Greetings Friends!
I am writing to you right now on a delightfully quiet, damp Sunday morning at 6:15 am EST. Life is good. I’m huggin coffee and aside from the occasional car alarm or Bollywood Hip Hop drive-by-car-stereo-blast, it’s quiet here in NYC 🙂
Last week I finally shot the video to my Stevie Wonder Instructional Guitar DVD and I edit tomorrow…but this post is not about beating my chest, alpha male style, and getting you to cheer me on. I have an inquiry about the whole nature of achieving goals.
It’s gratifying to knock out goals and see one’s visions take shape in the world. But why? The more one does “winner” type things, the more one (I) become addicted to the elation of achievement.
Is it an addiction? What’s happening here? What’s the point of goals, accomplishments and so on? Will it ever end? Can’t I just relax into the moment and simply “be”?
Don’t get me wrong – accomplishing things is the coolest thing ever. To place an image of an achieved goal in the drop box of my mind – and watch it spring up like a flower is unbelievable. It’s like playing with the mechanics of the universe!
Maybe I’ll never be able to answer the “why”. However – one of my heroes, Lester Levenson explained the following. (You can find audios of him on youtube).
In the achievement of goals our inner resistance comes up. The “can I do it?”, the doubts, the anger, the impatience, the feeling that something is too big, too small – or even that “this is easy”, “I’m the best / the worst” (ego), “I’ll show them”, “I’ll never be able to”…the point being – our deep emotions get unearthed.
The overcoming, releasing and understanding of these emotions ultimately are the lessons we need to learn. We come up against our own resistance and ego. Goals help us shine the light on our inner junk and see it for what it is worth.
Food for thought.
Have a wonderful day y’all. Love you.
Adam
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Purpose. Habit. Growth.
As humans we need to have purpose, otherwise what’s the point? Just walking down the street isn’t really purpose…but for a 1 year old being able to walk is pretty tricky stuff…goals/purpose just get more complex as we go.
“6 weeks to form a habit” they tell me. Where forming a habit might be breaking an existing habit 😉 Goal-achieve-next-goal-achieve-next…sounds like a habit to me, born from purpose. Once it is habit, it is “normal”, so it’s just what we do.
Growth, now there is something the economicists rely on, but personally, it is irritating. How come the sum of our material existence needs to be greater than zero? Why can’t we sit back and smell the roses? What’s so important about the destination that we can’t enjoy the ride?
Good thinking stuff as always Adam, I could go on but I must get back to work – clients who want to increase their production; although the work gets me out of bed each day I think it has become habitual 😉
JAW
Mr. Rafferty,
Your points regarding the inner resistance caused a ‘Lightbulb’ moment for me. I never considered that “The overcoming, releasing and understanding of these emotions ultimately are the lessons we need to learn.” was the point.
This is quite liberating because I usually analyze everything to the point of having nothing to do. What I think I am really doing is trying to make the idea pointless and/or impossible but ‘finding’ all of the problems inherent to trying something new.
Thanks,
Justin