How to achieve your goals.
Sisyphus, a 12,000 word thesis, and a vision to stop suffering stupidly.
Most people are ignorant of a hidden art form.
The art of setting and achieving goals.
Until one day it hits you.
You're turning a street corner on an average Tuesday.
Your overpriced mocha in hand on your way to work, and you get smacked in the face with a profound idea:
You're not at the wheel of your own car.
In reality, you're in the back seat, letting someone else drive your own car for you.
If you never try and take back the wheel, you'll never influence where your life will end up.
Goals are how you take back the wheel because goals dictate direction.
Go to school and get good grades.
Go to college and get a degree.
Get a well-paying job and get paid lot's of money.
That's it?
That's all you need to live a meaningful life?
Fuck no.
Most people have this, and yet they still lead miserable lives characterised by intense (i would say pointless) suffering.
If you don't build your purpose, you will be given one.
What if, the default path is not the fix?
I don’t think it takes much looking around the realise that it isn’t.
The default path offers a default life, with default ideas that condition your mind, body, and soul, to suffer dreadfully.
Most people don’t live like how we’re supposed to be living. And that’s why they suffer.
Here's what I think:
most of your suffering is avoidable if you act on the right profound ideas.
If you take action on what we'll discuss, you'll become able to set and achieve any goals you want.
Let’s begin.
A cure for the itch
“About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.”
Carl G. Jung
What if most people are doomed to live a 60-80 years of life suffering like Sisyphus?
Sisyphus was cursed by the gods to push a large boulder up a mountain for eternity. Every time before he reached the top, it would roll back down again.
He's still going as I'm writing this; sounds pretty fucking dreadful if you ask me.
But I’m seeing this everywhere.
People with misery in their eyes walking down the street.
My past self grinding through my last two years in school.
A world of people pushing rocks up hills, with no idea why they're pushing.
No control over why they're pushing.
No wonder you feel so terrible all the time.
You go through life just existing, just moving.
You do work that doesn't push you, or demand you to be creative.
Society convinces you to be a cog in someone else's machine, fulfilling a purpose you don't care about.
I feel like this in my own job right now.
What if you want to build your own machine? What if you want to escape from all this?
You feel purposeless because you haven't given yourself a direction that let's you build a purpose.
Instead, you've been given a direction you don't care for because you never made a choice to begin with.
You're not in your own driver’s seat.
Here's a profound idea from Alice in Wonderland:
If you don't know where you're going, any way will take you there.
If you don't have a clear picture of what you want your life to look like, then anything you do is justified. No reason to fight against the default path. Pushing a rock up a hill will suffice, because you have nothing more important to be doing.
Your life will become pointless repetition if there's no meaning behind every push. That's why most people suffer stupidly.
This is what I think a lot of people miss.
They don't have a vision of where they want to be going
They don't know how to set or achieve goals, because goals are steps that take you towards a vision
And they have no purpose, because meaning is found in taking each step
Without a destination, you don't have a route, and you're driving in circles expecting things to be different.
Your purpose comes from making progress toward a vision genuinely worth making sacrifices for.
And this is another thing people get wrong.
What if you just don't care?
I don't have all the answers, and I hope I don't sound as if I think I do.
I just love thinking about these things. I can fall out of reality for hours when I do.
I am curious to learn about this though, and I can tell you what I spent most of last year telling myself:
"I want to do well in college to pass and get my degree."
…
No I fucking didn't.
I didn't really want to sit around writing a 12,000-word group thesis I didn't care about.
I wanted to start a newsletter to help people suffer less. Because that’s something I needed in my own life, when I was 12 years old when my mother had passed away from cancer.
And I could have suffered a lot less than I did, if I had the right ideas in my mind guiding me through that chapter of helplessness.
I want to write, to help others minimise as much unnecessary suffering as possible, because necessary suffering is bad enough on its own.
Most people fail at setting and achieving goals because they don't genuinely care about them enough.
You need to care about your goals on an emotional level.
You have to be willing to make sacrifices in order to achieve your goals, and to be truthful, I didn't care if I had to repeat the college year because it wasn't what I wanted. I didn’t need a degree. I needed skills I could learn online.
But I did put all my focus on getting my jiu-jitsu blue belt in college.
Because I cared about strengthening my:
Body - physical competence
Mind - solving problems under high stress while managing adrenaline (w/ TOOL songs as the soundtrack)
Soul - being part of a community of people all moving in the same direction
The degree wasn't doing this for me. Jiu-jitsu was.
This was my greatest purpose in my first year of college.
I have been more inconsistent since then. Sometimes I get obsessed for a few weeks, then stop going for weeks on end.
But it always helps me suffer less by suffering with purpose.
And I don't know why we aren't just told this any of this.
The source of unlimited goals, ambition, and obsession
Most of the positive emotion you feel comes from moving towards a goal, and not in achieving it. No goals, means no positive emotion. All the meaning in your life is to be found in the pursuit of something.
And you get to choose what you want to pursue!
You have to see yourself making progress, physically, through action.
My vision is to help people suffer less, because I think most of us suffer when we don't have to.
My goal is to waffle about profound ideas that may help others optimise their mind, body, soul, and purpose.
My purpose comes from writing a newsletter each week, learning new ideas, sharing my thoughts, and seeing what people think.
