Month: April 2017

I’m not really a goal-setting kind of person. While I certainly have short term projects I want to accomplish — say six months to a year at most — I keep reading how I “should” have longer term goals. My approach instead has been to become more comfortable with just setting a general direction, watching for opportunities, and enjoying where life takes me.

And I have been enjoying it. 🙂

Every so often, though, I bow to so-called conventional wisdom when it comes to goal setting, usually because it’s positioned as some critical aspect of a self-improvement book I’m in the process of reading.

Apparently that’s where I found myself five years ago. The other day as I was revamping my usage of Evernote I stumbled into — you guessed it — a note written in 2012 outlining goals for five years hence. Aka today, in 2017.

I hadn’t looked at it in five years. It was an interesting, and surprising find.

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I think that if my parents were alive today they’d be shaking their heads a little over the current craze that seems to be “mindfullness”. From their perspective I’m sure it’s not anything they hadn’t seen before.

In fact, it’s very likely that it’s something they’d been asking me to do since I was a small child.

They just used other words.

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My daily writing habit has become somewhat less than daily. 🙂

In reflecting on it some, I think I’ve identified at least one of the reasons. It both surprises me, and yet it makes sense.

I want to matter.

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I recently finished the book 1984. Technically it was a re-read, since I’d read it many years ago in high school, as, I suspect, many of my generation were required to.

There’s been a renewed interest in the book due to the current political climate, and sales have been soaring, putting it back on the best seller list at many book stores. I’ll admit I did my part – purchasing the book again simply to increase the attention that it so deserves.

As I read it I was heartened by what was no longer relevant. And yet, on further reflection, it raised enough analogous issues that could still apply to remain an appropriately cautionary tale.

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An imagined response to an imagined comment….

I’m glad of what you’ve accomplished. It was no small feat. You’ve done something significant, something that you can be rightfully proud of.

I, too, have accomplished something similar. It, too, was no small feat, and something that I have some small amount of pride in having done.

In essence, you and I have arrived at the same destination.

But we’ve done so via very different paths.

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I produce a lot of content. Ask Leo! articles, books, and videos, of course, as well as The Ask Leo! Tip of the Day, but I also facilitate HeroicStories, curate Not All News is Bad, and manage social media posts for Ask Leo! on Instagram. I also have no fewer than three WordPress blog migrations in progress for friends and organizations I support, as well as my own random experiments (like tweaking my video studio, or playing with a ChromeBook “just because”).

Then there are the Corgi web sites and activities I either support, own, or administer, my ongoing stress relief with my Night Elf Druid in World of Warcraft (don’t judge), the occasional “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” animal-related call out, and radio-related emergency preparedness and volunteer support.

I get tired just writing all that. (And, heck, I probably overlooked something.)

And yet, what keeps nagging at me is simply this: I could be so much more productive, if I would just start.

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