Achieving goals and gaining more goods is like eating potato chips. It doesn’t fill you up. It only numbs the pain of your hunger until you find a denser and more nutritious source of food. I don’t mean to cheapen the process–and the merit–of achieving goals. It’s really important to have a calling, a “personal legend,” a trade, a specialty in life. There is a definite purpose in life for the sculpting and refining of our skills. And because there is a higher purpose for our skills, it cannot be the ultimate reason for our life’s pursuit to begin with. It’s a means to an end, not the end itself. So I compare achievement to potato chips not from the outlook that it is worthless in its nutritious yield, but that it is a placeholder, one step removed in its ability to give actual satiation.
Let’s look at this in concrete terms. Recall some of your achievements: attaining your college degree(s), mastering a skill (i.e., programming, swimming, playing a musical instrument), perhaps moving to America and becoming financially stable. Recall, also, some of your large purchases: home theater system, Aston Martin DBS, jewelry, your first home, etc. In all these moments, I expect you felt a rise in worth and/or confidence. I also expect that as you moved forward from that moment in time the novelty or significance of that achievement or object diminished. This is natural. As a biological being, you experience a stimulus (triggered by some aforementioned gain), you become excited, and then your tolerance heightens to accommodate, your excitement plateaus again, and due to–this blessing and curse of a force–homeostasis, you feel the way you did before the acquisition. Briefly put: you adapt. This, of course, is a simplified view.
As you can guess, to regain this feeling of well-being and worth, we recycle this process. We continually, and hungrily, strive to “self-develop” in an attempt to arrive at an “enlightened” station. The only seeming solution is to continually achieve more, and to continually buy more, and to remain inwardly focused. On the one hand, this is admirable. Some people have very little drive and they play out their lives not having achieved or contributed much at all; in comparison to them, you’re a champion. On the other hand, continually wanting more is intoxicating (and somewhat selfish). Sustaining your “I feel good”-ness through this method is very taxing. It requires a lot of energy, and quite simply, the rewards are fleeting. They vaporize and you have to keep laboring to replenish and maintain a fabricated sense of purpose for your life. As with any mistake, though, the problem can be solved through education.
What if there was another method? Earlier, we said that this process of achievement and attainment is merely a means to an end. What is that end? If we can’t eat potato chips forever, what is this denser and more nutritious source of food?
To explain this other method, we must start by accepting that fulfillment does not await at some future point of achievement anyway–at least not any more than gaining knowledge awaits at some finished point of understanding before learning itself becomes exciting and enjoyable. The process of learning, by itself, is enjoyable. The initial stages of learning are steep and difficult, but once we gain momentum, the rewards become continual and endless.
In this light, our efforts can be thought of as goalless pursuits. Devotion to a goalless pursuit might seem incomprehensible, and even bizarre. But behind all the media’s rhetoric that exhorts us to win and to achieve and to buy, there’s a deeper truth: the people we know as masters don’t devote themselves to their particular skill just to get better at it. They simply love practicing, and because of this they do get better.
The shift is subtle but powerful. As a consequence of mastering a narrow domain, you influence others. And being a positive influence–a road-map, even–for others who are just as passionate about the field you’re seasoned in is noble. It is an honorable service to yourself and to others who will follow you. It’s no wonder why Klout is arranging a formulaic system to measure our influence in others’ lives. It’s a blessing for our world to be connected; we have Facebook and Twitter and Skype and all the other social media platforms to thank for weaving the world together. This is the age of unity. Now it is important to realize that it is not enough for us merely to focus on our own development. We need to realize our capacity–and our privilege!–to inspire and encourage one another.
“The things we keep, we lose. The things we give away, we keep forever.”
So it’s not the behavior that changes; you’re still growing and achieving. Your perspective is what is changing. You’re transcending the notion of merely achieving and obtaining just to achieve and to obtain (and to show off, perhaps). Perfection is unattainable. We know that. It’s not a foreign notion. But so many people behave (and stress themselves) as if they’re inept for not being perfect. Perfection is an asymptote. The point is not to reach perfection, but to perpetually coincide with it. The more “sides” a circle has, the more perfect it looks to the naked eye. If you ever perfected life, you’d quickly become disenchanted with it all, and beg for escape.
