20 minutes of French, German, Dutch, and Danish per day.
Ditto piano.
Starting to think it will take a miracle to manage all these lofty goals. Well. So be it. It’s a year that sounds like it belongs in a Science Fiction novel, after all. Nothing is impossible in sci-fi. Engage warp speed (and discipline)!
Most people are familiar with the concept of a Catch 22 – even those who haven’t read the novel by Heller know that it’s a somewhat absurdist law, literally catching you out, forcing you to do something you don’t want to and/or refrain from doing something that you do want, no matter what.
Life can be a little like that; who hasn’t felt trapped in a job or a relationship because you didn’t see a way out? Regular readers know that I like the idea of achieving, of experiencing, of expanding and improving. Or maybe it’s the opposite that scares me; stagnation, resignation, wasting what little time we have. Either way, I often feel that I don’t do enough, and I think that many might feel the same. There is a bit of Catch 22 in this, too; you don’t do anything to pursue your dreams, because pursuing them risks exposing them for what you fear they are: dreams.
But: big dreams stay dreams because you don’t divide them up into manageable chunks. You want to circumnavigate the world, but you don’t because it’s too difficult a thing to plan and execute. You want to get rich, but you have no idea how, so you don’t even try. You want to sing like Adele and write songs like Ed Sheeran, but since you probably can’t you don’t even sit down at the piano.
However, break it down into smaller pieces, and suddenly it’s feasible. I have a colleague who is traveling the world one country at a time, and he makes it look easy; he went to Machu Picchu over a long weekend, he did Australia (the civilized corner) in a week. Granted, it’s costly to travel like that, but what I take away from it is that you can see a lot more if you do many little trips than if you sit around dreaming about going on an extended world-cruising, continent-hopping holiday that somehow never materializes. I don’t think I want to go to South America for three days (I fear the jet lag alone would turn it into a mescaline trip), but the principle is sound.
The same goes for anything, really. Take finances: I never really had a plan for money beyond avoiding going into red, but I’m slowly starting to change that. And it’s the same thing there: you can’t turn into a finance wiz overnight, but you can read up on, and invest in, a LOT of things that over time will (hopefully) net you substantially more money than if you just leave whatever is left at the end of the month in a savings account.
As for healthy living, again, no one can expect instant fitness – it takes more than one gym session to get ripped, alas, and more than one healthy meal to live forever, cruel and unjust as that is – but if you set a weekly goal of not eating anything unhealthy except on Sundays, say, and working out a little (20 minutes, the length of a sitcom) every day, then it doesn’t seem quite so impossible to attain.
It IS important to be accountable to someone tho, as this increases the likelihood you’ll go through with your ambitions. So, here are my goals and how to reach them in -22:
– I will do a minimum of one trip per month to places I’ve never been – city weekends, short hiking hols, bonsai road trips, what have you,
– I will try to double my savings over one year. I have a figure in mind, but even if I don’t reach that I will actively try to improve my knowledge in this field,
– I will get fit – defined as 80kg body weight or less, and/or fat percentage of 18, and use the above mentioned template as my starting point,
– I will read at least 20 non-fiction books, or a little less than one every two weeks, on top of the Blinkist ones I’m already reading, and report them to my fellow jolly readers,
– I will learn a new piece of piano music every month, for a total of twelve.
I have other ambitions too, like more paragliding, bee keeping, sauna building, gardening, chicken keeping, et cetera, but these are easily visualised, and easy to quantify and report back on, thus keeping me (hopefully) on the straight and narrow.
Here’s to seizing the day, and making 2022 a good catch!
January is at an end, and as always when things are ending there is a bit of apprehension: did I do everything I could? In my case, the first month of the year is always a bit of an indication of how I will fare over the rest of the year in my intentions and ambitions, so how did I do?
I am still plagued by injuries, but indoor biking has worked remarkably well, as has core exercises and stretching, which I hope will eventually see me back on my feet. In total I biked some 250 kilometres in January, which is a good start. I have to ease off on the weights for the time being, so having the bike is a bit of a life line, honestly.
