Personal development
Goals
January 2nd, or “the death of goals day”. You spend the first day of the year thinking about all the things you want to achieve and by this day you’ve broken your promises to yourself, forgotten about the things you want to get done, and wondered at what point in your life one day hangovers turned into two day hangovers.
Don’t worry. We have all done this.
I have an ambivalent relationship with goals. On the one hand, goals add value and, if chosen well, meaning to your life. On the other hand, goals can be stifling, endless wells of disappointment and failure.
If you’ve ever done any kind of personal development course you’ve probably been told to make goals SMARTER (the personal development industry loves an acronym). And for some things, SMARTER really is better. If you want to pay off your credit card debt then being specific about when you’re going to do it and making sure it’s an achievable thing is good idea.
But not everything you want to do in life is SMARTER. And the peril with trying to apply the same framework to everything you want to do is that you end up feeling bad when you start something only to find out you don’t care enough about it to actually keep going.
Sometimes, you need to start small and just find out if something is right or possible for you. For example, I’m interested in photography, and – as I don’t have any hobbies and know I need something other than work in my life – I want to see if it’s something I enjoy. I could set myself a SMARTER goal on this: “By the end of January I will have found and enrolled in a photography course”, say. But suppose I look around, read some course descriptions, and find that actually it all sounds dreadful and I can’t get excited about it? Have I FAILED in my goal?
The best advice I’ve seen about goals is Ryder Carroll’s in The Bullet Journal Method, where he talks about splitting goals into sprints, little two week chunks which achieve something in themselves – each sprint is complete in that sense – but achieve something within that overall goal. And importantly, if after a sprint you find you want to head off in a different direction from where your goal was leading, that’s fine.
Sometimes, all a goal is is an opportunity to learn about something and maybe take it further. So start small, and be forgiving. Never forget that it’s fine to decide that something which looked important to you before you started is not something you want to pursue.
Everything you do is a chance to learn. The only time you learn nothing is if you do nothing.
Happiness
How often do you think about what makes you happy? Not “how often are you happy?” but how often do you reflect on the things which make you happy and try and learn something from that?
If you’re anything like me, which you probably are, then the answer is “almost never”.
Yet it’s only by doing this kind of reflection that we can understand happiness and try and make our lives better.
One of the most limiting parts of our culture is that we learn what happiness looks like not through self-reflection but through watching other people. Whether that’s watching Love Island and imagining ourselves looking like or being like the people on it, or it’s watching YouTube vidoes about some guy in LA with the most uber-minimal life you’ve ever seen, it’s the same: “This person does this stuff and is happy. If I did that stuff I’d be happy too”.
We’re all guilty of this. It is at the crux of our mediated lives.
So take some time to think about the things that make you happy. Think more on what it is about those things that you love, that (to steal a Marie Kondo-ism) sparks joy in you. They can be big or small: one of mine is simply watching the birds on the bird feeders outside our living room window. Why does this make me happy? Because I love nature and the natural world, so I want to get into it more.
Today’s a good day to think about this.
Becoming a creator
OK, this sounds trite. But…
The difference between you and the creators you follow is simply they are creating while you are consuming.Source: 13 tips for making the switch from a consumer to a creator | Nathan Barry
You can’t create more than you consume. Consumption is quicker and easier by definition – it takes far longer to write a novel than for even the slowest reader to consume it. The key question is how much time you’ve investing in each.
Nathan’s tips are well worth reading. I think my favourite is this:
Decide what you are going to do before you sit down at the computer — Too often I sit down at my computer and think, what should I work on? That’s dangerous. It usually starts with checking social media, reading slack, and catching up on email. The trick is to decide what you are going to do before you approach the computer.In other words – and this is something I come back a lot at the moment – be intentional about what you're doing. If you're just sitting there with a device playing around with it, you're not doing anything that's actually of value. Know what you're going to do before you do it. Be intentional.