A couple of years ago, as a member of Austin Kleon's ephemeral Read Like an Artist book club, I read Tamara Shopsin's book Arbitrary Stupid Goal.
Arbitrary Stupid Goal included some stories of Shopsin's experience growing up inside the Shopsin family and working at the world-famous Shopsin's Family Market in Greenwich. The idea captured in the title, and that drove her father to create an iconic space in the world' most interesting city, is that a person should regularly set an arbitrary stupid goal.
In short, your life can be enhanced by the pursuit of a goal which has no purpose except having done it.
For me, this year, my goal is to visit and do an activity in all 80 (or more) Cincinnati City Parks.
My 2025 arbitrary stupid goal presented itself at an unexpected time, as arbitrary stupid goals do. In my job training 911 calltakers, one of our modules is teaching geography to our new calltakers. And Dana, the person in charge of teaching the calltakers, handed out a list of Cincinnati City Parks, so we could be familiar with their names and locations.
I realized right away that a list of 80 parks presented a perfect arbitrary stupid goal because it was indeed, arbitrary and stupid, while also moderately challenging while still being do-able.
- Arbitrary - the way the goal presented itself, in immediate response to being handed a sheet of paper with the list on it, epitomizes arbitrariness.
- Stupid - there's no realy reason to do this. Nothing is gained from it. I will have to go out of my way or make specific designated trips to accomplish the goal. I could easily go to the SAME park 80 times and have just as good a time … but will I have accomplished a goal? No.
- Challenging - 80 works out to slightly less than 2 a week. When you subtract for weather, work, and other travel, I'm going to have to cram in a lot of park time. But, it's
- Do-able. Yeah, I can do that. And to add to the level of difficulty, I added that I would do an activity in each park.
So when we had some nice weather the weekend after receiving the list, my wife eagerly joined the challenge. We set out to visit 4 local parks, each on our side of town, and 3 of them on the same street. We walked, tossed a frisbee, and took pictures.
One bonus was that this particular arbitrary stupid goal allowed me to accomplish a larger work of visiting my home town as if I was a tourist, a move I think will help me see my city differently.
And we even discovered a 5th Cincinnati Park - or should I say an 81st Cincinnati Park - that wasn't on the list! Unlisted McQueety Park.
This newfound park is simply a row of trees in the middle of a road, so our activity there was “photography.”
A couple of friends have noted that this is a good goal, and have adopted the challenge as their own.
I welcome everyone to adopt their own arbitrary stupid goal!