimental is that we may neglect the process - the steps that take us to that goal. The difficulty is, as mentioned above, we cannot know a priori what all of the steps towards a huge goal are. Moreover, the enormity of the goal can overshadow smaller goals and make them feel petty and meaningless. Whenever I myself set a big goal, I’m a big fan of working backwards from the goal to think about some of the steps to help achieve that goal. As a result, micro-goals arise as means from the larger goal. The trick is to then almost intentionally forget about the big goal for the most part, as it frees up a lot of mental energy and space to focus on the process. In my running, for example, it’s far easier to focus on one week at a time and within that one day at a time instead of thinking about the big race a few months down the line all the time. In the past, I’d be inclined to say that the bigger goal can be drawn upon as inspiration and motivation when times are tough, but I now question how useful such an extrinsic motivator can be.

Now that we know the importance of immersing ourselves in the process, which itself composes of sub- or micro-goals, there’s an important thing to mention: discipline. Without discipline, we become engulfed in the pursuit of a goal and in wanting to achieve it, which can paralyse us and make us freeze in the present. Discipline means being attentive to the small steps along the path as and when they arise. It also means doing the mundane, boring, and seemingly pointless little things that eventually build up to something extraordinary, deep, and meaningful. Many people talk about the importance of breaking things down into more achievable goals. This is not new. However, I think many of us get caught up in a strange space between the projected fantasies of our minds and action, which results in an inability to take even the smallest steps.

When taking small steps along this landscape that is life, it is also not about going all in with great intensity. Yes, in the short term, perhaps this can be done without too many consequences. But if we try to apply this logic to things that take more time, which are many things in life, then we will burn out. I used to view going all in as something the best of the best do to become successful, but the disillusionment of what it means to be successful and an increased appreciation for so called slow living has made me lose interest in this fallacy. Sustainably becoming a better person is all about the navigation. If we focus on the navigation - that is, the process - then we will always arrive where we were meant to while simultaneously avoiding the incessant pursuit of idealistic, illusory goals.

Timescales matter

OK. That’s enough spiel about goals and why the magnitude of the goal that we set matters, and can impact our life. Something else that’s important is the concept of time. With any goal, as mentioned above, it does help if we can tie something conclusive to it. Achieving a particular goal in a certain time is a way of doing this. By time, I don’t mean running a sub-30 5 km. Instead, I mean running a 5 km in four weeks’ time, for example. Or maybe you want to have written the first section of your thesis by two weeks’ time. The key with any goal is for it not to be too far into the future. Yes, some goals can have longer timescales, such as training over a year for a race, but we must have shorter timescale goals along the way too. This helps us avoid disappointment when big setbacks arise too as we’ve hot hedged our bets on something that could happen a long way down the road.

I certainly saw the importance of time-centered goals come into play during my time at university. Yes, we had exams to sit and a thesis to write, but we always had goals that were operating over short timescales too. This allowed full immersion and involvement in the process and made it easier not to be overwhelmed by the big picture. Even then, though, the longest goals - at least in my head - were no longer than a year. Looking further into the future seemed like a waste of energy to me. But I appreciate now that sometimes it is useful to have perspective and realise that most things of worth take a good handful of years at the least to manifest properly. So it is still important to bare this in mind as otherwise we might fall for the trap of thinking that change and progress can happen overnight.

By setting goals that have relatively short timescales, we can stay grounded in the reality of the present. This avoids us falling down the slippery slope of setting goals that are too big and having no life satisfaction consequently.

Stripping back

By now, it should be obvious that for goals to be effective and useful, we need ones that are sustainable and that won’t cause a big crash after achieving them. This is where I think things become interesting. When working towards a goal, the type of goal matters. What I mean by this is that it may not be a great idea for your goal to be to binge-watch 6 hours of Netflix every day of the week. You might easily achieve your goal, but I’m not sure we can call the attainment of such a goal ‘success’ in any sense. Instead, I think that it’s incredibly valuable and powerful to only pursue activities and goals that add intrinsic value to your life. Of course, what these things are is up for each individual to decide for themselves, but I hold the view that we may actually be better off not chasing some goals, especially ones that are a byproduct of societal conditioning. Such goals only contribute to the increasing problem of pseudo-productivity in the modern world. Many of us would likely be better off setting goals of not doing something - that is, embracing boredom and solitude. This is the first step in stripping back our goals - only set ones that align with the direction that you are headed and rid any that are simply noise.

