We’re hard wired not to care what’s on the other side of our goals.

I should never have kissed her.

I shouldn’t have got her number. I shouldn’t have asked her out to dinner. I shouldn’t have brought flowers.

And I definitely shouldn’t have put on that firefighter costume.

In hindsight, it was all a mistake. In foresight, it was a mistake too. I knew that it would cause nothing but trouble. But somehow it just seemed like a mistake worth making.

And it taught me a really interesting lesson: sometimes “achievement” is a seductive lie.

It’s like the other day I was talking to a friend of mine. We played soccer together. We were talking about our golden days, and about how he got selected in the Australian Under 17 side to tour Asia.

He was reflecting on how he was never such a talented player. He didn’t work all that hard either.

But he said he wanted that Australian jersey so bad it would keep him up at night.

He would imagine how it would feel to put on that green and gold tracksuit with the kangaroo on it. How it would wear it to the shops and how people would be impressed by it.

“To be honest, that’s what I was focused on. I was focused on selection. On the honour that would come with that. I actually never thought past it – to what it would be like to actually play for Australia.

“I would just go over and over it in my mind. What it would be like to hear my name called out at the end of the state titles. Calling my family back home to let them know I was in. Getting my tracksuit and ticket to the AIS in the mail.

I wanted it so bad I could literally taste it.”

And in the end, at the state titles, which was where much of the selection took place, he just had a blinder of a carnival. Everything fell into place for him. He surprised everyone, including himself.

And he got selected.

The dream came true.

And what was it like to play for Australia? Well, he never went. He did his knee in Canberra and stayed home.

“I wasn’t as disappointed as you’d think. I’d got what I wanted, truth be told. The cosmos had delivered. It had given me everything I had called in. I’d just forgotten to ask for anything beyond the tracksuit!”

Good that he can laugh about it now. Getting old is good like that.

I feel like a see this a bit with people’s success journeys. When you dig into the kinds of things they’re striving for, often it’s the moment of the achievement itself, not the fruits of that achievement.

Take a simple example. Say someone wants a flashy new car. Now, do they really want a shiny merc? Or do they want that moment when their neighbours see their car in the driveway for the first time? Do they want bragging rights to their friends? Do they just want to be able to tell themselves, “It’s ok. Life’s going all right. We’ve got a merc…”

What’s the problem with this?

Well, one, you’ll never be satisfied. If the problem is the stories you’re telling about yourself, those stories will always reassert themselves, no matter how many cars or boats and vintage fighter planes you throw at them.

You’re chasing your tale.

(My entry in International Pun of the Year.)

Two, it’s a total waste of energy. If you want a new story about who you are and how you’re going in the world, just tell the story. You have that power and it is as easy as that.

I’ve covered this stuff before.

But the point I wanted to make today is don’t beat yourself up about it. Recognise that humans are hard-wired to focus on achievement, not the fruits of that achievement.

Our instincts drive us in this way. It’d be too much work and energy if your instincts had to convince you of the benefits associated with every motivation.

For example, our don’t instincts don’t say, “you should eat apples because they’re healthy and nutritious and they will give us the energy we need to sustain our endeavours.”

No. They say, “Get shiny sweet things and put them in your mouth.”

And that is literally where it ends. By design.

In fact, they deliberately create a blind spot around everything else that happens after that. From the instinct’s perspective, it’s just a distraction.

So take my friend with a thing for firemen. I knew that it was all a bad idea. But I just found it really hard to care.

My instincts had me focused on my attraction to her. Nothing else. They made it seem like the whole human story had only existed so that we could be together, and some great cosmic alignment would take place the moment we kissed.

Of course, that was never the case. And after the fact, when I looked to the instincts that had now gotten me into all that trouble, they were nowhere to be found.

You’re on your own now buddy.

Just another one of the joys of being human.

So my advice is this – be aware that we have a tendency to get fixated on the moment of achievement – the moment a goal is realised or a task is completed.

Be aware that while that feeling of achievement is awesome, it’s fleeting, and if your happiness is tied up with achievement, rather than the fruits of achievement, you’re on a treadmill to nowhere.

Take stock of your goals. Do you actually want what comes with them, or do you just want the satisfaction of achievement? Feel it out. What does it feel like once you’ve had that new car for a while?

Do you even care?

If not, your energies are better placed elsewhere (probably on the stories you’re telling.)

And finally, the tram to St Kilda is no place to be caught impersonating a member of the emergency services.

