21.09.2026
How to reach your goals
In 2011 I was organising a music and yoga festival for the summer, and the first thing we did wasn’t a list. It was sitting down and imagining it already built.
The stage. The camping area. People arriving from different places. The performances, the toilets, the industrial kitchen. Seeing it running before any of it existed.
That isn’t self-help visualisation. It’s that without that picture you have nothing to pull on. Once you have it, you have two points: where you are now and where you want to end up. And the head, which is bad at storing things, is superb at filling gaps. Give it both ends and it starts on its own.
After that it’s a matter of picking things out. Out of the heap comes a list of projects — build the stage, the website, the artists — and some open into smaller ones: inside artists, one project per artist.
And at the very bottom appears what still strikes me as the most useful thing I learned from all this: however big the thing is, it always turns out to be made of tiny actions. Make a phone call. Look something up. Talk to somebody. Buy a cable.
There is nothing else in there. A project you’re afraid to look at is, once you open it all the way, a row of calls and errands.
I built a temple from nothing the same way, and it wasn’t down to having a great vision. It was down to the list at the bottom.
This text warns you where this gets lost:
Those who are on this path are resolute in purpose, and their aim is one. O beloved child of the Kurus, the intelligence of those who are irresolute is many-branched.
Bhagavad-gītā 2.41. 1972 edition.
Their aim is one. And on the other side it doesn’t say the irresolute man is lazy or stupid: it says his intelligence is many-branched. He’s clever, and it runs off in twelve directions at once.
That’s what kills projects, not a shortage of willpower. Twelve goals is none, because each one gives you permission not to do the other eleven.
So if you’re stuck, look at which of the two you’re missing: either you haven’t seen the end in enough detail for your head to know what to fill in, or you’ve seen it and it’s four different endings at the same time.