While a grad student, I often justified the way I spent my time by saying that “I had to.” I had to stay up night to finish an assignment. I had to skip family Thanksgiving to study for final exams. I had to do whatever it would take to graduate, on time, with a gpa that would satisfy The Firm. Well, all that had to single-mindedness got me somewhere. But now that I have my JD and MBA I can see that doing what I had to was a survival strategy, not the way I want to keep on living.
Sure, there will always be things that I have to do. But if I can make a change, if I can stop seeing myself as a person who is constrained by long-term goals and instead set my own course to include a satisfying short-term, I am bound to be more happy and more successful.
How do I go about setting my own course? It’s simple: I need to create a list of goals/wants. And while it seems so simple, I am finding this hard to do. First, it is hard because–for so long–the JD/MBA was the only goal that I actively worked toward. Second, it is hard because I seem to have accepted (I’m not sure when) that my life would not include certain things that I want (badly!).
A creature of habit, I began in precisely the wrong way. I opened an Excel workbook and created a financial model of my life from the present up until the month of my 50th birthday. I found my evening with my Excel workbook to be a pretty darn emotional look at the long-term. The process got me thinking about my big goals: family, health, savings, home ownership, and travel. But the process also showed me that even in what I consider my personal worst-case scenario, it will be possible to stay afloat. This, in turn, helped alleviate some of the negative feeling I’ve been harboring about the future. It also assured me that not every decision has to be about the big, long-term goals.
Now that I’ve considered my future on the macro level, I want to give some thought to what I hope to accomplish in the near term. Because I will turn thirty at the end of 2010, I thought it appropriate to create a list of thirty goals that I would like to accomplish by the end of my thirtieth year. These goals are neither long-term nor financial. They are short-term goals that I hope will help me have some fun. I hope that they will help me reach the end of my 30th year with a feeling that I am closer to living the life I want on a day to day basis, not just getting by for the sake of long-term goals.
- Go to the Blanton for the first time
- Visit Milk+Honey (use gift certificate)
- Kayak on Town Lake
- Photograph my favorite spots in Austin
- Make China, India, and Austin photo books
- Become a patient of my brother, the DDS
- Start and finish a painting
- Teach pups to do a trick other than “sit”
- Forge a new friendship
- Travel to New Zealand
- Go to a concert of my own (not a bf’s) choosing
- Go to a yoga class, dance class, or dance performance at least once per month
- Return to state park for a hike
- Return to my old beach spot & eat favorite taquitos for lunch
- Find new home
- Move to Beach Town
- Visit my recipients
- Start my Career
- Write and publish an article
- Run my 2nd half marathon
- Return to the slopes to ski for the first time in many years
- Arrange a photographer for family photo when we’re all home for the holidays
- Repair my bicycle, hit the trails in Beach Town
- Visit with Stanford friends
- Meet my best friend V’s new baby and best friend L’s new baby
- Visit cousin at grad school
- Visit family in Pacific Northwest
- Attend a college sporting event
- Attend a professional sporting event
- Read twelve books
Read the full article: Setting Her Own Course