How To Achieve Goals

If you want to do anything in life--any goal at all--I don't care if its learning to play the oboe, starting a fitness routine, changing your career, or just making new friends--no matter what the goal is, the best shot you have of actually achieving it is to build it into the structure of your regular life, right into your daily routine.

Let's say your goal is to exercise. Picture this (it shouldn't be hard because you've probably been in this very situation): You wake up and struggle your way to work in the morning, hustling through alarms and traffic to get there in the nick of time. You work all day, then drag your tired body home through rush hour traffic. Get in the car, get out of the car, get in the car, run some errands, unload the car. Find food, do some laundry, look for some down time . . . Then you want to do some exercise! God forbid anything unexpected happens in your schedule, because there is only a very small window for exercise even on an ideal day.

Its no surprise that a regular, fulfilling exercise program rarely takes root in such a lifestyle. Its totally extraneous and doesn't even fit into the flow of the day. Considering that most people are running at or near capacity most of the time, its a wonder it is even attempted at all. When you're busy, when you're tired, when you need some rest, when you just don't feel like it, your exercise routine is the first thing out the door. Its not essential and sometimes its just too much.

Kudos to people who (with grim determination) can make it happen anyway, but those isolated few are not a model for the majority of us who just don't function that way. Most of us do not want to go through life with a trench warfare mentality, gripping that exercycle until someone pries our cold, dead hands off of it. Blaming yourself because you can't force your way through life is just heaping unnecessary guilt onto an already disappointing situation.

For any goal, you will sometimes need to must up some determination to get through a lazy day. However, if you find you have to force yourself all of the time, then the problem is that you are just not set up properly. You've heard me talk about infrastructure before. You need to build your day around your goal. Spend your energy on your goal, not on some kind of test to prove your level of determination in the face of unnecessary agony. In other words, the goal is to exercise--the goal is not to see if you can get to the gym daily. If you make it unnecessarily difficult for you to achieve your goal by relegating only to your "extra time" and superimposing it into an already-packed schedule, you have to ask how much of a priority your goal really is.

You won't walk to the grocery store if you live 10 miles from it. However, if you live 1 mile from some shopping areas, you may be inclined to take a stroll. If you live in a neighborhood with good sidewalks and bike lanes, you may ride your bike more often than someone who has to load the bike into the car, drive 5 miles to the bike path, unload the car, bike for a while, then reverse the process to go home. See what I mean? You'll be more likely to actually do it if you can just walk out the door and jump on your bike on a whim.

Urban planning is all about this, as Alison talks about in her blog. You are more likely to walk if the sidewalks and neighborhoods are conducive to it. You are more likely to take public transportation if it makes sense in the rhythm of your life, with convenient routes and fees. You are more likely to meet your neighbors if you have natural, regular times for meaningful contact (not waving at each other through rolled-up car windows while hurriedly driving past them). Urban planning is all about building an environment that encourages a certain outcome--in most cases, that hoped-for outcome is community building.

The same principle applies to your life as an individual. Build the environment that is conducive to your goals. If you want to meet new friends, you need to put yourself in situations where that is likely to happen, given your temperament, style and history. So you may want to work at a place with a lot of people intermingling instead of a job where you are isolated behind your cubicle walls. If you want to exercise, find ways do that that within the normal course of the day. Move closer to your work so you can walk or bike there, or take a walk on your lunch break. The activities that fit within the normal flow of your day are going to be activities that have staying power.

I lived in Spain for a semester while in college. Me and a friend lived on the outskirts of town. Buses were too expensive to take regularly, so every time we went anywhere we had to walk. And walk. And walk. Rain? We walked. Sick? We walked. Didn't feel like walking? We walked. Feet hurt, hungry, in a hurry, bored with walking, you name it--we still walked. We simply had to, there was no other option. We walked miles daily. It was almost religious. We got into great shape, and it was such a powerful experience (I do believe in the miracle of daily walking, and I'll write about that some other time).

The point to the Spain story was that we were successful at walking regularly because we had to be. It was just a part of life. It was the most consistent exercise I have ever gotten in my life, and all because there was no way out. I didn't even have to waste energy fighting with myself over whether to walk or not. There was no need, because it was woven right into the fabric of life.

There are sometimes going to be some hard choices. If you work 40 hours a week and commute 1 hour per day and need 2 hours in the evening to unwind after your workday before you can even think of doing something else, you will most likely have neither the time nor the energy to develop into a star cello player. That's just reality and some simple math. You may have to substantially overhaul your daily routing to make room for what you want. That might involve such things as moving, changing jobs, reducing your hours at work, reducing your commute, and finding other ways to make yourself available for your goal.

If you don't have the time to work on your novel, but find time to wax/wash your car every week, you may be lying to yourself. I'm not advocating driving a dirty car, but there's priorities and then there's priorities.

Sometimes joining a group of people who are already doing what you want is a great way to get the support structure you need. I played music more when I was in a band, just because we had gigs and practices and I had to be there.

Working with your style and temperament is just as important a part of your infrastructure as the tangible environment of your home, job and community. I am particularly bad at doing regular exercise. However, I practically race home from work, leap out of my office clothes and into the garden. I will sweat myself dry daily in a garden. Knowing that this is exercise I will easily and gladly do, the key to build the right infrastructure to support my exercise habits is just to make sure I have a plot of land that I can conveniently attend to. Gardening is ideal exercise for me because it is exercise I will actually do. Sometimes it forces me to work because there are things that need to be done, but more often than not its just a pure joy.

Your temperament plays into your social goals, too. If you are a shy person who craves long discussions about books, then why are hanging out in bars on football Sundays? If you want to meet a Roman, your best bet is to go to Rome. I'm all for magic happening anywhere, but there is something wrong about putting yourself in impossible situations on a regular basis and expecting instant karma to hit you out of the ballpark (pun intended).

I am not recommending taking the easy way out. But I am recommending making it easy on yourself. Spend your energy on your goal, not on all the business of getting to and from. Take some chances and find ways to weave your goal into your very routine. It may involve a move, a change in job, or at least a change in scenery. It may involve a little bit of planning or set-up work to save you lots of headaches later. But if your goal is precious to you, it will most certainly be worth it.