Focus on the task at hand and your goals will take care of themselves. Be grateful you have goals, anyway, even if you don’t quite understand the process how you’re getting there. That aspect of your life is going considerably better than you may believe—whether you think it’s going brilliantly or a bit less than that. Your direction is well set, and the way I suggest you express it is through devoting yourself passionately to the quality of the work you’re doing rather than where you expect it to take you. This calls for an act of trust, but not such a big one. In fact, as you involve yourself directly in the tangible substance of what you’re working on, you’re learning many things that are helping you sort out elements of the big picture, refine your methods, and get clear in your ideas about what you’re doing. One thing about your sense of mission—think of yourself on a quest for your roots. You’re working your way backward through many different evolutions of our “goals” toward a wellspring at the core of yourself. While you’re doing this, clear away everyone else’s goals that you might be influenced by. Do your best to scrap your “sense of service” for something deeper: what you know is right for you (which will end up being of service even more). And please do something that many people scrap on the way to success: Deepen your emotional roots rather than pull them up.
This article appears in March 2012.
