Page 34 - Hard Goals

Heartfelt 25

moment, if your commitment to that goal is suffi ciently heart-
felt, you’ll saddle up and plow right through. But if it’s not, if
there’s no heartfelt connection, well, that’s why your local gym
is overcrowded with resolution makers in January and empty by
March.
In the past few years there’s been a spate of books on how
to be happy. Not deeply fulfi lled, emotionally resilient, high
achieving, or doing something truly meaningful and signifi cant
with your life, but rather, happy. (Doing really easy stuff like
gorging on pizza while drinking beer and watching Blade Run-
ner would make me happy, but that’s not exactly a recipe for
self-respect or a life well-lived.) In one of these happiness books,
the author tells a story about a woman who loved reading lit-
erature so much that she decided to pursue her doctorate in
the fi eld. According to the story, the woman got into a good
program and started taking classes. However, she quickly dis-
covered that it was hard. There were grades, deadlines, papers,
rewards, punishments, and so on. She eventually said, “I don’t
look forward to reading anymore.”
Now, the author of the book was making a totally different
point in telling this story, but here’s what I took away from it:
that woman didn’t have a deep enough emotional connection to
her goal; her connection wasn’t truly heartfelt. Listen, just about
every goal worth doing is going to take work. You don’t just roll
out of bed and get a Ph.D. because you enjoy reading Shake-
speare. Were that the case, I’d win the Tour de France because
I recently took a wine-drinking (er, I mean tasting) bike tour
through Napa Valley. And maybe a Nobel Prize too because I
love talking to smart people.
Once again, every goal worth doing will test your limits;
there’s simply no getting around it. And, at some point, even the