“There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.”
-Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
PARADIGM SHIFT
Overcoming the Habit of Drifting
Napoleon Hill (author of Think and Grow Rich), taught that definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. He believed it was the foundation stone upon which all other success follows.
Defining a major life goal which is both measurable and attainable, and keeping it before your attention on a daily basis, produces a transformative effect in both the short- and the long-term.
Former clinical psychologist and professor Dr. Jordan Peterson has observed that, “You experience positive emotion by noticing that you’re moving toward a goal.”
Interestingly, if movement toward a goal causes positive emotion, then that means it’s not just the attainment of the goal that produces the positive effect. It’s also the little steps that make up the journey.
In Napoleon Hill’s posthumously published work Outwitting the Devil, the greatest weapon against the success of humanity is described as the habit of drifting.
“A drifter is one who permits himself to be influenced and controlled by circumstances outside of his own mind…A drifter is one who accepts whatever life throws in his way without making a protest or putting up a fight. He doesn’t know what he wants from life and spends all of his time getting just that. A drifter has lots of opinions, but they are not his own.” (Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill)
So across his various works of authorship, Hill effectively pits the idea of definiteness of purpose against the habit of drifting.
It’s a bit like the way quantum particles work (I’m a big physics enthusiast!).
The electrons that encircle an atom’s nucleus are sort of in a state of being everywhere and nowhere at any given time (described as “superposition”), just a cloud of potential in one sense…that is, until we actually attempt to measure their location. Once we measure the electrons, each electron’s wave function collapses into a definite position. The electron doesn’t have a definite position until a measurement forces it into one.
That’s how I see definiteness of purpose and its relation to success. Without focus that collapses the wave of potential, the cloud of our potential will remain simply possibility.
But we want to turn potential into kinetic energy.
In principle it’s simple.
But I think possibly a major obstacle to goal attainment is that we often set them for such a long timeframe.
Having a 10-year goal doesn’t feel the same as having a 1-3 year goal.
As Dr. Peterson said, not only do we need to move toward a goal, but we also have to recognize that we’ve moved toward the goal in order to experience positive emotion.
Setting those measurable and attainable 1-3 year goals that are in line with your much longer term goal is one of the most powerful things I think you can do for your success.
Three years might seem like a long time, but it’s the positive emotion that the purpose offers day-to-day that keeps us pursuing that thing which we desire. And the micro decisions and habits that are the building blocks of our lives end up guiding us toward that ultimate attainment.