In this article, I will discuss how, based on my own experience, we can set and achieve long term goals.
This topic was actually my daughter’s idea to celebrate that this is my 53rd weekly consecutive article, which marks the completion of a goal that seemed too ambitious when I first set it: write one article per week for one year.
Goals
In my opinion, goals need to be meaningful to us. If they don’t, they won’t have any chance of survival.
Whatever our goals are, be they learning a new programming language, getting a promotion, having a daily commit on GitHub, and so on, we will only be able to achieve them if we see value in doing them.
For me, the main reasons for having this goal were to positively impact others, organise my thoughts, improve my writing skills, improve my English language skills, deepen past learnings, and build a portfolio. You can learn more about these reasons in this other article I wrote some time ago:
Make Them Realistic
I believe that we can dream as high as we want, and nobody should stop us from pursuing our dreams. That said, goals need to be realistic. For example, we cannot push a GitHub commit on 400 days in a year, because even leap years only have 366 days.
But even if we go down to 365 days per year, is this realistic? At least it is possible, but it would be unrealistic for me. If I get sick or I have a very busy day, I may not feel like coding. Or maybe my laptop breaks before I can push the changes, breaking the streak.
As I just showed, it could take one external issue to prevent us from achieving a goal. And if the goal requires that we do something that cannot be scheduled or delegated, there is no way to work around it.
In my case, setting this goal ticked all these boxes. I was very sick a few times this past year, unable to write. But because I needed to publish one article per week, rather than one per day, I was able to write a few articles ahead of time, in case I needed them.
Small Increments
My goal was designed to be in small increments. If I had chosen to have 53 articles by the end of the year, without specifying the frequency, I would have certainly failed.
There is only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time. Setting clear, regular, and frequent milestones for our goals will increase the chances of achieving them.
This plays really well with the fact that people are creatures of habit. We can create the habit of doing something regularly that will help us with our small increments.
For example, I need to go to the local library every Saturday for one hour. Instead of browsing <add a social network here>, I set that time aside to work on one of my articles.
I recommend reading the book Atomic Habits, by James Clear, to learn more about how to build healthy habits to achieve any of our goals, while this article covers some topics related to how to work towards our goals:
There is always time
As I explained in this other article, we always have time to do things. It’s up to us to decide what to do with that time:
When I say there’s always time, I consider realistic goals. If the goal is to read every book ever written or watch every movie ever filmed, it just falls in the unrealistic goals category. There is always time to work towards realistic goals, as long as we decide to spend it towards them, and not for something else.
Beware, though, that it is easy to underestimate the effort required to achieve our goals. When I started, I did not realise the time that it required to write a full article. As a consequence of this oversight, I had to take some of my sleep or family time, or refrain from doing something else I wanted to. This was a huge cost I decided to pay, despite my calculation error. But it had some unexpected positive consequences.
The Positive Impact On Others
As I mentioned earlier, when I committed to writing this blog I was aware of many benefits that it would bring. However, I completely missed the indirect impact that it has on others around us.
Achieving goals is hard work, and it’s not easy to pass unnoticed. If we lose weight or gain muscle, people will see it. If we learn new skills, others around us will notice, one way or another. In my case, my family could see me every week spending several hours writing the articles I’ve published. And this has had a positive impact on my children.
When my daughter suggested the topic for this article, I asked her if she’d write a short honest description of her impression after following this process. This is what she wrote:
I think that anyone that can post an article on a blog every week for a year is very dedicated to what they’re doing.
Part of what I find hard about it is coming up with new ideas for every article. It’s really hard because once all the good ideas are taken there isn’t much left to do.
What I would do is probably set myself short term goals. Like, on Monday I’m going to finish the article, and then I’ll revise it on Tuesday. And then when I do that, I set myself new goals.
As a father, I am proud that she can observe the dedication and effort I’ve put into this, and I hope that this serves as a role model in the future. If you’re reading this, thank you.
On top of that, she was able to identify one of the main struggles I have, which is choosing a topic for my next article. I have a few strategies to cover this, but it’s not bulletproof, and more than once I’ve struggled to choose a topic until very close to the deadline.
And finally, she was able to realise that we need some kind of habit to be consistent with our goals, as I was explaining, but also that after we achieve our goals, we need to look forward to our new goals.
In fact, I think that she covered most of the main points I presented here, and very concisely!
Final Thoughts
Goals are important for our lives. They give us purpose, but only if they have meaning.
Setting goals is easy, but achieving them is not, especially if we don’t carefully consider their real cost.
In my particular case, I am proud to have stayed true to myself and have met what for me is an important achievement.
But I could not have done it alone. Thanks to my family for their unconditional support. And thanks to my readers: without you, I would have stopped writing long ago.
Thanks!
José Miguel
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