Potential for finding out what you are capable of + what will give you personal meaning day by day = a goal worth going for
“Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life.”
Considering Session 4 of Stoan Method is about identifying a goal, having a ‘beware of looking for goals’ post may seem contradictory. It isn’t though. Hunter S. Thompson’s perspective is massively helpful.
It took me quite a while to feel comfortable with the word ‘goal’ in Session 4 when I was developing the Stoan Method approach. For myself I resist judgements of success or failure. It’s just not a helpful perspective. The idea of goal does have a hit or miss, succeed or fail ring about it. That’s the trouble with it.
So how do you set goals if you’re not going to judge, at some point, whether you succeeded or failed?
The answer is it’s all about how you look at the goal and how you use what you’re learning as you go along towards it.
It’s alertness to what you’re finding out that’s really the thing.
That isn’t a cop out. The point about any goal is that, by definition, it’s in the future. You simply cannot know what’s in the future. Anything might come along to change circumstances so dramatically that the chances of achieving the goal in the terms you first set it out are blown out of the water. The changes could be external (I’m writing this 15 months into the COVID 19 pandemic) or they could be closer to your immediate circle of influence: relationships, health, finances are the first to come to mind but there are others.
The truly helpful perspective is to be alert to what you’re learning as you go along. Alert and conscious living is the thing.
Here’s more from Hunter S. Thompson’s letter. He says it so well. It’s all about ‘he’ and ‘a man’ - I guess because he’s writing to his male friend and he was writing it in 1958 when he was only 20.
“....we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of a certain set of abilities and desires - including a need to function in such way that his life will be meaningful.”
“Naturally, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’ve lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence. So it isn’t any too difficult to understand why you feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have a choice made for him by circumstance.”
“Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living within that way of life. But you say “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”
But even by deciding to look you go a long way toward making the choice.”
In many ways this is what Stoan Method is all about. Deciding to look and using the sessions to help when you’re saying “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”
Achieving a wider perspective through using some different thinking techniques really helps. As does simply saying out load what you’re thinking in the sessions to a person who has no preconceived notions of you at all.
The sessions open up a powerful possibility of a change in perspective. It can make so much difference.
When I think of my personal goal, at its most expansive, it’s to keep learning and stay alert and flexible in my responses to opportunities and circumstances. Yes, within that I have the necessary measurable bits - income, caring responsibilities are the most immediate that come to mind - but they are always framed in the larger goal of learning and flexibility. It really is true for me that I started thinking more expansively when I first did what has become Stoan Method nearly thirty years ago. Here’s the brief story of that.
I’m grateful to Shaun Usher for his Letters of Note concept. He’s bought together letters form all sorts of people and published them in various volumes with various themes.
You can sign up to receive his emails. Once a week or so he sends a letter that’s resonating with him. You can get to the sign up here. I get them and nearly always enjoy them - that’s where Hunter S. Thompson’s letter fortuitously came to me.
And if you use this link you’ll get to the book where Hunter S. Thompson’s letter is published in full and also the website telling you more about Shaun Usher and Letters of Note.