APN34 - Bling vs. Being Goals

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson More Wisdom in Less Time this is a mini chapter from Brian's book A Philosopher's Notes. You can find it on Amazon.

Now we're moving into the section on goals. We will begin with a few of my favorite quotes. First, Paulo Coelho says, when you want something, all the universe can conspires in helping you to achieve it. Dan Millman tells us, avoid fragmentation, find your focus, and seek simplicity. Purposeful living calls for elegant efficiency and economy of effort, expending the minimum time and energy necessary to achieve desired goals, while Sonia Liebomersky tells us it turns out that the process of working toward a goal, participating in a valued and challenging activity, is as important to, well, being as it's attained. And finally, Tal Ben Shahar says, attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain, nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain. Happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak. So goals. Whether our goal is to live with love, appreciation, joy, kindness, generosity, and all that goodness, or to start a business, compete in a triathlon, or create financial freedom, goals are important. So let's explore some ways that we can rock our goals. First mini chapter in this section is Bling versus Being Goals. Goals. They're super important, but from my perspective, people spend way too much time setting bling goals when they should be focusing that energy on being goals. Two important reasons why the near exclusive focus on having and stuff goals is a bad idea. 1. As we've discussed, acquiring stuff doesn't lead to happiness. Changing your thoughts and behaviors does. And two Outcomes are simply byproducts of consistently rocking it. So it makes a heck of a lot more sense to set creative production goals and blisscipline goals than it does to obsess about outcomes. Little footnote here. Examples of being goals would include being being more kind, generous, optimistic, courageous, loving, etc. Basically living with more virtue.

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