Cohen and goal setting

I love artist stories. Legends about the trials people went through to bring their art into the world. One of my favorite is Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah. To clarify, what I don’t want to hear is more college acapella groups cover it. Snobbery aside, we all know the song is beautiful but to me the back story makes it even more so.

Cohen was one of the best poets in Canada, for whatever thats worth. He knew he wanted more success and so he started writing songs… to make money..lol. I wouldn’t have believed this I didn’t read his biogrophy. He knew he had a talent, and he knew his talent had reached its zenith in the confines of poetry so he expanded.

Even early on his songs were artistically successful, people took him serious, he had a record deal etc.. but like many careers do, his faltered. Cohen recounts how a guy at his label said to him “Leonard, we know you’re great, we just don’t know if you’re any good”.

As he gathered songs for what would be his album, Various Positions, Cohen had this song Hallelujah. To Cohen, the hallelujah is when you have cried and wept and worked and come to an end of yourself and you are alone in front of the mystery and all you can do is accept it.

Like all big ideas, this one was difficult to capture. There is a famous story of how incredible his re-writing process was. He would fill an entire composition notebook by hand with versions of the song. He wrote over 100 verses.

At the end of this Herculean effort, his label told him not only was it not good enough to be the single, that it shouldn’t be on the album.

Obviously, time and culture sided with Cohen and the song became what some consider the greatest of all time.

That mental image of him filling a notebook has been staying with me lately. I’ve filled countless notebooks, but I’m not sure if I have ever taken one idea, and polished it with that kind of brutal self effacing effort.

I just turned 38, and the year is ending, and times like this make me thoughtful.

Younger Joseph would rush to form outlandish goals, and knowing my need to prove myself, would get pretty goddamn close to many of them.

Older me has a slightly more nuanced approach.

Today I’m thinking about when is anything ever enough?

If I make the goal to be good at judo, how could I ever know? Good at what? The entire sport? Best in the world? better than I was yesterday? Setting goals are hard for one lightning rod point:

people don’t think hard enough about how deep they want to go.

My current belief is there is a spectrum of goals based on how much you care.

there is the hate fuck on one end, and the eternal on the other.

What do I mean by hate fucking a goal? One of the first reactions to the pain of realizing you are incompetent is to try and become super-competent. For me in my twenties, realizing I sucked at Danish, I told myself I was going to become impressively good at Danish. And I did. Then I found myself in this fancy course learning Danish for college study writing essays about climate change in Danish and feeling fucking miserable because I went too deep. That was more of a hate fuck goal.

On the other end is pursuits that I call the eternal. Things that are a lifelong study. For me, that manifests in creating things with words in any format, martial arts, performance, businesses, etc.. lots of stuff.

This is the kind of goal awareness that lets you have the fortitude to push through setbacks. Cohen could finish a masterpiece like that because no matter what anyone said, writing was who he was, it was his holy of holies, and it might not be ready today but the forget never cooled. You can’t stop a person like that.

Whoever you are, there is some kind of eternity that you are supposed to pursue, there is some kind of notebook that needs your hand and ink and words.

As I’m setting goals for myself, I’m trying to remember that not everything can be equally important. Thats the world view of the fool. The wise make heuristics of value and live that way.

I hope you hate fuck what you need to get done and find those obsessions that deserve your all.