How to Plan for a Life-Changing Year (and Actually Achieve It!)
Think back to the best year of your life so far. Maybe you went on an incredible trip that opened your mind to new cultures. Maybe you made a new group of friends who broadened your horizons. Maybe you had your first child, and the wonders (and struggles) of parenting drew you deeper into your life
Whatever it was that made that year special, one thing is probably true for most of you reading this. You didn’t know on January 1st how important that year was going to be. And yet, by some magic, it came and it changed everything.
If you haven’t had a year like that, or if it's been so long that it feels like it might have never happened, don’t worry. If that amazing year was so recent that you think the magic won’t come again anytime soon, think again.
With the right tools, you can engineer a life-changing year.
That’s right, you can orchestrate a 12-month-long odyssey into passion, insight and personal breakthroughs.
Choose Outrageous Goals
The first step is to choose amazing goals that, if they were to happen, would be life-changing.
There are only two rules:
It should be different than what you would normally do. An outrageous goal needs to be far beyond your status quo, or typical routine. It needs to propel you to explore uncharted territory and break out of your comfort zone.
The goal should have enough impact or stake attached to it that it will actually be life-changing. This means that the goal will significantly adjust the way you live, work or interact with others in the future.
To get your creative juices flowing, here are some examples:
I will start a business and get my first 20 customers
I will become fluent in a new language
I will read 52 books
I will learn to type 100 words per minute
I will learn to paint and hold an exhibit
I will write and publish a book
I will take a month off work and walk the Camino de Santiago with my family
These kinds of outrageous goals are what we are looking for. Go bold on looking for goals that will impact your life for years to come, and you’re on the right track.
For example, although the typing goal might seem boring on the surface, learning to type faster can save hundreds of hours in the future years of your life and thus constitutes a “life-changing” achievement. Similarly, spending a month walking the Camino de Santiago will be a milestone that you and your family can talk about for decades, and the friends and experiences you make on the journey can completely change your life.
Breaking Out the Steps
Here’s the thing, because we’re choosing some goals that might be a little scary and audacious, you’re going to find yourself looking at the goal with a tingling of excitement, possibly nervousness. So how do you keep yourself from being intimidated by this wild and crazy goal? The last thing you want is to give up before the year is done and dejectedly live in the same routine as your other years, too intimidated to take that risk and stretch to new heights.
To accomplish something wild and intimidating, you need to break your goal into consistent actions that build on each other over the year. You want to find the small steps you can take one at a time to bring you to the big outcome.
Let’s say you want to become fluent in a new language, your steps might look something like this:
15 minutes of DuoLingo every day for two months, find a conversation partner (try Tandem) and chat three times a week for six months, visit a place where the language is spoken
Or if your goal is to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, you might approach your goal like this:
Choose a nearby mountain, hike every weekend, camp on a trail once a month for six months, climb a small mountain nearby with full gear, then, climb the goal mountain
These two goals are big. You’ll never forget the year you learned Hindi or climbed Kilimanjaro.
But what about the year where you did both?
If you’re feeling adventurous, you can try stacking some goals to do two or three complementary goals each year. You might want to break them up into categories like professional life, personal experiences, or physical health.
Try it out for yourself. What you’ll find is that you can create a life-changing year, any year, starting now.
