Special V-Day Edition: Goals – A Love Story

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

– Charles Bukowski

The world doesn’t need a new way to set goals. What we need is a way to have a relationship with our goals. Pile up the literature on to-do lists, resolutions, “SMART” goals, and business plans and you could blanket the planet a few times over. Good luck finding guidance on how to keep striving toward those goals. It’s probably simple economics like selling pickaxes to prospectors instead of lockboxes to successful ones. Hoards come searching for gold while few find it.

The fitness company Strava researched data on 800 million user activities around New Year’s Resolutions in 2019 and found that 80% quit by the second week of February. So many quit on January 19th that they dubbed it “Quitters Day.”*

That’s not a relationship; it’s more like a vacation romance. So what does it look like to fall in love with your goals?

The arc of most romances begins with flirting and progresses to dating. As time goes on, we fall hard. Some go on to propose and say, “I do.” It’s never an easy path, but it’s a familiar one. Most pursue their goals with these steps jumbled up. They launch with a proposal. They declare their goal and then attempt to date it and fall in love with the process. Can you imagine asking a stranger to marry you? Maybe that’s why so many get off track so quickly.

The best formula I’ve found comes from our work in The ONE Thing. The foundation of your goals comes from your purpose and values. Once we discover our values and our purpose, only then do we seek priority and work backward from a someday goal. To return to our Valentine’s Day theme, we’re letting our hearts lead our heads. But that still isn’t a relationship. Relationships are founded on time together. Regularly engaging with your goals is like dating your sweetheart. We call this time blocking and the 411. Every week, take your goals on a date.

My wife and I have had a standing date night for over 15 years. To avoid the battle for babysitters, we gave up on weekends and moved date nights to Wednesdays. Voila! We always could get a babysitter (no competition), there was always a table at the best restaurants (the midweek lull), and no movie was ever sold out (new films debut on Thursdays.) Date night became an institution, and our relationship has benefited from around 750 dates. This summer we’ll celebrate 25 years and I’m sure date night has played a big part.

My challenge to you is to start treating your goals the same way. Block a weekly appointment. Reflect on your progress. Make adjustments to your time blocks to advance the work and stay on track. That 30-minute meeting with yourself may be the most important investment of time you make. If you’re wondering, Wendy and I date our goals on Sundays. For almost as long as we’ve had date nights, Sunday mornings would find us with our laptops out, updating our 411s and syncing our calendars.

One question to ponder in your thinking time: When is my standing date with my goals?

Make an Impact!
Jay Papasan

Co-author of The One Thing & The Millionaire Real Estate Agent ​