The Work of a Lifetime

Most people set goals that are too ambitious to achieve in one year and are ridiculously easy to achieve over the course of a lifetime.

This was an assertion I heard recently on a podcast and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I think that one of my problems is that I have too many goals that I’m running all at once and that the goals conflict with each other, and that I’m not conscious enough about choosing the one most important ring—I mean goal—that I want to rule them all. But that is perhaps just another version of the statement above, that I am not accepting that many of my goals are going to take a really, really long time to achieve, but that none of them are impossible.

I like small goals. I like the immediate feedback of achieving small goals. Maybe everyone is like this? So maybe we all do the same thing, running too many small goals and ignoring the larger goals that we could be achieving because we are focused on the trees rather than the forest.

Sometimes, what happens is that we achieve big stuff anyway, but not in the same conscious way that we might have done otherwise. Like, we all will move forward in our jobs because that is the nature of jobs. You do work, you get paid, and often you get promoted simply because you do the small stuff day by day and that leads to the company seeing you as an asset. But because it’s not as conscious on your part, you often are letting other forces choose the larger goals that you have.

For me, I think I can see this happening when I started out as a young adult writer. I thought that what I wanted was to just move forward along the path of becoming a more successful young adult writer. I kept writing young adult books month after month, year after year because I focused on the small goal of writing x words each day and then finishing books each year. What was nearly impossible was for me to see the larger goals of becoming a writer who could write different kinds of books in different genres and for different audiences. This happened, but it wasn’t a conscious path. It was just a default as I fell out of interest in writing for young adults.

I’ve written over twenty published novels at this point. I’m proud of them, but I don’t think anyone would look at them and see a conscious purpose working behind them. Not necessarily a bad thing, but if when I started out, I had understood that I was going to write that many books and that I could write them about anything I wanted, I think I could have had more clarity.

Even now, I look at my life and think that I might have another forty or more years left to live. How many books could I write in that time frame? How many different writing careers could I go through? How many different new lives may I live in that time as the current life I am living becomes unpleasant or impossible for one reason or another?

When I started running Ironmans, I could only barely conceive of the idea of finishing my first race. I couldn’t have grasped the idea of spending the next twenty or thirty years doing races like that and accumulating the sheer number of medals that are currently on my walls. But again, this may be an accidental problem. It wasn’t what I set out to do and I don’t know that it was a good idea to do it. If I were to design a racing program for an aging athlete, Ironmans would not be part of it, and certainly not the number of them that I’ve done. It’s part of the problem that I enjoyed one and then decided to just keep trying that same thing again. But this is not the path to the greatest growth as a human.

Anyway, thoughts on goals as we are moving past the rush of the first of the year. I can never stop making goals in the back of my mind, but I am trying to do a better job of seeing the really long picture of time as it stretches out and considering what it is I want to do with the remaining years that I have, which are limited, but not short and will probably be productive in ways I don’t yet understand but might be more open to.