Goals? No, no... Anti-Goals!

Somewhere over Denver last week, I made a decision: I never want airline status.

Not now. Not ever.

Not because the idea of airport lounges and early boarding is inherently bad. But because of what it signals.

It means you’ve spent so many hours away from your real life that a corporation started rewarding you for it. It means you’ve optimized for work. For departures. For not being there.

Even just a few months ago I saw status as something to aspire to. A marker of importance. Look at me — on the move. In demand. Too valuable to stay put.

But that flight home from Vegas made it painfully clear:

I couldn’t unsee the pattern this week.

A lot of things get handed out like trophies that secretly point in the opposite direction of a good life.

We confuse busy with valuable.
We confuse money with freedom.
We confuse inbox zero with having accomplished something meaningful.
We confuse streaks and challenges with growth.

All of them are false peaks. Impressive until you get there. This lines up with something Chris Williamson called: Rogan's Value - Difficulty Conflation — after something Joe mentioned on his podcast with Chris a few years back.

“Look at the car he’s driving, look at the watch he’s wearing, look at the girl he’s with. That’s unattainable to many people, so it seems valuable. But when you attain it you realize that it's not valuable, it's just difficult to get."

I take a lot of pride in how sexy and optimized my calendar looks most days. Unfortunately for me it’s not a great goal:

Naval talked about the luxury of not maintaining a calendar on a podcast last month, and as he was explaining it, I almost felt a weight leave my body thinking about what life would be like without a calendar.

If your life has to wait for a cancellation, what are you really prioritizing?

Another idea that used to and still does plague me — likely from being too terminally online — side hustles are the only path to freedom. Thanks hustle bros.

Productivity metrics?

You can spend an entire afternoon organizing your inbox, colour-coding your calendar, and grooming your second brain — without moving the needle on a single thing that matters.

Guilty 🙋‍♂️

Same goes for all those 30-day challenge badges and reading quotas and gamified wellness streaks.

They’re seductive because they make progress feel like a game you can win.
But the only thing that counts is what changes after the challenge is over.

I finished 75 Hard in the middle of March, and since the end of that, I reverted back to my old ways. Only to realize after 45 Non-Hard that both my mood and energy were significantly better during the first two and a half months of the year. In what should be a surprise to no one, I’ll be reverting back to more walks and less sugar.

I can sum up these anti-goals with an excerpt from the Rich Roll podcast I listened to — and identified with — on the plane ride home from Vegas:

The Strivers Lament

Rich Roll:
Fundamental to many strivers — and I guess I'll just speak for myself and my own experience — is a sense of feeling like you don't belong. The way to feel that sense of belonging is to achieve great things or to get noticed.

And then, kind of a layer beneath that, is a fundamental sense of being unlovable. So the way you compensate for that is by trying to be exceptional.

And then, when you have a partner who's like, "I want your presence," that's very threatening. Because if you don't feel loved and you're being summoned to be vulnerable, you're thinking, "Well, if this person really knows who I am, they will reject me."

Arthur Brooks:
This is the thing — I mean, this is a striver's lament.

And there's three things that are wrong here: You don't love yourself enough. You don't believe that other people would love you without your accomplishment. And deep down, you don't feel loved by the divine.

You don't believe that God loves you — is what it comes down to. And that's deep philosophical and spiritual work that needs to get done.

H/T - Rich Roll

A lot of the things we’re taught to want — status, speed, recognition — only look like success when you’re sprinting too fast to ask what they’re actually costing you.

So this week, I’m thinking less about what I want to achieve. And more about what I want to avoid.

What’s a shiny badge you’ve decided to stop chasing?

Words I Wish I Wrote

Links & Learnings

• A 🔥 take on members clubs. (link)

• Marriage Goals.

• “For most of human history, the limiting factor in what a person could accomplish was often their intelligence. But now that we can outsource intelligence to machines, the new bottleneck for most people will be how proactively they make use of all that external intelligence.” - Freya India (source)

Psst… DSTLLD has a podcast now, too. I know — like the world needs another podcast, right? But here’s the thing: if you can tolerate my written rambles, you’ll probably find my in-person yammering… well, moderately tolerable. It’s basically me and a guest chatting about the same offbeat stuff you read here, except now you get to hear me stumble over big words in real time. I’m not saying it’s the greatest thing in the universe (trust me, I’ve listened to it), but if you like DSTLLD, there’s a good chance you won’t hate it. Win-win! Subscribe or follow on your favourite podcast platform:

• Youtube

• Spotify

• Apple

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PHOTW: The best kind of third wheeling in a relationship.