I learnt a new piece of music on the piano (Bohemian Rhapsody), and I read two non-fiction books (one guide to Stockholm’s culture and history, and another on the failed polar expedition of Andre – the former so-so, the latter spectacular -) but I didn’t study enough French.
I was in Sweden twice and Italy once, and I kept my diary going, so all in all I’m doing well as far as my new year’s resolutions are concerned. Thus far, at any rate. How are you doing?
We’re in for a new year again, and I feel I have found a model that works for me (no, not Claudia Schiffer): Keep your ambitions S.M.A.R.T. and make sure to make the most of time,.
So I’ll stick with the familiar format – develop as a human (intellectually and physically), travel, have new experiences, and set myself new challenges – one trip or challenge per month on average, for a total of twelve.
Trips: I have nothing planned (beyond the fact that I am in Rome celebrating New Year as I’m writing this), but hiking somewhere with my brother, taking the kids on several trips (the first one in February), and paragliding in either Spain or Switzerland (back allowing) are definitely happening.
Challenges: As last year was plagued with injuries, I don’t dare set any fitness goals at the moment. I do hope to improve my fitness, but in what way remains uncertain as of yet. The ideal is a workout per day, of some sort.
In the workplace things are equally up in the air, with my job as a roving reporter having come to an end, and nothing concrete to replace it. I want to keep writing and working with communication one way or another, tho, and I have a few ideas – let’s see what happens.
I already know I want to stay vegetarian for the coming year (having stuck with it for two months I see no reason to change back to a carnivorous diet), and I want to continue to stay off refined sugar, so that’s two. I really want to learn how to paraglide properly, which makes three. Also, limit time spent on social media (more difficult than it sounds?) – four. Keep a diary – five. Read (at least) one non-fictional book per month – six. Improve my piano and French skills, for a total of eight. And linked to all this: use my time more efficiently and wisely.
There is a funny passage from the book About a boy (later filmed with Hugh Grant in the lead) that has stuck with me:
His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.
The protagonist of the book is a time waster, but the concept works: divide your day into time slots, and make sure to use them. That will be another challenge.
Why do this? Well, first of all, because, as the poet Herrick wrote in To Virgins, to make much of time:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying
and this same flower that smiles today
tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
the higher he is getting,
the sooner will his race be run,
and nearer he is to setting.
In other words: Our time is limited, and every breath takes us closer to death. That’s grim, as realizations go, but if that doesn’t light a fire under your ass to get things done, nothing will. Also, to quote Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
Or rather, I wanted to make sure that I would be more likely to achieve my goals, so I resolved to be smart and make ’em S.M.A.R.T.– Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Did I succeed? Yes and no.
Chess: ✅ I played every day for a month and got the rating I had set my mind on. (Then promptly lost it.)
Reading: ✅ One non-fictional book per month. Done.
Piano: ❎ I did play, but didn’t learn as many pieces as I had hoped. The temptation is to stick with the ones you know…
French: ❎ I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I had planned, mainly because I had to focus on Danish.
Travel: ✅ I went to Morocco, Egypt, the Seychelles, Norway, Italy (thrice), and Denmark (plus Sweden), which is less than usual, but still acceptable, especially since Egypt, Italy and Norway was with the kids.
Fitness: ✅ The year was marred with injuries – first recovering after the paragliding incident, then a wonky neck, a messed up Achilles’ tendon, a tennis elbow, and finally a slipped disk – so running and biking and swimming suffered. I did manage the Paris marathon, and a runstreak of 100 days, but I’m nowhere near the distance goals I set myself for runs and biking. Nor did I learn to crawl, but I’ve racked up some 100 gym sessions, including an ironstreak of 40 days or so, which has meant three or four extra kilos’ worth of muscles.
Challenges: ✅ Apart from the aforementioned run- and ironstreaks I’ve successfully given up coffee, tried intermittent fasting for a month, I’ve become vegetarian, and I’m currently on a no sugar diet, so that’s gone well. Less well went my attempt at keeping a diary – I kept it up until Denmark, but then fell out of habit, unfortunately.
