This Is Why I Don’t Have Goals (And What To Do Instead)

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1:20Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

1:59Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm not recording this on a Sunday, but you're listening to it on a Sunday. I wanted to talk about something I think makes me a little bit unique, which is that I don't have goals. That probably seems crazy, but it's true. I don't have goals. There's not a certain number of books I'm trying to write. There's not a certain amount of books I want to sell. I don't have a number that I'm trying to hit financially. There's not a certain number of downloads that I want for this podcast. I mean, I do hope the producer of the podcast wants the numbers to go up.

2:41Claire, if you're listening, but I don't have like a, this is where I want to go. I want it to be the biggest show or want it to surpass this show. That's not how I think about it. I'll give you an analogous thing in my life. I run every day, but I'm not training to run a marathon. I swim a lot. I did a recent episode about that. And I bike, but I'm not trying to do an Ironman. In fact, when people ask me, I'm sort of baffled. I don't really get why anyone would want to do those things. Because the point is that I like doing the things. What I want to do is run and swim. What I want to do is right.

3:19To me, that's the win. Doing the thing is the win. I don't fault other people for having goals. If that's what motivates you, enjoy. And again, obviously companies and coaches need to set goals for their staff and for their team. I check in to see how my employees are doing on things. And if, I don't know, my book sales went down by half, I would be concerned and I'd try to see what happened. This is how we evaluate and compare performance. Certainly a public company would have to have revenue targets. Investors would demand them. But that's not how I think about things day to day. What I do instead is I'm much more focused on process.

3:59That is to say I focus on doing the thing as opposed to achieving some particular thing or some level of that thing. And this mostly has to do with something the Stoics talk a lot about, right? What's in your control? What's not in your control? Most goals, I would say, are rooted in an external result that's not in your control. Writing a book is not a goal most people have. No, the goal, when you talk to them, and I've talked to so many of them, the goal is hitting a bestseller list. Only you determine whether you write the book or not. But the bestseller list, that's up to the New York Times, just like winning a Grammy is up to the Recording Academy or a Nobel is up to those folks in Stockholm.

4:39Even competitive goals, like being the fastest person in a race or the richest person in the world, these depend on what your competitors do. And this fixation on external results that are not in your control, I'd argue it carries a hidden cost. It consumes a significant amount of time and energy that could be spent better doing things that actually generate results. A musician chasing in a spot on the charts. They churn out derivative work. They don't find their unique sound. A speaker fixated on an audience's reaction, they lose their train of thought. And a swimmer who glances over at the competition or looks up at the finish creates drag and slows down.

5:20It's like in golf. If you look to see where the ball is going, you're jerking your head and usually the ball. Over the years, this is more my previous life in my marketing list, I've worked on so many book launch. You might've heard me mention some of them on the podcast over the years. And every once in a while, I'll do one, but not as much anymore. But I used to do a lot of consulting on book launches. So people would call me and I'd walk them through. And I'd usually kick that call off by going like, let's start by talking about what success looks like. And whenever a person, and Brent, my business partner and friend, the guy up at Saragorda, he would be on a lot of those calls.

5:59We'd always talk about it after. Whenever we would ask a person what that success looked like to them and their answer was something about hitting number one or making a certain amount of money or success is selling a million copies, I'd roll my eyes or I'd get a pit in my stomach. I'd be like, this is someone we don't want to do much more work with. Not because they weren't ambitious. That's not my problem. But it was the arbitrariness that was a signal to me that something was off. Like the goals were always so random. I remember asking one guy why he'd chosen 2 million books. And I appreciated his honesty.

6:34He was like, well, didn't this book sell one and a half million? He'd heard of someone else's number and just said more. He basically pulled the number out of his ass. And of course, he never came close to this number because almost no books do. But I'm often struck also by what people didn't or don't say. They don't say success is like, I want to make something really amazing that helps people, or I want to create something I'm really proud of. What instead they're thinking about is like the benchmark, rather than thinking about what it takes to even have a chance at hitting that benchmark, which is usually being present and dedicated and pure hearted and disciplined and creative and self-aware and patience.

