Goals

Here I sit at my 45th birthday, wondering where I go from here. Last night I was lying in bed thinking about the past year and trying to remember what had taken place since my last birthday. Honestly, I had trouble remembering anything, partly because so much happened and partly because it is difficult for me to keep track of the timeline (did that happen in the past year or was that two years ago?).

This made me start thinking about goals. I have never been much of a goal planner, especially long term goals (the question "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" always put me in a cold sweat). I have taken life as it has been dealt to me. This may not be the most proactive approach, but it had two things going for it: 1) I didn't have to do a lot of soul searching to see what I wanted to be doing and 2) I didn't have to face failure if a goal wasn't reached.

I was reading a blog that I like to follow on Runners World yesterday and the writer was talking about goals. She said that 50% of the goals you set are never reached. And she wasn't saying that this is a bad thing. At first, I looked at this as failing half the time. Then it hit me, this is actually succeeding half the time. A saying came to mind - you fail at 100% of the things you never try.

Back in 2009, my wife Boots and I attended Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University. We learned how it is important to plan for you money to get control of it. This has been a major success. While we are not 100% perfect, we are much better than we had been and it illustrated the importance of planning.

So, as I enter my 45th year, I am going to set some goals. The article I read mentioned a website that the author used for setting her goals, lululemon.com. I went there and began planning for the next 10 years of my life. One of my goals for this year is to use this blog as a journal about my goals for the year. I will post at least once a week, which, considering my inconsistancy in posting, will be a major achievement in itself. It should also keep me focused on what I am working on.

I am posting this from a computer. I wrote a similar post on my phone and when I went to save it, the words went off to la-la land with no way to recover them. I will probably try again, but will attempt to copy the post before saving.

I will post the goals that I have in the next entry. But now it is time to celebrate my birthday by heading out for the day with Boots.