processes not goals

My old therapist used to say: don't select goals, build processes. Rhymes with DBT's emphasis on mastery rather than success. The idea is, much of the time you don't really want an outcome so much as you want the process that can generate that outcome. This is because whatever you want is likely to be a stable preference, and to refer to a class of desirable outcomes. So achieving it once is likely to leave you feeling a little like you won a lottery, but creating a process that hits that outcome reliably leads to justifiable feelings of security and assurance. Even better if it's a practice, i.e. you're enacting the process, because you can bring all your power to it and expand the process into a skill that can cover an expanding range of desirable outcomes. Mastery!