Day 24:  Pick Something BIG Off Your Life List. 

 

    Make it something that will take six months to a year to accomplish or maybe it is a five-year goal. 

    It is important to have big goals in our lives.  Big goals remind us that we are here on this planet for a reason.  When we were little kids, we could dream about being anything we wanted, we could travel anywhere we wanted to go.  And the reason we could do that is because as kids, we aren’t subjected to the daily drudgeries that drag us down. 

    Think about what your job was as a kid.  Get up.  Eat your breakfast.  Go to school nine months out of the year.  Change out of your school clothes.  Do your homework.  Play.  Maybe you had some household chores as you got older. 

    Now think about what your parents’ job was when you were a kid.  Get up, get the kids up and ready for school, make them breakfast, make sure they had everything they needed for school that day.  Go to work for eight or ten hours.  Come home, cook dinner, make sure the kids did their homework, clean up the kitchen, do any laundry that needed to be caught up on.  Then the ongoing duties:  Pay the bills, keep the house clean, make sure the outside of the house is maintained, worry about paying for braces, college, weddings.  Worry about whether you are going to get that promotion.  Keep everyone safe.  Nurture and teach the kids.  Be a good spouse.  Be a good employee.  Be a good neighbor.  Be a good citizen. 

    Is it any surprise that people are sleep-walking through their lives?  They are bogged down with worry and fear, and rightfully so.  But your dreams and aspirations get sacrificed in the process.  And you find yourself on the treadmill, running ever faster and not getting ahead.  It is no wonder that we live lives of quiet desperation.  A person without a dream is a person who has no reason to do more than the minimum to survive.  You end up in survival mode.  Well, survival is an integral part of life, but life is more than survival. 

    You are reading this because you want MORE out of life.  So pick something BIG off your life list.  And live a bigger life.

  The point is I checked to see if I was on track and adjusted my plan to get back on or keep on track.  The same thing goes for your month long project.  You need to set markers or checkpoints along the way to ensure that you are making progress and staying on track.

    Say your goal is to write a short story.  At the end of the month, you want a completed short story.   So what will your story look like at the end of three weeks?  At that point, it should be fairly complete and just need polishing and honing.

    What will your story look like halfway through the month?  You should have your characters and plot in place but maybe the action is disjointed or the characters aren’t behaving in ways that are congruent to the personalities you have assigned to them.  During Week Three you are filling in the details, fleshing out the characters, truly putting the whole story together. 

    Week two might be the outline of the story as well as the character sketches.  You write descriptions of the characters – what they look like, how they dress, physical gestures, personality tics, how they speak.  You have a plot outline and you have a strong idea of how your characters are going to interact and move the plot forward. 

    The first week you should be doing a lot of thinking – what do you want to write about?  Is there a particular character, event or theme that is tugging at you?  Noodle things around in your brain, sketch some ideas out on paper.  Start working on the characters and plot.

    So take your short-term goal, and work backwards, asking yourself where should I be in three weeks, in two?  What should I have finished the first week.  And set your benchmarks so you can make sure you are on track.