Welcome to Part 10 or X…
Today, we’ll take some time to remind ourselves about goal setting. Make sure to look at your plans and goals and keep working on your next plan. You’re working on one letter at a time and sooner than you think you’ll find yourself at retirement.
Don’t worry about making your plans ‘perfect’. Trust me, over the years you’ll have to fix, adjust, massage and rewrite many of them. That’s the beauty of life, you never know what’s going to happen next. The important thing is to keep it as simple and achievable as possible.
It’s a good idea when making life plans to think about what really makes you happy. I read a great article today that may help you with your plans.
Here they are, according to Daniel Kahneman in his essay “The Focusing Illusion”:
- If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent.
- If everyone had the same income, the differences among people in life satisfaction would be reduced by less than 5 percent.
Life is what you make it. If you want a good retirement the first thing you should do is work on your marriage. You need to be happy to be happy. You need to think more about the good things in life and focus less on the bad.
Does that mean you ignore the bad? Of course not, it means that you shouldn’t have a laser focus mindset on the bad. Shine your spotlight on the good in the world, your friends, your family, your hobbies and whatever else gives you pleasure.
My wife and I don’t pretend or try to forget that our daughter died of cancer. Trying to forget that would probably drive us into a huge depression and have the exact opposite effect of the one we wanted.
We spend the year thinking about her and wondering what she’d be like. And when the time of year nears her birthday, we acknowledge it and we talk about it and we cry. When the anniversary of her death approaches we do the same. The pain and the sadness are real and some years are harder than others. We understand that our PTSD will pass and that our lives will resume.
But during those tough times, we allow ourselves to mourn and we also allow ourselves to recover from it. We take time off work, we don’t expect to accomplish a lot in the course of those couple of weeks. Eventually life returns to normal and we go on.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, plan your happiness as well as you can.
We’ll be back soon, keep working on your stuff.
Chip and Hunnee Toodee