Lessons from 2018

As I write this, it is the last day of 2018. I am reflecting on the goals that I wrote and reviewed and shared and reviewed again and pondered and redlined and reviewed again with the team and rewrote at the end of 2017. I am a bit perplexed that after spending so much time putting these goals together, that I did not accomplish them all 100%. It’s like Groundhog’s Day. This is the same thing that happened in 2015, 2016 and 2017. If I am generous with myself, I can say that I met or exceeded 50% of my goals. This is disappointing when you look at the numbers. This is not even a D+ on a curve. 

But consider the alternative. What if I had not set a single goal for the year? Where would I be then? Every day would be an aimless activity, moving from one distraction or problem to the next, waiting for something to happen and responding to problems instead of making my own way. Granted, most of us have to spend a significant amount of time responding to problems, but we all have power over much of our time, and we can spend it productively progressing toward our goals or despondently reacting and waiting for the next problem to arrive.

Two of the goals I set for 2018 were exceeded. I can trace this back to the strategies and timelines that we put together in 2017. Almost every day, I was doing something to make progress toward these goals. I can attribute some of the success in these areas to the passion that I had for them, but mostly, I believe the success lies in the daily persistence to do the little things over and over again to make progress in bite-sized chunks.

If I achieved 50% of my goals, that means the other half were unmet. How disappointing is that!.......except for the fact that we made significant progress in each of those unmet goal areas. We did not reach our goal, but we still made progress. Again, consider the impact of having no goal to begin with. If you have 1,000 arrows and a target to shoot at, you might hit it 100 times or 900 times or 1,000 times. If you have no target, you will hit it ZERO times, no matter how hard you work and how focused you are. 

“Set realistic goals, keep re-evaluating, and be consistent” -Venus Williams-