Definite Chief Aim

The phrase comes from the correspondence-course era of American self-help, where it was the first instruction in almost every programme: decide on one aim, state it in a sentence, write the sentence down, and read it back often enough that you stop having to ask what you are doing.

The claims made for it at the time were extravagant and should be left there. What is worth keeping is narrower and duller: a purpose stated in one sentence is a purpose you can act on, and a purpose you are still carrying around as a mood is not. The sentence is a decision made once so that it does not have to be re-made every morning under whatever pressure the morning brings.

It is not the same as a goal, and the difference is the useful part. A goal is a thing you either reach or do not. An aim is a direction that tells you what a day was for, which means it can be served on a day when nothing measurable happened. That is why it survives contact with an ordinary week and a quarterly target often does not.

The difference from ikigai is one of altitude. An ikigai is what makes your days worth getting up for; a chief aim is what you have decided to do about it for now. Omzoe keeps both: the Compass works out the first, and an Aim Spec is the second, written narrow enough that thirty-two days of practice can be built on it.