In 2019, I exercised more and ate healthier than any of my other years on this planet. I learned what it takes to burn off one calorie and that was super depressing. We started the year with this 10 day plant based challenge which helped bring some much needed perspective to our day to day eating habits. In the spring, I found new discipline to wake up in the morning and work out with my wife. For the love, I even started jogging! Jogging!!
This brings us up to today, where the other night I was joking that I am going to finish the year at the same weight I started at this year despite all the good habits and exercise. This cluster of glutinous holidays in the last 6 weeks of the year should have been on last week’s post of “Two Things Chappin’ My Bottom.” Anyhow, in that moment of joking, I also had a very simple realization that one year is a really long amount of time.
As financial planners, we like to ask questions like “What do you want to do when you retire in 10 years?” or “What goals do you have in the next 3 to 5 years?” These are good questions that hopefully lead to interesting conversations about what is really important. They may help us determine our priorities when it comes to money, but they are not very good predictors of actual time frame. Why you might ask? 🙂 Cause 3 years is a mountain of time let alone 10 years from now. The number 1 has such a small numerical weight and when used to describe a length of time, I feel like this is one of these scenarios where our language does us an injustice.
As we wind down 2019, my call to action is for us all to conquer the 1 year ahead of us. Conquer each day, week, month so we can look back on the year and respect the time and how it was spent. Your definition of conquer may be going to the movies more often or just saying hello to strangers. Mine will be asking clients questions like, “what do we want to accomplish in the next 3 months?”
Happy Friday!