Goals…it feels so good when you coming up with your goals. When you envision at the end of accomplishing that goal will look like. You decorate your dream board and you get really excited, but then a year goes by and you wondered what happened. The truth of the matter is dreaming of accomplishing your goals is easy, but what we don’t think about is the work that goes into accomplishing the things that we want in life. It’s almost as if we live in this delusion where we think we will get everything we want without putting any action into it. Then we wake up one morning and wonder why the things we wanted didn’t happen, and then there comes the water works.

After many years of strongly starting a goal and then dropping it soon after I feel like I’ve finally got better in my life of working towards these goals instead of letting them get away from me. After many years of trial and errors when it came this topic I learned one skill that helped me grow in certain goals and that was “a little bit each day.”

Looking back I could have let this lesson sink in as a kid as I remember my mom telling me that her teacher always told her “If you do something 15 minutes a day you will get better at it.” Sadly, this was one of the things I heard and agreed with, but didn’t fully grasp how beneficial that could be until recently in my life. I think as a kid I couldn’t see the benefit of spending a short amount of time as beneficial. I always felt like I had to spend a lot of time on something during my day or I might as well not do it at all. I’ve had that mentality for most of my life until recently.

The way I like to view it now is like how you have money sitting in a bank account where you can grow interest. The interest may not be that much at first; however, over time the interest grows. That can be the same for the goals we are trying to work towards. I’ll give you a simple example from my own life. One of my goals is to learn Spanish. For a long time I would get into a phase where I would practice for a few days and then give up, but then I made the dedication to practice Spanish each day. I use the Duolingo app on my phone and I spend a few minutes every single day practicing Spanish. I have been now on a streak of 251 days and I’m going to continue the streak for as long as possible. I am no way fluent in Spanish, but I can read a lot of words now in Spanish because I committed a little time out of my day to learning it and the skill has compounded over time.

I can also see this in other areas of my life like when I get into a good exercise routine. When I commit myself to even doing a little exercise during the day it helps me establish a routine and move me closer to my goal. Yes, you may not move crazy fast towards your goals but only committing a small part of your day towards any of your goals; however, committing a little bit each day for a year is way better than going super hard for one week and then giving up for the rest of the year. It’s about deciding what your goals are and determining how much time you can spend during the day or week that is realistic that’ll move you towards your goal.

I’ll be honest I didn’t feel like writing this blog post. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to come on here and write about today, but I told myself that I want to commit to writing more in my blog. Then it came to me that, that was the topic I should write about today. Because even though today I have been severely tired from work today I reminded myself that my goals are important to me and I can make a little time to write during my day or I can just let my goal of writing slip out of my fingers. I then decided to take that little bit of time from my day to commit and so can you! I know it can be hard when you have a busy schedule and feel like you don’t have much free time as it is, but you have to decide is the free time more important than those goals. To me, I’ll take that little bit of pain for that long term gain.