The big 100 and selfish goals

Today marks Sunday Sparks' 100th edition. This upcoming September, it will be two years since I began writing it. Wow!

It's hard to imagine that it has gone this long. Not because I thought I would fail, but because when I started, I had no grand plan. I didn't have any big audacious goals or any specific metrics to reach a particular subscriber count or views per post, nothing at all. All I had was a clear purpose. I knew why it was important to me.

My goal was a selfish one. Yup, it was all about me 🤣. My focus was to discover what I wanted to write about and I didn't care who or how many people read it. It sounds harsh, but I promise, it's not meant to be.

Setting a selfish goal made one thing possible. It gave me control over a process that can easily become externally focused. It put me in the driver's seat, calling the shots, and deciding what to write. It didn't matter to me if some topics would attract more readers or if twice or thrice a week might be better for engagement and growing my subscriber list. It wasn't about any numbers; it was about what writing would do for me.

I found a rhythm that felt right and adopted a method that allowed me consistency every week to focus on what I found most interesting and kept me coming back. Perhaps that is the most important aspect of this approach. Instead of asking what I needed to do to write a blog, I asked what will enable me to write every week and keep coming back, happily, energetically, and effortlessly. The answer to that question is what I've been doing during these one hundred posts.

Paul Millerd writes in his book, The Pathless Path, about a very similar strategy regarding how he chooses to tackle life:

On the pathless path, the goal is not to find a job, make money, build a business, or achieve any other metric. It’s to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing. This is one of the most important secrets of the pathless path.

Selfish goals (better known as intrinsic goals) are goals that align with your values. They provide fulfilment, they are satisfying and keep you coming back. They are as much about the journey as the destination.

John P. Foreman writes in Integral Leadership (Highlights):

If we reflect on our own experience, we may discover that many of the goals we have achieved were unsatisfying. Were those based on our values or the values of someone else? The extent to which our goals and our values are out of alignment may be the most profound litmus test for our own feelings of worth, purpose, and personal success. This has many implications for leaders. The first involves our own career and life satisfaction. Until we have clearly defined our core values, we will most likely not achieve deep and lasting fulfillment from either our professional or our personal life.

Extrinsic goals have their place too. They are the goals we set in alignment with external rewards. For that promotion, that career or business advancement, or more wealth to live more comfortably. When you work for an organization, most of your goals are in alignment with the organization in exchange for a paycheque; they are not necessarily yours.

Extrinsic goals cannot be discounted but they also cannot be the only ones we set. Extrinsic goals provide an external reward but they don't necessarily drive purpose and fulfilment, nor do they automatically align with our values. What they provide is a short-lived reward.

When most of our life is driven by extrinsic goals, we're often left dissatisfied when we reach them. They deliver a dose of dopamine, of excitement for reaching them, and then nothing. We ask, what's next? And, we try harder, set bigger audacious extrinsic goals and get stuck on the hedonic treadmill.

Metaphorically, we can look at extrinsic goals as a cheap, inefficient and unstable energy source; they require a constant need for more to keep going. By comparison, intrinsic goals are a rich, clean and stable energy source; they keep burning and going with ease. Having a few extrinsic goals amongst a healthy number of intrinsic ones is a much more sustainable way of going.

Starting the Sunday Spark, I needed something efficient, something that would keep me burning and coming back, and so I chose to be selfish, and as it turns out, I'm still writing. 😀

I want to leave off with a thank you to everyone. Some of you have been here since the beginning. Some of you joined along the way. And to everyone, thank you for reading, commenting and sharing your thoughts with me, I always appreciate it.

Miguel,
Sparknotion – Think Differently.