Work: ✅ I added Danish to my language combination, and continued working in Communications. In addition to that I MC’d a couple of conferences using participatory leadership, which was fun, too.
Blog: ✅ I increased my readership quite spectacularly this year (from just shy of 3,000 readers to 5,500, and from 5,000 views to nearly 10,000), which is really gratifying.
So. What worked and what didn’t? Some goals turned out to be insufficiently specific, such as “learn a piece of music”; others were unattainable due to factors beyond my control (the fitness targets) or had to be downgraded in terms of priority (French, when I was paid to go learn Danish), but overall it’s a sound principle, and one I will continue to use in 2019.
Now all I have to do is decide what those goals should be…
I was thinking about what I want to try to achieve in 2018 when I came across some good advice that really resonated with me. If I have failed to reach my goals in the past, it’s nearly always been because I haven’t made sure they were S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. So that shall be my credo for 2018: be smart about what tasks I set myself.
The fundamentals haven’t changed: I want to develop as a person, intellectually and physically, by testing my limits, working diligently and hard towards certain goals, and I want to travel to see the world and broaden my horizons, ensuring that by the end of the year I can look back and see progress and time well spent.
So: smart intellectual challenges – the ones I’ve worked on for a couple of years now still remain the same: I want to read more non-fiction, get better at piano, French, and chess. That’s not very specific, tho, so measuring progress will be key; I need targets I can quantify. One book per month. One new piece of music learnt every two months. One hundred French words per month. And as for chess… well, getting a rating of 1400 before the end of the year would be an easily measurable goal, if not necessarily that easily attainable. (I’m hovering around the 1300-mark as I’m writing this…). Plus I will note down every half hour spent on each activity, thus keeping a tally for accountability purposes.
So I’ve got all of those down to an A.R.T. Physical challenges are a little different, mainly because of the uncertainty I’m living with at the moment, so for 2018, I have decided to change tack a little. For my first challenge in January I will do a runstreak. Running every day will hopefully allow me to rebuild what was damaged in the accident in November. If that goes to plan, Paris marathon in April will be another milestone on the road to recovery, and if that goes well I’ll sign up for either another ultra marathon, or a full length Ironman. Or both.
Alas, there are too many unknowns at this stage for me to know if I will be able to run such distances again, but if I can, then a total of 1500k each of running and biking seem attainable goals overall. At least I know I can bike, so if running is out then I’m doubling that number for biking (and only watching Netflix while on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone – limiting my Netflix binging AND encouraging more time in the saddle!).
Weights have never been anything but a complement to my other workouts – now more so than ever as I try to strengthen my weak leg – but again, if I find I don’t recover my running capacity, I will focus more on getting strong/building muscle. Having always been skinny it would be interesting to see if I could actually muscle up.
As for swimming, I want to learn how to crawl properly! At present I can hardly do one length in the pool, and even though I managed the Ironman 70.3 anyway it would be nice to shave off five or ten minutes from that time, so learning how to crawl at least a kilometre is another challenge.
I will be working more in 2018 than I have for a decade, which will hopefully have the dual effect of giving me the opportunity to take on more interesting work on the job, and allowing me a bigger travel budget, as, happily, my children have said they want to travel more with me, so that will affect what trips I take this year.
2018 promises an Arab spring once more, as I’m going back to Morocco in January and have another trip to Egypt in February (with the kids). I have a week of holidays in March that I don’t know what to do with yet – downhill skiing would be nice, but again it’s dependent on me making a complete recovery. I want to go back to Spain and get a fully-fledged paragliding pilot’s licence. Hiking in Iceland would be lovely, the last part of Bergslagsleden still beckons, and I want to do at least one journey further afield – maybe watching the great sardine run in South Africa? Or taking the kids to the US? There’s no shortage of possibilities.
Other challenges: I wouldn’t mind doing more for the environment. This could involve installing geothermal heating in the house, keeping hens for eggs, joining a wind power collective or other changes. One thing I do know I want to try is becoming a vegetarian. At least for a month.
