Ready—Aim—!
I’m sending this off late because I couldn’t satisfy my vision for this week’s post, that is, until now. Just understand that these are very large topics that I could never fully do justice to in this short time; the only thing that lets me hit publish is the fact that this is ongoing and never a “final” say.
You can expect to learn about:
What it means to set an aim for your life.
The tools needed for setting a proper aim.
Psychology’s Greek roots.
How the Tales of Great Heroes can help you aim.
6 general principles for setting your own aim.
Also, don’t forget to like and share this post if you enjoyed it—it goes a long way toward getting new subscribers and growing our community!
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Reach for Something Else
In a little bit, we’ll talk about how studying the lives of Great Heroes can benefit us and our pursuits, so I thought it would be fitting to link a podcast dedicated to walking through the Great Books of the Western World.
Deacon Harrison Garlick runs this excellent podcast dedicated to all things Great Books. I’ve subscribed for a while and really enjoy the conversations he has with various guests.
He’s walked through the entirety of the Iliad (yes, that little-known book that Alexander the Great slept with) and is nearly through the Odyssey, my personal favorite of the two.
If you’re interested in what the Great Books are and how they can help, this is an excellent source!
How to Set an Aim for Your Life
Discussing the cost of aimlessness last week made me remember a very famous line by one of my favorite thinkers:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
“Walden” — Henry David Thoreau
One of the most beautiful things about Thoreau is that, in an attempt to counter this desperation, he gave us a beautiful alternative of which he spends some time discussing but could be summed up here:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Living deliberately.
Deliberately must be some kind of cousin to integrity—the process and the outcome of a good life.
To set a deliberate aim for yourself, you need to have an idea of what you want to hit.
What impact do you want to make?
If you’re uncertain about this, you can discover what kind of impact you’d like to make by reading, writing, talking with friends, and contemplating about what you’d like to contribute to the things beyond yourself (no, you don’t go through all of this effort for yourself, there’s very little meaning in solipsism).
You may also start with what you don’t want, there’s likely plenty of ideas there… especially if you’ve never attempted the whole “reach for more and aim deliberately” thing.
Just be careful that your aim isn’t out of desperation and total avoidance, there’s no integrity in abject fear; rather, you might say with a strong chest and decided voice, “No matter what happens, I’m not going there.”
Again, strong and decided, not quaking with fear or resentment; those obstruct your aim.
When you first set out to accomplish something new or decide to improve something already in motion, you need to be aware of not only what you’re measuring but also the instrument by which you’re conducting the measurement.
Where would we be without the yardstick, ruler, and tape measure?
Would the Seven Seas have been charted were it not for vital tools of measurement such as the sextant or compass?
We’d think not.
So when it comes to the measurement of human actions and desires, what’s our means of measurement?
As it turns out, this is far from a new discovery and the understanding of the nature of this tool has shaped Western Civilization for millennia and can be properly summed up into this two word statement: “Know Thyself.”
You’re the tool!
What do you measure with?
Self-awareness.
More particularly, the matters of humans affairs, the instrument humans use to measure is their soul, and our attentiveness to it is the only way we can have any say in our lives.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into some metaphysical spiel, all I will say is that our souls are the chief object of the study of Psychology.
Brief Greek lesson:
Psychology = psyche + logia
Psyche = soul
logia = study of
The Greeks, in large part (making several mass generalizations here) saw the soul as the way in which one ordered their life and was essential to set right if a life was to be lived well.
Okay, lesson over.
For the soul to become proficient in the art of measuring, which is akin to the art of aiming, we must do our best to educate it, especially in relation to it’s self-awareness.
How do you educate your soul?
The short answer is to read Great Books of the lives of Great Men and Women.
Reason being? we learn best through experience.
To see whether in our current state we might be able to make the impact we deem significant, it’s helpful to see the different types of character traits and how they lead to their various outcomes.
If we’re to aim well, it’s necessary for us to thoroughly examine ideas, knowledge, and wisdom.
Each of these unfolds as you read and reread (yes, reread great books) the stories of great heroes.
The general layout of the heroes journey is the most important and shows us how we might develop an aim; necessity (fate) demands some unknown and generally insignificant person who may or may not have a divine/noble bloodline (potential) receives some kind of insight from a divinity or journey into the “underworld” (education) to conquer a beast (chaos/ideas-untested hypotheses) and reap the treasure (knowledge-ideas that work) and eventually be deposed by their lack of humility or, inversely, establish a mighty empire (integration of knowledge into wisdom).
In these stories, there’s a great many things to overcome and it might feel alienating at times, especially if the greatest task we’ve yet to face is answering a DM from a potential romantic partner or going to an interview for a job we’ve been wanting for awhile.
But then again, maybe reading how Perseus slew Medusa and rescued Andromeda would help contextualize that job interview…
All of that is great, but in the end, it’s best if we can remain as practical as possible.
In an effort to stay aimless for as short a time as possible, and to avoid being one of the mass living in quiet desperation, I’ve listed some ways you might begin to live more deliberately and set your aim true:
Make sure you’re not aiming at something you don’t want to hit.
Evaluate the significance of what you do aim at, is it worth all of the effort?
Once decided upon, avoid changing your aim.
Train—there’s no other way to reach your goal if you’ve not invested time practicing and learning the craft necessary to reach your target.
Cut away any excess, if it’s not helping you reach your goal, you must either reevaluate or rid yourself of it.
Be relentless in your pursuit and cease only once you’ve done all you can.
These are broad, but they should be.
It’s your life, you need to decide the aim, no one can do that for you.
If you’re not sure where to do with this, here’s how I can help:
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Thanks for reading!
See you next week!!
xDevan
Keep up the great work 😎👍