Success is in the Journey

Where are you right now in terms of accomplishing your goals? Are you where you want to be at this point in your life? Or has life handed you a detour?

You have dreams and goals you want to accomplish in life, right? Are you there yet? Will you ever be there?

It’s hard to realize and come to terms that you might not completely accomplish the dreams you plotted out for yourself. Come on, at 30 years old and never taken gymnastic classes in your life, you will never be the Olympic gymnast you had dreamed of becoming when you were 6 years old.

OR

Even though you love playing the piano AND you took lessons AND you practice every single day, you may never be the solo pianist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra you dreamed about after attending an orchestra concert.

BUT, you do play the piano better than most. You play at church and in the community, and you teach piano to the youth in your community.

Does this injure or minimize your original goal?

1. You see, half the feeling of success is the journey you take to accomplish your dreams and goals. To measure that success and accomplishment, you need to see how far you have come, even if the dream or goal changes or seems out of reach.

Have a dream or a goal, but never started? Start today. What’s stopping you?

You must begin your journey toward your goals by starting where you are, but like I asked at the beginning, where are you in terms of accomplishing your goals?

If you don’t know what you want to accomplish in your life and have no clue where you are in that journey, you will have a difficult time getting there.

It’s time to participate in some self-examination and self-evaluation because you should never begin the journey toward your goal without knowing where you are at the present. Go ahead, get a piece of paper and something to write with because it is good to write this stuff down.

1. Write down at least one of your goals, but not more than three.

For example, mine might read: I want to publish a novel; I want to publish articles regularly on my blogs and on Medium.com; I want to minimize the unneeded “stuff” in my life.

These are fairly vague, right? So, let’s take the next step.

2. Go back and take a look at that goal and give it a deadline and maybe clearer wording. Be realistic, but realize that you can extend the deadline if necessary.

Given a deadline, my goals look like this: I want to publish my first novel by the end of 2018; I want to publish at least one article a week on my blog and on Medium.com; I want to unpack, photograph, research pricing, and post for sale at least 3 items per week.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT STARTING WHERE YOU ARE

In looking at my dreams realistically, I realize that I need to look at the end goal AND look at where I am to determine if I have what it takes to accomplish my goals.

You see, you can’t begin to plan how you will need to do to accomplish your dreams and goals without investigating the journey ahead of you.

If you choose to take that journey, you MUST look at the task ahead of you through a couple of different lenses. First, you need to realize that you live day to day. Not that you don’t plan, but life tends to throw twists into your days. Second, it’s best to look back to the day you began your journey to accomplish a goal to see how far you’ve come than to just look forward to see how much you have left to do. Sometimes that can be too daunting and you can begin to question whether you should be on this journey or not.

I used to love asking kids about where they saw themselves after graduation, or graduation from college. Far too many thought they would be making a yearly income of at least $100,00.00 or better. They would graduate college with that business degree, or medical degree and start their career at the top, they would begin as CEO or president.

Nothing against the grand ideas of teenagers or the fact that you can begin a business as a teenager, but the idea of not having to start as a lowly college graduate, put in the hours, or do the work is frustrating to me.

For some reason, as a society, starting from where we are (a novice, a rookie, an inexperienced employee) is foreign to so many people. Colleges tell students that their placement stats are top notch and that they can get the student a great job with a great salary.

With my goal of writing a novel, I have to look at what I have.

I have several horrible rough drafts and volumes of prompted writing pieces.

I have at least 15 minutes a day to work on writing this novel. (If time permits, 15 minutes can grow to 30, 45, or even 60, but when I say to myself that I will write on a given topic for 60 minutes, my mind rebels.)

What if your goal was to get physically fit or healthy? One of the tasks you need to incorporate in your schedule is to exercise. Do you suck it up, join a gym, and go every day? What if there isn’t time one day? Yup, a speed bump. Does it derail you, or do you have an alternate solution? For example, go for a walk around your neighborhood after dinner or put in an exercise DVD. Viola! You’ve done your exercise for the day.

Do I always have time to sit at my writing desk and write? Of course not. Solution: Keep a notebook with me so I can write in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, at the table in the restaurant we frequent for breakfast on Mondays, or use the hand-held tape recorder to tape my ideas as I drive.

Do you have time for a full exercise session every day? Maybe not. Solution: Dance around the kitchen as you make dinner or park your car farther away from where you need to go so you have to walk.

Instead of chucking out a goal, do what you can each and every day to move yourself closer to that goal.

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Thanks for reading.

AND

As you move through your day-to-day activities and responsibilities, please remember to

Live Life –

Keep Things Simple –

Look for the Positive –

AND

Smile.

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