I'll keep this short, sweet, and to the point.
My friend Donald Miller says you can only complete three projects in a given year. Just three. It's no wonder we get so discouraged a month into our New Year's resolutions as we look at a haunting list of ten aspirations still left untouched. We've already set ourselves up for failure from the start. We're much more limited than we would previously have liked to admit.
It's really easy to avoid vulnerability and decide to not have any goals. If we don't set goals then we can't fail, right? Wrong. By not trying we guarantee failure from the beginning. Never swinging the bat ensures you're going to strike out. If we don't try at all, we fail.
Goals help us become proactive rather than reactive.
Deadlines force us to move. Because an object at rest stays at rest. If I don't have to do anything then I'm not going to. But a looming deadline approaching incites action, creativity, and a sense of urgency, giving me the motivation I often lack. It would be such a waste to just plod along through life, bumping from opportunity to opportunity without any real direction. We'll get to the end of our lives and feel a deep sense of existential despair rather than a pervading sense of satisfaction. We will have created a life out of happenstance rather than a life full of meaning and purpose.
Our lives are brimming with meaning and purpose.
Everything we do matters. Every hour we spend, every word we speak, every meal we eat, it all matters. With each passing day we can work towards hope, renewal, and love or we can passively sit by and watch those things fall apart. We can be consumers or we can be cultivators. We can create or we can complain. And trust me, we'll be full of complaints when we get to the end of our lives and realize they felt like mere accidents.
Three projects. One year. And who knows how many years we have.
Tick tock tick tock.
And it's scary to want things, I mean really and truly want them. It requires risk and vulnerability to go out on a limb and accomplish those goals. It's also scary to want things out loud, loud enough for others to hear. Because then there's a sense of accountability.
All of that to say things might get a little quiet around here for a bit.
Which makes me nervous. I fear, especially if you're new around here, that you may move on. I fear I won't be able to hold your attention and you'll discover there are infinitely wiser and cooler blogs out there worth reading. For the longest time I was afraid to slow down the blog and actually commit to the things I feel most passionate about because people would abandon ship. And really I was afraid to be all in with the goals I would actually like to accomplish. It was easy to put those career goals on hold because I would say I didn't have time. I hid behind things like this blog, building a platform, and a lot of other bullshit to keep me from pursuing something.
Because I would like to write a book.
Now, I would also like to vomit because I can't believe I just typed that out loud. But it's true. I would like to write a book. Writing a book isn't the only project I'm focusing on (if you want to know the others just ask), but it is certainly the most time consuming. It's going to take a lot of time, energy, and effort. If my efforts are split up into multiple places then it'll never get done. And if it does miraculously get done it'll be horrible and no one, not even my mother, would ever want to read it.
I'm really freaking scared.
But I figured it was better to be honest. You can expect a post maybe every week or every other week tops. I'm not completely going off the grid. I also won't be hiding out in some cabin in the woods in my underwear typing away. I'm very much alive and well, I'm just focusing in on some projects that need my mostly undivided attention.
Thanks for coming on this journey with me. I'm excited but mostly terrified. I'm well aware of the fact that I can and most likely will fail. I'll ask for you to help dust me off along the way. It's really hard to look at your three projects and fully commit to them with zero assurance that they'll succeed.
So what are your three? Do you need permission to go do them? If so, come join me. Say no to some things and make space for your projects. Creativity and inspiration have waited long enough. If you've quit your projects along the way then pick them back up again. If you don't have projects or goals I say sit down right now and write them down.
I would seriously love to hear what you want to do. Email me, text me, comment on this blog or on Facebook. Let's hold each other accountable to discovering and developing our three projects. If we don't accomplish anything other than becoming a little less lonely along the way then I guarantee it was all worth it.