The Goal Is to Forget the Goal
How setting attentional aspirations can steer you back to the joy of mindfulness practice.
A meditation goal is not an oxymoron.
Goals help you create focused, sustainable plans, but your day-to-day attention should remain on the process itself. When things are going well, your mindful awareness goals can motivate you to keep showing up—even as you set them aside.
Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, in his new book The Score, captures this tension between pursuing goals and staying present in the process by distinguishing between two kinds of motivation:
“There are two very different motivational states in which we can play a game. There’s striving play, and then there’s also achievement play. The achievement player is trying to win because they actually value winning. The striving player, on the other hand, doesn’t actually care about the win, deep down. They are only trying to win because they value the struggle. The achievement player cares about the win itself; the striving player cares about the process of trying to win.”
When you set a goal for your mindfulness practice, you’re not trying to become an achievement player. You’re not playing to win. You’re playing to get better at playing, which leads to getting better at paying attention. You’re using the goal the way a striving player uses the rules of a game—as a structure that generates the very experience you’re after.
Designing a physical fitness routine
Decide what you want to develop. Find exercises and activities to develop them.
To build muscular strength, lift weights and progress through sets of exercises, paying close attention to each repetition as you go.
To improve flexibility, ease into a series of stretches, holding each one as you ride out the clock.
To build endurance in the pool, focus on the rhythm of each stroke as you swim your laps.
Once you’ve designed your program, you can keep redirecting your energy toward following through on the planned workouts.
Designing an attentional fitness routine
When it comes to your mindfulness practice, start by identifying which attentional capacities you want to strengthen, then choose targeted exercises to develop them.
To sharpen your focus, try exercises that train you to repeatedly return your attention to chosen sensations for set blocks of time.
To enhance relaxation, practice exercises that help you notice, cultivate, and savor restful sensations.
To increase emotional awareness, intentionally observe your responses to a variety of pleasant and unpleasant emotional triggers.
Whether you’re building physical or attentional fitness, progress comes from consistently practicing the exercises you’ve chosen.
But here’s the deeper insight. Nguyen points out that the most valuable states we seek—relaxation, absorption, genuine presence—can’t be achieved by chasing them directly:
“We often use striving play to sneak up sideways on these delicate mental states. A lot of the time, my true purpose in [rock] climbing is to relax. But if I aim at relaxation directly — if I consciously try to relax — I’ll absolutely fail... To actually relax, I have to forget that I’m trying to relax. I have to put my true purpose out of my head and focus on a very simple, very narrow goal: to get to the top of the cliff. Philosophers have a term for this kind of thing: a self-effacing end, which is an end that cannot be pursued directly. Games help us achieve self-effacing ends — relaxation, meditation, absorption — by providing us with smaller goals to focus on.”
This is why having a goal in meditation isn’t a contradiction. The goal isn’t the destination—it’s the set of handholds that guides your attention. By focusing on these handholds, you give your mind something concrete to engage with, allowing the deeper qualities you seek to emerge naturally.
Perhaps the most valuable meditation goal of all is simply to fall in love with the process itself—to become so absorbed in the experience that the urge to reach any particular outcome gradually withers away.
You can explore this for yourself with the attention exercise below.
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Exercise
This exercise targets three distinct attentional skills simultaneously: flexible focus, perceptual clarity, and responsive composure.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Bored
Frustrated
Relaxed
