Only The Curious

My brother and I were enrolled in a martial arts program as kids. It did a lot of great things for us, but I think the most important part of it for me was learning how to set goals. Because we were always working toward earning a black belt with many levels in-between, we were constantly thinking in terms of both long- and short-term goals. Not to mention the books we had to read and essays we had to write prior to our black belt test.

Goals are something I didn’t realize the value of until fairly recently. I was talking with a friend who had never really thought about setting goals; nobody had ever encouraged him to do anything more than just whatever made him happy. While I’m not discrediting this (I often find myself admiring the Zen-ness of the way he directs his life) I have seen him struggle to make decisions about his life.

Whenever I have a difficult decision to make, (which is often, because as an ENFP, I see just about every option available to me in every situation) I find that the best way to make the decision is to work backwards. But this only works if you have an endpoint to work from. When you know where you’re trying to go, figuring out the best way to get there is easy. It’s when you don’t know the destination that choosing a route becomes impossible.

Goals keep us on track. It can be easy to get distracted, and while it’s always good to remain open and try new things, if I have a goal in mind, it’s easy to see which option moves in the direction of my goal, which ones are neutral, and which ones run in direct opposition.

I was inspired to write this post thanks to my friend Rebecca Thorman (author of Modite), who put out a challenge to fellow bloggers recently to participate in a monthly goal meet-up. The idea is that each month we post our personal and career goals on our blogs, to help one another with setting and achieving said goals.

Last month I achieved one of my longest-standing goals, which was to move out to Colorado. Because of all the changes this inevitably brings, I feel like I’m cheating a little bit in setting some of my goals for September, but here they are:

1. Get a job in Colorado
2. Get an apartment near said job
3. Start soliciting freelance work again
4. Get back into exercising at least 3x/week
5. Start playing my guitar again (it’s been over a month!)

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