Focus past your goal

It's probably occurred to me at some point, but not recently - and not in this context.  Rather than focusing on my goal at the moment, I should be focusing past my goal, to the next thing on my mind.

This makes sense on a lot of levels.

1. I always do better at something tricky and/or requiring any amount of subtlety if I don't look right at it. If I'm distracted, disinterested, thinking of something completely different - any of those things, or all of them - I usually nail exactly what I'm looking past. The job I didn't really want. The opportunity I had already dismissed. The project I thought was never going to happen.  It's like The Secret, only the opposite. Or "only better"?????

2. It's always nice to have a dream in reserve. It's weird to say, but I've said it quite a bit to my family and friends: I've really done all of the things I've wanted to do in my lifetime. No I don't mean that all my useful days are over, but that each time I have a big dream, I seem to meet that dream and live it. And then on the other side of living it, I realize (with some sense of depression for a few months) that I haven't yet build a new dream to work for. What can make us happier than being on the cusp of all we wanted? Actually having all we wanted! And then how do we follow that act? By being the person who is looking back with excitement and awe, but not looking forward? I need a reserve dream, so when I overshoot my current dream, I have a soft landing.

3. I need to stop obsessing about some of my current situations. Since I am a born and bred obsessive thinker and worker, this means I need to substitute obsessing about one situation for obsessing about another. This would work well ONLY if I had more than one thing I was genuinely dreaming of.

4. I need a plan. Desperately.  I don't often think more than one step ahead, and I am lonely right now, and I need structure. I don't know that the dream-beyond-the-dream would help my loneliness, but it would definitely ease my need for structure.

For the next few days I'm going to think more about this. Focusing past my goal. The dream beyond my dream.

PS. Tomorrow is a big interview for me. For the "current dream".  In the car on the way there, I totally have to come up with the Next Big Thing so I can look beyond what I so desperately want. (this is where it starts to sound a bit made up.... )