Big Growth is a Collection of Small Decisions
[A brief and uncomfortable update: 2020 is halfway over.]
My girlfriend and I spent a few hours recently crafting our vision for the next several years; during this process it hit me how quickly time is passing.
Each morning I sit on my front porch and watch our dog wade through grass, snapping at flies and soaking in the morning sun.
Those mornings and these days seem to be blurring together - and I often worry about whether or not I'll be able to fit everything into my life before I don't have any time left.
If you're anything like me you have broad and sweeping goals for your life - a sort of mental wishlist of all the experiences, accomplishments and relationships you desire for your time on earth.
Maybe you even use a process like Year Compass, Lifebook, or The Reflection Ritual to capture your dreams, and perhaps return to this vision to tweak a few things once or twice a year.
But most of us don't have clarity on the direction we're heading, and even more of us don't stop to reflect on our progress.
It can feel overwhelming to plan a course of action particularly if you don't enjoy blocking a day or two for deep reflection. Not to mention, it's intimidating to consider where you want to be 10, 20, 50 years from now - especially with the uncertainty of what work and life will look like this time next year.
While I do believe big goals provide us with direction, keep us inspired, and inform our commitments - they're not enough to inform our day-to-day lives.
For the first few weeks of the COVID-19 stay at home order I was lost. I navigated my days with no direction: sleeping in, reading all the news, watching all the shows, eating at random times, having no set hours to work. It was a mess.
And it made me feel terrible about myself.
At the end of Q1, after a couple weeks in quarantine, I willed myself to look at my yearly plan and life vision only to be discouraged by my unrealized goals again. But then I remembered something Jon Butcher, the creator of Lifebook, says about the secret to effective goal setting:
Create a goal to establish a habit which helps you reach your goal.
Ah yes! It's so easy to stray from the persistent truth our lives are made up of opportunities to decide who we want to be - and who we become is the accumulation of those decisions.
Creating a larger than life vision for ourselves is exciting, and I recommend it for everyone, but it is intimidating if we don't have a bridge to get us there. Additionally, I'm not convinced an inspiring vision in and of itself is going to keep us on track in the short-term - we need daily practices which become their own reward.
With this approach, we essentially don't have to worry about obsessively maintaining our goals and revisiting our life vision as often, because the rhythms of our days are on autopilot doing the small incremental work of growing us into who we desire to be.
Besides - a rich life isn't lived in the future. If we fixate too much on next decade we'll miss all the opportunities for meaning, learning and connection right now.
Better to consider our long term vision, then work backward by zooming in on the cornerstone habits which will enable us to participate more in our growth every day.
For example - I know meditating first thing, writing daily, walking with my girlfriend and the dog every morning, blocking specific times to check email, drinking a green smoothy each day, working out three times per week, and protecting two uninterrupted hours for focused time on my larger goals are practices that will both make my life better now and support my intentions for my future.
I love the scene in the movie Central Intelligence where Kevin Hart's character asks his old friend from high school (played by Dwayne Johnson) how he lost 200 pounds and accomplished a total body transformation - to which The Rock provides a simple answer:
I just did one thing...I worked out six hours a day, every day, for the last twenty years straight. I mean, anybody can do it, right?
Anybody can do it.