This ties into the next step in stripping back our goals: the importance of not taking too much on or putting too much on our plates at once. I’ve fallen prey to this many times during my life. It’s difficult not to when the collective psychology is one that pursues and encourages productivity and busyness. However, this, once more, is often busyness for the sake of busyness; for distraction’s sake. I’m inclined to say that much of this is what I’d call pseudo-living. This state of living contains many tasks that simply act as void fillers, distractions, taking away from the things that we truly want to pursue and achieve. A concrete example of this for me was Strava. It did not help me in any way to step closer towards the person that I want to be, while enjoying my running being an element of this. All it did was occupy some of my time, making me believe that I was getting closer to my goals and aspirations. But this is perhaps more an example of things that fill up our time without us noticing.

I guess taking too much on at once is a little different. It may be that you get carried away in trying to maximise progression in a number of different avenues in your life, leading to having to juggle all these things at once. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have range in our activities and pastimes, but there’s a fine line between chipping away and burning out. Again, I’ve been there. The crux here is to make sure that you set realistic goals given the context and your circumstances - those last two things are key. If you’re already training for your first marathon and raising a child, maybe it’s not the best idea to be trying to set up your own company too. Intuition and awareness of Self are our best friends here, but it’s very easy to allow the clouded view we see online to start sending us around in circles.

OK, so how do I know which goals to and not to pursue? Despite all that I’ve said above, I also think that there’s a lot of power in just doing something when you decide that you want to do it (within reason, of course). We often feel like the stakes are high and the whole world’s eyes are peering over us, but many things that we procrastinate and fail to do are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Best case, you achieve your goal. Worst case, you land back where you were before, so long as you obey the things I’ve mentioned above when setting your goals. With enough discipline and realism, we can still achieve many things that we thought were beyond us.

Now, suppose you have some goals you’d like to follow through with. The next key step in stripping back is, in my opinion, to go analog. Or at least as close to analog as possible. I’ve used a pocket notebook for years, and it’s one of the most useful tools that I have. I can throw in any important deadlines or dates into the calendar, timeblock my days to keep on top of things, and write any lingering thoughts down instead of habitually reaching for my phone or laptop to look something up. I find that having a year calendar on my wall also helps a lot when working towards some goals. It gives a visual representation of time, which often makes it easier to be realistic with my goal setting and to sketch out the sub-goals and -steps on the way to a particular goal. Despite my seeming push for people to plan out their time to the minute, there’s also a lot of power in allowing things to arise when and where they are meant to. This tends to naturally happen as goals become a means, as touched on earlier. Just maintain enough awareness and discipline, and things will often fall into place, especially if you’ve stripped things back.

The gift of gratitude

Having set goals, at some point - not always - we’ll end up achieving the goal. Especially if we’ve been realistic with them, whilst still making them difficult enough for growth to occur. One’s disposition might push them to immediately turn their attention to the next goal. I’ve just run a PB in the 5 km, what is the next thing I can do? Oh, maybe try to beat that PB, or run a new 10 km PB. It’s natural, and such responses are certainly ingrained in the collective psychology due to the aforementioned conditioning. However, please listen to me and take some time to step back and appreciate what you’ve achieved. Allow yourself to bathe in the joy of achieving the goal. Too many times during my life - in fact, most of the time during my studies - I was chasing a goal, only to achieve it and immediately move onto the next thing. No celebration, reflection, or self-praise. OK, education is perhaps not the best example as I now think that such numbing to success is a consequence of the competition-breeding education system, but it’s happened in my running too. In fact, I think it might be impossible for most of us not to start thinking what’s next when we achieve a goal. But these days, I try to allow myself, sometimes forcefully, to take a break and reap the rewards. Otherwise, surprise, surprise, we hit burnout and, at worst, gain no life satisfaction. If we’re going to pursue what could be argued as merely superficial, then let’s at least spend time celebrating them.

Celebration is one thing, but I believe that there’s a more important aspect to being content and satisfied when we set and reach our goals: gratitude. There are countless studies out there showing the power and benefit of expressing and feeling gratitude towards things, be it others, yourself, or nature. I’m no neuroscientist, nor will I bore you with why it’s good for us. But, from experience, it certainly gets some good juices flowing. You see, if we operate on autopilot in a mode where the ego - the I - is central in our lives, we may not think at all about being grateful for things. For e’re living in a vacuum where feeding the ego is the priority. Gratitude is the opposite of this. Whenever we experience success, it is never only from our own efforts. There is always something else that has helped you achieve success. Maybe it’s something obvious, like a tutor or mentor. But often it’s - and I’d argue, should be - subtler. Even when writing this blog post, I’m grateful to have a roof over my head, to have power to charge up my laptop and to have the energy to write because Mother Earth has given me nutritious food. You get my point. We can always find something to be grateful for if we step outside of the bubble of the I. Sometimes it’s harder to do so, but it’s these times where digging out the things to be grateful for has the biggest positive impact on our lives.

