When I started 2019, I wrote in my journal: “This year cannot be the same as the two that proceeded it”
When I got to the end of 2017, and end of 2018, I had a mild sense of dissatisfaction as I looked back on each year. Sure, I’d had a lot of good moments – holidays, family time, the hikes I did so many weekends, all the new friends I’d made. This was good, but it was not good enough. I’d made almost no discernible progress professionally or in my hobbies. There were items I had been procrastinating for ages.
In January 2019, with frustration as fuel, for the first time in a long time, my monthly expenditures exceeded my income as I went all out to achieve some long-asleep goals. I booked ski lessons, an improv course, my wisdom tooth removal surgery, flights for a few weekends away. I booked my practical driving test, got my California driving licence (only took me 2.5 years of living in California!). This month I made that booking for Patagonia’s W trek for this December (a trip I’d wanted to do since I heard about it in December 2016 and had been waiting for some magical moment for it to be magically booked without me booking it/for someone else’s schedule to be aligned with mine. Realization: I don’t need to wait for anyone, I can go by myself).
The change has been a mix of having goals, planning for them and having the motivation and the means.
Some variables that facilitate goals are out of your control. Your task is to make sure you capitalize on the environment when it is favorable, and not be too harsh on yourself when you simply can’t (e.g. don’t have the money). Other goals are well within your control but you procrastinate due to lack of courage.
At business school and at various training courses at work, I wrote a few letters to my future self with some goals and reminders as part of mandatory exercises. When they were mailed to me several months/a year later, I opened them and was disappointed at what I’d written. In the business world, there is such a practice as “sandbagging” targets – it’s when people set targets pretty low so that they are confident they can meet them and secure their bonus. I had sandbagged my life goals. Some of the letters practically read as “I hope you’re still alive, and working out like twice a week”. Ambitious.
Recently, a few months ago, something clicked in me. I was pushing my clients to be ambitious. “Aim for the moon, land among the stars” I told them every day. “It’s ok to fail but let’s fail trying”.
I realized I owed myself the same ambition.
It is scary to declare even to yourself, let alone others, that you have big dreams. Sometimes those dreams feel so unlikely to be achieved and it seems like the odds are stacked against you so you’d rather pretend to yourself and to others that you didn’t have those dreams in the first place. There is a simple equation that characterizes happiness:
Happiness = Reality – Expectations
I now believe a balanced approach is needed towards this equation. Too much emphasis on keeping the expectations low is the lazy short-termist option. You avoid working hard to enhance your reality, but at some point, your real expectations catch up with you. If you’re an intelligent and capable person, you can only placate yourself for so long by compressing expectations.
No doubt, the barriers to getting a reality you love are numerous, and far greater for some of us than others (for ethnic minority women, things are objectively harder).
I had so many excuses: No one else values environmental issues so I can’t achieve my environmentalist contribution goals. I have massive overhead in San Francisco on account of my apartment rent, so I can’t take as much travel time-off and go to the destinations I wanted to. I don’t have enough time to work out so I can’t get to the level of fitness I want. I can’t cook and won’t cook so I can’t eat as healthy as I want.
Be stronger than your excuses
It’s easy to set the bar low and then walk over it, it takes spectacular courage to set the bar high and fail. And you will absolutely fail. Brenee Brown tells it like it is in her Netflix special “The Call to courage”. People are often energized after her talks and say “yes, I will take risks now, and risk failure”. She points out that when you live with courage, you don’t risk failing, you assure failing. Hopefully, you don’t fail at everything you set out to do, but even if so…
…In 2019, I decided I’d rather fail climbing Everest than succeed in walking in a park.
Stiletto Muse 