Goals 2015

If you've read my blog you know I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions. I don't like the concept of waiting until the beginning of a new year to try to better yourself. You can just as easily set self-improvement goals on April 17 or Sept. 20 as you can on Jan. 1 (or Jan. 11, as I glance at the calendar).


That said, I'm a little motivated right now and I feel like now would be a good time to set some goals for myself. So, here goes:


SAVE MORE MONEY: This was a goal for last year, too. I'm being purposely vague because I don't like to get too specific about finances. I will say this: the target dollar value I've selected is a pretty ambitious goal.
Sometimes they say being too ambitious is unrealistic and sets yourself up for failure, but I'm looking at it this way -- if I save half as much money, I've done myself a lot of good. So, I'll do my best and I'm not going to beat myself up if I don't achieve it.


LOSE 7-10 POUNDS: In the past year I've lost a good 25-30 pounds and I feel a lot better about myself. I have more energy and that's helped me not just physically but emotionally as well.
When I started this health kick, I had a goal weight in mind, which was what I weighed a few years ago when I felt like I was in the best shape of my life. I am currently (depending on the time of day I weigh myself and how good I've been) about 7-10 pounds away from that goal weight. Now, my goal weight is an educated guess. It's possible I may only be able to lose 5 more pounds without starving myself. Time will tell.


FINISH MY NOVEL: This is the one goal I set every year, and the one goal I have the most problem with. It's always a time commitment issue -- I have a full-time job and a part-time job, an active social life, and unfortunately a need for occasional sleep. Sometimes these are legitimate reasons; other times I uses these as excuses because I fear that nobody will ever want to read my novel and I'll fail.
Back in September, a friend of mine gave me a really good suggestion as to how to force myself to continue to work on my novel (and of course, after this suggestion two of my associates at work spent the next month taking vacation time and it made it very hard to implement this idea). I'll keep working on it, because in a lot of ways this is my most important goal. Sometimes the best goals are the scariest ones, and the ones you're most afraid of failing at, but that doesn't mean you can't confront your fears and strive to achieve them. I would like to get my novel to the point where I can at least have some trusted people read it start to finish and give me helpful feedback.


So there it is. We'll see what happens. I'll be back at the end of December to let you know how I did.