The point of cornhole is to get a little sack of corn into a hole.
Helpfully, in this case, the telos is right there in the name. Cornhole. Look at the little blue or red sack in your hand. Then look at the hole. And then orient your behavior toward getting that bag in the little hole.
This is so obvious that it sounds like the setup of a joke, but you’d be surprised what happens in your mind as you’re playing cornhole, if you’re really paying attention. You might be adding up the score in your head and guessing at the likelihood of victory, or thinking about how the other guy throws the bag, or who’s watching you and what they think about how you’re playing. You could also be thinking about getting something to eat, or the temperature in the room. Or maybe how your arm is moving, whether to grab the bag vertically or horizontally, how much you should bend your knees when you toss, where you should keep your eye, and so on. You might even tell yourself that you’re overthinking it. You’re being too neurotic. It’s just a game! You should take it easy and not get so competitive. Then, you surprise yourself when you overshoot the entire board by six feet and hit the ankle bone of a waitress carrying a tray of full beers and you turn beet red. You bark an odd laugh at yourself and say “oops” loud enough that everyone hears your remorse. You’re even less likely, on the next toss, to get it in the hole.
If you can observe all these goings-on in your head and also somehow be honest with yourself about them, you might say: well, hey, I’d like to win this game. It’s a tournament, after all. There’s prize money to be won. You remind yourself: the point of cornhole is to get the bag in the hole. You fix your eyes on that hole.
You realize only then, perhaps, that your eyes tend to wander off the hole itself, onto the platform (the wood surface that surrounds the hole) because you have an unexamined self-defeating belief that says: I’m not likely to get it in the hole, but as long as I make it on the platform here and there, I won’t be too embarrassed. If you were to interrogate that motivation, you’ll realize your actual aim subtly shifted from getting the bag of corn in the hole, to not losing too badly. The subtle placement of your eyes reveals that you’re actually aiming to lose by a respectable amount, which is not the point of cornhole.
That’s helpful to know. Because what’s motivating that sub-pattern of attention is the superior intention that you’d actually like to win this game. Wouldn’t that be fun? By fighting that temptation and instead putting your eye fixedly on the hole, not the wood around the hole, you’re telling yourself: I know I’m actually a little afraid to find out what I’m really capable of. Since I’m here, though, and I’ve got nothing better to do, why don’t I just aim at the hole? In other words, aim to win, and just see what happens. You were already aiming to lose on some level, after all. So, losing while trying your best obviously wouldn’t be the end of the world.
On the next turn, you resist the urge for your eyes to flick away from that hole, and instead fix them where they ought to be. Then, you give it your toss. You only then realize that in the middle of your throw, your gaze (and therefore your aim) glosses over the hole. You were looking at it, but you weren’t paying attention. Instead, you’re paying attention to your form: do I look like the kind of person who makes it into the hole? The arm movement, the grip, the bend of the knees. You miss badly again.
On your next turn, you decide: I am going to, no matter what, keep my attention on that damn hole. So, without moving your eyes, you toss the bag for the first time with the right intention. Your body’s not used to this, and it goes a little haywire trying to perform the right movements without your direct attention on it. You miss again. But you resolve that your body’s going to have to figure out for itself what it needs to do to get the thing in the hole. Over the next couple of turns you get closer and closer, and then finally you start tossing them, as if by magic, right into that hole. You still miss occasionally, but your percentage goes way up. Despite being completely obliterated the first game, you’re winning 19 to 4. Now people are watching you.
Your teammate, however, begins to choke. His attention (you guess) becomes focused on not losing the lead instead of where it should be: getting the bag in the hole. You’ll still probably win, you tell yourself, even though the other team is gaining on you quickly. All you have to do is remain calm and focused. But you can’t. You have an overwhelming urge to go to your teammate and tell him what you’ve realized (just focus on the hole), but you can’t because he’s way across the room. Your own focus slips toward your fumbling teammate. The other team dominates for ten consecutive rounds. They beat you. The tournament is two-round elimination, so you’re out.
I’m talking in the second person, but obviously this exact scenario happened to me the other night. I had fun, anyway. Surprisingly, when you lose while trying your best to have the right aim, it’s much easier to be a good sport. So I shook hands with my opponents and then I ate someone’s leftover fries.
I’ve been thinking about what I learned from that game. It snapped something into focus for me that’s been brewing for a long time. As I’ve gotten into real adulthood, past my physical prime, I’ve become a much better athlete overall. Before, I was one of those awkward, heady kids. What I didn’t realize at the time was that, yes, I was certainly thinking about things more than my average classmate. But to the extent that all that thinking was making me less able to coordinate my body toward an aim, those thoughts were the wrong thoughts. They were poor aims: fixations, often guided by the desire not to lose too badly, not to be in last place, or to not be seen a certain way, instead of aiming directly for the goal I wanted, which was to do well at the task laid before me, whatever that happened to be.
