Goals. As a philosopher who has studied goals and goal setting for more than 30 years, I’ve occasionally come across books with titles like “Goalless Living” and “Living Without Goals.” The idea of these books seem to be that goals lock us down in a world of constant surprises and that instead of chaining ourselves down with goals, we’re better off just going with the flow and letting serendipity do with us what it will. We can just be in the moment and let good stuff find us.
But imagine that I was impressed with such a book. What would I do, set it as my goal to live without goals? And what about normal life? Imagine that my wife asks me to take out the trash in a few minutes and later on today pick up three items she needs from the grocery store. Now imagine me saying, “Sorry, honey, I’m living now without goals.” Finally, imagine me with spouseless living. The first problem is that it’s impossible to live without any goals. So why not pick good ones? And the point about serendipity is this: I tend to find good luck come my way, serendipity and synchronicity, precisely when I’m pursuing clear goals. In fact, the clearer the goals I have, the better I’ll recognize good luck as such.
Finally, goals don’t lock us down, they get us going. It’s hard to see what life has in mind for you when you’re utterly passive. And that’s because, for one thing, life does not have in mind your being utterly passive. You and I are supposed to be planning trips, finding paths forward, setting and revising goals, dropping some, and attaining others. As Aristotle saw, human life is essentially teleological, or oriented toward purposes and goals. With an inattention to them, we end up largely aimless. So if goals are necessary, and they’re important, we might as well do our goal setting wisely, and not to chain us down, but to open us up and get us going forward, where serendipity awaits.
For more on goals, please see books of mine like “True Success” and “The Art of Achievement,” along with “The Stoic Art of Living” and “The Oasis Within.”