7:11Oh my God, so much patience. And then so much luck too. Oh my God, the amount of luck. So somebody who comes right out and says they're chasing a number and that they could like purchase getting to that number or that it's following a certain formula that gets them to that number. I just know they're on the wrong track from the beginning. They're motivated by the wrong thing. And again, I'm not saying you shouldn't strive to accomplish great things or be all that you're capable of. You definitely should. It's just in my experience, the best work comes out of just doing the work, not visualizing the success, not trying to reverse engineer what's working for someone else, not setting a big, hairy, audacious goals as that business acronym says.

7:51It's in the quiet day-to-dayness of the work, in immersing yourself in the craft, not in the charts, and being process-driven, not goal-driven. It comes from loving the process, not from thirst. Buzz Williams, the head basketball coach at A &M, he has this great clip about being an everyday guy. Let me play it for you real fast. But the hardest thing about what we do best is we do it every day. It's not punishment. And then here's the next thing. And it ain't gonna change. And it's not because I'm trying to be like, I've got it all figured out. I've watched like thousands of these in my career.

8:35I know what the times are. I know what the deal is. I've seen hundreds of people do it. The best thing we do is every day. But the hardest thing we do is every day. and all that September proves is who's an everyday guy. And if you're not an everyday guy, it doesn't mean we love you less. It just means you're gonna have to sit over there on the side. Right? You have to be everyday and it's not gonna change and it's not gonna go away and I'm not gonna lose my patience and go, oh, nevermind, we'll just do it again tomorrow. No, we're gonna do it today. Buzz came on the Daily Stoic podcast a couple weeks back.

9:12You and I have known each other forever. That was a great interview. You should listen to it. But I asked him about what it means to be an everyday guy. Are you tough enough to be an everyday guy? I think, I don't think it has anything to do with ball. I think a lot of it has to do with how I was raised and what I witnessed as I was growing up is whatever it is that you're trying to do, however you deem success, are you tough enough to do that every single day? And I think that time, if you're basing it on talent, well, talent at some point in time probably will prevail, but not always. And so if you remove talent, then it becomes consistency, then it becomes discipline, then it becomes how are you spending your time and are you tough enough to do those things every day?

9:58And like I tell our guys all the time, I would like to win, but I want to win playing my hand. And I'm okay losing if I'm not playing my hand. And my hand is what I believe is right. And I can't sacrifice what I believe those things to be are right. And I'm not saying that I am right. I'm just saying an everyday person is who I respect the most. An everyday person, their talent is going to improve because they're tough enough to do it every day. Hey, I can't shoot. Well, it's like compound interest. just just shoot then if you can't shoot hey i want to get stronger go in there and lift weights hey i want to lose some weight and i just think maybe it's counterintuitive to constantly talk about the end hey you want to lose some weight i can tell you how to lose weight don't eat breakfast for 200 days and walk on the treadmill do that for 200 days and then get on the scale not going the other way around.

11:03And I think that's, to me, that's what an everyday guy is. Yeah. It's like, uh, it's the difference between my friend, Austin Kleon talks about, he says, you know, a lot of people want to be the noun. They don't want to do the verb, you know? That's good. That's really good. I think it's, it's like, we want these end states. We want to be seen as X, but we don't understand that it's really a result of doing Y, right? Like People want to publish books. They don't want to write books. But publishing is a byproduct of writing. Of the writing. And yeah, improving is a byproduct of doing the work. Having a great jump shot is the result of having done many, many jump shots.

11:47So much of what you're being praised for publicly is whatever it is that you're doing privately. Yes. whether it's somebody making a jumper or somebody writing another bestseller. Ron, how are you doing that? There's layers to that. But somewhere in that layer of what you've done over the last 15 years, somewhere in that layer, you've continued to refine the process. And somewhere in that process is included. I'm going to do it every day. Now, I may write more on Wednesday than I do on Saturday when I'm taking the kids to get donuts, but somewhere in there, the consistency of I'm going to do it every single day for me, where I'm from, how I grew up.

