Everyone has dreams. Everyone works toward some purpose or purposes.
You may never have called these goals, but everything you do leads to something.
What do you want? What would you like to do? What will you have accomplished in six months, one year, and five years?
assignment 6
My big goal for this year was buying a house. I had no idea how much time and trouble it would be. After spending two months looking, I found the right house at the right price and spent the next three months closing, cleaning, painting, and moving.
That's a good accomplishment in a year. I certainly hope not to do it again in the near future.
Previous goals have included writing a book (done, twice), finding the right job (again, done), having code accepted into a major free software project (done, a few times), and graduating from college (summa cum laude).
I've never been good at making long-term goals. Most of them have fallen into my lap. I went to college because I didn't know what else to do after high school. I found my current job through a long series of related but apparently coincidental events. I spent time wondering where my brother and sister-in-law and nephew would live for the next few years before starting a serious house hunt.
With those excuses in mind, I do have several longer-term goals.
Financially, I set a high savings level. I prefer to live frugally. One previous goal was to pay off my truck before buying a house. I did that. I also put down a large cash down payment on the house. Every year, I sock away the maximum allowable pre-tax amount into my work 401(k) account. My financial goal is to have a net worth of over a million dollars in the next twenty years. (That's very aggressive, but it's possible.)
My shorter financial goals include creating monthly and yearly budgets, increasing my personal investment accounts, and giving away more money to charitable causes. In short, I want more information about where my money goes. I do well having a vague, intuitive impression of how much I can and do spend, but I would like to do better.
Health-wise, my goal is to work out at least three days every week. I haven't reached this goal very often in the past year and regret it strongly. Even on days where I don't feel well (I'm struggling with the remains of a cold right now), I can still walk around the park down the street a couple of times. Having watched my grandmother on one side and my grandfather on the other side cease moving in their 70s, I want to maintain a reasonable level of fitness and activity for as long as possible. It's also nice to keep off some fat and put on more muscle.
Another smaller goal is to floss every other day. My dentist has warned of signs of gum disease already and I would like to arrest its progress (or reverse it, if possible). Again, three of my four grandparents lost their teeth possibly before my birth, so their examples inspire me to live differently.
Speaking of family, I have no goal of having children. It's the opposite; I have a goal never to have my own. Adoption or foster-care would be okay, but the idea of bringing a child into the world to face some of the health risks in my family — while there are plenty of children already who need homes and loving parents — seems very selfish and wrong. My thoughts may change later, but I have felt strongly about this for several years. Watching my 18 month-old nephew both amazes and frightens me. How do parents do it?
Despite wanting to remain childless, I would like to marry the right girl someday. That's definitely a long-term goal, however, because I don't know who she is. I have a couple of nice friendships that may eventually lead to something more, but I try not to look at life that way.
Perhaps that's another goal too, to treat women not as potential (or rejected) mates but rather as sisters and friends. I would rather grow a long-term relationship out of a strong friendship than jump into short-term relationships hoping to develop a friendship as well as a long-term relationship. A month into this experiment, it has taken some time to adjust to the mindset that friendship is more valuable than dating, but it has already changed my worldview.
Professionally, I have an amazingly cool idea for a book. I've explained it to a few other editors and am looking for authors and co-authors. This project will probably take over a year to complete, but it has the potential to reach a lot of people that need a good book on this subject. I'm being intentionally vague here.
In my hobbies I have several smaller and unfinished software projects to complete. This week I hope to revise my e-mail software to understand incoming messaes more fully, then to write another piece of software to implement one-way mailing lists. This will allow you to create a list of recipients, send a message to one address representing all recipients, and receive any replies to you only. This will be nice for keeping everyone in my family up to date as to my schedule, for example.
Other software projects include finishing the OpenGL bindings for Parrot SDL and setting up a family website where we can share pictures and stories with the various relatives across the country. My mother really wants that last project. Maybe I can work on it in December.
There's a lot of house work to do too. The office ceiling needs repainting and the entryway ceiling needs painting to match the living room. The deck needs washing, staining, and some bracing underneath. I have several pictures to hang and, in one corner of the living room, the arcade cabinet to assemble and paint.
Finally, I have a lot of small ideas to organize my life better. For example, what if I had a program to keep track of my meals and recipes and shopping lists? Would that be easier than taking notes and cooking what I feel like cooking?
I haven't categorized these as short, medium, or long-term goals yet. Perhaps the right answer is to make a list of things I would like to finish, then commit to doing one of them from every category each week. That could work.
Finally, I plan to finish both creating and writing the assignments for Write Your Life. This assignment marks the 20% point. It has gone well so far.