When Jesus doesn't come to the board meetings even when you save Him a donut

Goals vs. systems vs. scrupulosity

The other morning, Substack decided that I needed to see this post by Marcellino D’Ambrosio. It’s called, “Goals aren’t for everyone.” It’s a good piece, mainly because it affirms something I believe.

He quotes Scott Adams, (the “Dilbert” creator):

“Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do.”

That hits, as the kids say.

I’d been thinking about goals quite a bit in the lead-up to New Year’s Day, or rather, for decades. I’m sure there are real people who successfully cast big visions, assign timelines to the chunks necessary to accomplish their objectives, and then break everything down into chunks they can delegate to “chunk-specialists” or whatever, but I am demonstrably not one of them.

And somewhere between goal-oriented people and systems people are God-people. Or, perhaps, a lot of hyper-scrupulous rules-followers who need to check every initiative with God before they do anything. I would fall into that camp.

I’m certainly not alone there. The same day I saw Mr. D’Ambrosio’s article, I saw the following on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter:

It’s a bit scrupulous, as Catholic me might have said, but a valid question for those who put God’s will first, or at least aspire to do.

I responded:

I don’t think so, but it can definitely get in the way of acceptance of God’s will. It’s a delicate balance—obviously we need to make prudent decisions about things, but it’s very easy to let OUR will take the lead.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure it out and I’m just beginning to “get” it, and my conclusion is to have a general plan for the future, pray, and focus on this very moment.

When I took my first few gulps of entrepreneurship, I got the same buzz every new HustleBro gets. Similar to actual inebriation, it gives one a feeling of power. Not quite invulnerability—in fact, it enhances one’s awareness of risk, but it also suppresses one’s awareness of consequences. “Let’s jump off the cliff and build the glider on the way down! Leeeeeeroy Jenkins!”

When you get those first few dollars in your pocket from effort that exists outside of the normal, expected, and encouraged life activities like getting a college degree and a “good-paying job,” you feel like you’ve ascended.

You’re out of the Matrix, and you’ll do anything to avoid going back.

And what do you have to do to stay out of the Matrix? Build. Scale. Hustle. You have to cast your vision into the future and make decisions based on the information you have on-hand. It is incredibly easy to become solely reliant on yourself.

This is what relying on yourself looks like.

You can see how this might cause some problems with your Christian desire to put God’s will first.

In the tough moments, when the day’s challenges expand into crises and everyone is looking at you to make a decision, to save the day, or at least comfort them, it gets reeeeeally lonely. You might cry out to God for help, but all you hear is silence.

Faced with the realization that this call comes down to you, you make that call, cross your fingers, and deal with the consequences. Multiply that by a thousand more crises, and you begin to resent the very idea of relying on God for anything. “Sure,” you might say, “I believe in God, but he never comes to the board meetings.”

My brother said that once. “I even saved him a donut!”

I have actively tried to remove God from the equation in my professional and creative work. After all—most of the guys I follow who are killing it professionally don’t talk about God much. They seem unencumbered by the concerns of the divine, and it seems to work very well for them. We Christian weenies, it seems, have to weigh every practical decision against some esoteric ethical concern. It really gums up the gears.

Obviously, boxing up God and faith into a “vertical” in your life doesn’t work. If you’re a believer, God can’t be a category in your life—he has to be the foundation. He has to be the air you breathe. But you also can’t wait for corporate Jesus to come into your life with a divine PowerPoint presentation.

What finally “worked” for me, in the “faith/life balance,” was abandoning the attempt to control everything. There was no big, dramatic moment where I knelt down in a big field at sunset and gave myself over to Christ. “Do with me what you will, Lord!” No, it was more like a series of events that left me gasping on the floor of my monastic cell, head bleeding from where I’d been bashing it into all the walls I’d been trying to break through…

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll try it your way.”

That conversation may have happened multiple times, and will, I can almost guarantee, happen many more times. One still has to make decisions, after all. And that old need for control takes over again. And again. And again.

So, I ora et labora. Pray and work. For me, it feels radical. Irresponsible. Radically irresponsible. It’s not that I don’t have goals—I most certainly do. The biggest of all is to get back to a place where I can actually have my children at least half the time. That will require money, which requires substantially better income generation than I have right now. But that goal, and the others (which might be better considered “wishes” at this point) I leave to God. I know what I want, and He knows what I want, and I believe all that stuff about Him wanting to give us the desires of our hearts, but I also know that my ideas about getting there may not be the best way of getting there.

Ora et labora.

This year I didn’t bother with a big whiteboard project management session. I guess I’ve been radicalized. It’s a real danger when you live at a monastery. “Normal” is substantially different than out in the world. I mean, it’s possible to see undeniable miracles or even diabolical manifestations between lunch and dinner. Kind of puts the S.W.O.T. analyses or Scrum sprints in perspective.

If I crater, I crater. I’ll get up and keep going. Instead of asking, “Why did this happen to me?” I’ll ask, “What is this teaching me?”

This year I’m maintaining a simple baseline: Creative work in the morning, day job in the afternoon, bookend every day with a few simple prayers, and leave the goals to God.

Simple. Radical.

Reminds me of something I came across in the readings recently:

“The true man is he who can control his will, and bring his desires into subjection to the will of God.”

—Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov

Speaking of those simple prayers, I made a short recording of my “prayer rule.” It’s a wimpy prayer rule, although it’s supplemented with an unusual amount of vespers and Divine Liturgy attendance (of course—this is monastery life, after all). Have a watch.

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