It’s now mid February, and statistically we’re at about the point when most of people’s new year’s resolutions have fallen by the wayside.
I notice it especially at the gym, where in early January, the crowds flock. With Christmas weight bearing down on their consciences, and resolutions to regain fitness levels of a past era, the enthusiasm to turn life around and get healthy is all a-go-go. Then February rolls around and the crowds are thinning out. By next month it will be the same old regulars again with a couple of newbies who did manage to keep up the habit.
I think about how people set themselves such lofty goals, like “go to the gym five times a week” when they were never in habit of going before… or “lose forty pounds” without any new knowledge on nutrition… or “earn 30% more” with no concept of how it might happen.
I know I’ve set goals before without a plan of how to achieve them and what invariably happened is that I started with gusto, and began to move forward a little, but I gained little traction because I had no plan to rely on.
“He who fails to plan, plans to fail.” – Proverbs
We live in a world of instant gratification and it becomes an easy trap to fall into. If we’re not getting what we expect right away, then there’s no point in continuing… “Here I fail again!” attitude.
I know that I have at times become despondent about not achieving my lofty goals as quickly as I’d like, but what we need to realize is that we often over-estimate what we can do in a year and under-estimate what we can do in five or ten years.
Think about that… we often over-estimate what we can do in a year and under-estimate what we can do in five or ten years.
How can you possibly work out whether that’s true for yourself?
Click on the Milestones Calendar on the homepage of my site (about half way down). Take thirty to sixty minutes to write down achievements, awards, events, significant anniversaries, milestones etc that have occurred over the last seven or eight years. Each month has its own space to write a milestone, so it may take longer than half an hour to find a milestone for each month over the last number of years.
I first did this for myself a number of years ago and now have a Milestones Calendar of my life dating back to 1997, with most of the cells filled in. Whenever I look at this sheet now I can see a tremendous progression in my life, and the turning points and the evidence of what I learned at each point becomes clear moving forward.
At age 21, I was starting in my first job, having just come out of University with my Bachelor of Commerce degree. I was earning a whopping $23,000 and, with my girlfriend, renting an old house from a friend of my parents. We owned no furniture (the old house came with old furniture), and my only “asset” was a 1986 Ford Telstar TX5. It was white with a mere 200,000km on the clock. “A bucket o’ bolts” as my Dad would say. Two years later I had more than doubled my income, and five years later I was living in London, England and working as a Direct marketing Manager for a large holiday company.
A little over five years ago I was happily married with no children and was working as the Marketing Manager for a successful General Motors dealership. Today I’m still happily married (my wife would tell you I’m ecstatic actually!), now with three children and I work as a corporate trainer and coach.
With an idea of where you want to go and a rough plan of how to get there, it really is amazing what can be achieved. What I know is that the better and more detailed your plan and the more closely you stick to it, the faster you’ll achieve your goals.
“Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.” – Napoleon Hill
Take a look aback at your own past ten years and see how in every facet of your life you’ve made great changes and see that the possibilities for the future are equally as expansive. When you look back ten years ago, and remember how you felt at that time, where you are now seems like it could never happen. That’s the same with the next ten years. A decade is a long time. Two US Presidential terms total only eight years and think how much happens in that time.
Ten years ago the wikipedia encyclopedia was created and September 11 happened. Facebook was still three years from being launched and You Tube was five years away!
So no matter where your life is at now, know that in a few short years it could be transformed beyond your wildest dreams. All it takes is vision, planning, persistence to achieve and sometimes a little luck.
“Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.” – Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
