As an INFJ only child with a Scorpio ascendant and a lifetime of being right, deep down I believe myself to be the wisest person I know. Absolutely, I learn from others and am always looking for new material to scheme with, but the way I process and repurpose that information is truly an artform I do not often see paralleled in the natural world. Thank goodness I have a blog.
One of the most common traps people fall into is thinking that we have to pick just one of the things we're interested in, and pursue that over everything else. This concept is, to put it delicately, the actual worst. If you only care about one thing then fab, have a wonderful, productive life. For everyone else, this belief can be discouraging and lead to complete inaction if you can't choose which of your own dreams to shatter forever, so the sooner you realise it ain't legit the better. Sure, you do need to have a strong focus on your goals if you want to take them anywhere particularly notable, but there's no reason you can't have more than one goal at a time, and find ways to make your passions fit together.
That being said, figuring out how to organise yourself and your priorities in a way that facilitates pursuing multiple separate avenues at once is one of the most difficult things in the world, especially if one or more of the areas you care about is something that others are dedicating their entire lives to. For example, one of the things I want to do in my life is write books. This doesn't particularly stress me out because it's a pretty straight forward process and I can easily see where I'd have the time to do it. Conversely, I have done virtually nothing with music or singing in my adult life, despite consistently saying I want to and being (no h8) pretty fkin good at it, because it's so vast and important and (most crucially) undefined that I get overwhelmed any time I really think about it and put it to one side. Add to that the fact that there are people who dedicate their entire being to pursuing it as a singular life passion, and it becomes immobilisingly intimidating. The key here is perspective.
While there's an enormous part of my life that I've left virtually untouched for years, in that time I have also accomplished a lot of other quite big things with relative ease; the key point of difference I can see between the two is the existence of clear, measurable goals. When it comes to things like starting a 'normal' career or moving overseas, I was able to set clear goals and tick them off. When it comes to music, the fact that I'm not willing to make it my sole raison d'être has placed me at the bottom of my own mental pile. No one else has ever told me I can't do it, but because I can't point to a specific example of someone who's done exactly what I want to do (which is honestly irrelevant, and impossible since I haven't even figured out what that is yet), I get discouraged before even trying to set specific goals, so nothing gets done.
Goal setting and monitored productivity is something that deserves its own post, so I won't go into it now, but there is one quick way to get some solid insight of your own without needing any background knowledge or planning. Take 30 seconds (important that it's just off the top of your head, so no longer) and write down your three most important goals in life right now. Once they're written down, focus on one question:
What is keeping you from having reached them already?
It sounds like such a wishy washy surface level question, but when you get over yourself and actually think about it the answer becomes one of your most important tools. Sometimes it's a matter of timing, for instance if you have everything you can in place but are waiting for a particular event like a moving day, but usually it's deeper than that and takes a bit of self awareness to reach. For me, regardless of the goal I have in mind, my reasons almost always fall into one of two very clear categories.
1. Procrastinating and directing too much of my energy towards the wrong things
2. Fear and being easily discouraged
The second point is the more difficult to unpack, because it can include everything from fear of failure to being discouraged because I don't have a particular skill I think I need to do something 'properly'. Over the last year or so I think I've come quite a long way with it, but not quite enough that I feel qualified to offer advice yet, so for now the first issue is what we're here to talk about.
At this point it should come as no surprise that I have been floating in the midst of a rather uncertain time in my life, which I am keen to wrap up promptly. It's been a nice readjustment period but I would like to start achieving things now, thank you, and this time I plan to do it on a new scale. To quote Julius Caesar, "Go big or go home, bitch." My aim is to create a permanent, sustainable shift in the way I live my life, but every good scheme needs a timeframe so I've given myself one. I am turning 26 in 260 days* and that seems like quite a reasonable period over which to transform one's life and productivity, so I'm crafting a plan to finally get all my goals to work together and train myself to execute them with deadly efficiency. I would like to become the achievement machine I was born to be, and to do that I need to enlist the best.
As stated in the opening of this post, I believe that is me.
Over the years I have written a plethora of helpful posts imparting various gems of wisdom on everything from breakups to writer's block, and if you pick through the colourful language and rampant narcissism there is actually some solid advice to be gleaned. I've never undertaken a complete life overhaul on quite this scale, but I sure have written a whole lot of mini-guides that will be handy along the way, so I've decided to take those and integrate them into an overall plan to take me from where I am now to where I want to be by my 26th birthday.
Since I am a very particular little princess and do not like the idea of such a major undertaking beginning half way through a month, the first segment of this plan is not an Official Month, but rather a two week preliminary period of getting one's ducks in a row. Luckily, today is a new moon, which is great for starting new things. Even BETTER, it's an ARIES full moon which is GREAT for starting new things, AND the moon in my BIRTH CHART is in Aries so it's quadruply good for ME. I will level with you quickly all I feel in my heart right now is caffeine. ANYWAY.
My aims for this sneaky little 2 week prelude are:
Sort out my sleep pattern using How To Be A Morning Person
Establish consistent morning & night routines
Separate creative work from work work
Finish my portfolio website
Get boring life admin done (tax, business registration, voting enrolment etc.)
Make the lists from point #2 of Detox Your Life
Set long term goals and clear intentions
Make and complete daily To Do lists
Cultivate a positive growth mindset using a mix of mindfulness and tacticss from How To Un-Rut Yourself
Get blog posts ready ahead of schedule so I can focus on actual work
Organise our living space & clothes (Post on clearing out your wardrobe here)
Generally feel as though I am a functioning human being who will be able to handle the addition of consistent upgrades without having a meltdown over some uncovered base down the line
I see this project as an intensive course in productivity and balance, and a kickstart for the various avenues down which I hope to successfully wander. Each month I should think will have a theme and its own set of goals, and it's going to be a process of trial and error, action and assessment. At this point I'm guessing the key is going to be scale - not running blindly at overall goals, but breaking things down into smaller steps and keep track of those steps with deadlines in mind. Basically my theory is that you don't learn a language by reading an entire book off the bat, you learn the basics and gradually build up from there, so that's what I intend to do with a lifestyle.
These two weeks are for building my foundation, and these eight months are for becoming the person I need to be to live the rest of my life the way I would like to. Hopefully there will be a bit of method to my Maddiness (smiled so froggishly to myself just now #HamletFanz come forth), and I can turn my own experience into something you can use as well. I'll be interspersing updates with my normal posts to keep me accountable, and if you're doing any kind of scheming at present please keep me in the loop on social meeds so we can soar together.
For now, I must go and make soup, for it is 3.37pm and I am famished.
Many blessinz, x0x0.
*I am so amped to be 26. For some reason in my head ages are grouped like '26, 23, 24, 27, whatever all the same' and '25, 40', so I am ready to be back in my 20s and side step The Menopause for another couple of decades.