Not eating any sugar in any shape or form may be another challenge, and limiting my social media intake to half an hour per day wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
And of course I want to continue building my blog, writing about my experiences for the joy of writing, but also as a living testament to what I do with my life when I don’t have my kids. Hopefully my readership will continue to grow, but that is less important. If I can inspire only two people, that is more than enough for me.
Here’s to a S.M.A.R.T.er future!
P.S. All this goes out the window if I were to get my dream job, of course… 😄
As some of you may know, I have an old injury in my left leg, which leaves me with a structural imbalance. It’s always been a fear that this would someday get even worse, and, well, one forceful step was all it took: As I was running down a hill in Spain last month I heard something tear in my groin, while a flash of intense pain shot up through my buttock.
I was hardly able to stand afterwards, let alone walk or run. I managed to do the rest of the paragliding course, literally limping across the finishing line, but the damage was done, so now I have to undo it as best I can. This will have to be my challenge for December then: Operation Shed A Tear.
I signed up with a physiotherapist, which is a misnomer. She gets very physical, that much is true. Therapeutic? If you’re a masochist, perhaps.
Now, it would be wrong to say she gets Medieval on my ass. More Chilean – under Pinochet. There’s horse liniment, a plunger(!), electrodes hooked up to a car battery, duct tape, needles. All these things go onto or into my ass. And groin. Then there’s exercises. Core exercises, balance, stretching – all those things you should do all the time, but never do (at least I don’t). Plus biking, as much as I can take. And drinking lots of water to keep the cells nice and supple.
I haven’t run for two weeks (the scales know this already!) but I seem to be working out as hard as ever. Hopefully I’ll be back on track (again quite literally) before the end of the month. That’s the goal. It’s already taken blood and sweat. If it can alleviate the tears? We’ll see. Paris marathon in April is still on, as far as I’m concerned.
…and it’s time to summarise what’s happened this far 2017. As has been the case these last couple of years, I set myself certain tasks in January, to be completed over the next twelve months, and at the halfway mark it makes sense to take stock, to see what has gone according to plan, and what hasn’t.
Looking back, it’s quite a lot crammed into six months, so I’m pleased with that.
I’ve managed to work out quite a lot (unsurprisingly, what with the races) but not as much as I had set out to do in total – weeks of hiking and skiing and diving have prevented me from reaching the goal of a marathon run and biked every week, and I haven’t done much yoga either. But then there’s still six months left to remedy that.
Have I developed my French, my piano and chess playing, and done more non-fiction reading? I certainly got off to a good start, doing thirty minutes per day of each, but a good friend giving me a Netflix password threw a big spanner in that particular structure. I haven’t completely derailed, but there have been leafs on the tracks, shall we say.
As for taking on new tasks at work, I have, happily. And not least because of this very blog, in fact. Turns out people at work read it and thought I might do good in Internal Communications, so from now on I will spend one day per week as a roving reporter, highlighting goings-on in my work place. Very happy about that.
So what’s next? I will try to make up for lost time in those areas where I haven’t quite managed to reach my targets, obviously.
I’ve still got the mountain ultra X-trail coming up in the beginning of August, and ten days of hiking the Bavarian alps hot on the heels of that. After those ten days I don’t really have any plans for the rest of the year. An acquaintance has invited me to Bilbao, and another to Nepal, so those things might happen. Or not. Readers should feel free to make suggestions.
I still want to try and beat my marathon record before the end of the year – I’ve improved significantly on my personal best for shorter distances, but whether that will translate into a new marathon PB remains to be seen. Time to start looking for a fast race, in any event.
At work I have made a promise to attempt to add Danish to my official language combination, so that should keep me busy for quite some time (maybe there are Danish movies on Netflix?!), and the new job will hopefully continue to present new challenges, as well.
All in all I feel quietly confident that the second half of this journey will be as filled to the brim as the first half was. Come fly with me!
We’re in for a new year again, and I feel I have found a model that works for me (no, not Claudia Schiffer): Keep your ambitions 
At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
I was thinking about what I want to try to achieve in 2018 when I came across 