The process of giving it your best shot
May 2018We live in a society that is obsessed with setting and achieving goals.
Our biggest corporations have quarterly and annual performance targets. Best-selling books advice us to begin with the end in mind - by defining a goal as clearly as possible and imagining how its outcomes would unfold. They tell us to picture ourselves working in our dream job, or imagine our names on best-seller lists for that novel we are writing.
All of this serves as great fuel for motivation. It encourages us to step in the direction of achieving our dream, consciously and unconsciously. As Paulo Coelho states, once you want something so badly, the universe conspires to helping you achieve it.
All our thoughts, actions and efforts ride the crest of our intentions, just like a surfer rides a wave. It helps to have our intentions well defined and vividly imagined to have this wave grow higher and higher.
The problem is that this comes with great risk.
In any of our endeavours, we are merely in control of the inputs and not the outcomes. During a job interview, we can ensure we present our best version. We are not in control of the type of employee the company seeks, the disposition of our interviewer that morning, or the prejudices he may bring to the table. We have limited control over how the world receives our performance, and given this situation, the goal-oriented approach of imagining ourselves in a desired outcome can be a recipe for disappointment.
The higher the wave of our expectation, the greater our risk of sustaining injury if things do not work out well.
Is there a way out of this predicament? Is there a means to cushion the risk of disappointment while following a goal-oriented approach?
An ancient Hindu text seems to offer an answer
One of the most frequently cited portions of the Bhagavad Gita is…
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन | — karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣhu kadāchana
…translated as: "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions."
This message has always intrigued me. It seems to cushion the risk of our expectations. Nevertheless, it has always been a little cryptic. How does one detach one's self from the outcome, while staying motivated? How does an author stay detached, while working day and night to realize her dream of getting published? How does the competitive swimmer not think of winning a medal, as he wakes up at 4 AM, takes a cold shower and swims a kilometer?
The key to detach one's self from an outcome lies in the knowledge of giving something their best shot. When a person knows that, she is aware that she has done everything in her control. If the desired outcome is secured, there is no cause for worry. If things do not work out in spite of that, she realizes that an external, uncontrollable factor has played its hand here. Consequently, the disappointment she faces is reduced accordingly.
Pulling through with all her current capabilities, if an author writes a novel that does not end up selling well, there is solace in knowing that she could not have changed that outcome. She picks herself up, learns from the experience, tweaks her writing process and starts off writing another one that is more likely to succeed.
But achieving what I have written above is not easy to practice. There are several illusions that keep us from realizing if we have genuinely given something our best shot, such as the niggling the feeling that we could have worked harder or prioritized better. There are endless causes for self-blame whenever failure strikes, especially because it isn't usually clear what caused us to fail or by how much we failed. We need an approach that frees us up from the tyranny of this doubt and uncertainty. This is how I interpret what the Bhagavad Gita describes as every individual's "prescribed duty".
Process orientation — giving it your best shot
Having established that giving something our best shot is the overarching goal, let us take a step back. The solution I propose is to orient our efforts around a well-defined process. This can be executed, by using a broad three step approach.
- Define the process: Break your goal down into rituals that are performed regularly. The more specific these rituals are, the better, for they can be measured, tracked and managed. For example, the goal of writing a novel could be broken down into a ritual of writing 500 words per day or writing and editing for half-an-hour each, every day.
- Execute the process: Once the process is defined, execute it without exceptions. The idea is to do the process repeatedly until it becomes an automatic action — a habit.
- Refine the process: Refinement is the act of gathering feedback periodically from your execution and making changes to the process.
The bottom line
Goal orientation is a great approach for motivating ourselves to set and achieve lofty goals. However, goal orientation comes with the risk of disappointment in case we do not achieve our goals. Given that the intended outcomes for several of our goals are not within our own control, we need to cushion goal orientation with a process — one that helps us give a particular goal our best, realistic shot.
The idea behind process orientation is to shift the motivation from achieving the goal, to the enjoyment that we derive as we inch towards it with a regular practice. In the immortal words of Ursula K. LeGuin: "It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."
After all, the greatest aim of every human being is to self actualize — live with a feeling that one has given one's best shot at living it. Building a process that helps us get there is a life-long endeavour, aligned with one of our most ancient sources of wisdom.
This essay was first published on Medium.