It makes sense, too, that there’s a stereotype that athletes are dumb and smart people are awkward and nerdy. This is probably mostly wishful thinking on the nerds’ part. However, the partial truth hidden in that stereotype is that if you have an excess of brainpower, you’re much more likely to get attached to bad aims that get in your own way. The cause and effect could also be reversed: if you’re a late bloomer, or have less than ideal athletic form, you could get attached to the wrong ideas purely out of resentment. Whatever the case, that roughly happened to me.
If you haven’t already seen where I’m going, this does not only have to do with sports. The idea that behaviors and subsets of behaviors have a telos, and that you should train your attention to focus on that telos, is obviously not a new idea. It’s Aristotelian. It’s also helpful that the ancient Greeks believed a powerful athletic body was not separable from a sharp and facile mind, that even your looks revealed the clarity of your habitual aims. Not perfectly, obviously. Sometimes ugly people are quite brilliant and strong (and even oddly beautiful), often precisely because they’ve had to work so hard to overcome their limitations. There are lots of counterintuitive examples, which still doesn’t disprove the rule.
It also helps me make sense of that new-agey manifestation stuff, and also why it ultimately fails on its own terms. In the simplest possible terms: if you train yourself to focus on visualizing the outcome you want (like putting the bag of corn through the cornhole or, I don’t know, a million dollars) this thing happens where, at the very least, your entire physical form and biology works with you, toward that aim, without you having to consciously guide any particular part. You no longer have to think about your fingers, or your knees, or the guy next to you, or the score. All the right neurons naturally begin to fire, the ATP is released in your muscles, your posture gets right. The extent to which everything around you also bends toward that aim is, if not deep and cosmic and magical, can at least very much seem that way because of innumerable knock-on effects. A few of which may be: people, being social animals, are very perceptive. If they perceive your intense focus on an aim by cues of body language, they may react to that as if they’re an extension of your own body, helping you achieve it. If awkwardly at first, over time with more and more unification. By focusing solely on your aim, too, you become hypersensitive to minute environmental changes, barometric pressure, wind, momentum, and new opportunities. You can react to them better in real time, because you’re not too distracted by mechanics.
Maybe it would seem to others like extraordinary luck that a gust of wind pushes your bag just where it needs to be, or that you meet the exact right person you need to get your book published. Maybe it was. Or maybe you were able to perceive some subtle shift and factored that in. This is not me trying to account for everything, but just to say that the extent to which our aims inform how the outside world engages with us, and in turn how we respond, is certainly not none, and probably a lot more than we know or could know.
The problem with manifestation is the part that goes unexamined. You never ask yourself: why is this aim important to me? If my aim is to manifest a cornhole win at any cost, for example, I could ruin a lot of other things. I could be a bad sport, ruin the friendship with my teammate, and so on. How do I know when to change my aim to let someone else win? When our aim goes bad, and we don’t know what to aim at anymore, the only thing to do is to adopt the aim to receive the right aim. You need the humility to be receptive to and adopt the right aim, given any circumstance. When you embody this meta-aim to have the right aims, you will naturally get on your knees.
This brings us to another type of overthinker: the optimizers. In reaction to the fear of not knowing the right aim or not being able to focus on it, they focus on the causal markers of those with good aims. They focus on things like testosterone, or muscle fibers, or throw mechanics. If you spend your life optimizing for measures like this, you may get your performance to well above average, but you can’t transfer that expertise to other domains. You will lack the metacognitive ability to assess a situation with gentle and open awareness, decide what the right aim is, and focus on it with the humility to realize that as you make your first attempts, your performance will vary quite wildly.
The best meta-aim, as many people have already identified, is something like the permanent humility of the beginner. This is partly why children can learn languages so quickly. They don’t have a developed enough intellect to be fearful or ashamed of their wide variance in utterances as they babble toward the telos of communication with their parents. But it still allows them to experiment broadly and therefore quickly unify their embodied actions toward their aim. Being generally good at any task you embark on requires more of this childlike openness and playfulness, mixed with focus on the desired outcome.
The task we are set with is to achieve the aims that actually occupy our hearts alone. Not the resentful knock-on aims that result from the undisclosed positive aim; itself undisclosed precisely because we’re afraid of admitting our desire to achieve it and to fail.
An even subtler danger, too, is that we can spend all this time talking about how to focus on the right aim instead of ourselves focusing on the right aim. This is an intractably personal problem. Kierkegaard said that we are constantly in denial of the freedom to be ourselves. That freedom is always singular and unique in our particular circumstances, and therefore in our aims. We would rather make ourselves into specimens, dead categories of a larger pattern, so as to deny the truth: I would actually like to win at cornhole.
If I don’t win, I’ll at least lose with clear eyes and a full heart.
