I have 1,000 different ideas rolling around in my head at any one time. It is a blessing but also a huge curse. Often times the list of all of the things that I’ve always wanted to do just seems to keep growing without any of them getting achieved or fully realized. It has given me great anxiety in the past, even to the point where it kept me from sleeping, that I wasn’t achieving all of the things that I wanted to do in life. Over the last few years, I have focused less on worrying about not achieving my goals but specifically on how I learn best and how I make things a habit. I found myself researching how humans tend to think about problems, how others have theorized how best to solve a problem, and how project management works. My research led me to learn something that I basically always knew, and that was small doable tasks make up the greater goals that you want to achieve. And isn’t that how it always goes? The hardest questions that we have for ourselves are usually answered by truths that were buried within ourselves already.

I am sure you have heard the various sayings like “A journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step” or “Practise makes perfect”. I definitely have, and I probably have retinal damage from how much eye-rolling I’ve done over the years at these truths that seem to be more cliche than sacred. Perhaps it is how many times I have heard these adages or rather the people that told them to me that made them so aggravating. I always thought that telling somebody to practice something was WAY easier than achieving the goal itself. In fact, even though I believe that practicing something will make you better at it, telling someone to just practice until they are a master is not very nuanced and is just downright misleading. It would be like a clinical psychologist telling one of their patients who suffer from depression to just snap out of it. Yes, the patient is there to ultimately “snap out of it” but in this scenario, they are not given the tools to help themselves reach that goal. I wanted to know the real way to “practice” something but in doing so I added yet another goal to my ever-growing list of goals; learn how to efficiently achieve goals.

Just to give you a picture of what I am dealing with in my head, which to me just seems like a random smattering of interests and hobbies, here is a list of some of the goals that I have for myself. Some of these I never have started, some are in the works, and some production has slowed down.

• Learn to play the drums.
• Grow vegetables indoors.
• Learn React or Angular.
• Write screenplays.
• Draw comics.
• Collect trading cards.
• Write novels.
• Record music where all the instruments are played by me.
• Keep a video diary.
• Resell comics and antiques online on a regular basis.
• Help my girlfriend with her stuffed animal store.

These are all goals that seem realistic enough for me to achieve. There are a lot of goals not on this list that I consider unrealistic, and so I will not show them here. In all honesty, you probably should never stifle your dreams but marking them as “unachievable” in your mind but it’s probably ok to filter out some into a “someday” list that is not going to happen soon, like going to space for instance. One day I might be able to actually do this. I am probably going to be pretty old when it is a possibility, or who knows maybe not, but right now it’s just not going to happen if I am being honest with myself. Instead, I could focus on one of these other more doable goals first and be in a much better position to go to space. Hell, any of these ideas could lead to enough capital for me to buy a ticket on an early Space X civilian rocket! But this leads to me my first strategy which I call Goal Focus.

Goal Focus

For years I had a lot of debt. Credit card debt and student loan debt mostly. But I could never get anywhere with paying down the debt because of the interest rates, I didn’t make much money, and my car was always breaking down. My girlfriend Kina, who is very financially savvy, suggested that I only focus on one debt at a time. I suddenly recognized that I always thought it was better to spread out payments on all debts so that I could finish them all at the same time, but honestly, this was completely wrong even if it felt intuitive. From then I treated these debts as goals, but I only focused on how to get rid of each one individually.

