#43things

It's a brilliant website where you can make a bucket list and yearly resolutions.

I got emailed today reminding me of my yearly resolutions.

[ X ] Get A Job

[ X ] Start Saving for my Future

[    ] Read a Book a Month

Well Get a job, Booyah. Done that. I have definitely started saving for my future also since I have gotten a job. Unfortunately I will be digging into it to fund my new bedroom...

43 Things is one of my favorite sites. I love this goal-oriented social networking site where you can post the things that you are doing, thinking about doing, have done and get support from others along the way. Right now I have 22 things in progress, some of which are "Someday/Maybe things" but many of which I'm actively working on.

Today I was working on one of my goals, read every book on my Kindle. I have a terrible habit of buying books on my Kindle and never finishing them. For today's Kindle adventure, I had downloaded Peter Bregman's 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. His mantra is to focus on 5 things in a year and to structure your day around this. Which brought me back to 43 things, a wonderful friend I hadn't visited in a long time. As I started writing this, I started thinking about those things, I started thinking about my 5 year plan, and I started thinking about focusing on being directionally correct. 

The thing I realized today was that my life looks nothing like what I planned it to be. If I think back to junior high, I wanted to be a lawyer. I am not a lawyer and grateful for it. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a history teacher. I am not a history teach and very grateful for that (I would have hated it!) When I graduated high school, I had decided I needed a break from school and started working. When I started working, I decided I wanted to get promoted in the bank I was working for...I didn't. When my oldest son was born, I decided it was time to pursue a career and ended up in technology, a career that I have loved for the past 15 years.

7 months ago on a whim I decided it was time to go back to school to get my MBA. Within a month and a half I was attending classes and am 1/3 of the way through my program. 4 months ago I was going to start my own business in 2013, once I was closer to being completed with my MBA program. 3 months ago I had decided that I had had enough of corporate politics and that I would start my own company this year. I tendered my resignation and today I happily say that I am an entrepreneur. The thing that I realized from this is how often my life changes and how directionally correct those changes feel.

When I looked at my 2011 5-year plan, I wanted to be a director at my former company, I wanted to write a novel, I wanted to fall in love, I wanted to have adventures. In 2011 I fell in love, had many great adventures, learned I wasn't ready to write my book yet, and was working toward a promotion. At the beginning of 2012 I found I didn't want to be a director after all, found that I really wanted to get back to what I love which was working with business to design and implement software, and, in the beginning of an MBA program, found that NOW was the time to start a business venture. Everything that has transpired since has validated that decision. How different my life looks than what I thought it would....but I only know in my gut that it is directionally correct. In a year I will be glad that I went this way even thought it's 100% the opposite of where I thought I'd be.

Getting back to my 43 things list. I looked at my list and realized some of these were things that I had completed long ago. Some of them were memories of painful times in my life. Some were major achievements that I am very proud of and changed me forever. Some were totally inconsequential in the scheme of things. But, almost all of them were directionally correct, almost all of them brought a great story to my life or some type of adventure, all of them expanded my horizons and my life in one sense or another.  Some of them were never things that I had goals on, some were twists in the road where I took a left when I was expected to go right, some turned into major decisions in my life on a whim. None of these things I regret and are all things that I am grateful for.  It reminds me of my favorite poems:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear, Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I marked the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. 

Robert Frost

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