“Specify your damn goals. Because how are you going to hit something if you don’t know what it is?”
Jordan Peterson
I came across an article that Jordan Peterson has a new book coming out, Beyond Order. It got me thinking about the balance of order and chaos in our lives and the goals we set to move through that.
Jordan is often cast as a divisive character because some of his views appear controversial. We are all flawed individuals, so putting that aside, I find he has an enormous amount of practical wisdom and psychological truths about human nature in his work.
I like how simple and straight forward much of his advice is, like the quote above. Often we overcomplicate things and get tangled up in our webs. It helps to pull back to what our goal is:
- Who am I trying to be?
- What am I aiming at?
I’ve been struggling through my own web of goals recently. I feel pulled in many directions. It’s hard to know what is right. Remember, there is no set rule book for how we should live our lives. It’s up to us to figure that out.
So, what would be a good life worth living?
“Often, people don’t specify their goals because they don’t like to specify conditions for failure. So if you keep yourself all vague and foggy, which is real easy, then you don’t know when you fail.”
Jordan Peterson
Some of my goals have been vague and foggy. I haven’t been clear on what I am aiming it at. Maybe by being unclear, I am subconsciously hiding from some pain of failure.
So, where am I going?
It appears I am just drifting around.
I have found drifting helpful as I work through the mess of finding meaningful work. I know I don’t want what I was previously doing and where that was heading. So, I have been trying new things aligned to what I think I want and following what feels right. It’s like playing a giant game of trial and error to work out what I actually want.
I am becoming more and more conscious of too much drifting without concrete action while time is slipping away. After all, life is short. It’s a lazy option to leave it all down chance. That chance may never happen. Clear goals are the way forward.
Do you know where you are going? Do you have something to aim at?
It should be something we want to move towards, not something we think we should move towards.
We often don’t specify our goals as we don’t want to know when we fail, as that is painful.
Peterson refers to this as “willful blindness”, we could have known, but instead, we chose not to.
Time to get specific.
Reflection
Today I am going to focus on clarity.
- Have I been deliberately unclear to avoid failure?
- Who or what am I trying to become?
- Are my daily/weekly actions aligned with this ideal?