Move the starting line

Why goal-setting is less about where you're going and more about where you are...

My coffee is too hot to drink.

It sits on top of the tiny space heater we have in the living room that keeps our toes from getting cold. I’ll admit that using the space heater as a side table has a very “it’s not much but it’s home” kind of vibe, which I like. That state of not quite ready, not quite perfect, but very functional and comfortable, describes the reading chair’s corner.

Really, everything about this morning has a feeling of “not quite ready” about it. The coffee, my toes, the sun, all waiting to cool down, heat up, and rise again. But not yet.

I love the “not yet” part of early mornings. They feel lonely but in a good way. The day hasn’t attacked me with any tasks and every to-do can still wait for a few more hours. There’s stillness here. And too hot coffee. And too cold toes.

Eventually, the morning will shift. The sun will peek its head over the horizon, my coffee will be ready to drink, and I’ll have to turn the space heater off once it starts to singe my leg hairs. But for now, I can wait. And write.

This is the part where I have to admit something. I’m writing this at 5:30 am on Friday, February 5. The first Friday of February. The day on which this newsletter is supposed to go out. In fact, you’re reading this just a few hours into the future, which completely terrifies me.

Normally, I have a draft of this newsletter a week or two in advance that I tinker with the week before until it’s ready. Not this time. This time I almost didn’t make it. My year-long goal of delivering The Paper every month almost died today. The snooze button almost stopped me in my tracks.

That’s the danger of setting goals. One misstep today can make tomorrow seem suddenly unattainable, especially when focusing solely on the end result. Which, I guess is the difference between setting a goal and achieving it. The former is about a desired future. The latter is about translating that future into the present. If goal-setting is about picking a point on the horizon, then goal-achieving is about the step you’re going to take today.

The last step is the fun one to dream about. But the current step (whether your first or fiftieth) is the only one that matters.

At one point in my life, I did triathlons (I’m as surprised as you are to read that). One of my favorite parts of races was the buzz around the starting line—the natural result of communal nervous energy. The starting line is a magical place where people are happily waiting their turn to use a porta-potty.

Then, the race starts and your energy begins to resemble an upside-down bell curve. The excitement at the starting line fades as the race goes on and gets harder, hits an all-time low around the middle, then picks back up and crescendos at the finish line.

I found that the only way I could enjoy a race was if I turned it into multiple races. I wanted to keep that happy porta-potty energy for as long as I could. So, I would set multiple starting lines. Getting out of the water and transitioning to a bike—that’s a starting line. Every aid station, starting line. Finished mile 1 of the run, boom mile 2 is a starting line. Suddenly a massive daunting race would become a bunch of bite-size achievable races.

I don’t think this is a new idea. Surely this self-help book exists already. It’s probably titled, “Taking Baby Steps Toward Big Goals” or something. But the magic in this idea is not the way new starting lines make goals achievable—it’s how they changed the way I viewed the process.

Multiple starting lines still created their own inverted bell curves, but the valleys weren’t as deep. Suddenly, a disastrous mile or two doesn’t derail the whole race. Instead, I could just start over at the next mile marker and begin again with the infinite potential that a starting line entails—happy porta-potty!

I’m trying to take this attitude into my life. This section of my 12-mile race to write a newsletter every month did not go well. Writing projects remained unfinished, time was not managed well, and ideas just didn’t come to fruition. I could list all of my excuses here, but, as they say, excuses are like butts—everybody has one and some of them have hair on them.

Anyway, this is the end of February’s newsletter. I didn’t write anything else to include at the bottom. I’m disappointed in that, but I’m also not. Because that’s the step I took yesterday.

Today is a new starting line. And so is tomorrow. And so is the day after that. And so is…you get it.