Set Goals And Change Your Life
My 40th birthday was last week!
This was a big birthday for me. Not just because I entered a new decade of life, although that IS significant. But because it marked the due date for a handful of goals I set for myself over a year ago.
Right around March of 2023, I decided that my life felt a little “stuck in the mud”. I wasn’t where I wanted to be professionally. Father Style wasn’t taking off as quickly as I would have liked. I wasn’t reading as much as I had in the past. I didn’t feel particularly physically fit.
Many areas of my life just felt… flat.
I definitely didn’t feel like the rock’em-sock’em go-getter that we men like to think we are.
So, I decided to make a change. A number of changes, actually.
I decided that I wasn’t going to accomplish anything of note unless I wrote down my goals and kept track of them. So that’s what I did. In the back of one of my work notebooks, I wrote down about a half dozen goals for myself and committed to accomplishing them all by my 40th birthday.
I cast a wide net. My goals included achieving a higher role at my job, pushing Father Style to new heights, finishing War and Peace, and working up to being able to do 100 pushups in a clip.
I figured that, even if I didn’t accomplish ALL my goals, I would, at the very least, be much further along on my journey to accomplishing them. And that’s progress!
So, how did I do and what did I learn?
Honestly, I didn’t accomplish many of my goals. I didn’t get promoted at work. Father Style is steadily growing, but slowly. I wanted to get published, but that didn’t happen.
I DID, however, finish War and Peace and I DID get to the point where I could do 100 consecutive pushups!
So, how do I feel about the fact that I only accomplished maybe 30% of my goals?
Actually… pretty good! You want to know why?
Because I accomplished all the goals which I had 100% control over!
I had total control over reading all 1,215 pages of War and Peace. I had total control over putting in the time every day to banging out pushups until I was able to struggle through all 100 without stopping.
This concept was something that struck me about six months ago. When I first set my goals, I went after them with gusto! I read them over every day and felt excited about tackling them, little by little. After a while, though, the luster wore off a bit. I started to slack. It was ok, I reasoned, because I still had plenty of time.
My birthday was still half a year away and, until then, I wasn’t really confronted with the notion of how I would feel if I DIDN’T hit my goals. I suddenly started to panic! Holy moly, I thought. What if I get to 40 and look back on all this time and am disappointed with myself? Man, that would really suck.
It was then that I split my goals into two categories. The first category was for my goals that I have complete control over. For this category, there are NO excuses for me not to achieve them. If I fail with this category, I SHOULD feel like crap because it means I was just plain ‘ol lazy! And I can’t enter my fourth decade in that way.
So, I buckled down. I figured out how many pages I needed to read each day. I got back into doing my pushup workouts every day. These were the things that were all up to me. Just me. No one else. I didn’t need to rely on anyone else in order to hit these goals.
In one way, that made me feel optimistic! It’s all in my hands! In another way, it was a little scary! It’s all in MY hands! I have no one else to blame if I fail!
The second category was for my goals that, even though I was working diligently to accomplish them, needed some sort of outside input or influence. The goals that pertained to my job or this website, for instance, fell into this category. Sure, I am always working to advance in my career, but I still need buy-in from others (namely, my bosses) to make that a reality. Same thing with this website. I prioritize consistently posting quality content (mostly because I enjoy it so much), but it’s not entirely up to me whether this site lives or dies. I rely on you guys to spend your very valuable time engaging with the content I provide (for which I am incredibly thankful, I want to add).
With the goals in this second category, as long as I was making good, honest, measurable progress, then I would be happy come my 40th birthday. And that’s where I find myself. I feel like I am on the cusp of knocking down these remaining goals and that’s because I have been putting in the work for so long.
All in all, I feel like I am entering my 40s in a really good place.
How are YOU doing with your goals? You have goals, don’t you? If not, do what I did…
WRITE THEM DOWN. Be ambitious. Shoot for the moon. Write down a bunch of them, so all your eggs aren’t in one basket.
