(Soundtrack: Charles Mingus' New Now Know How)Welcome to 2009! While I don't believe in New Years Resolutions (and since they tend not to last past Groundhog Day), I do like to think about goals, possiblities, things I'm shooting for and would like to accomplish in the coming year. One of the big ones is simply to Finish Things.
I have a lot of ideas, thoughts on scraps of paper, projects in various stages of (in)completion -- if I just decided to go ahead and finish some of these darned things, I'd look like one of the most productive mamby-pambys in the universe! It's easy to see how some of these things, both at work and at home, began to pile up. Sometimes the idea of doing them proved more interesting than the actual execution. Some things were just dropped on me, and no one likes to do things they really don't want to do. Various "I need this now!" items showed up, pushing other projects to the side.
And sometimes I just got scared. I didn't think I could do them. Or do them well. Or these items had to be "perfect" (an interesting insight I heard toward the end of 2008 was how perfectionism often leads to procrastination). Done is better than Not Done: Finished is better than Perfect -- especially if it's going to take forever to make it perfect. And there's always the 'revision process' and going back and improving things and making them better later.
So that's it, my Big Hairy Goal for 2009 summed up in two words: Finish it! We'll see how that goes.
Here's another Goal, or perhaps better put, a mantra for the new year, from Zen Habits blogger Leo Babuta: Stop waiting for happiness. Happiness is right here, right now. An interesting thought with intriguing, life altering implications.
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