There was one day last week when I thought I had found peace of mind. I had just finished writing a piece on brand belief for a company, and as sometimes occurs, the muse had really hit, and my head and heart combined synchronistically to push the words through my fingers and onto the page. And while this was happening, the sun was shining, a light breeze splashed through the open windows, the love of my life was humming and five children were playing without a glimmer of competitive angst. It was a moment indeed.

But why only a moment? Why am I unable to hold on to that moment inside myself, even if something does change in the external environment around me? Do I not have the inner commitment or courage, the ability to focus and concentrate, in a way that would prolong the moment into something longer and more consequential?

Or does it really matter, because to think it could be more than what it is would really be an ideal—an illusion? I have always struggled with this. I am what the original movie Doctor Dolittle (with Rex Harrison as Dr. Dolittle—you must see it) called a pushmi-pullyu, a two-headed llama. I have both a creative and a business brain. Yet to the creative world, I am not purely creative—as in fine artist, tortured artist, world-changing artist—and to the business world, I am not so driven by the bottom line because I look at business as creativity as opposed to reduction of process and operational excellence. It has taken me more than 30 years to be at peace with the dichotomy of myself, and to be at home with the word “original.”

What has changed, however, is how I have come to see the setting of goals as something much more than some poor man’s MBA class, and something more akin to that which can move the organic unfolding of things toward a grounded solution of meaning. What I had, for such a long time, thought of as confining and limiting, I have come to see as freeing and real. Indeed, what this has allowed me to see more clearly is how I might move ideas to other people so they can weave them in with their own, catalyzing imagination and innovation. If the artist uses his art primarily to understand self, then I am discovering how to move my work into the world, which is what I really care about. So I have come to think of goals as good.

As a father, this has been an important discovery, not because I want my children to decide their careers before they go to high school (there's an old Jewish joke about a woman meeting a mother with two infants in the park; when she asks how old they are, the mother answers, “The doctor is 3 and the lawyer is 5”), but because I believe our children learn to be grounded to their own sense of self by seeing their parents grounded in the same way.

Having goals—inspired, creative, “world-changing,” if you want—linked to a process, and an ability to process what happens along the way, makes me more creative because I can be creative based in reality, not in the ideal. Moving myself from the ideal to the real is the biggest piece of growing and nomading I am doing, and it will take me the rest of my life to keep walking that way.

So there was this one moment last week that was unbelievable; but there is the everyday work that I am doing on myself that, although perhaps not as viscerally sublime, is actually more important. I, like so many others, may grab at moments to stand in awe of, when it is actually the whole passage of my life engaged in process that is the most beautiful thing of all I have.