Goals Are The End, Not the Process
The process is how you achieve a given goal.
I’ve been postulating for a while now that the Meaning of Life is this: TO LIVE. That means to experience all that life has to offer, take an active interest in who, what, where, how, and why you are, and make choices and decisions to drive your experiences.
The more I analyze and explore this idea, the more I’m convinced that TO LIVE is the Meaning of Life. The grand and glorious notion that scientists, philosophers, theologians, and the like quest for boils down to this simple notion.
What many fail to recognize is that nobody but you can live your life. Nobody else is in your head, heart, and soul. Thus, you’re the only one who knows what you desire, who you are or want to be, and all the other things that make you tick.
That’s not to say you can’t seek guidance and learning outside yourself. You need to. It might all begin within, but nobody lives in a vacuum. We interact with the people, places, things, and overall world around us every day.
While life is not necessarily linear, it does have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like it or not, progress occurs, change is inevitable, and you are not who you were and won’t be who you are going forward. Along the way, however, you’re empowered to make choices and decisions to drive your life experience.
This is where goals come in.
Goals are a potential future
There is an entire industry built around goals. From seeking them out, setting them, finding them, and working towards them to everything that goes into achieving them, the goal machine is well-oiled and always chugging along.
Lots of gurus, educators, pundits, philosophers, and other leader-types will tell you they have the One True Way™ for reaching any given goal. They most likely have a way, but not the only way. That’s because there is no One True Way™.
The first reason why there’s no One True Way™ is that no two people have the exact same goal. Similar, possibly. The same, however? No. The second issue is the starting point. It’s systemically a lot easier for me, a middle-aged cis-gendered white American male to work toward a goal than a twenty-something transgendered black immigrant. The third issue is that there are circumstances that are always outside of your control.
Even with these issues and challenges, everyone has goals. Most are not ginormous and earth-shattering. Goals include things like not hitting the snooze button every weekday morning, eating a vegetable at every meal, calling a parent once a week, and so forth. It’s the goal industry that focuses most of its attention on those oversized, humongous goal concepts.
Even a given larger goal, like retiring by 60, starting a business, or finding someone to marry, is potential and not absolute. Recognizing this, let’s address process.
The process is action
No idea can be made manifest without action. I might have a novel in my head, but unless I sit down and write it, nobody other than me will ever see it.
No goal is achieved without work. Ergo, action. You can’t just make something manifest with a wish. This is where prosperity gospels and elements of The Secret and “ask, believe, receive” miss the point. The Law of Attraction is real, and what you focus on you can consciously create, but not without taking action.
I can wish to be a best-selling author until the cows come home. I can ask for it, believe it, and wait to receive it for my whole life. If I don’t bother to sit at my computer and do the work and write a damned novel, it can’t be a best-seller because it won’t be manifested.
This is why developing a process for things in your life is important. To achieve any goal, no matter the size, you must apply active conscious awareness. Because if you don’t begin with self-knowledge, you are already hamstringing yourself and your goal-achieving potential.
For example, if the goal is to stop hitting the snooze button every morning, you need to get up with your alarm. If you seek to lose 10 pounds, you must take actions regarding what you eat and when and how you exercise. For retiring at 60, there are lots of small actions involving creating investment accounts, doing the investing, earning money to invest, and so on. All of these require processes, and the process is always a matter of action.
Which brings us to the meat of this article.
Goals are the end, not the process
The goal is what you desire to realize. The process is how you get there. You need both.
If I plan to go from Point A to Point B, I need to set a process in place to do so. If Point A is home and Point B is the other side of the country, I need to take action and drive, fly, take a train, walk, bike, or whatever to get from A to B. Hence, the goal is to get from A to B. The process is the action.
The process is in many ways more important than the goal. Why? Because the process might change the goal. For example, let’s say you have the goal of opening a coffee shop. As you start the process of taking the actions to make that manifest, you might realize that your deep desire to start a coffee shop gets changed by the process. Instead, you find you desire to start a bakery.
The process is the journey that is any path you choose to walk in life. It’s the life experience that is, when all is said and done, the meaning of life. The process is how you apply TO LIVE to your existence. That’s why it’s imperative to recognize that goals are the end, not the process. Also, there can and should be tremendous comfort, joy, and excitement in the process itself.
That’s not to say the process won’t be scary, uncertain, and distressing at times. When you leave any given comfort zone (or, truth be told, familiar setting that might not be comfortable), the unknown is uncertain. The process, however, is how you navigate this and act to make manifest your goals.
Make choices and decisions
The reality of the process is that you make choices and decisions to get from Point A to Point B. Without choices and decisions, you aren’t driving your life toward any given goal.
No matter your current circumstances, you are worthy and deserving of the effort of process and the achievement of goals. Despite other industries that are pressing their agendas to shape the world for a limited audience, the reality is that you’re not less than anyone else.
The color of your skin, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, and nothing else makes you lesser or greater than any other person on the planet. Neither do these artifices make you unworthy or undeserving. TO LIVE, to apply the meaning of life, is the right of everybody.
That’s why I’m concluding with this: If your goal involves interfering with someone else’s life, their ability to live with potential and possibility, is it really your goal? Because true goals are about you becoming, and any negative impact on others is unintentional and outside your control.
For example, if your goal is to end DEI or abortion, how is that about you? It’s not, because you probably don’t need the programs for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you will never need an abortion, or you can choose to get one for yourself or not.
Don’t let yourself be distracted by the narrative of the collective consciousness when setting your processes and goals. Make your choices and decisions for you and your life experience, because that’s the only person you can make choices and decisions for.
So, do you see that goals are the end and not the process?
This is the six-hundred-ninety-ninth (699) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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