live – Budget Bliss: Bucket List

In an earlier post, I wrote about letting go of the wall while ice skating. The wall was a place of safety, it kept me from falling and allowed me to build up the skills that I needed in order to traverse the ice. After all, it is by definition a rather hard surface and falling on it of course causes pain and potential injury. Yet, the wall is very limiting. One can only go as far out as one’s arms reach. If there are many people clinging to the wall, then one cannot go faster than the slowest person. One does not know the joy of freedom even though freedom brings risk (as it always does).

If skaters only ever clung to walls we certainly wouldn’t get the phenomenal performances by the top figure skaters, we wouldn’t have hockey or speed skating. In order to be able to reach great heights one must be willing to take those risks. What we often don’t see if the number of times these top performing athletes have fallen. Those who stand on the precipice have a path paved in failure.

In order to truly live authentic, extraordinary lives, we have to be willing to forgo some safety and take risks. If you want to pursue a certain career most of us would have to take on a least some risk of taking on student loans and going to school. Even a technical school usually requires a modest sum of money which many of us don’t have ready access to. Even if you do have that money, you’re still risking having spent a good chunk of change in hopes that it will pay off. In order to find love and get married, you have to risk heartache and loss. If you do manage to find love and get married, you risk losing that love through death or abandonment. If you go on an amazing once in a lifetime vacation, you still have to travel which carries a risk. If you want genuine friendships, then you have to risk rejection. You may lose your current relationships in your pursuit to be more authentically yourself. The pay off to these things is worth the risk because otherwise you risk living a small, unfulfilled, lonely life.

Photo by Alexandre Cubateli Zanin on Pexels.com

Isn’t that what so many great stories are about? The person who risked it all and became famous? The person who made the big discovery or invented the next big technology. The person who became the hero. All of these stories require great risk and often personal sacrifice. Over and over again, the stories we tell require the protagonist to step outside of their comfort zone. It is the only way for them to grow and change enough to overcome the obstacles to their goals.

It’s actually the only way for us to grow and change as well. Without letting go and challenging ourselves how will we gain new skills to overcome life’s obstacles? Can we really risk not taking the risks? After all, if we haven’t pushed ourselves to go further then we may find that we aren’t able to keep up with the ever changing world.

We are taking a risk either way, but one way gives us an illusion of safety. We stay in the same dead-end job because it seems safer than looking for a new one or starting our own business. That is until the economy tanks and you lose that once seemingly secure job or your salary is no longer enough to keep up with inflation. The safety we had becomes our downfall because we aren’t in a position to pivot.

The truth is when we cling to the safety nets in fear of something bad happening to us we are choosing to let something bad happen to us anyways. I don’t condemn people who choose the wall and choose the safety net. After all, I’m a bit of a risk averse person myself. I have a lot of responsibilities and someone who is dependent on me. You, dear reader, may have children or other dependents. It is very difficult to choose the uncertainty that comes with risk. Research has demonstrated that people would rather choose the unpleasant reality that they know then experience the anxiety that uncertainty brings, even if that uncertainty would most likely lead to a better outcome. It is very difficult to fight that and we can come up with all sorts of reasons as to why we shouldn’t let go.

I don’t wish to lie to myself or to you. When we choose not to take the risk, we are choosing the certainty of a life that is smaller than what could have been. However for all my risk aversion, I, for one, do not want to choose a small life, so it’s time to let go.

As it is Christmas Eve, that means that in only one week’s time, the New Year shall be upon us. After the Christmas festivities, carols, feasting, presents, and pageants, our attention shall turn to reflection of the year previous and to the year ahead. If you are like most people, dear reader, as always, you started the year with the best of intentions. You resolved to lose weight, write that novel, go on that vacation, finally get married, pay off that debt and others I haven’t named here.

Like most other people your resolution probably quickly faded. The habit you were trying to set didn’t quite “stick”. You may have faced a set back like an unexpected health issue preventing you from going to the gym every day or the time you set aside to work out got eaten up by staying late at work or if we’re honest, you were probably too exhausted and burned out to keep it up every single day. Then the feeling of failure crept in, negative self-judgments and justifications as to why you just can’t follow through with your plans followed quickly by negative coping usually in the form of doom scrolling through feeds you don’t even actually like and binge watching objectively terrible shows on whatever streaming services you happen to have.

