You Only Achieve What You Aim At

Our ability to see determines a lot about our quality of life. Imagine losing your vision. What would your life be like? How would you navigate the world? You’d have to learn to use your other senses to guide you.

Helen Keller (1880 - 1968) was blind and deaf from the age of 19 months old. She couldn’t remember what it was like to use her eyes and ears. Even though she was considered disabled and many doubted that she could accomplish much in her life, she didn’t let any of that hold her back.

Helen’s sense of touch and smell guided much of how she interpreted her world. She had to learn how to communicate with others by the use of finger signals that spelled out words in her palm. Braille was taught to her so that she could read books. Helen even learned how to verbally form words through lip reading, by placing her fingers on a speaker’s lips and throat while having the words spelled out for her in her palm.

Through her efforts, she developed skills never approached by people with similar disabilities. Helen even wrote about her experiences with blindness. She published her life story in various books and magazines, which gave her opportunities to lecture in front of audiences who wanted to know how she could develop such skills. Later, Helen co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped improve the treatment of people with disabilities and still exists today as an organization committed to fight for the underprivileged.

Though Helen was afflicted with blindness and deafness at a young age, she didn’t let it hold her back. Through her persistence, she maintained a vision of what she could accomplish. Though she couldn’t see or hear, Helen created a meaningful life for herself and blessed the lives of others.

My questions to you are, what kind of life can you create? What are you aiming at? Where will your vision lead you?

“What you aim at determines what you see. That’s worth repeating. What you aim at determines what you see.” — Jordan Peterson

Determine Your Aim. Pursue It With Confidence.

Aim is difficult. If you’ve ever attempted to shoot a target, still or moving, you know what I’m talking about. Whether your weapon of choice is a bow or a gun, it’s difficult to hit the bullseye first try. It takes practice. You have to learn to steady your weapon, line up your target, and go for it with confidence. If you jerk the trigger or bungle the release of the bowstring, you’ll miss every time. You have to build confidence through trial and error. Readjusting your sights, your posture, how you handle the weapon. You can have the best equipment in the world, but if you can’t use it properly, what’s the point?

It takes hard work, daily practice, and attention to detail to hit your target consistently. You’re going to miss the mark more often than you hit it at first, but overtime you’ll notice that hitting your target becomes easier. You become more accurate. Your confidence grows and you find the process more and more enjoyable with each attempt.

The same concepts apply to what you aim at in life. You can’t properly align your aim at anything if you are completely undisciplined or uneducated. You might have lofty goals and grand achievements on your horizon, but what are you doing every day to hit your target?

It’s possible that you don’t know what you should aim at. If you pay attention. Allow stillness. The things that you need to fix will manifest themselves. Start there. As you fix the broken things in your life, you’ll be able to aim at the highest possible good and pursue it with much more confidence.

Your new aim will allow you to see past your limitations. You’ll overcome your natural tendencies that have held you back. You’ll see that a better today leads to a better tomorrow, a better next week, a better next year, a better decade, a better life, and a better legacy.

Your aim for a better life compounds and will extend to family, friends, strangers — and maybe even your enemies. Your pursuit of a better life elevates the lives of everyone you interact with.

Even the smallest steps towards your new aim will let in enough light to guide you towards greater change. The aim will become easier to pursue and you’ll miss the mark less often because you’ll see what you’re aiming at with greater clarity.

This new aim will allow you to take better risks. You’ll take life more seriously, taking careful steps forward while having faith that you’re on the right track. You’ll see yourself as a person of greater value, not just to yourself, but to others. You won’t want to lose the progress you are making, so you’ll work harder, smarter, and with greater care for the life you have created.

A life filled with mists of darkness has become a life full of light and clarity. You are no longer blind to what you can become because your eyes are open and you can see. You see opportunities that you never knew existed. You see relationships in a whole new light. You see that what once seemed like an impossible mountain to climb has now been conquered? You can now see. Your aim is true and your hand is steady. With confidence, you can pursue the life you have always wanted.

Weekly Challenge: Determine your aim. Answer these questions (write other questions that come to mind):

• How do I want my life to look?
• What is one meaningful thing I want to do every day?
• What is one thing I’m willing to sacrifice today to pursue the life I want?
• What should I be doing to train and educate myself to follow this pursuit?
• Review the answers to these questions everyday this week. Add or take away from them as needed.

Recommended Reading:

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos by Jordan Peterson — “We cannot navigate, without something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate.”

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