Designed to help you find focus and tackle “the prob­lems we face as we try to live and cre­ate in a world of over­whelm­ing dis­trac­tions” is focus : a sim­plic­ity man­i­festo in the age of dis­trac­tion.

This is Leo Babauta’s lat­est book and he is pro­duc­ing it iter­a­tively online. One issue I have is that if there are two cur­rent trends that I’m unde­cided about and feel have been blow out of pro­por­tion it’s the min­i­mal­ist lifestyle and the notion that mod­ern life is distracting.

Regard­less, I enjoyed the fol­low­ing from the chap­ter let­ting go of goals, describ­ing why we should do exactly that:

They are arti­fi­cial — you aren’t work­ing because you love it, you’re work­ing because you’ve set goals.

They’re con­strain­ing — what if you want to work on some­thing not in line with your goals? Shouldn’t we have that freedom?

They put pres­sure on us to achieve, to get cer­tain things done. Pres­sure is stress­ful, and not always in a good way.

When we fail (and we always do), it’s discouraging.

But most of all, here’s the thing with goals: you’re never sat­is­fied. Goals are a way of say­ing, “When I’ve accom­plished this goal (or all these goals), I will be happy then. I’m not happy now, because I haven’t achieved my goals.” This is never said out loud, but it’s what goals really mean. The prob­lem is, when we achieve the goals, we don’t achieve hap­pi­ness. We set new goals, strive for some­thing new.