No Goals, No Paradise

In 2024 I bought a house. I only looked at three, because I already knew exactly what it had to be, not just the house: the block, the neighborhood, the whole area, the exact spot.

I had the reasoning for everything worked out: every corner, where each piece of furniture and object was going to go, I knew my daughters would run up and down those stairs, that I'd gather people I love around a grill, that the sun would come through the window. I even knew I'd spin around 360 degrees standing in the living room and smile. Today, when I spin those same 360 degrees, I still get emotional remembering I wrote that scene six months before it happened.

All of this was a massive exercise in something you could call manifestation. In the text I read every morning when I woke up and every night before falling asleep, for six months straight, all those specifications were there: my daughters laughing, a curtain moving next to my bed, sunlight coming in, the smell of coffee, even though I wasn't drinking coffee at the time.

Sounds like manifestation, yes. But that mental image was what built a goal so concrete that my energy told my focus to tell my hands to move in one single direction: that one, and no other.

I'll admit that during those months I lost track of a few things, other activities slid down to second priority. My head went full focus mode. At the time it felt one-track-minded, I had a hard time saying no more than once, and every so often my radar just switched off. Eventually I stopped suffering from FOMO and switched to JOMO.

In the process I needed to hold onto something more real than this idea of turning dreams into something solid. So I brought them down into something more mental and turned them into goals, ones I could actually shape into a method, because there's no paradise without goals, and because when we're talking about something this abstract, it's hard to know which direction to pull once you've rolled up your sleeves and put the gloves on.

It's not that you have the goal and walk straight toward it. It's that the road winds, and it's still worth holding onto.

What we might hear described as manifestation is nothing more than a state of extreme focus. The habit of doing something with so much conviction that it becomes consistency, that doing it over and over, adding a tiny daily dose of impact, gets you to a result no matter what.

I read a lot about this, because all of a sudden, this was the biggest achievement of my life and I wanted to know what I'd done, backed up by what other people had written.

Sofía Contreras says something related in Take Action: in a world with abundant options in every area of life, it's hard to choose the option that takes the most effort. It's the same paradox Barry Schwartz describes: the more options we have in front of us, the harder it gets to choose, let alone choose the hard one.

Atomic Habits talks about how the strongest motivation shows up once a habit settles in and becomes part of our identity. And the more you like that version of yourself, the more you'll keep feeding it. Same thing here: the more you move toward your goals, and especially the more you see yourself reaching them, the more you want to keep going.

The Secret leans hard into the law of attraction, and while I agree with the approach, I think that law can be brought down to something concrete: you want to make something real, imagining it makes you feel happy or satisfied, that pushes you to act, and that same focus keeps pushing you forward. The law of attraction can sound spiritual, mindfulness-adjacent, but it has a real engine behind it: doing concrete things starting from a goal that's conscious and sustained over time.

Now, all this moving-forward stuff sounds great, but it's a road full of thorns. The excitement about something, with everything and everyone, isn't permanent. It's easy to live when it's there. What's interesting is watching how we fight through its absence.

This is what a habit looks like when it starts strong and stalls halfway through.

Once the foam settles is where everything shows. Starting, and starting with energy, anyone can do that, it's a world saturated with color and flowers, optimism bias jogging out onto the pitch wearing the number 10. The real test is when hardship floods your life and at some point you question your whole existence, your head starts sabotaging you and asks for a cooling off break to scroll for a while instead of pushing on, tells you life is short and you're not built for this much suffering.

That's where the real work starts. That's the field where you find out who's actually got it: the ones who make it to the other side understood there's no lukewarm alternative, it's this or it's nothing. Everyone else takes the easier road and stays comfortable, though there's always going to be a small corner of their head that wonders what could have been and wasn't, for lack of drive, initiative, decision, follow-through, or whatever circumstance they choose to blame instead: negativity bias coming off the bench to warm up.

This moment has to be lived through and it has to be gotten past. You close your eyes and keep walking, one foot in front of the other. This is discipline. It's your own hardware fighting your soft skills. Robot mode for when you're about to give up.

The fight's not over while you're still standing. Just look at Argentina's comeback that ended 3-2 against Egypt at the 2026 World Cup. Statistics say that at minute 79, down 2-0, the odds of winning were 0.16%. Out of more than 10,000 teams that had been in that exact situation throughout history, only 16 managed to turn it around. Nothing like it had happened in 96 years of World Cups.

And that was one single, clear goal, carried into the body, with System 1, that automatic mode your head runs on when it doesn't need to think to act, working at full capacity: what you already know how to do, on autopilot, running from memory, head fully locked in. It's not magic, it's not spirituality, it's sustained attention.

J.