Lately, I’ve been thinking about the way I think about goals. When I write, I seek absolute clarity. When I exercise, I seek to feel Olympic health. When I read, I seek to uncover the base layer of reality, and when I converse, I seek to awaken myself and my conversation partner to all-encompassing god-consciousness.
These aspirations are flawed. They’re too focused on achieving greatness, and not focused enough on the path to its actualization. This kind of aspiration assumes that I’ve already fully cognized the nature of perfection, and all that remains is for me to go out and actualize it. It’s imbued with the assumption that greatness is something that can be conclusively achieved—that once I go out and do the thing I will be great and that then, no further action will be needed.
There is something life-denying in this conception of greatness—in setting out to attain the ideal and be done with it. It seems to connote that the process of achieving greatness is inherently unpleasant and should therefore be completed as expediently as possible.
Why life-denying? Because every moment until the supposed greatness is achieved, one is dissatisfied with the process of attaining it. One feels that one must force oneself to do it. Attempting to jump to greatness as quickly as possible makes me feel an impatient tiredness and a skepticism about whether any of this is even worth it.
A striving for greatness that is focused only on the end goal of greatness itself is doomed to fail. First off, greatness isn’t clearly defined—it has many meanings. Even if we clearly articulate our idea of greatness and make it concrete, we will end up with an idea that has our blind spots and imperfections baked in. When our life begins to fit the parameters specified by this imperfect notion of greatness, we may even delude ourselves into thinking we’ve achieved it—that we’re done. This leads to complacency, a trait I would be reluctant to associate with greatness.
Any static conception of greatness leaves open the possibility for complacency. True greatness is dynamic—it must question and improve itself. It reformulates itself based on what it has learned and experienced. True greatness must be willing to throw everything out and start over from scratch.
For this reason, I’ve decided to stop viewing greatness as a destination to which I will one day arrive. I make more progress with the question, “How can I make things a lot better?” than the question, “How can I make things perfect?” To be effective in the world, our thoughts need to make contact with reality. If I spend all day living daydreaming about an ideal world, I will be disappointed when I see the real one, and my despair will hamper my motivation to improve it.
True perfection is infinitely far away and is infinitely unknowable by beings with a brain made out of meat. While our notions of perfection are useful orienting mechanisms, true perfection can never be attained. However, we can take one step at a time towards it, recursively improving ourselves while creating better models of what perfection is really like, and how we can bring more of it into this world. Greatness is a journey—we can use our ideas of it to orient ourselves, but action can only take place in the real world, one small step at a time.
"Greatness is a journey—we can use our ideas of it to orient ourselves, but action can only take place in the real world, one small step at a time."
You've got it. All big things will have small origins. Striving for greatness will only make the process seem more arduous than it already is. Don't focus on the "greatness" aspect of something, but on why you care enough to do something about it. Greatness will have no choice but to come follow you.
I have been thinking about ambitious goals recently and how I can align my energy to work on the most important problems of today. Not every single important problem in the world, but the ones that I care about and believe I am uniquely capable of solving. Success will depend a lot on our faith and resilience to work on it.
Beautiful essay and picture.
Regarding having the image in your head, that must be true. Nikola Tesla would actually figure out and visualize his motors on his head until everything made sense and worked and only then he would go and build it. Highly recommend his autobiography. Take care!