GOAL TENDING

Bend Oregon went from 85 to 40 like it just passed a State Trooper.

One Monday it was summer.

By Tuesday, autumn had arrived.

And with it came something I wasn't expecting.

A downshift.

Not just in the weather.

In me.

If you live somewhere with distinct seasons, you probably recognize the feeling.

The days shorten. Air changes.

The smell of woodsmoke hangs over the neighborhood.

The earth takes on a rich, damp fragrance after the cold nights.

Even the lighting seems different.

Your body recognizes the change before your mind gets around to acknowledging it.

I've always loved autumn.

But I've also noticed that it brings with it a subtle melancholy.

Not quite sadness.

Not quite depression.

More like someone quietly turned down the volume on my enthusiasm.

Nothing particularly wrong. Nothing particularly right.

Just a little less electricity in the wires.

This year, however, something about that feeling caught my attention.

I've spent the better part of the last year rebuilding my life after the dissolution of my marriage.

I've done some difficult, necessary work.

Confronted uncomfortable truths about myself.

Changed habits. Reconsidered priorities.

Started businesses.

Rebuilt relationships with parts of myself I'd neglected.

And I've made meaningful progress.

But sitting here this morning, with autumn settling over the mountains, I realized something.

I have dreams.

I have ambitions.

I even have goals.

What I don't have is a map.

And I think that's why I've been feeling adrift.

I've wanted to make movies since I was a kid.

And through a remarkable series of circumstances, I found myself working in Hollywood at a relatively young age.

I recognized an opportunity, threw myself into it, and built a career that took me places I could scarcely have imagined.

It was extraordinary.

It also taught me something that would quietly undermine the next thirty years of my life.

I learned how to seize an opportunity.

I never really learned how to manufacture one.

Because my dream had, in a very real sense, come to me, I began to believe that this was how dreams worked.

Want something badly enough. Believe in it.

Put yourself near it. Work hard.

Stay open to possibility.

And eventually, somehow, the universe delivers.

Sometimes it did.

Often enough, in fact, to reinforce the belief.

But here's the painful truth I've only recently begun to appreciate.

My early success may have insulated me from having to learn the discipline that would have made my later success more intentional.

I wanted to become an accomplished film director.

I directed a feature documentary. . . episodes of a series for Disney.

Commercials.

Music videos.

Things I'm proud of.

But I never built the sustained directing career I'd imagined.

Certainly not because I lacked passion.

And not because I lacked ability.

Because somewhere along the way, I'd mistaken wanting something badly enough for having a plan to achieve it.

And wanting, as it turns out, is not a plan.

That's a hell of a thing to discover at 51.

Here's something else I've been thinking about.

Summer has a kind of built-in momentum.

Long days. Travel. Recreation.

Social engagements. Outdoor projects.

Sunshine.

Life seems to propel itself forward.

Then autumn arrives.

The evenings come earlier.

The world gets quieter.

The distractions begin to fall away.

And suddenly, the momentum your environment was providing disappears.

So. . . what's left?

Whatever momentum you've created for yourself.

And when you haven't created much, you feel it.

You can work twelve hours a day, make money, exercise, socialize, travel, and generally conduct yourself like a highly functioning adult.

And still be drifting.

Because none of those activities necessarily tells you whether you're getting closer to the life you actually want.

Drift doesn't necessarily feel like failure.

It can feel like activity.

Productivity. Busyness.

Even progress.

That's what makes it so dangerous.

Particularly for men who've built lives that look successful from the outside.

A full calendar is not a destination.

Neither is a full bank account.

And neither, for that matter, is a head full of dreams.

One of my favorite metaphors for pursuing a meaningful goal comes from space exploration.

When NASA sent men to the moon, they didn't simply point a rocket in the general direction of the sky, light the engines, and hope for the best.

They calculated a destination. Established a trajectory. Monitored their progress. Made course corrections.

Over and over and over again.

From a distance, the journey might appear to be a straight line.

Up close, it's a carefully managed series of adjustments.

And here's the little part that matters the most.

The destination determines the corrections.

Without a destination, there's no such thing as being off course.

You're simply moving.

Think about that for a moment.

If you don't know where you're going, how can you possibly know whether today's activities are bringing you any closer?

You can't.

You can only hope.

And hope, while a wonderful thing to have, is a terrible navigation system.

I've spent an embarrassing amount of my life hoping.

Hoping my career would evolve into what I imagined.

Hoping financial prosperity would eventually materialize.

Hoping the things I wanted would find their way to me through some combination of hard work, good intentions, and proximity.

And some did.

But I've come to realize that spending enough time near your dreams to have a little of their stardust land on you is not the same as charting a course to the moon.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life confusing the two.

We talk endlessly about goal setting.

Write your goals.

Visualize them.

Manifest them.

Dream big.

Believe in yourself.

Fine.

But setting a goal is an event.

