Stay Committed to Your Goals

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%%"I've got my faults, but living in the past isn't one of them.
There's no future in it.%%" - George "Sparky" Anderson 1934 - 2010Baseball player, coach, manager

How many dreams should you commit to in a lifetime? One? Infinite? Somewhere in between?

While I fully anticipate committing to one man for my lifetime, and having one family, professional commitments have become more fluid with time.

Instead of the pensions of our forefathers, we are mostly left to fend for ourselves saving for retirement, as few of us will be able to count on company pensions and social security as more than a meal out a month in retirement.

So, when your original dream doesn't work out quite the way you expected, how do you choose the next dream and make the commitment to see it through?

Most of us can tell you what NOT to do. Don't buy every bright, shiny object in your path, thinking you'll get rich quick and never have to work again.

Find a way to settle yourself into some piece of calm and think. Perhaps you'll ask yourself these questions:

How do I want to live?How do I want my days to look?Who do I want to be?What do I want my children to see, based on my actions, not my words, is truly important to me?Figure those things out and you'll be able to answer the question:What do I really want to do?

As you go through this process, you'll find you make a deeper commitment to the dream. Say you want to be a travel writer. You pay for the courses, maybe even get started, and then life gets in the way. You put it aside, you're a little committed, but not all in, and know that it's there for you if you want to get back to it, someday.

That day may not come for a few years when you realize you're not burnt out from your day job, like you hear from so many of your colleagues, but you really are beaten down. The travel writing courses will cross your plate just as another opportunity serendipitously comes your way. For us, it was my daughter's gap year between college and grad school.

The commitment to travel writing came from the enjoyment of both travel and writing. The commitment to do it now came from traveling across multiple (new) continents and countries, experiencing the highs of the Auckland Sky Tower to the lows of the reefs of Bonaire, Dutch Antilles (deeper than the Great Barrier Reef).

Being able to make a living as a travel writer takes a commitment to productivity.

As American businessman Paul J. Meyer said, "Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort."

Here's to you: Choose wisely the thing worthy of your commitment. Don't be afraid to abandon a spirit sucking job for something worthy of your talents, time and life.

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