You know what I’m realizing more and more everyday. Half of the battle is just choosing what you’re going to do while you wait for what you’re trying to do.

Seriously. 

I have picked some very lofty and slow goals for my life. I want to learn Spanish, to the point where I could go a full day without using any English and not notice. I want to learn Russian, to the point where I can talk with my wife and keep that part of her life alive when her parents pass away. I want to get rich. I want to have a healthy body. I want to have a well informed, peaceful, happy mind that has a focus in math and programming. 

And that’s it. All of those are achievable, but they take time, most of them in the 5-10 year range. 

It’s picking the outlook, and then just sticking with the program that is the hard part. 

I’m going to focus on health, because that has been a big one, and the one that has informed my thoughts here more than anything else. 

I used to smoke. I also drank WAY too much (I mean, I work in the restaurant industry, as a bartender, I feel like most of that demographic drinks too much). Not enough that I’ve ever been hospitalized or anything crazy, but enough that I could tell I was gaining weight from it. Enough that I drank too often. Enough that I likely was less happy overall than I could have been in my life. You know, ENOUGH. 

I quit smoking in 2021. I’d tried for years and years, and failed. Then, I started telling people in November 2021 that I would stop in december. I didn’t know then about consistency, and about how hard it is to announce to people you are going to do one thing and go back on it. So it stuck for a while. I was using the nicotine patch. When I finally stepped off of that, I caught Covid. I couldn’t break the quarantine. I was stuck. It sucked, but I got nicotine off my back. 

Then I gained a lot of weight. I quit smoking, but I didn’t change my diet or my drinking. I used to eat terribly, and then I just wanted to eat more and more now that I didn’t have nicotine curtailing my appetite.  I felt bloated and gross. 

So I started walking. Stopped drinking. All the time. Walk walk walk. It helped a bit. Then I moved and I stopped walking as much. I started drinking again when I got into the advanced sommelier exam (I bet you would too, it’s stressful AF). 

Finally, in Omaha, I heard something Tony Robbins said and it really clicked. He talked about when he was first on his journey to becoming healthy. He made a deal with himself that he’d work out for 9 months. And if he didn’t like it, he’d never do it again. 

I don’t know why that worked for me, or resonated with me, but it did. I tried it. And I kept at it. I keep going everyday. 

My yardstick for whether or not I was successful was small at first. Intentionally small. Did I go to the gym for 5 minutes? Success. Small, daily movements. Small, daily tricks to keep me coming back day after day.

That was back in January of 2024. Now it’s September, and I regularly go to the gym for an hour. I don’t do anything too hard. I try to listen to something or read while I’m there. On the bike I can burn around 500 calories in an hour session while reading. That adds up. Bit by bit. I’ve learned to lift some weights. I keep is small and simple. Day after day. 

What are you going to do while you’re walking towards your goals? How are you going to learn to celebrate not the outcome, but the process? Because if you become obsessed with the process, if you fall in love not with having the perfect body, but instead what it takes to get the perfect body, you’ll succeed. If you fall in love with making money, and not being rich, you’ll eventually end up rich. Fall in love with learning, not the knowledge. Skills and not facts. Motion vs. structure.