Many people start the new year with “resolutions” to start fresh, make big changes, and optimism about following their dreams. While this may sound like being a killjoy, figuring out where you’re really at in life is probably more important than the dreams of where you want to go. Knowing where you’re really at, not just physical location, but also age, physical health, financial health, responsibility load (time constraints) and actual skills you possess right now, will help center your plans for the future on reality – not the big dreams. This isn’t intended to burst your bubble or dissuade you on pursuing dreams, but more a statement of fact to help ground you in how you go about achieving your dreams.
Wherever we’re at in life, as long as we’re alive we can all work toward tackling new challenges and pursuing dreams, but there’s always that “but” and often we might have to chink away at some of the more unrealistic and impractical dreams and focus on the doable for where we’re really at in life. Often once you start working on the doable, you’ll build a solid foundation of skills and knowledge, that will make achieving those loftier dreams possible. The idiom “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” means building something great takes time and dedication.
Benjamin Franklin was probably America’s first self-help guru, as he set about developing personal virtue as the path to building civic virtue in our new republic. The centerpiece of building our American republic was a citizenry of people committed to civic virtue. Civic virtue is the willingness of citizens to put a high value on commitment to the community and be willing to make personal sacrifices for the good of the community over their own self-interests. America’s founding fathers believed in the importance of civic virtue for our American experiment in self-governance to thrive.
You can’t become a nuclear scientist or a doctor or even a good cook without practice and building a foundation of skills and knowledge. That learning to practice and develop skills is how to learn self-discipline, which is the key to building good character. Our culture has completely lost sight of the importance of developing virtue, which all comes from learning self-discipline. I wrote about this in a 2017 blog post: When everyone gets a gold star. Once you start developing more skills and knowledge through dedication to practice, the larger accomplishment is you’re learning self-discipline, which will carry you through on more challenging endeavors.
I’m going to use needlework as an example, because years ago I offended some cross-stitchers online for pointing out that a popular online challenge in May some of them promote, they call it Stitch Maynia, focuses on the wrong thing. The idea behind Stitch Maynia is to start a lot of new projects in May. Some participants start a new cross-stitch project every day in May and others pick a set number of projects to start in May, but the goal is about starting a lot of new projects. Upfront I don’t “participate” in online challenges of any sort, but this one bothered me a great deal.
I was watching videos online of people new to cross-stitching preparing for Stitch Maynia and I knew they would likely never complete those projects. While they were enthusiastic about all the amazing projects they’d be doing, I knew from things they said, that some of them were taxing their budget to buy the patterns and supplies for a month’s worth of projects at one time. It’s easy to spend a lot of money on needlework quickly (I speak from experience here). The larger aspect of this Stitch Maynia, is rather than being a wonderful way to inspire new stitchers, I still feel this is a recipe to waste a lot of money and acquire piles of projects that will never get finished. Even more importantly, I saw videos of experienced stitchers talk about their regret and disillusionment about starting so many projects at one time. I’d expect most of the new stitchers quit cross-stitching quickly after participating in this, but plenty of cross-stitchers participate in this challenge. Counted cross-stitch takes a lot of time, even small projects can take 8-12 hours (or longer) of stitching and large projects can take months, even with stitching a few hours a day.
So, what happens when you start a dozen or more news projects and then the reality hits that you can’t possibly keep up with stitching that many projects? I saw some YT cross-stitchers who do elaborate spreadsheets of rotating through their numerous projects and stitching so many hours on each one a week. Most of us aren’t going to keep to that sort of commitment and the other big reality is for most people, something that started out as a dream we were excited about, becomes a chore, or worse a burden, and then there’s the guilt factor of spending a lot of money on all that stuff that’s just sitting there. All the excitement with “being inspired” in the beginning can wane as the reality that even hobbies can require a lot of hard work and time to achieve the beautiful end result you’re dreaming about.
Trust me, I’ve been there on starting too many projects, but the bigger problem is the focus shouldn’t be on starting lots of projects. To become a better stitcher takes time and developing the basic skills. You’ll make mistakes and have to learn to fix them. Where the focus is on developing basic skills and finishing that project, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment. There’s nothing but looking at defeat if you start dozens of projects and realize you will likely never finish them. That’s all about instant gratification hits, as you pull out something new and exciting each day, then push it aside to start something new the next day.
Shortly after that gold star post in 2017, I wrote another post, Dutiful women and needlework, about how from one generation to the next, America went from the old way of rearing children to learn basic skills with daily chores as the norm, to a much more permissive parenting model by millions of American parents who lived through the Great Depression and WWII. I am a product of parents, who were part of that Greatest Generation and although my mother was big on assigning us chores and teaching us skills, she didn’t want us to struggle as hard as she had growing up. She learned from a very young age to put duty above her personal wants, because that’s how most children were raised back then. My mother had a lot more self-discipline than I do. We’re now a few more generations down the road and everything is about how children feel, not making sure they develop practical skills and knowledge, learn how to work through adversity, but most importantly – learn self-discipline.
Rather than starting all sorts of new projects at one time or chasing some big dream this new year, perhaps most of us would benefit at figuring out where we’re really at in life, then focus on small steps to take every day that lead to building more skills and knowledge. I need to start an exercise routine and make changes to my diet. I’m also working on dealing with my lifelong cluttering habits – especially with paperwork and craft/needlework supplies, however this really stems from my bad habits of hanging on to too much stuff, in general, and my totally delusional belief that someday I’m going to use all this stuff. Reading more is one of my goals too.
Everyone has areas where they could use some work – whether it’s more self-discipline with diet, exercise, getting things done on a timely manner, tackling tasks we don’t enjoy and put off, and the list goes on and on. We can all find things we can improve in our habits and new challenges to tackle that put us on the road to becoming more disciplined. And then we’ll be well on the road to achieving those big dreams.
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