Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas
You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for. Ted Turner
We are almost at the end of the year, and have we accomplished what we set out to do this year? It’s time to start thinking about what we want to make happen in 2024.
I haven’t been as good as I should have been about setting goals over the years, and goals we didn’t set often weren’t achieved. If we aren’t where we want to be in some areas of our life, perhaps it’s because those are the areas we didn’t set goals in. Is it too late to start setting goals? We can have personal goals, financial goals, work goals, travel goals, reading goals, family goals, health and fitness goals, and many other categories of goals. Do we sometimes not set goals because we don’t know where to start, and we don’t want to give ourselves a job of making the goal come true, so instead of working toward a goal we are aimless?
Do we think we’ll feel worse if we set a goal and don’t make it? Missing a goal and evaluating our progress is probably better than not setting a goal at all. Maybe we set too audacious of a goal, maybe we need to break it down into smaller goals, and maybe something changed, and it isn’t our most important goal anymore.
How many of us wish we’d set some financial goals years ago? Is it too late to set those goals now, it’s too late to reap the harvest of seeds we didn’t plant, but is it too late to start planting seeds now and reap a harvest? What would we still like to do, be, have, see, and experience? What is still possible in our lives and we need to be careful we don’t think everything is over for us too soon, what if we live to be one hundred? What can we do in ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years or more? What if we make every year our best year, it’s the best one because it is the one we are living. It is the one that has the possibilities because we can’t change the past, the future hasn’t come yet, and everything we want to do has to be done in the present.
The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score. Bill Copeland
What if we make it our goal to make the present count? There is so much to do and see, we can’t do it all, but if we set our goals we can do the most important things. We might even find the more we do, the more we can do. We might think our life is too full to add one more thing to it, but if we find something we enjoy we’ll find time to fit it in.
This is what I am finding with knitting. Yesterday my daughter, grandson, and I went to Michaels to pick out yarn for a blanket I’m knitting him for Christmas. He wanted to touch everything, but we got out of the store with an assortment of blue yarns, and this time I’m deciding where the stripes start and finish. The beauty of knitting a blanket for Christmas is the deadline. I have until Christmas Eve to finish it, wrap it, and put it under the tree. I hope he likes it as much as the baby blanket I knit as a baby gift.
We live busy lives, and if we don’t lead busy lives then we sometimes think life is boring. We need to find the happy balance of doing enough, having enough goals, and choosing the right goals when we can’t do everything. When we look back over our lives and we had to give something up for something more important are we happy with our choices? If we made the right choices our lives have probably worked out pretty well.
Sometimes the choice is about two good things, and sometimes it is about making the best of what is, and what can be. If the choices we made were the best for our family then we are probably happy with our choices over the long haul. One of the goals of every parent I think is to set their children up for a good life. That doesn’t mean they won’t have to work for a living or that life will be easy, but we want them to have the tools to build a life they are proud of, and their children will be proud of.
2024 is coming soon, what goals will we set and accomplish? If we meet every goal too easily perhaps we need to set more audacious goals.
The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting and achieving goals. Og Mandino
Focus on the process “Focus on the process more than the goal; goal leads to success or failure, the process leads to the goal.” Ashim Sarmah
If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes. Andrew Carnegie
Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more, and have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.
