Only The Curious

Okay, I’m stepping away from the goal-setting posts for awhile. I’ve been waiting to write until I accomplished something I had said I was going to, but I haven’t accomplished any of the goals I set.

I feel lame that I wrote about my goals, and how important goal setting is, and then didn’t do any of them. But sometimes life just gets in the way. Because goals were the big focus of my last few posts, it became very easy to procrastinate and just not write at all, because “I’ll write next week, once I’ve started following through.”

Now another month has passed, and setting those goals has actually gotten in the way of my writing.

Sometimes when you hit a tough spot, the best thing to do is to set it aside. Instead of trying to push the boulder out of your path, just go around it.

I remember struggling with this in college, when I was taking theater courses. We would all lament that inspiration cannot be forced and would panic when a project was due and the creative juices weren’t flowing. We couldn’t show up to class and say “I wasn’t feeling inspired.” We had to come up with something. So I’m not saying that it’s not about giving up altogether, but finding a different way to go about it.

So I’m going around the goals for the time being, though I guess you could say that my goal is simply to start posting regularly again. And I think that’s enough for now.

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It’s been nearly a month since I last blogged. This is, in part, not my fault. No, I’m not trying to place blame anywhere. But I haven’t had much access to internet, and have found the times I’ve been inspired to write failing to coincide with times I have access to a computer and an internet connection.

That being said, no excuses. It’s the beginning of October, so it’s time for another round of goal setting. Why goal setting? Because of Rebecca Thorman and her monthly goal meetup. I love this idea, because it’s easier to stay motivated and dedicated when you’re not doing it alone. There’s a whole community of bloggers who are posting their goals every month and following up on them. It helps us to stay on track. I’d feel lame if I just stopped participating.

An important part of goal-setting, however, is following up on your goals to review what you accomplished, what you still need to do, and what you could do better the next time. After all, talking is the easy part. And there’s always something to learn from your experiences. So, here were my goals for September and how they went:

1. Get a job in Colorado

Check! AND it’s a good job. One that I want. And like. And now I can stay in Colorado and not run out of money. Hooray!
2. Get an apartment near said job

Also managed. I will admit, there was some luck to both of these first two. BUT there were also hours upon hours of research, sorting through craigslist, making calls, and just staying on task until I found what I was looking for.
3. Start soliciting freelance work again

Okay, I haven’t gotten to this, for very much the same reasons I haven’t been blogging. But I will.
4. Get back into exercising at least 3x/week

I’ve had some special challenges with this one in the form of a knee injury. But I have been playing ultimate and getting to the gym once a week, so I just need to fit in one more class each week and I’m good to go.
5. Start playing my guitar again (it’s been over a month!)

Ugh. Challenges here, too. I broke a string the first time I tried to tune up my guitar, and have been afraid to touch it since. Though I did get the string replaced…

So I’d say I made it to 2.5 out of 5. Halfway there. Not bad, but not great. Always room for improvement.  Which brings me to my October Goals:

1. To accomplish all of my goals, not just half of them. (Is it cheating to have a goal of accomplishing your goals?)

2. To play my guitar at least once a week.

3. To ACTUALLY get exercise 3x a week.

4. To write at least one article and/or solicit at least one writing job.

5. To begin the research and planning for the publicity consulting business I’d like to do to help fellow entrepreneurs. Since this goal is hard to measure, I’m going to decide that I’m successful if I’ve got written down the services I want to offer, how I will market them, and what I will charge for them. Because in order to be achievable, goals need specific, measurable results.
So there it is. I’ll let you know how it goes!

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I used to have anxiety attacks. All the time.

Walking to class, talking on the phone with my mother, sitting alone in my dorm room, I’d be thinking about my day, or my plans, or my life, and it would crash over me like a wave. My hands would sweat, my stomach would feel knotted, I’d get lightheaded.

