The importance of goal setting
Happy New Year!
It is that time of the year again. Light up the Christmas tree and deck the halls with boughs of holly. Or maybe a menorah or some winter solstice lanterns.
The end of the year is also the perfect moment for reflecting on the past and if you are happy with how things are. If you are not, why not try some New Year’s Resolutions? It’s tradition, after all. Start the new year full of positive energy and expectations, only to forget all about it in the next few weeks.
I, too, made New Year’s Resolutions for 2022. Only I didn’t make them last week, but way back in September 2021.
Defining what you want
I set my New Year’s resolutions for 2022 way back in September 2021. I didn’t call them New Year’s resolutions, but just plain old goals to reach. Why September? Because that is when I decided I wanted to completely turn my life around and do something different.
I was unhappy with how my life was going for a while now, but I didn’t know what was wrong or how I could fix it. I learned about digital nomads at the beginning of 2021. Lockdown still in full effect, I, like many others, took to the internet for entertainment. YouTube was my drug of choice, and I scrolled through those videos for hours. I wanted to escape the whole lockdown situation, so I mainly searched for travel content. This is how I found out about Sorelle Amore, Lost LeBlanc, Flying The Nest, and so many more. These content creators pulled me in with tropical beaches and beautiful sunsets, but what made me stay was how they took on life.
Each and every one of them felt like something was missing. They didn’t fit in with the typical 9-to-5 structure our society likes to impose on us. So they started looking for something different. They recorded their journeys and let us, complete strangers on the internet, partake in their failures and successes. They didn’t put on a fake “everything is great, look at me traveling the world” persona, but they were genuine people trying something out of the box. It was a matter of hours and they completely sucked me into their world.
I have no idea how many videos, blogs, and books I researched on digital nomads and traveling the world, but it got a bit obsessive at that point. I wanted to know EVERYTHING. So I did what I do best: a deep-dive on the internet and completely neglect my friends, family, and work. After a few weeks, I came back up for air and I felt like a different person. I had found my next big thing.
Figuring things out
So I had found my next big thing, but the thing was really big and I did not know how to get there or even where to start. I wanted the freedom to travel the world and experience new things. To achieve that, I needed time and money. Becoming a millionaire overnight wasn’t in my cards, so I needed to find a way to hack the system. The perfect solution was working completely online. But I’m an ecologist. Ecologists can’t work location independently, or at least not so easily. The most fun part of being an ecologist is visiting project sites. I can’t do that if I’m on the other side of the world.
I had no other choice than a drastic career change, and this is where I got stuck. I built my whole adult life around being an ecologist. I spend six years at university learning everything there is about trees and plants and ecosystems. I spend another six months in America completing my master’s thesis on how trees react to vegetation management. After graduating, I applied for jobs to be an ecologist. I got a job as an ecologist at a consulting firm. I am an ecologist.
So what else am I good at? That’s a horrible question to ask me because low self-esteem and the imposter syndrome made for some depressing answers. I’m not really good at much. But do you need to be really good at something before you try it? Or is that just an excuse we like to use to not try new things?
Getting over the fear
After months of wrecking my brain on how to hack the system, I finally took the time to read the digital nomad bible: The 4-hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris. Technically, I didn’t read it. I listened to it while doing bat surveys deep into the night. I needed something to keep me awake, and this mind-blowing book did the trick.
It didn’t just keep me awake; it convinced me I could actually do it. Or that I should at least try. No, I wasn’t exceptionally good at something. I didn’t have a hidden talent or something that could be easily converted into a product or service that I could sell online. But that’s the thing, almost nobody does. The success stories I was by now so addicted to all started out somewhere. They didn’t become overnight successes. They tried and failed and tried again until they found what worked for them. I’m channeling Nike and Shia LaBeouf here and JUST DO IT.
So I did it. I set up an Upwork account and started sending in proposals to jobs that seemed like I could do. I can write. I can translate. I can proofread. I might not be the best out there, but I’m more than capable of getting the job done, and more than capable is enough to just do it.
Society puts a lot of fear in us. You have to have a stable job or you’ll go hungry and lose your house. You have to have an apartment or a house or you’ll be homeless. You have to have an education or you’ll never get a job. My plan went against each and every one of those things. I planned to give up my stable job and become a freelancer. I planned to give up my permanent housing to go travel the world and live in hotels and AirBnB’s. I planned to start a new carrier in something completely different from what I’d studied for. It was terrifying, but I felt I just had to try it, or I’d always regret it if I didn’t.
Setting the goal
I knew what I wanted, and I knew how to get there. Now I just needed a goal to make it manageable. The fear was still there. It’s easy to get lost in the fear and use it as an excuse to postpone things. I know I’m an epic avoider of things I’m afraid of, so I made a deal with myself. If I could make € 1.000 per month from my freelancing business, then I’d take the plunge and go for it for real. I gave myself a year to get to that goal.
Now I had a number and a deadline: get to an average income of € 1.000 per month by summer 2022. Those were my “New Year’s Resolutions” for 2022 that I made back in September 2021. I gave myself a year because I’d read a lot of stories on the internet of other people trying to do the same as me, and a general theme in those stories is that it can take quite some time to get your business up and running steadily. I was still working full time in my comfortable 9-to-5 job, and it took a lot out of me to take this on in the evenings and weekends. But I had a clear goal and a strong passion, so I muscled through.
I was prepared for a lot of hardship and exhausted nights, but I was not prepared for success. Within two months, I achieved my yearly goal. That’s right. In November 2021, I achieved what I thought would take me until summer 2022. How crazy was that?
I had no more excuses. I had set a goal and a deadline, and I crushed it. Now I had to actually set things in motion and jump into the unknown, no excuses. In the span of a few weeks, I quit my comfortable 9-to-5 job and gave up my apartment. It was really happening.
I made new goals now. Now that I got over the biggest hurdle and I gained some confidence in my online talents, it was time to add some more weight to my business plan as a freelancer. I found more clients, I worked on long-term relationships, and I got a bookkeeper. You know, all the professional, grown-up stuff serious people have to do when they want to become their own boss.
It sounds silly, but that first small goal of getting to a € 1.000 dollar a month is what got the ball rolling. I have far more ambitious goals now, but I own everything to that first act of goal-setting. I made a deal with myself that if I could achieve X, then I could do Y. Having that first success is what gave me the confidence to take it further. When people tell me I’m brave for doing this, I just shrug my shoulders and say meh. But no, it is brave. I just hacked my own brain into thinking it was easy and normal because I started with a small, achievable goal and went from there. But it wasn’t, and the road ahead will not be easy and normal, but I am not afraid of that anymore. Because I know I just have to do it.