How do you keep yourself focused on the other side of achievement?

How a computer nerd hacked the universe

So I went around to my friend’s house to talk about a development we were doing together.

We go into his home office – kind of a man-den. It was obvious that this was where he did his work and his whiskey drinking.

I’d been to their place to dinner a few times but I’d never been given access to the den. It felt like I should have learnt a secret handshake or something.

Anyway, after a while hanging out and looking over some designs I notice he’s got this little wooden sign on his desk.

It was an unusual thing.  On the top part it had “Difficulty Setting:” embossed into the wood. Below that it had EASY, NORMAL and HARD. There was also this kind of pointer thing – like those score counters in pool.

It was set to EASY.

I point to it and ask him about it. He laughs and looks a little bashful. He knows what I get up to and says, “If I tell you it’s not going to end up in one of your blogs, is it?”

I’m like, “nah mate.”

Anyway, he says that he first came up with this thing about 10 years ago. He was going through a rough trot. Things weren’t flowing his way. He had no money in the bank, he was in debt, someone stole his car, and then his dad died.

Life had hit him with a sledge hammer.

He thought about throwing in the towel.

And he said he was joking to his friend one day that it felt like the difficulty level on his life had jumped up to HARD while he wasn’t looking.

I got what he was talking about, but I wonder if everyone does. He says he played a lot of computer games in his teenage years – kind of when they were first coming out. A lot of those games let you choose the difficulty setting.

Easy meant there weren’t many enemies about, and they were terrible shots. It was a walk in the park.

Difficult was when you got swarmed by bad guys and they were all crack shots.

Normal was kind of how the game makers intended it to be played.

He said that back when he was a teenager, and back when games were super expensive, he couldn’t buy a new game every time he’d finish one.

So he’d go through and ‘clock’ the game on the normal setting. After that, he’d go back and set the difficulty to HARD and clock it again.

So that’s what he meant. It felt like his life had been set to HARD and everything was getting the better of him.

“You should set your life to EASY,” his mate joked.

And so as a joke he went back and stuck a sign, scrawled on some paper, to his desk: Difficulty Setting: EASY.

He meant it as a joke but something happened.

Because he had that experience with computer games – when the EASY setting was often so easy it was comical – enemy robots would practically blow themselves up – his sign evoked a really strong feeling.

And that feeling was that things were easy. All challenges were a matter of course. It was all about fun. You had unlimited ammo and infinite lives. There was no doubt that you might lose.

And so every time he looked at that sign, it brought back that feeling. It’s fun. It’s easy. All the odds are stacked in my favour.

I’m sure people stick motivational posters to their walls – pictures of dolphins with “The cosmos wants you to succeed you gorgeous snowflake” written on it.

But for him. This is what worked. This is what spoke to him.

And after a while, it started to work. After a while, life did feel easy. His challenges weren’t as hard to get through. He received help from unlikely places. His enemies blew themselves up.

And after a few years, he’d become so impressed with it, that he got his friend to make him up the sign that is still on his desk.

He confided to me that it really felt like he had “hacked” the universe. That something happened when he wrote out that sign that sent a very clear signal to the universe – “I’d like life to be a bit easier please.”

And the universe was only too happy to agree.

(Note two of the keys to manifestation here: write it down, and focus on the feeling first.)

And he reckons that since then, life has just been one success after another.

Nice. I’ll have one of your top shelf whiskeys then, thanks.

I asked him if he ever thought about setting the difficulty to hard.

And he said, “You know what. Sometimes I do. It’s like the computer games. There’s the thrill of the challenge. It’s exciting to overcome incredible odds.

And I used to worry that I was making myself soft – by choosing the EASY setting I was missing opportunities for growth.

But I’ve decided that I’m happy with the difficulty setting on EASY. I’m just going to focus on progressing through more levels.

I mean, even on the easiest difficulty setting, the journey to Prime Minister of Australia would be incredibly difficult and challenging.

So I’m just going to let everything come easy. I’m just going to go deeper and further than I ever thought I could. That’s my plan.

And at the end of the day, it might just all be in my head, but I just enjoy life more this way.

I’m playing for fun.”

This was too good. I said he had to let me write about it.

Ok. Just don’t use my name.

No worries Garry.

Now, I’m not sure if he really did hack the universe, but I am sure that if you approach life like a walk in the park with unlimited ammo, you are putting yourself in a very powerful state of mind.

And that state of mind will get results.

Where’s your difficulty setting at?