Now, I could parrot the many articles as to why it is so difficult to keep resolutions. Yes, we often aim too high and bite off more than we can chew. The common advice is to set smaller more obtainable goals along the way like if we want to learn a new language, to devote 5 minutes a day to learn a word of phrase (that won’t work to help you learn a new language that’s terrible advice!). We’re extoled to consider the why we want to change. The experts will remind us of the adage that the pain of not changing has to be greater than the pain of changing for us to really change. Therefore, we must consider the greater purpose to our goals! Which is true to some extent – but I digress. I have yet to see these well meaning advice columns actually help.

However, there is one very clever YouTuber CGP Grey who introduced me to a new and novel approach to New Year’s Resolutions. Now, some of you may already be familiar with his work. If you’re someone who likes history, flags and other niche esoteric topics and have not yet discovered this gem of the internet, now you have and you’re welcome – but I digress again.

He suggests that we throw out the SMART Goal version of resolutions (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) and instead introduce ourselves to a general theme. A SMART Goal may be I will reach A2 in Spanish by the end of the year; instead I might say “Year of Spanish”. It’s broad because it’s supposed to be. After all the point of most resolutions is that you’re trying to improve yourself in some manner so exact milestones don’t matter so long as the trend is positive you’re still reaching the goal. Even just stopping a negative trend can be a positive or decelerating one is still improvement. Maybe you didn’t lose weight, but you stopped gaining weight. Maybe you didn’t put on muscle mass, but you created a work out habit.

With a theme you’re focused less on the “big SMART goals” and mostly just focused on any small, positive changes you can make towards your theme. Your life is full of small branching decisions that allow you to have more, less or the same of the things you want. If your theme is Spanish and you find yourself standing in line, rather than scrolling on Instagram you pull out your phone and start learning Spanish words.

As Grey describes it, your theme becomes a friendly little bot pushing you in small moments towards your theme and a good theme can’t really fail because those small changes will start to add up. It’s a matter of picking large enough themes, to move your life in a positive direction that can encompass a myriad of ways to get there. Let’s say you want to lose weight, maybe your theme could instead be “Year of Health”. Your friendly little bot may nudge you towards eating healthier. However, you find that you struggle to make good choices with your eating habits but instead start walking every day, you are still on theme. Maybe you were thinking of going to the gym, instead of that gym member ship, your bot nudges you to buy those weights and you start doing some light exercise at home.

After all, we can’t plan for the future. If the resolution is I will lose x amount of weight by the end of the year and then you become ill, you may not be able to lose weight, heck your only goal may simply to be improve your health at all. If your theme was say health, then you haven’t failed because it wasn’t about the weight it was just making small choices in each moment towards the theme of health. Having a theme allows you to pivot with the hills and dales of life, a theme is adaptable. Maybe you started off trying to memorize different Spanish words and found that learning a word a day didn’t actually help you speak to your Spanish speaking co-worker. However, after a few stumbling interactions, she agrees to have lunch with you each day and starts to teach you – you haven’t failed because you stopped memorizing words. In fact that would be one of the best ways to learn!

By keeping yourself “on theme” you will begin to notice all the different choices that you make each day either towards the theme or away from the theme. This gets you to reflect on how you think which changes how you think. Instead of experiencing yet another failure of not meeting goals of your past self, you are free to experience the successes of the person you are in this moment and free to set down the path for your future self. Often what we envision the theme of the year to mean in January isn’t as we envision it in December, which is beautiful! According to CGP Grey, Themes should be broad, directional and resonant. It’s about building a life you want to live – which incidentally is exactly what this blog is about. Helping people life exceptional lives.

CGP Grey breaks down “Building A Life You Want to Live” into Themes, which goes into systems to build up those themes, to targets for creating those systems, targets which may or may not get you there and small actions you take to hit those targets. Consider learning a language. An action I may do is practicing Spanish on Duolingo everyday. A target may be “get through 1 unit each week” a system may be that I need to practice for 30 minutes after dinner each day. This encompasses a theme of language learning which helps me build a life in which I can converse in Spanish with relative ease. It’s in those in between steps targets and systems that our resolutions fall apart. We think we need to take the life we want and break it down into small bite size chunks. Instead, with a theme we allow the targets and systems to arise more organically from the actions we can reasonably take towards the theme.

Finally, CGP Grey encourages us to consider that a year is a long time but a season is a very nice chunk of time, not so long as to slip away from us but also not so short as to be unreasonable. As we just hit the Winter Solstice, perhaps you would consider Winter of Order to try and become more organized. As nature changes reminding you of passage of time, it can help keep you “on theme”. So over this next week, I encourage you dear reader to consider a theme instead of a resolution.

Tag: live

Take the Risk and Let Go

New Year’s Resolution or New Year’s Themes?