I was always a very goal oriented person. And I generally have been good at achieving my goals.
Ever since I can remember, I was told of the family myth: my great-grandfather was a great man who got a scholarship to study at the Harvard School of Public Health so that he can come back to improve the standard of public health in war-torn Korea. At that time (I believe between the late 1940s and early 1950s), Korea was an impoverished, agricultural economy.
I was half-expected to follow his footsteps. As early as five, I told my parents that I wanted to go to Harvard. That seed of an idea drove me to go on a singular mission to get into Harvard. And I did.
There was a lot of sacrifice along the way to get there. My parents sacrificed their life in Korea so that their kids can get a better education in the US. I sacrificed time with friends, family, and the carefreeness that can only be experienced as a teenager. I sacrificed a comfortable and conformist life in Korea so that I could be one of the only Asian kids in school (I grew up in a predominantly Hispanic Miami, FL) and constantly feel different and alone. We didn’t really go on vacation or were able to afford a ton of nice things, because we were saving up for two kids’ private education on a middle-class salary.
So I think I developed a “if only I got into Harvard, I will do X” type of mentality. And once I did get in, I think I was lost, and perhaps tried to make up for lost time. Only when I set another goal for myself, I was able to focus on achieving that, and able to forget the present as merely a distraction for something else I had to achieve. I was investing every bit of resources so that I can compound into the future.
This mindset persisted into my late twenties. When I set myself on a journey of entrepreneurship, I had a certain financial goal in mind. It was a number that a member of the FIRE (financial independence retire early) community would be delighted to hit. By the time I was 30, I overshot that goal.
But I hit the absolute lowest point in my life. My method of “if I had X million, then I will be happy” rhetoric hit a breaking point. I felt bitter about all of the lost time in my teens and twenties. I didn’t feel like I had enough. Nothing felt like enough. The difference in the expectation of the joy that I would feel in hitting that goal and the reality was too much to bear. Instead of stopping and re-assessing my life, I stupidly pressed on, trying to hit that next milestone, with even more fury than ever before.
The crisis that became an opportunity was the absolutely brutal market crash of 2022. It gave me a rare opportunity to reset my lifestyle and re-evaluate my path that I was on. I knew that every crisis in my life was a message that the Universe was trying to send me. It was up to me to listen to it or not.
I chose to listen. I was able to reflect (with the aid of a lot of coaching) and synthesize that I cannot live a goal-oriented life anymore. I had to shift to living a pursuit-oriented life.
The goal oriented life puts off the present in favor of the dopamine rush felt when achieving said goal. The goals only get bigger. The brain gets more and more de-sensitized to achievement. One puts off the present for the future.
The pursuit-oriented life views the every day pursuit itself as the reward, so that one does not expect a huge dopamine hit when achieving a goal. It allows the brain to be able to always build towards something bigger, but be able to enjoy the day-to-day (because there is no expectation of a reward coming in the future).
Once I realized this, I was able to achieve peace, and re-wire my brain for the pursuit, not the goals. I fundamentally feel like a different person.