The One Rule of Achieving Your Goals

A couple weeks ago, Mr. K and I had the glorious task of raking the backyard. The backyard is big and we had put this off for weeks, so the whole place was covered with leaves.

Ever the drama queen, I felt hopeless, completely hopeless. I wanted to quit before I began. I was thinking "there is no way we will be able to finish this." Luckily, as a foil to my pessimistic self, Mr. K jumped right to it, raking with abandon. I joined in begrudgingly. Soon enough, the grass was becoming visible. Within the afternoon, we had blisters on our hands from the rakes (the worst part about yard work) but had cleared the yard.

Why tell you this, admittedly boring, story? This mundane experience had something to teach me. I struck upon an aphorism: start working and keep working until it's done. I have a tendency to quit before I even start because a task seems impossible. I want to take the easy way out. This temptation is in all of us, in one area of our life or another. If something seems unattainable, why even attempt it? Maybe it's in cutting down your spending, or in saving money, or in kicking a bad habit. However, I think that we overestimate the difficulty of tasks because we're focusing only on the final result.

Goals are great, but when that goal seems unreachable, it can become a burden of expectation instead of inspiration. When this happens to me, I have to shift my focus from hitting that goal 100% and turn instead to making progress 1% at a time. When it seems impossible or complicated, I simplify things by just telling myself "start and don't stop until it's done."

Often, we can make things more complicated than they need to be, especially when it comes to finances. If you want something, like financial independence, there's not a special formula that will get you there in a snap of the fingers. You just have to start and keep going. You have to start saving/ investing more and spending less and then keep doing that until you reach financial independence.

Here's the secret sauce: the work along the way has a goodness in it. Like the trope "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way," the growth and progress is the point. A metaphor is helpful here. Think about sports. The goal is to win the game. However, the fun, the good part, is the actually playing and playing your best. Winning is just the icing on the cake. The same is true for life. You want to achieve your goals, but the goal isn't the only good part of it. "Playing your best" is where the transformation really happens. That's where you build the life of your dreams. That's where the joy lives.