Start Where You Are

As long as you're seeking, you're not practicing. A Zen reflection on goal-setting.

As we march headfirst into the new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what goals to set for myself and what changes I want to make this year.

I’ve set countless goals for myself over the years — many of them sounded totally reasonable. A few may have been a bit ambitious.

Most of them failed.

Not because I didn’t want them badly enough or because I’m too lazy — but because I mistook wanting, imagining, planning, and advertising my plans as actual progress.

There’s a fancy psychology term that describes this exact problem — it’s called “mental contrasting.”

This is a Zen blog, so I’m not going to get into the weeds about it here, but you can learn more about this concept here or here if this interests you.

Put simply, the idea is that when we vividly imagine a desired future without seriously engaging with present reality, our brains register a small reward. We get a fresh dose of dopamine, and it genuinely feels like we’ve made progress — even though nothing has even happened yet.

That feeling of progress arrives before the actual work does. And once that feeling is satisfied, the work loses its importance.

There’s a talk from Alan Watts that addresses another, closely related problem with goal-setting. This one is inspired by the classic Zen suspicion of the striving mind.

Watts uses “the devil” as a metaphor for the part of our ego that sabotages our efforts towards change.

“If you’re going to outwit the devil, it’s terribly important that you don’t give him any advance notice. If you’re gonna leave town and you owe lots of money, you mustn’t announce that you’re leaving. You’ll have creditors at your front door by morning… So you’re always a moment too late if you decide first — you have to act and decide simultaneously. If you decide before you act… the devil will catch you.”

The point is that by declaring your future intentions, whether just to yourself or to others, you begin to build an identity around them. As a result, action gets delayed (or avoided altogether) because the idea of change matters more than the act itself.

Let’s take my New Year’s resolution last year as an example to cement this idea…

When I declared that “I’m going to spend no less than one hour per day practicing my bass guitar,” I had turned a simple action into a promise, an identity, and a standard I had to live up to.

I raised the stakes. Practicing bass suddenly became a test of discipline — evidence, even, of who I am.

Ironically, the ego avoids situations where it might fail to live up to itself. Fear of falling short became an obstacle to my practice.

So to summarize, there are two traps at work here:

1. When we imagine a future where the change we want has already been implemented, we undermine our motivation to stick with it.

2. When we declare our intentions in advance, we raise the stakes and attach the action to our identity. Practice becomes a test of who we are, making failure feel threatening — and giving the ego reason to delay, avoid, or retreat altogether.

So what are we to do?

Catching The Devil Off Guard

Like most Zen teachings, the solution is paradoxical — and stupidly simple. It’s not about being more organized, more structured, or more disciplined. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.

Instead of saying, “I’m going to do this every day,” you simply do it today. Don’t worry about tomorrow, or next week, or 6 months from now.

If you want to be a meditator, go meditate right now.
If you want to be someone who exercises, go exercise right now.
If you want to write a book, grab some paper or a keyboard and just write something — anything.

Each day, you arrive without any announcement. You begin exactly where you are. And each day, you leave the ego with nothing to negotiate against. No future to resist. No identity to protect. You’ve essentially caught the devil off guard.

This may sound obvious — even a bit too simplistic — but like much of Zen, that’s the whole point.

It undermines our habit of overcomplicating things and constantly living one step ahead of ourselves.

Resist the urge to imagine where you could be a year from now and just start where you are — right here, right now.

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