Don’t you love it when that charismatic self-help guru inside you asserts himself again?

“Good is the enemy of the best,” he says, and under his humourless and watchful eye we dutifully set yet another goal before, alas, yet again failing to meet it. Now our inner critic sheds all charisma and his voice takes on a sinister feel. Only the best will do, comes his mercurial warning. Shape up and be outstanding.

I have a bombshell confession for inner critic guru and all who might listen: I am addicted to online Scrabble. It’s an unusual addiction, almost respectable as addictions go, and some might even think it oddly charming for a white cis dude to develop endorphin rushes over playing multiple bingos in a Scrabble game. At least it gives off less of a toxic masculinity vibe than sitting around playing Manhunt or posting polarising Twitter messages. But baptize an addiction all you want, it still keeps you from showing up for your life.

Then last week I decide my 4 daughters are more important than Scrabble. They are more ruinously beautiful and inexplicably original than Scrabble. I declare a 7-day fast from Scrabble so that I can play rounders with them more often. Inner critic guy is placated at first, but when I re-download the app prematurely on Day 5, he calls down judgment: it’s Father’s Day, but you are a deadbeat dad. He alerts me to the strong possibility of my languishing forever in a bog of mediocrity.

Speaking of mediocrity, my wife sent me a quote the other day by Joseph Heller: “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.” In other words, everyone is pretty mediocre if you think about it. The quote could have been my wife’s way of saying she sees me sinking into mediocrity, though I choose to think it was just her way of initiating a friendly tête-à-tête to break up a (mediocre) Tuesday.

Actually the larger post was making the point that mediocrity can be the antidote to a messiah complex. Another quote in the post was from Fredrich Buechner in which he said, purportedly, that the one true messiah was the only person who never suffered from a messiah complex. The gist of the post was that while a few people living in their grandmother’s basement don’t view themselves seriously enough, most of us tend to view ourselves too seriously.

Take that, I said to inner critic twerp and opening a bag of Doritos, I logged onto Scrabble.

Funnily enough, I have always been quick to set goals, though of course sticking to them is another story. What I’m finding is that we can actually be too proactive. Far too often my tendency has been to set frequent and expansive (but often very half-baked) goals and then do a rush job in carrying them out. Plan your work and work your plan, my father always said, which was rich coming from him because when folks in our community thought of somebody who does things in slapdash, seat-of-your-pants manner, they thought of our family first. I’m told that people in the small town in southern Ohio where the Yutzys come from still repeat this adage: “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Yutzy way.” But at least we usually get our apples schnitzed.

My insight is not more or less profound than this: set goals but don’t fixate on the outcome. Be more concerned with the process than the product. We may as well, because often as not personal growth comes unbidden, an unexplained favourable gale on the intimidating and capricious sea that is our life.

We are, of course, speaking of the lifegiving kind of personal growth here, not the kind that turns us into anal-retentive, Seven-Habits-of-Highly-Effective-People people. Sometimes I think we are obsessed with effectiveness. What are we trying to do, please some Type A Frankensteinian CEO-deity we have created? Honestly, I get the feeling the zealot God is tired and just wants to take a nap now. Let’s give that god a rest and get comfortable again with the God for whom a thousand years is as one day.

Let’s get comfortable setting goals, but just as importantly, let’s get comfortable with how it feels when things don’t go as we idealised.