Birthday weekend.

The photos featured below are from my birthday weekend back in december.
This year I don’t have any big goals instead I chose to swap them out for small daily rituals and here’s why.

Back in 2017, I started journaling daily.
Sadly in 2021, I let go of my daily writing.
This practice was once something I did every morning from 2017-2019 and most mornings through 2020.

With this practice, my goal is mainly self-awareness.
I want to learn more about who I am as a person the good and the bad and part of this journaling is my attempt at studying what I’ve done that has worked out well for me in the past.

A key thing that has worked well for me is something I call the “grain of sand theory”.

The idea is to imagine your life 5 years from now.
Where do you see yourself?

If you haven’t thought about this you probably should because for most of us 5 years is going to come a lot sooner than you think.
Take the time to write down where you see yourself in 5 years and try to be as clear as you can.

The way I think of this theory is in 2 key components.
Simplicity and consistency.

Now let your goals 5 years from now represent a beach made of sand and it’s your responsibility to find that sand to make that beach.

The task seems daunting and in most cases, it will be but your goal here is to find an activity that will allow you to collect sand daily or in our case repeat a process daily to get incrementally closer to your goals.

Adversely if you try to shovel all the sand you can in one day you will be sore tired and have to take days off.
This is what I call the intensity model which is a problem because days off compound just as much as days on do.

The goal to making your beach is consistency and with simple math, you can see why this is so important.
Imagine you shoveled sand for 20 minutes a day for a year.
Everyone has a free 20 minutes a day especially when it comes to pursuing your most important goal.
In one year you would have worked on your goal for 7,300 minutes.

Now imagine you work on your goal for one hour a week.
That’s 3,120 minutes a year that’s 4,180 minutes less than if you worked on something for 20 minutes a day.

This is why journaling for me has to be done everyday not the once a week thing I was doing in 2020 and the same goes for the rest of my goals.

If you want something focus on small efforts daily and build the intensity over time.