Greetings from a stormy Friday night at the Hilton Garden Inn.
"What would happen if you started taking your goals seriously?" I have been violently confronted with this question on seven separate occasions in the past 36 days.
Each time, I’ve tried to answer it. I've reflected on whether or not I believe I'm worthy of my goals. I've examined if I'm even clear about what it is I do want and don’t want in excruciating detail. I’ve checked myself on whether or not I’m more afraid of success than I am of failure.
Apparently none of that work mattered, because the question showed up again for an eighth time — in total defiance of any norms or reasonable measures one might use for “coincidence” — on Wednesday morning. The question itself hadn’t changed.
“What would happen if you started taking your goals seriously?”
But somehow it felt BIGGER. Bolder. Louder. I was infuriated. What more did this question want from me? Why wouldn’t it leave me alone?
It wasn’t until this morning that it dawned on me. The entire point of the question is to not answer it. Instead it was pleading with me to stop thinking everything to death and do something —anything except indulge in more useless, self-obsessed excavations of my psyche. It simply took me eight times for that truth to sink through my thick skull.
It’s so easy to get sucked into the process of examining your own beliefs, ideals, temptations, and desires under the shiny mantle of personal growth. Don’t get me wrong, looking inward is a powerful way to uncover deeper meanings and truths. (I'm a big fan of meditation for this reason.) But all too easily, that purposeful introspection can slip into pointless, cowardly navel-gazing — seeking within what you can only find without.
In fact, I'm willing to bet a significant amount of money that each of you reading this right now have a similar question in front of you. A question, a problem, a person, a temptation, or an unknowable something just beyond your reach that is tormenting you.
You’ve maybe spent days, weeks, months, or years even just ... pontificating. Waxing earnestly, philosophically, and morally about the perceived pros, cons, rights, wrongs, ins, outs, fears, risks, threats, and so on of whatever it is that haunts you. Yet no relief, answers, or fulfillment ever arrives.
For a time, you might have been able to ignore it. But then, one day, that question inevitably shows right back up on your doorstep. Unsolved, louder, and more aggressive in its insistence for your attention. And you’re right back where you started.
I'm here to tell you that no matter how much you try to think your way out of whatever box you’re in, you’ll get nowhere. Because your question isn’t asking you for answers, thoughts, or ideals. It’s begging you to get off your ass. To take action. To conquer. To question. To confront. To challenge. To grasp. To leap. To indulge. To devour. To give in. To try. To reach. To take. To dominate. To demand. To consume. To be consumed. To experience. To create.
To throw yourself in front of whatever it is that’s keeping you up at night. To finally, once and for all, do something about it.
The answers you seek are waiting for you to come find them. They will only be revealed to those who possess a relentless hunger for the truth that makes the fear worth it.
So, what would happen if I started taking my goals seriously? I'm done imagining and wondering and fantasizing about what the answers might be. I'm going to go out into this big world and find out the truth for myself.
And as for the question that is sitting like a rock in the bottom of your stomach right now, slowly but inevitably drawing more of your energy toward it … are you done pretending you’ll find anything except more confusion within the recesses of your mind? Are you done masking your fear behind lofty veils of "responsibility"?
Or are you content to let the weight of that emotional burden you're carrying increase a little more each and every day until, one morning, you finally crack?
Your paralysis is a choice. Move.