I'm just an Irish dude who wants a small couch-corner on the internet, to talk with people about interesting ideas, while trying to minimise the amount of unnecessary suffering in my life and others.
Because that's what I love talking about with the people in my own life.
Philosophy, self improvement, psychology, books, (maybe throw some Linkin Park in there too as background noise).
I don't know if I'll get what I want. Genuinely. The only thing I'm certain about is how uncertain I am about everything.
Speaking authoritatively does build trust, but so does being honest.
So I’m going to go in against the grain here and tell you this:
I haven’t a fucking clue if this will work because I’m only human.
But I'm 760 subscribers closer than where I was 3 months ago, with nearly 37,000 views in the last month, with my first few paid subscribers.
It’s helped me to understand my own purpose.
And that’s why I want to start being more open about my “origin story,” if you will.
So we keep going.
7 Day Vision-Goal Reset
You need to do a lot less than you think to build a great life.
Just a few new ideas to adopt, with some small habit changes here and there to build on over time.
Here's a framework for getting started. It will take 7 days.
(1) Create your vision for next week
Set a timer for 10 minutes. Write down every problem you have in your life. Things you want to change. Once the timer is complete, circle everything you think you could improve by 1% in a week's time.
Use this criteria to know what to circle:
You can change them
You're willing to sacrifice time/money/effort for them
You believe changing them helps you and others
You actually want them (not what you think you should want)
(2) Profound idea: the 1% rule
Aim ridiculously low.
You don't walk into a jiu-jitsu gym and give everyone the smoke on the first day.
You don't choose Nietzsche as your first author to read and expect to understand it all straight away.
Tiny changes, if purposeful and done consistently, build an unbreakable foundation across time. Maximum output from minimal effort across weeks.
Drive to the gym, then leave (don't touch a barbell yet)
Sit in bed holding a book, don't read a single word
You don't have to talk to anyone new, just smile at them for now
Aim so low that failure becomes impossible. Make just a 1% improvement this week.
Try one new habit for 10 seconds. Because next week you can do 20 seconds. And in 1-2 years it will become such a deep part of who you are and how you live, that it will become painful not to do it automatically.
(3) Creating goals = work backwards from your vision
You have a vision.
You're looking for lots of 1% improvements in 7 days time.
Write down:
What tiny changes must I make to improve but just 1%?
When will I make these changes during the week? What days and times?
What knowledge or skills must I learn to achieve these changes?
Here's an example.
My vision: is to write a newsletter that helps as many people as possible
1% goal: stop going off topic and improve my actionable advice section this week
What I must learn: writing an outline before I start writing, how to write concise, practical advice in my frameworks
(4) Weekly Reset
In 7 days, think.
Has my vision changed in any way?
What did I learn about what I actually want?
What did and didn't work for me?
How will I adjust my goals to move closer to my new vision?
Understanding yourself is a process of questioning. You gain clarity in life by doing.
Learning is just guess-taking and error correction.
If you take a wrong turn, don't stress.
Redefine your vision, adjust your goals, keep building purpose in a direction slightly better than yesterday.
It’s not about the journey or the destination; it’s about becoming someone new along the way.
Profound ideas to take away
Most of your problems aren't justified. Most of you suffering is unnecessary and pointless.
You don’t have the right philosophical ideas guiding your actions.
So I've curated the best ideas from this newsletter into a list. If there's one thing to act on from this newsletter, it's this list:
Vision → goals → purpose
You only need to improve your life by 1% each week
Positive emotion comes from progress, not outcomes
Learning is guessing with error correction
If you don't build a purpose, you will be handed one that you don't want
If you want help with executing your vision, I have a Discover Your True Life Purpose prompt that automates this process for you. It helps to reduce mental friction, and works wonders alongside a journaling or meditation practise.
You can check out my complete Prompt Library here.
I’ve turned on the “7-day free trial behind the paywall” feature; so use it!
What I love about prompts is they help with taking action on an idea.
Information is no longer the problem for people; it’s action.
All the information you could possibly need is online, on Chat GPT.
Unique human perspectives are the new oil.
You can ask Chat GPT or Claude to make you an AI prompt on your phone. But it will be generic, and will be based upon information available to everyone online.
That's why I made these 2 free prompts based on my own personal experiences, my own process of organising my life, and remembering everything I read.
I think this is the future of helping people educate themselves with profound ideas.
Imagine having a template that shapes itself based on your weekly schedule, your constraints, your specific problems? That helps educate and teach people how to change their habits?
Anyways. I hope you've found some value in reading this. I definitely did while researching and thinking about all this. I came across a lot of profound ideas that have shaped how I've been acting in the past week.
I wasn’t happy with last week’s newsletter. I think I rambled too much and I wanted to work on being more clear and concise with my writing. I’ve been working through Caleb Ralston's 6 hour personal branding course on YouTube, and it’s been quite eye opening.
So I’ll be changing some things around here over the coming weeks.
Leave a comment below telling me how you'll adopt these ideas into your week, and what things you plan to change in 7 days time.
I'd love to hear about it!
What’s one profound idea you took from this?
And share your stories. I’ll start sharing more of mine.
Thanks for reading, you're an absolute legend.
- Craig :D
The Profound Ideas newsletters you legend’s loved:
How to Become an Expert in Anything FAST (and think like a genius)
it’s simple if you know what to do (and herein lies the problem)
🔥
So well written!