Tending a goal is a practice.

A gardener doesn't plant something in April, congratulate himself on having a garden, and return in October expecting a harvest.

He tends it.

He waters.

Prunes. Feeds. Protects.

Adjusts.

Some days he works for hours.

Some days he walks through the garden for ten minutes and pulls a weed.

But he returns.

The gardener cannot make the plant grow.

He can only create the conditions in which growth becomes more likely.

I love that.

Because it allows room for the unexpected.

For serendipity.

For the magic of life that I still very much believe in.

You don't have to abandon the magic.

You just have to stop expecting magic to do the gardening.

And that's what I've been missing.

I've spent plenty of time dreaming about what I want my life to become.

I've even identified the big things that matter to me.

Health. Financial independence. Creative accomplishment.

But I haven't consistently done the work of breaking those ambitions into measurable destinations with timelines.

What does success look like in five years?

In one?

In ninety days?

What needs to happen this month to make those outcomes more likely?

And perhaps most importantly, what am I doing today?

Because if I don't know what I want to accomplish this month, how can I possibly know what to do with today?

There's another uncomfortable truth in all of this.

I love the dream.

I love the possibility.

I love the electricity that comes with imagining something extraordinary and recognizing that it might actually be achievable.

What I've historically struggled with is the long, unremarkable middle.

The Tuesday when nothing extraordinary happens.

The Thursday when progress is so incremental you can barely measure it.

The month when the results don't reflect the effort.

And I suspect I'm not alone.

We love beginnings.

We love imagining endings.

But the middle?

The middle is where dreams go to die when nobody tends them.

You don't need bigger dreams nearly as much as you need a better relationship with the boring middle of pursuing them.

Excitement is wonderful fuel for ignition.

It's not particularly reliable for the long journey.

Neither is fear.

Neither is inspiration.

At some point, you have to become the man who shows up whether he feels inspired or not.

The man who keeps his promises to himself when nobody's watching.

The man who understands that extraordinary outcomes are often built from profoundly ordinary actions, repeated long after the novelty has worn off.

There's nothing particularly cinematic about that.

But it works.

Here's the part of this realization that almost embarrasses me.

I already knew most of this.

I've read the books. Heard the lectures.

Absorbed the wisdom.

Probably dispensed some of it myself.

And yet here I am, at 51, rediscovering something so elementary that a reasonably bright twelve-year-old could explain it.

Write down what you want.

Figure out what it takes.

Do the work.

Repeat.

Jesus. Groundbreaking stuff.

But perhaps that's another lesson worth learning.

Knowing something is not the same as having built a life around it.

You can recognize that drinking alcohol costs you your peace and still do it.

You can know that exercise is essential and still neglect it.

You can understand compound interest and still fail to save.

You can believe relationships require attention and still take someone you love for granted.

You can know that dreams require plans and spend thirty years dreaming.

Intellectual understanding is not behavioral integration.

And one of the peculiar humiliations of growing older is discovering how frequently we have to relearn things we already know.

But maybe. . . just maybe, that's okay.

Maybe wisdom isn't a collection of lessons we graduate from.

Maybe it's a collection of truths we learn to return to.

Like a map.

You can study a map so many times that you begin to believe you've memorized the terrain.

Eventually, you put it away.

And somewhere along the journey, you drift.

You forget a turn.

Misjudge the distance. Overlook a mountain between you and your destination.

And when you finally open the map again, you're astonished by how much you've forgotten.

The mistake wasn't forgetting.

The mistake was putting the map away.

A map isn't a test of your memory.

It's a tool for finding your way.

And the man who consults it regularly isn't less capable than the man who insists he knows the route.

He's probably going to get there sooner.

So this autumn, I'm doing something a little different.

I'm returning to the map.

Not to lament the years behind me.

Not to inventory every missed opportunity or prosecute myself for the things I might have accomplished.

There's no useful destination down that road.

I'm returning because I've finally begun to appreciate the distinction between the life that happens to us and the life we deliberately participate in building.

And because time, that undefeated bastard, keeps moving whether we're paying attention or not.

I have no idea how many autumns remain for me.

Neither do you.

But I know that I don't want to spend them waiting for the universe to deliver the life I've imagined.

I want to participate in its construction.

Deliberately.

With ambition, yes.

With wonder.

With room for spontaneity and the unexpected.

But also with a plan.

One year.

Ninety days.

This month.

This week.

Today.

Not ten grand ambitions.

Just a few destinations that matter enough to change everything else.

Each with a measurable next milestone.

Each with a date.

And every morning, a few minutes spent tending them.

Not because I'm lost.

Because I finally know where I'm going.

And perhaps the ultimate purpose of goal tending isn't simply to accomplish the goal.

Perhaps it's to become the kind of man who can be trusted to keep his promises to himself.

That's a destination worth pursuing.

And the good news is, you don't need to wait for spring to start planting.