4.4 - Define your goals, write them down, and let go of the wanting

Energy follows attention. What you focus on grows. This is not woo. It's basic cognitive psychology: your brain looks for evidence and opportunities related to whatever you've been thinking about, while filtering out everything else.

The implication is that if you don't focus your attention on specific goals, your brain has nothing to organize around, and life happens to you instead of through you.

Writing your goals down sounds almost too simple to matter. It matters. The act of writing forces specificity, and specificity is what makes a goal something your brain can actually pursue. "I want to be successful" is not actionable. "I want to launch this specific business by this specific date, with these specific milestones" is.

A few orientations that help:

• Be specific. Numbers, dates, descriptions of what success looks like. The more detail, the better.

• Revisit them often. Weekly. Monthly. Quarterly. The act of re-reading them keeps them active.

• Focus on abundance and gratitude alongside the goals. This sounds soft and it matters. You will attract more and produce better work from a state of "I already have a lot, and more is coming" than from a state of "I don't have enough, I'm behind." The first state opens doors. The second state shrinks you.

• Choose goals bigger than yourself. Not bigger as in more grandiose, but bigger as in not just about you. Goals that serve a larger circle (family, community, customers, a craft, a cause) tend to outlast the dopamine of self-focused ambition. They also tend to be the goals you don't burn out chasing. Goals driven purely by ego or ambition for ambition's sake have a way of feeling hollow even when you hit them.

When you decide clearly what you want, write it down, hold it in your attention, and act in alignment with it consistently, something does change in how the world responds. Call it priming, call it confirmation bias, call it the universe, call it whatever helps you stay with it. The effect is real, and almost everyone who has built something meaningful describes some version of it.

The paradox: desire blocks what you desire

A subtler layer is worth understanding here, and it's one of David Hawkins's most useful contributions (see Chapter 2.1 on Letting Go).

Hawkins argues that the very presence of strong desire for something makes having it harder, sometimes impossible. The mechanism: desire is, by definition, the state of feeling you lack something. If you sit in the feeling of lack, that lack is what your nervous system is broadcasting, and lack is what gets reinforced. The wanting itself becomes the obstacle.

You've probably noticed this in your own life. The things you've wanted desperately, you often didn't get, or got only after you stopped grasping. The things you wanted in a calmer, more confident way tended to arrive. The state you're in matters as much as the goal you've set.

This sounds like a contradiction with the rest of this chapter (write down what you want, focus on it, hold it in your attention). It isn't, once you see the combined practice. The goals stay clear and specific. What dissolves is the desperate emotional charge of wanting them.

A practice that combines the two:

• Articulate the goal or need clearly. What do you actually want? Be honest with yourself.

• Write it down in as much detail as possible. What it looks like, when, how it feels to have it.

• Let go of the desire attached to it. Sit with the feeling of wanting, and instead of feeding it, release it. The Hawkins method (Chapter 2.1) is exactly this practice. Acknowledge the feeling, allow it, and let it pass through you instead of holding onto it.

• When the wanting comes back, witness it and release it again. Desire doesn't disappear from one release. It rises, you let go, it rises again, you let go again.

• Repeat until the emotional charge is exhausted. What remains is the clean intention: you know what you want, you're acting toward it, but you're not grasping at it. The grasping is gone.

The state on the other side of this practice is the one that actually attracts. You're clear, you're committed, you're moving toward what you want, and you're no longer in the state of lack that was repelling it. People who operate from this state tend to get what they wanted more often, and tend to be much more at peace whether or not they get it.

Goals plus release. Clarity plus non-attachment. Both at once.

Let go of money you've already lost

The same practice works backwards too, applied not to what you want but to what you've already lost.

Years ago I was running a telecom company. One of our biggest clients was based in Lebanon and usually worked on prepaid basis. At some point he started asking for credit, and we extended it to him. Slowly the credit piled up to around $20,000, which he kept promising to pay "soon, soon." Eventually he just stopped paying altogether. I would call to remind him, and he'd refuse.

One day I called him and said: "Hey, this is your last chance to pay the money."

He laughed on the phone. "Or what? You're going to come here to Lebanon and find me and extort the money?"

I said: "No. What I'll do is I'll forget that you owe me. And then that will become your problem, because you won't."

He laughed again. "Fine, fine." We hung up.

And that's exactly what I did. I let it go. I accepted that he wasn't going to pay. I grieved the loss. And then I forgot it, like it had never happened.

About a year later, an opportunity came up. We had a cheap destination from a carrier that was open for a short window of time, and I needed someone who could buy that destination from us at high volume for a couple of months. I knew the client who had owed me money was exactly the kind of buyer who could move that volume. So I called him and offered the deal.

He got on the call, surprised. "Is there some kind of catch here?"

I said no.

"But I guess you want to get that money back, right?"

I said: "No. As I told you, that money is not owed to me anymore. I don't treat it as something you owe me. I forgot about it. That's why I can call you now and offer you this deal."

"Fine, let's do it," he said, puzzled. "But I'll give the money back."

I said: "If you send it to me, I'll return it. It's not my money. Give it to charity if you want. But don't send it to me."

He was shocked. In that moment, he felt the actual weight of what he had done. I was offering him a chance to make a lot of money on a deal, after he screwed me. The karma had returned to its sender, and there was nothing I needed to do about it.

But the bigger lesson, for me, was something else. If I hadn't let the original loss go, I wouldn't have been able to pick up the phone and offer him that deal. My pride would have stopped me. My anger would have stopped me. The opportunity cost of holding onto that grudge would have been about fifty times the original amount I'd lost.

The lesson generalizes. If you've lost money somewhere, don't beat yourself up. Don't keep grieving it. Feel the grief, let it go, release the emotion. If it comes back, let it go again. Do it until you don't feel it anymore.

Don't get stuck in resentment or regret over lost money, missed opportunities, chances you didn't take, things you could have done and didn't. These are some of the most expensive emotional states to live in - not because of what they cost in the past, but because of what they cost going forward. If you're stuck in regret or resentment, your eyes are pointed backwards, and you can't see what's coming next. The opportunities ahead of you are walking past while you stare at the ones behind.

Feel it. Release it. Then turn around.