I did it again. I failed.
And today I just simply want to publicly admit that I failed again and hopefully provide some value to you so that you learn from my mistakes.
I’ve had a couple of failures in my life as I’m sure we all have but I’ve found that you should be proud of failed ideas, projects, plans. In many countries around the world, including mine (Slovenia, Europe), we value achievers.
We look at what this and this person has done. But we mostly overlook what they had to do, how many times they failed in order to achieve their big goals. And from my experience we also have a totally wrong culture around failing. Most of the time people are kind of happy if you fail. And if you fail once or twice you get this badge of being a looser. “Ah… he/she failed at this and that so he/she will never be able to do it this time” which is totally wrong.
OK, so to my story. In the beginning of 2018 I decided I’m going to “relaunch” myself. I decided I want more from my life and to achieve that I would have to change myself and make some progress in different aspects of my life. Too many aspects of my life, as I’ve learned later that year.
Here’s my plan in more detail (if you are interested) but basically I wanted to be better in: physical health (move more), productivity (do more faster and organise myself better), learn more (read more books, attend more seminars), change my eating habits (low carb) and to have better social and spiritual life. That all looked like a really simple thing to do and something I really wanted.
But it didn’t work out for me. I wanted to change too much at the same time. I thought that if I give myself one year to achieve all of this that this is too simple not to do it. And if you look at the list now you are probably thinking the same. It seems not that big of a change.
But what I haven’t realised is that the plan included too many areas with a lot of change. Why a lot? Because I was trying to change my bad habits. And habits are crazy hard to change.
Imagine you just want to drink more water per day. That’s easier sad than done, right? I bet you already tried that and failed. Well, most of you did. Me included 😉
And you know why we failed?
Why I failed?
In order to change even a little… let’s say you want to start drinking more water, as we know how great that is for your body in so many levels, but in order to make this a habit, in order for this new behaviour to stick we need to install some kind of a system. In order to drink more water we need to be reminded, we need to have water always at hand and it’s also good if we keep track of how many times and how much water we drank so we know how we are doing and we can measure our progress.
So, what did I do with my list of goals for 2018? Nothing. I wrote down a list of things that sounded nice and it would be great to do but I haven’t made a system. I haven’t created any routines around my goals.
And that was really stupid. I mean, setting your goals and just magically waiting for them to happen? But as you will find out in the next minute or so, I needed exactly that. I needed to fail so I was able to grow.
The next day after I wrote this post I kind of forgot about it as I was dragged into everyday, chasing after everything life brought upon me (either business or private life related).
So, the first big lesson here is … ideas or goals are nothing – execution is everything!
Shame on me… I haven’t put any systems in place. I didn’t break down my goals into small, easy, doable steps, I didn’t put any of my actions into my calendar or task manager. I didn’t take enough time to even start executing. What a looser 😉 Really.
But, I have to be honest, I haven’t realised that changing habits it’s so damn hard. And I definitely didn’t have enough knowledge about how to effectively execute goals. I wasn’t organised enough.
What have I learned from this
Long story short, as I look at all of this now, I really needed this to happen. OK, I have to admit that I moved the needle in some areas of my life a little bit but waaay from what I planned for. Eventually I looked at the list of goals a couple of times and I was motivated for a day or two so I did something but the next day or the next week I stopped again.
It’s a mindset game, right? It’s true that I was crazy busy in early 2018 but it all comes down to priorities. Now I know I should have made different choices, I should have chosen one area and focus on that and I should have put activities in my calendar or Todoist (which is my go to task management software).
I should have planned for reaching my goals!
After realising that I failed in achieving my goals for 2018, which was probably around March or early April it was already too late. We were also expecting our second daughter in the summer so I decided I will go easy on me. I decided that 2018 is obviously not my year. I chose a wrong year. What a full truck of bullshit.
My mind tricked me again. Or better, I tricked myself again. It’s easier to do nothing as nothing bad can happen to you, no injuries, no wolves in the forest wanting to kill you 😉
To tell you the truth… I changed that year. And then again in 2019 as I wanted to know more about how mind works, why this is happening to us. Why are we such an obstacle for ourselves. Why do we stop executing on our goals, how to change habits, what do we have to do to start moving towards our goals and how to stop listening to this inner voice that is always stopping us from doing more with our lives.
And I have to be honest that today I’m way better in the area of productivity. I’ve read a lot about it and watched a lot of content on this topic and I started to understand how I should organise myself to be more efficient and to do more. And I mean waaaay better than ever before.
I highly recommend that you take some time and learn more about productivity and changing habits as this will definitely change your life.
And there’s always space for improvement.
If you know anyone who can benefit from this post please do share this with this person or post it to favourite social site. Big thanks. I love you.