Today I am almost 5/12ths into my 29th year of life. Like most people, I look at those big age milestones and see whether I’m doing as well as I think I should be. In some ways I am doing better than I ever expected – I’ve had interesting and meaningful careers, made some not-stupid financial investments, and had some fun. However, I have also almost completely neglected my personal life. I am 100 pounds overweight. I have a couple of incredibly good friends, but not the kind of social engagement that I really enjoy (and no boyfriend). My life is almost completely devoid of non-work fun. I have an enormous amount of debt.
When I turned 29 on June 7th this year it was like a slap in the face. How could I have let things get so skewed? I began making some changes. Life is better now than it was 5 months ago but I wonder how I am going to meet my goals for June 7th, 2009. This blog is going to be about rapid change, sustainable choices and holding yourself accountable. I get all the same information that you do – from the media, from other blogs, from books. All the advice sounds pretty reasonable until you try to put it into practice or tweak it for your own life and personality.
Here are my goals for my 30th birthday:
Lose 100 pounds. I’ll be pretty up front about this – it’s a big goal. It flies in the face of the 2-lb a week safe weight loss that the media babbles about incessantly. I’ll explain why I think it’s safe and acheivable in a later post.
Build a social life around 3-4 hobbies that I truly enjoy. This means doing the activities and also translating the time I spend with those people into friendships, doing things that aren’t the activity. This might be kind of rough for me since I have never had “hobbies” per se, and making friends takes a degree of conscienciousness that I have a tendency to underprioritize.
Pay off my two credit cards, currently with a balance of $9,492. The balance was actually a lot higher 3 months ago, but I’ve been doing pretty well so far. Still, to reach this goal by June 7th I’ll need to make more changes.
With this brief overview I realize, as you probably do, that these goals constitute a life-overhaul. I can’t afford to neglect my work or other obligations. It’s going to an adventure, one I think will be worth reading about.
