Audacious Aspirations, Low Expectations

Short-term goals as naturally emerging stepping stones to compelling aspirations.

The fantasy of the summit and the crude reality of the stepping stones.

It is often said that happiness is the gap between expectation and reality. We are miserable when our expectations are way higher than crude reality. We might logically be tempted, therefore, to increase our happiness by adopting the mindset of the pessimist and setting lower expectations. But then, if we aim too low, we will never realise our potential, so we jeopardise our longer-term fulfilment. So how does one find the sweet spot?

Our long-term BIG Goals are prone to failure, there are too many unknowns. Too many twists and turns of fate. We suffer when we become overly attached to the BIG Goals of life that never become a reality. Even when we finally achieve them we may feel deflated, not experiencing the longed-for happiness and without a clue about what’s next.

“I have come to believe that a life enslaved to a single Goal, no matter how noble, becomes a mechanism rather than an organism, a business plan rather than biology, a tool rather than a gift”

James Ogilvy, Living Without a Goal

There is much more certainty around achieving short-term goals - seeing what is in front of us and hunting it down. A goal is a prediction, a motivated prediction with a payoff, but a prediction about the future nonetheless. Generally speaking, short-term predictions are easier to judge correctly than long-term predictions¹. The argument I’m presenting in this article is that the ways we think about and talk about goals lack nuance. We use the word ‘goals’ for both our long-term dreams and our short-term milestones. We tend to over-inflate our short-term expectations around what we can achieve, whilst being under-imaginative about what we could achieve in the long term through consistent effort. We either expect too much in the short term or avoid having audacious aspirations. This conflation may result in negative and unhelpful emotional associations with the whole idea of having goals.

The ideal balance therefore might be achieved by deliberately thinking about our long-term goals and our short-term goals as entirely distinct representations in our mind. Simply using different language containers for them - ASPIRATIONS vs GOALS - could help us to be more realistic in our thinking and remove the many frustrations on the path of mastery - making realistic iterative stepping-stone progress with low expectations towards our audacious aspirations.

We live in an anti-mastery society which is waging a prodigious ‘War on Mastery’ as described by George Leonard. The external world seems to have lost its way with mastery as we ‘amuse ourselves to death’, to borrow from Neil Postman. On our personal paths of mastery, we must resist inflating our short-term expectations through exposure to the abundance of the quick-win, you-can-have-it-all mentalities that pervade the online social sphere. In the workplace, we must negotiate a space for mastery amidst the pressures of results-driven performative overpromising and burnout.

Audacious aspirations for the long-term, low expectations for short-term stepping-stone goals.

We must learn how to tend to the reality of the short term whilst indulging in the fantasy of the long term. The path to disappointment is indulging in a fantasy of the short-term whilst becoming attached to the long-term as reality.

Goallessness

When we have clear and compelling aspirations, we don’t even need to artificially ‘set’ goals. Goals will emerge organically as stepping stones on our path of mastery. We can experience goals with a sense of goallessness - natural and obvious steps that we can enjoy with a feeling of momentum, rather than an arbitrarily set performance metric. We’ll have a very strong sense of intentional direction towards our aspirations but we know they may change so we do not become emotionally attached to them. When we are pursuing short-term naturally emerging goals driven by aspiration, we are living in the present, inspired by our direction and momentum, not a future promise of happiness, for we see the aspiration simply as a compelling vision, rather than a BIG Goal.

Now, I’m not saying that - you know the philosophy of carpe diem: let us drink today, for tomorrow we die, and not make any plans. What I am saying is that making plans for the future is of use only to people who are capable of living completely in the present. Because when you make plans for the future and they mature, if you can’t live in the present, you are not able to enjoy the future for which you have planned, because you will have a new kind of syndrome whereby happiness consists in promises and not in direct and immediate realizations so long as you feel that tomorrow it will come.

Alan Watts, Man is a Hoax

Definitions:

Goals:

Goals are stepping stones, small iterative steps on a path of mastery. They do not need to be grandiose and are best seen as ordinary, routine, and even boring. They are part of a system, a habitual automatic practice. A practice we can indulge with full intentionality and surrender, where we may find flow and fulfilment if engaging with a sense of reverence for the process. We need to maintain the beginner’s mind within an environment of experimentation - trial, and error and a tolerance for mistakes. We have low and realistic expectations for what is achievable in the short term.

There will be times on the path of mastery when we feel like we are on the plateau, when the summit of our aspirations seems out of reach, or when we even must traverse or endure setbacks, but goals are the tiny stepping stones that bring a feeling of momentum - and we may be on the brink of an unexpected breakthrough which adds depth and surprise to our journey.

Aspirations:

Our aspirations are found through listening for a calling in life, an appeal to what we feel as our higher self, with a sincere alignment to our deeply held personal values, of what matters most to us. We should indulge our fantasies and use our imaginations to allow for the emergence of a compelling vision that we can truly aspire to. The vision can stretch us beyond our current limits but must be believable as something we can create. As Robert Frisk suggests in ‘The Path of Least Resistance’, the contrast between our vision and our current reality can stir up feelings of tension, but we can indulge it as a creative tension that feels irresistible and helps us maintain momentum through our stepping-stone goals on the good days and the bad days.

Pursuing our aspirations should feel like the authentic creation of an original piece of artwork, not a rip-off copy of someone else’s. We are working from a blank canvas and our idea of how the final piece will look will likely change over time, becoming ever richer and inspiring as we ourselves change from moment to moment. We do not become overly attached to our aspiration, just as an artist is willing to let go of their painting so it may hang in a gallery for others to be inspired by.

If the expectations for our short-term goals are too high, we will suffer the pain of disappointment and frustration, but if we don’t indulge our fantasies and high expectations for our long-term aspirations, we risk an unfulfilling life of wasted potential.

As I was finishing this piece, my inbox pinged with the arrival of a new Substack post from Johnnie Moore entitled ‘Becoming’ which struck me as the perfect conclusion to my thoughts here, especially with his closing remarks, sharing a principle for Cathy Salit’s book, Performance Breakthrough, “We are who we are, and who we are becoming.” And as Johnnie says, the most interesting growth experiences come from holding ourselves, and each other, in that paradoxical space between who we are, and who we are becoming.

Becoming

Thank you for reading. With this Ordinary Mastery project, I am on my own ‘learning in public’ journey and I welcome critique and alternative viewpoints from readers.

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You may also be interested in two of my previous posts, one on Goals and the other on Aspirations:

1. There are exceptions of course. Some long-term predictions are governed by the laws of nature or the laws of physics for example.