First I focused on my car, I understood that this would never truly be complete because machines always need repairs, but it made sense to me to make preventive maintenance changes to my car with the cash that I had, instead of spreading it across the board to all of my debts. After my car was fixed to a state where I didn’t have to worry so much about looming repair costs I began to focus on my credit card debt, which honestly was the most costly of all of my debts because of the interest rates. I did some research about what my options were and I discovered that there are “balance transfer” credit cards available that essentially buy your debt from your current creditors and they usually give you an extended period of time to pay off this debt with them for no interest. I understand the gamble here, if a shopping addict were to get one of these cards it would just open the door for them to go on a new spending spree that put them deeper into the abyss of massive debt. But in all honesty, my credit card debt was just a bad holdover from the recession. Like a lot of working poor, I used my credit cards as a way to survive, as long as I made payments I knew that I could keep a roof over my head and food in my fridge. It was a safe bet to me that I could pay this debt off very easily in 12 months especially without having to pay the interest anymore, which was frankly kicking me in the teeth. When I was approved for the balance transfer card I found out I could make scheduled payments and as many as I wanted per month. So I did some math and found out exactly how much it would take to pay off this debt in 12 months and I split the total per month into two payments that automatically would come out of my bank account every two weeks. It worked like a charm and I could cross another goal off of my list, rather effortlessly.

So what really happened here was that I divided up what I perceived to be one big problem into smaller tasks. When I broke this up I also made it easier for me to wrap my mind around the larger problem and tackle it easier. You can pretty much apply this to anything in your life, but it where it really exceeds is in programming. Programming problems can be vastly complex and require a lot of pieces to be solved and so it is a must to break the problem into small tasks. There are many tools that you can use to make these tasks for yourself or others. My personal favorite is Clickup but I have used others such as Monday and Microsoft Project, these work just as well.

Don’t Give Up

While little goals can help you achieve, you will also face setbacks and failures. All I can say is don’t be dissuaded! You have the power to exact real and tangible change in your life and failures are just a toe hold to reaching your next success. In fact, you should want to fail at least a little bit because you tend to learn a lot more about what you are trying to do and you learn more about what works for you to better solve problems.

Speaking from experience, as I have grown older I have noticed that when I have an idea or a goal I work really hard at it at first only to lose some speed later and finally let a project go dark. Often, I would view this as a failure and never work on these projects again. In fact, I would spend so much time telling myself and others that I was going to these projects that I felt that when I stopped working on them that it would be an embarrassment to pick it up again later. I know this sounds crazy, but I was actually telling myself this in mind. Nowadays I force myself to pick these projects back up again because I really want the ultimate outcome and I keep telling myself this. Even if I work on something a little bit every few months, this is time banked towards that goal. Little by little I will cross the finish line if I just don’t give up!

The Obstacles In Your Way Are Made Up By You

We all have reasons why we can’t do something, some sort of obstacle always stands in our way, and I will make this brash blanket statement because I believe it is usually always true. We make up all of our obstacles, there are always some reasons we have invented as to why we can’t do something and it is seriously self-defeating. I am too old, I am too young, I am too fat, I am not talented enough, I can’t do that because of _______. Even though I am aware of this habit that we all seem to have in varying degrees of severity, I still make these excuses. I am usually unaware that I am doing it in the moment but I have developed a different way of looking at these excuses. There are probably some folks who can just turn this thinking off with practice but for me, it’s just not that simple. The best way I have dealt with this is to just treat an obstacle as if it is another task.

A little self-realization is just as important as trying to solve a problem. If you trace back your footsteps you may find that you made up these excuses to stop yourself from starting on your quest. You may have stopped yourself because you are secretly afraid of the hurt that comes with failure. This may just be your mind’s natural defense, a way of self-preservation. If you can just tell yourself, “Yeah I know doing this has a risk of failure, but I think that in this case the rewards far outweigh the risk.”, you might start to hear that little voice in your head say, “Yeah, you’re right, I give you permission to try.”

Develop For Yourself

Everything I detailed above is based on things I have heard from other people or I developed of myself because these were things that worked. I try different approaches, some work and some don’t, and you should do the same thing too. If it doesn’t sound like anything I just detailed will work for you, don’t bother with any of them. If you take away anything, it should be that looking introspectively at yourself in relation to your goals and how you accomplish them can help you develop your own system to better achieve your goals. Knowing yourself and what you will or won’t do can help you save a lot of time and see more results. Let me know in the comments if there are any techniques that you use to better achieve your goals.