Uncommon Success: Goal Setting, Defeating Resistance, and Focus

To live a fulfilling life, individuals should strive for success in two key areas: financial stability and engagement in challenging, intrinsically rewarding activities. Achieving both leads to an "uncommon success" characterized by a career that is both financially lucrative and personally satisfying.

Overcoming Generational Weaknesses

The rarity of this dual success stems from three common weaknesses prevalent in our generation:

1. Lack of Purpose: Many people drift through life without clear goals, failing to harness the power of effective goal setting.
2. Laziness and Inability to Overcome Obstacles: This includes procrastination, perfectionism, self-doubt, and complacency.
3. Shrinking Attention Spans and Distraction: The constant pull of digital devices and social media diminishes our ability to focus.

Counteracting these weaknesses is crucial for achieving uncommon success.

The Power of Goal Setting

The first step towards uncommon success is to establish clear goals, which act as guiding forces. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky noted, "Without some goal and some effort to reach it no man can live."

Steven Kotler, in "The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer," outlines three types of goals essential for significant achievement:

1. Overarching Purpose (Life's Goal): This is a long-term objective that must meet two criteria for uncommon success:

   • The activities leading to its accomplishment must be intrinsically rewarding.
   • It must offer potential for financial rewards. If the first criterion is not met, inertia will set in; if the second is not met, it remains merely a hobby. Discovering this purpose may come easily to some, while others may need to explore various fields through experimentation.

2. High, Hard Goals: These are major accomplishments that move an individual towards their overarching purpose. They should be motivating but not so large as to guarantee failure. For example, if the purpose is to be a successful musician, a high, hard goal might be to produce an album. Nietzsche warned against setting tasks that are too great, as they can diminish one's perceived talent.

3. Clear Goals: These are bite-sized, daily steps that provide direction for day-to-day life. Kotler illustrates this: "Becoming a great writer is a [life’s] purpose...Writing a novel is the next level down, a high, hard goal that could take years to complete. Writing 500 words between 8:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M.—now, that’s a clear goal."

Defeating Resistance

Once goals are set, consistent daily work is required. This necessitates counteracting the second generational weakness: laziness and the "force of resistance," as described by Stephen Pressfield. Resistance encompasses procrastination, self-doubt, fear, impatience, self-inflation, self-denigration, distraction, laziness, arrogance, complacency, and perfectionism.

To defeat resistance, Pressfield advises to "put your ass where your heart wants to be." This means physically placing oneself in the environment where work gets done, whether it's a writer at their desk, a musician with their instrument, or an entrepreneur at their computer. Additionally, engaging with one's tools—picking up a pencil, guitar, or placing fingers on a keyboard—is crucial. Cognitive scientist Guy Claxton explains that humans have an "inbuilt tendency to lock our attention on to objects that are [in] or near our hands," making it difficult to shift focus away.

By simply occupying the workspace and engaging with tools, individuals significantly increase the likelihood of doing work and overcoming resistance. Pressfield emphasizes showing up and trying one's best, without judgment on quality or quantity.

Defeating resistance also involves a mental and emotional commitment to one's purpose. By identifying as the artist, writer, or entrepreneur one aspires to be, a new way of perceiving the world emerges. This allows for the recognition of inspirations and ideas that might otherwise be missed, providing motivation for consistent effort. As William Blake wrote, "As a man is, so he sees."

Cultivating Distraction-Free Concentration

The third weakness to overcome is a short attention span. Uncommon success requires the ability to engage fully in work through sustained, distraction-free concentration. This skill leads to higher quality and quantity of output. Robert Greene, in "Mastery," states, "It is better to dedicate two or three hours of intense focus to a skill than to spend eight hours of diffused concentration on it."

A significant step to improve focus is to drastically reduce the use of smartphones and social media. These technologies are addictive, primary sources of distraction, and diminish concentration abilities. Oliver Burkeman, in "Four Thousand Weeks," describes them as "a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention."

Without the constant bombardment of alerts and endless feeds, maintaining distraction-free concentration becomes easier. For those with short attention spans, this mental muscle can be strengthened by starting with 15-20 minute focused sessions and gradually increasing their duration. Cal Newport, in "Deep Work," notes that performance psychologists suggest an hour a day for newcomers to deliberate practice, expanding to about four hours for those familiar with its rigors, but rarely more. Reaching these upper limits of focus provides a rare and valuable skill for achieving uncommon success.

The Hobbyist Approach to Uncommon Success

A critical decision for those pursuing uncommon success is whether to quit their current job and fully commit, or to adopt a "hobbyist approach" by pursuing their calling in their spare time until financial success is more certain.

While both approaches have pros and cons, the hobbyist approach is often more realistic. Quitting a job without sufficient financial reserves can create pressure and lead to poor decisions in the pursuit of quick financial returns. Many who have achieved uncommon success recommend the hobbyist route. Steven Kotler, for instance, worked as a bartender for a decade while developing his writing craft, allowing him to avoid financial pressure. He advises entrepreneurs to start with a hobbyist approach: "Curiosity into passion; passion into purpose; and purpose into patient profit—that’s the safest way to play this game."

The cumulative effect of a hobbyist approach can be substantial. Pressfield highlights this: "One hour a day is seven hours a week, thirty hours a month, 365 hours a year. Three hundred and sixty hours is nine forty-hour weeks. Nine forty-hour weeks is a novel. It’s two screenplays, maybe three. In ten years, that’s ten novels or twenty movie scripts. You can be a full-time writer, one hour a day."

Ultimately, the choice between pursuing uncommon success through hard work and risk, or remaining in a mediocre 9-5 job, can be profound. For some, it's not just about an easy life versus a challenging one, but a matter of health and well-being. Pressfield warns that many succumb to negative habits and ailments "simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to."