A new year, a new decade no less, gives pause to think about where I’m headed.
For children, milestones are recorded as first steps, birthdays, eventually graduation. As adults, career goals or finance-related goals are natural to work towards. And after that? Self improvement perhaps, learning new skills, or visiting new places. Opportunities are everywhere, but the time we have left to take them diminishes. How do you pick your goals?
I get more reflective as I get older: thinking about what I’ve achieved, trying, often failing, not to measure myself against other people. I certainly recognize that it’s up to me to effect change in my life.
I set myself a goal in November. Totally arbitrary, but I signed up for a running challenge. 30 minutes a day, every day of the month. The incentive was a $50 gift certificate, but of course the reward was in the completion. There were a couple (alright, many) days when I didn’t think I’d be able to do it. I got tired. I had early morning or evening commitments that had to be planned around. I had work, family, and a million reasons why I should just give it up.
Reader, I completed that challenge!
Who cares? I don’t need any reward or recognition, I got it all from achieving that (really quite minor) goal. I learned a lot about my resilience: supported wholeheartedly by my family, and by friends who came out in the dark and rain to run with me, telling me over and over that I could do it.
What does this mean for you? Keep trying things! Set a new goal every month of the year if you want. Make them big and scary or small and simple. Relish the feeling of working towards something, and of doing it for the simple reward of knowing that you did.
For the magazine, our goal is keeping things fresh and always striving to produce content that really matters to you. This January issue is full of changes: we’ve lost some columns, but only so that we have space for all our new ideas! There are new writers too. Make sure you look closely and then send us your feedback – that’s how we know we’re doing our job.