Look at that piece of paper every day. Do something each day that pushes you closer to achieving your goals. If you don’t have that daily reminder, you’ll forget. And then you won’t accomplish anything.
And make sure you share them with your kids! My boys were always asking why I was carting around this humongous book everywhere I went. I told them it was because I wanted to finish it before my birthday. I was honest with them about the fact that I set goals for myself and I was working hard to achieve them. They were even cheering me on when they knew I only had a few more pages to go!
On a side note… those last fifty pages of War and Peace? Oof! Tolstoy really makes you earn that one!
Also, your goals might change as you go! Or you might start to feel differently about them as time progresses. That’s ok too!
For my “100 pushups” goal, I started off with a bang and was doing crazy amounts of pushups every day. I would test myself on the same day every month to see how many I could do at once and that became my new benchmark. I made a great deal of progress… but then around last fall, I started to slip. It became a drag to do my workouts every day.
This happened to coincide with my new hobby of wood-chopping. I would get a fantastic workout from chopping wood and then I didn’t really feel like doing another workout later in the day. I was actually getting MORE fit from the wood-chopping than from the pushups, but I still wanted to tick off that I accomplished my “100 pushups” goal.
I ended up only hitting 100 pushups twice. Once back in March of this year and another time in April. My previous record was about 80 and when I hit that number again, I decided to really push myself. I was almost maniacal in that session! Getting to 80 was hard enough and there was NO WAY I was going to quit before hitting 100! I collapsed when I finally completed that last, shaky rep. A few weeks later, I repeated the torture just to convince myself it wasn’t a total fluke.
But once I hit my goal, I totally abandoned pushups for weeks! I was SO done with pushups at that point.
What my pushups taught me was that it’s ok for your goals to change. Or, not change, but shift a little. What I mean by that is, I was laser-focused on doing pushups… but what was I REALLY going for? I wanted to improve my fitness. I wanted to look better. I wanted to be healthier. I wanted my clothes to fit better. I wanted to reduce my stress and anxiety. I wanted more confidence.
Guess what? Chopping wood did all of those things a lot better than pushups did. I was achieving my goal of better fitness, but through a different avenue. I realized that doing my pushups workout didn’t make me feel as good as chopping wood did. Sure, I accomplished my goal of doing 100 pushups, but that was only because I was determined to hit that magical number. Once I did, I largely stopped doing pushups every day. But I still chop wood no matter what!
It’s ok to shift your focus a little bit if you find that something isn’t working for you. It’s ok to attack your goals from different angles. It’s ok to not continue to devote time and energy to something you don’t like anymore.
Even if you don’t accomplish everything you want in the time-frame you set for yourself, when you look back on where you started, you’ll be amazed at how far you’ve come.
My wife and I love to go hiking with our boys. Thankfully, they like it too. One of the things I love to do, when we are trudging up a particularly steep hill, is stop, turn around, look back down the mountain and point out to the boys how high we have climbed. It makes them realize that, while we aren’t at the top yet, we have made fantastic progress and they should feel good about it. This realization is usually enough to jazz them up into finishing the hike with enthusiasm.
Isn’t that a perfect analogy for viewing your own goals?
Just put in a little bit of time every day. It will build on itself slowly, but surely. It’s the compounding interest of goal-reaching.
So, even though I don’t yet have a corner office, I’m more than a year closer than where I was in March of 2023, when I set these goals. Likewise, Father Style’s monthly readership has increased many times over since that time. Would I like the site to be further along? Absolutely! But in looking back on the progress I’ve made in that time, I’m proud of how far it’s come!
In conclusion, I’m entering my 40s in about as good a position as I could have hoped for. And it’s all from scrawling some ambitious, half-baked goals in the back of a notebook some sixteen months ago.
My advice to you is to do the same. Don’t waste any more time not being the person you fantasize about being. Sure, it might seem far off, but I feel like I’m a completely different person than what I was back in March 2023. Yes, it took time. But if I started any later, I would be that much further away right now.
So, grab your notebook and start today!
