I’m reading an interesting book by Peter Block, which opens with this quote from him:

There is depth in the question “How do I do this?” that is worth exploring. The question is a defense against the action. It is a leap past the question of purpose, past the question of intentions, and past the drama of responsibility. The question “How?”—more than any other question—looks for the answer outside of us. It is an indirect expression of our doubts…

This integrates with something I mentioned last week — that there is a limit to explaining the “how.” You can offer scaffolding, but ultimately the final implementation of the “how” requires the initiative of the doer.

A simple example is that I can tell you how I get myself to my desk to work in the morning, but knowing my process may or may not help you get yourself to your desk. I do it by thinking about the writing I want to accomplish that morning, which is a very reliable motivator. But even I, knowing this process and following my own advice, need to adapt the process when it doesn’t “work.” Then I need to introspect why and implement a backup plan.

I have a process and several backup plans as a result of a commitment I made to start work at a regular time, despite the fact that I have total control over my schedule. It’s the commitment that motivates me to try again when at first I don’t succeed. It’s the commitment that spurs me to reflect on any difficulties I had. It’s the commitment that motivates me to experiment with alternate “hows” if my process isn’t as reliable as I want it to be.

The commitment comes first before you figure out all you might want to know about the how.

Don’t you need to know “how” before you commit?

This feels problematic for many people. How can you commit to something if you don’t know what you’re committing to? Don’t you need to know exactly what’s involved before you say “yes”? After all, we carefully check the features that are included before we buy a product — we want to know how it will meet our needs. We get to know someone well before we marry them — we want to know how our relationship will function. We find out the workload before we enroll in a course — we want to know how we will we keep up with it.

It is true that you need objective knowledge on which to base your decision to commit. This is Reason 101.

It is true that you need to ensure that the value to be gained is worth the effort to be made before you commit. This is Rational Selfishness 101.

And it is also true that for aspirational goals, you need to commit before you know exactly how to achieve them. An aspirational goal is a creative goal. It is a vision or an idea or new knowledge that doesn’t exist yet that you want to bring into the world. You see the possibility and a plausible path to it, but you can’t possibly know exactly how you will do it. You will only learn how to do it by an experimental process.

So how do you make the commitment rationally and selfishly to an aspirational goal?

In a recent article, I discussed how to validate aspirational thoughts. In addition to knowing that nothing you know makes your goal a metaphysical impossibility, you need some evidence you can and will do what’s needed to achieve it. That means having a lot of self-knowledge, including:

• Why do you want to achieve it, and how important is it to your whole life, meaning how does this goal fit with your entire value hierarchy? Why is it important to your happiness?
• What do you already know about how to achieve it and what do you expect to need to figure out?
• What skills do you have to bring to bear on the challenge, and do you have any old habits you will need to break to step up to the challenge?
• What “old baggage” might get in the way, are you willing to deal with it, and how hard do you expect that to be?

This knowledge is objective even if it is incomplete. It is based on introspected facts. Self-awareness includes awareness of what you do know and don’t know. Your strengths and weaknesses. Your values and disvalues. Your skills and foibles.

It is this self-awareness that then also allows you to judge whether the pursuit of an aspirational goal would be rationally selfish, even if it turns out to be very hard to discover the knowledge, disintegrate the old baggage, and retrain your skills.

How self-awareness factors into achieving an aspirational goal

For example, Ned (all names are changed for privacy) came to the Thinking Lab to figure out his central purpose. He was unhappy with certain aspects of his career, which had had some dramatic ups and downs. He was convinced, logically, that a central purpose would integrate his career values and was therefore necessary to his happiness. He had been in another program to figure this out, but the process didn’t “work.” His happiness was at stake, so he tried my process.

In coaching him, I heard a lot about his present work, about which he was extremely passionate. It involved very complex analyses of financial markets. After a couple of conversations, I said, “Ned, I think you already have a central purpose,” and I described what I understood to be the goal of his work. Yes, that was it. How ironic. He had had a central purpose and didn’t know it.

So why wasn’t he happy with his work? Once he had named his central purpose, that enabled him to re-evaluate all of the ups and downs in his career, so he saw them as the work he had done to create a truly unique expertise. He also saw a weakness in the area of people skills that had contributed to the difficulties. With the pride and objectivity that this knowledge instilled in him, he was able to think strategically about a career change that would put him in a position that he loved with sufficient autonomy to follow his passion. He found a new position. He did the work on the people skills as issues came up. He transformed his life. This didn’t happen overnight — it took years. He did all of that work because he was committed to his happiness.

He thought figuring out his central purpose was the key to that, and in some respects it was. But the thing that kept him in the game and made all of his effort worth it, including developing people skills that he hadn’t realized was part of what he needed, was his commitment to his own happiness.

How self-awareness justifies changing the commitment

Of course, no commitment is an out-of-context absolute. It’s a contextual absolute. Self-awareness justifies the initial commitment. It also justifies any decision to drop or change the commitment.

For example, another member of the Thinking Lab, call him Art, was very passionate about being an entrepreneur. He had thought about what he could do that was unique, and was working to build an unusual and potentially controversial business. However, he was hesitant to talk about it casually with people he met because it interfered with getting to know them. This meant that he felt isolated working on it and it seemed to be in conflict with his social and recreational values. But he was convinced it was a good idea, so he kept at it, learning to be more productive, to balance work and social values.

Then something happened. He got another idea for a different business — one that wasn’t controversial. It looked promising, so he took a little time to pursue it, and had some initial success. He saw for himself how much happier he was building this different kind of business. He proved to himself that it mattered to him that he have a business he could talk freely about with anyone he met. It made it easier to come up with marketing ideas; it made it easier to follow through. He had not understood this about himself, but he discovered it by self-awareness in the process. On that basis, he moved his commitment to the new business, taking all of the skills he had already developed with him.

This was not giving up when the going got tough. That’s a prescription for stagnation. This was seeing clearly where his long-term happiness lay.

It’s all about happiness

Personal happiness makes open-ended effort worth it. Incidentally, this is what makes an investment in learning Objectivism worth it to non-intellectuals. Objectivism explains the principles needed to keep you on a path that will result in happiness in the real world.

Happiness is not something you get after achieving your goal. It’s an enduring state of positive affect that keeps you motivated through the ups and downs of life on the way to achieving your many goals. It is the value that you build into your process for pursuing goals so that the process pays off in joy all along the way, even if the undertaking results in failure or a pivot. It makes the effort worth it one way or another. (See my series on happiness for much more on this.)

So…. Do you want to build a business? Write a novel? Raise happy children? Change the culture? What goal is intertwined with your happiness? Set that aspirational goal and commit to it, including the commitment to figure out how to do it, especially when the going gets tough.

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P.S. FYI, I doubt I will recommend Block’s book to this list, as it’s requiring a lot of philosophical detection and independent validation from me as I read it. That said, it’s provoked a lot of mulling. I’d be very interested to hear any insights or objections you have in response to my conclusions above. Just comment on this post — I will read it.