12:35That's what I respect is the toughness to do it every day.

12:45Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

13:30We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

14:10Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

14:23I'd say that when you remove goals, that's what it comes down to. Do you have the consistency and the discipline to show up every day? Are you working on getting better every day? In Discipline is Destiny, I read about the practice of kaizen. That's the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. It's about finding some way to make a little progress, focusing on the joys of getting a little better every day. That's the secret to being internally driven. It's being every day. Just as one person delights in improving his farm and another his horse, Epictetus would say, riffing as it happens on Socrates.

15:00So I delight in attending to my improvement day by day. I like Sam Altman. If you don't know who Sam Altman is, he's the founder of ChatGPT and OpenAI. I actually interviewed him when I was writing my book, Conspiracy, which is a book that, to go to the point, it's not my bestselling book, but it's one of the books I'm most proud of because I grew a lot from writing it and I was challenged by writing it. He talked about this in his interview with Tyler Cowen. He said, you want to strive to be internally driven, driven to compete with yourself, not with other people. He said, if you compete with other people, you end up in this mimetic trap and you play in a tournament.

15:38Even if you win, you lose. But when you're competing with yourself, all you're trying to do is be the best possible version of you. And there's no limit to how far that can drive someone to perform. And clearly, Sam has done pretty well for himself by any metric or any chart. So in that way, getting rid of goals can actually be more ambitious because goals by their nature are kind of finite, kind of fleeting. Once you achieve them, what then? You experience a brief moment of pleasure and satisfaction, but soon you're left with two choices. is you stop doing the thing, having reached the destination, you realize there is no destination, you just keep going, going, going.

16:14I kind of found that with my books. Like if I had set a sales goal for obstacle, no way it would have been what I actually ended up doing. Certainly for Daily Stoic, like I was just trying to write something that was good, that I was proud of, that I tried to do my best. And then I'm gonna stay at it. I wanna keep growing and changing, but also keep pushing that book. Like it'll sell what it's gonna sell. That's not what made it a success. What made it a success was what I put into it. You keep looking for new ways to challenge yourself, new ways to do things, going towards the harder way, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago.

16:45You keep showing up and getting better and you follow that where it leads. And this not only keeps things interesting, but it insulates you ever so slightly from the outcomes, from ego, from self-doubt and misfortunate. Again, it's not that you don't care about the results, it's that you have this trump card. Your successes don't go to your head because you're capable of more and your failures don't destroy you because there wasn't anything more you could have done. Again, this is stoicism. We don't control what happens, what adversity gets placed in our path, but you always control whether you show up, whether you give your best or not.

17:15No one can stop you from that. You may not end up number one in your class or win everything every time, but winning is not what's important. What matters is what you gave. What matters is you didn't cheat the gift. And giving anything less than your best is a form of cheating, of falling short of the real goal. The goal of realizing your potential, the gift of your potential, the gift of the opportunity. the gift of the craft you've been introduced to, the gift of the responsibility entrusted to you. You immerse yourself in the work and the process and the daily practices that make up the bulk of your life.

17:48You forget about goals and you focus on process. You become internally driven. You'd be an everyday guy and you never know where you'll end up. And I could not have known that this is where I would end up with the podcast, where I'd end up professionally, where I'd end up financially, where I'd end up in so many different ways. And I feel lucky, as I said, but I also don't feel that much about it at all. I just feel like I like doing it and I'm going to keep doing it. And that's what I focus on. What do I got to do today? What's that next right thing? Let's do it. If it gets recognized and appreciated, awesome.

18:27If not, whatever. And I think there's some ideas is here in Right Thing right now about the third thing. The third thing is the recognition, the achievement of getting through the goal. I do the thing. That's what I focus on. That's what matters. And that's today's message. I hope you liked it. And thanks for listening to the podcast and thanks for all your support.

18:54Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes. That would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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