There were lots of reasons for this anxiety. But I think it really came down to one thing: I wasn’t living my life the way I wanted it.

I wasn’t living my life the way I wanted it, because I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know myself well. I had lived most of my life doing what other people had told me to, assuming the great mystery of why would reveal itself at some point.

For the first 23 years of my life I went to school, worked hard, got good grades. I was president of student councils, wrote for school papers, sang in choir and even tried a sport or two. I was working hard to do what everyone told me to.

But I had no idea why, or what I was trying to accomplish. Just this vague concept that if I worked hard and went to a good college and had a solid resume, things would fall into place. I figured that sometime during college I would find something I loved, and that would be my career, and I would be successful at it.

But the great epiphany never came. There was no life-changing professor to steer me in the right direction. There hadn’t even been an advisor with a decent recommendation on hand. People would ask what kind of work I was looking for, and I didn’t have a good answer. I didn’t have any answer.

All I knew was that, now that I had a degree, it was not acceptable to work as a barista indefinitely. And secretly, I also knew that I did not want a traditional office job; something I learned during a fabulous internship my freshman year – I knew that if I hated just interning at what should have been a fantastic place to work, there was no way I’d ever love any office job. But somehow, if I told people that I didn’t want a “real” job, it made overachiever, overambitious me into a slacker in their eyes.

So I job hopped, which I now like to think of as conducting field research into how I like to work. For the first time since I was able to respond to the question “what do you want to do with your life” with “be a ballerina-rockstar-astronaut-anthropologist-writer-butterfly” I have an answer.

It’s taken a lot of introspection. My meditation practice has helped with that immensely. So has doing a lot of reading and writing, attending workshops, and finding like-minded people who are doing what I want to do.

My answer is that I don’t want to do any one thing. I love variety. I like moving around. I like interacting with and helping people. I also like writing. I don’t like limitations. I don’t want to be limited to doing one thing, every day. I don’t want to be limited to staying in one place for 8 hours at a time. And I definitely don’t want to have the number of days I can travel decided for me.

So it has been amazing me to discover the likes of Chris Gillebeau, Lea Woodward, Barbara Winter, and many others who have made it okay to not want a traditional office job. I feel like I’ve “found my lost tribe” as my mother would put it  – people who are their own bosses, who are location independent, who realize that working and living your life shouldn’t be on opposite sides of the coin. People who make their money from lots of different sources, and who value experiences over objects. People who realize that true ambition is living life the way you really want to, rather than putting in your face time and calling it a day.

I look forward to sharing my experiences as I work to transition out of the traditional workforce and into a life of adventure and fulfillment.

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I know people who insist that they can’t use up their vacation days. (I know, right?) They tell me  they have nowhere to go. Or they don’t have anyone to go with. Occasionally they’ll take a day off just because they can. And they end up calling to see if I want to have lunch, because by noon they’re bored of being at home.

To me, this is because they are looking at it from the wrong perspective. They’ve already decided that vacation days need to look a certain way – that they have to have somewhere they want to go, and they have to go there with a specific person (or kind of person.) Rather than exploring the possibilities of what they could do on their own, or other things they could do with their vacation (like volunteer abroad, maybe) they just choose to be bored. And disappointed. And bored.

(Sidenote: Can we PLEASE come up with a system where they can transfer their wasted unused days to people like me, who will use them very, very well?)

Obviously, there are places they could go. Anywhere in the world, really. There are group trips individuals can sign up to go on. Or I bet if they called up grandma and said “hey, let’s hang out in your favorite city for a few days” she’d oblige. But they don’t see these possibilities. From their perspective, there really is no place they want to go, or the only people they’d want to bother traveling with aren’t around.

If they chose to look at it differently, they’d see other possibilities. The world would open up.

So choose how you want to see the world today. Are you going to decide it’s a bad day because it’s not what you wanted, or are you going to be excited to explore something unexpected?

Only the curious have something to find. Are you going to be curious?

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