The gift of gratitude is one of the biggest there is. Gratitude itself will breed more gifts.

The next rung of the ladder

Having - hopefully - practised gratitude and allowed ourselves some time to kick back, it’s natural to eventually turn our eyes to the next goal; the next rung of the ladder. This is, in fact, important, as we may otherwise become stagnant and feel as if there’s no meaning to our lives. Related to my point about not putting too much on your plate is the following: when setting a goal on the next rung of the ladder, it’s wise to stay in the same domain. What I mean by this is if, for example, you’ve achieved your goal of writing ten blog posts, maybe the next, ‘difficult enough’ goal will be to write a short story. This will help avoid getting carried away and being unrealistic with our goals, as we have some understanding of the distances between the rungs of the ladder in the present domain. That’s not to say that we can’t work across domains or put a finger or two in another domain, but the bulk of the goal should reside in a domain you are at least somewhat familiar with. For example, you may have run your first 10-mile road race and think that trail running could be fun, so you set a goal of completing your first 10 km trail race. There’s enough similarity that the goal does not become a big lofty one with the risk of a big fall off.

Something I personally like to do is to group some of my goals into larger domains. For example, I may have a goal of running a certain race in a few months’ time, so I naturally create and happen upon sub-goals that fall under the umbrella of preparing for that race. Maybe it’s to practice fueling, do some strength work etc. The goal of doing the race itself lies in a larger domain, that is, to make sure that I move and respect my body. I feel like this reduces the cognitive burden and baggage of possibly getting overwhelmed by things.

One caveat, or maybe warning, that I’d like to add is that the ladder is essentially infinite. This can become a problem psychologically, as we only have a finite amount of time on this beautiful Earth. This is where it is important to remember that, above all, presence is the most important thing. For if we aren’t present, we may end up haphazardly and passively blasting up the ladder without taking time to appreciate each rung, only then to realise that what we were pursing (which is often pleasure) will never actually arrive. Anyway, I’ll need to read some more Freud before I can square this a little better.

Subjective success

I’ve said all of these things about setting goals and about being successful and achieving these goals, but it’s very important to remember the subjectiveness present here. My definition of success will be different to yours. And your definition of success will be different to The Pope’s. In fact, they should be different. Once you understand the true Self a little better, you can start taking steps across the landscape of the right map, as mentioned earlier. When we do this, we need to remember our own intrinsic motivators, the whys. Then, when we achieve our goals, this consistent success acts to compound confidence in a healthy and sustainable way. The alternative narrative is that we continue pursuing the status quo definition of success - maybe the American dream - only to realise that we were living in an illusion. One sees this time and time again in society. There’s one bit of advice that I like to give myself regularly: not to associate my self-worth and -confidence with external things, such as status, my job, my grades, or how fast I run. Once more, it’s difficult to do this all the time, as I, like many, have been conditioned to think that these are the things that constitute a fun and meaningful life. But if you sit down and define your own true success, then the risk of this lessens. Goals then become things that meaningfully improves our baseline, not our status. This is a double positive, as status breeds discontentment.

Thinking more broadly, I believe that one thing that would bring a lot of good and peace to the world is if we all went inwards a little more. Imagine if we started measuring success in terms of intrinsically meaningful things, which cannot be measured, such as inner peace, joy, contentment, compassion, and non-judgment. To me, this seems like a no brainer, for if we become overly reliant on others’ perception of our *external ‘success’ then we will feel as if we’re lost in a raging storm when this validation mechanism ceases to exist.

One interesting thing to ponder on is the following: what if the definition of success were to have the minimum number of things to do on our to do lists? No, I don’t expect people to be recluses and to remove themselves from society, but there’s a lot to say for less being more. I remember telling a supply teacher, “quality over quantity” during a class in school as a teenager. The teacher was unhappy with my attitude, to say the least. But I think that it is true, both in the context of writing an essay and in life more generally. We shouldn’t brush ourselves too thinly, only undertaking and interacting with the superficial. But, most importantly, we should take all of these things with a pinch of salt, as nothing external can bring true satisfaction and contentment in the long run.

A balance of being

Ultimately, in my very few years living on this Earth, I’ve realised that things require balance. Goals are no different. We must strike a balance between pursuing and striving and simply being. I used to think that simply being was a waste of time, for surely I’d be better off spending time doing, right? But the truth is that being is a form of doing. Some may argue that it’s the highest form of doing. I’d likely agree with them at this point in my life. Why? Because if we cannot realise the beauty and importance of being without wanting an alternative, then I think we are missing the point of life.

Perhaps one goal that we can all set ourselves is to simply be more often. It’s up to you how you do that, but you can start off by just sitting still and doing nothing for a few minutes after finishing reading this line.