The Power of the Pen

Happy 2019, everyone!  I took a bit of an extended holiday hiatus from my little blog. We did some traveling…

And we have a few other new projects up our idiomatic sleeve. But I am back, and I am ready to take on 2019.  

I love new beginnings.  I love the start of a new school year, but I love the start of a new calendar year even more.  Yes, maybe it’s an arbitrary new beginning, but still. There is just something so delicious about blank planner pages. Something so exciting about the opportunity to regroup.  Something refreshing about not having already screwed up the year royally. 🙂

January feels like the time to make things happen.  The world is your oyster right now, albeit a rather cold and bleak oyster, at least if you live in the Upper Midwest.  (To be fair, though, warm oysters don’t sound very appetizing, anyway.)

This could very well be your year. Or maybe 2018 was your year. If so, congrats.  But don’t sit back.  Make 2019 even better.

Set a couple of goals. They don’t have to be earth-shaking.  Maybe you want to run a marathon.  Maybe you want to walk around the block after dinner. Maybe you want to pay off your credit card.  Or your mortgage (or mine!). Maybe you want to drink more water, or maybe just better beer. Maybe you want to read to your kids more.  Maybe you want to watch all 5 seasons of Schitt’s Creek. I don’t know.  And I don’t really care.  No judgment here. You do you.

But I think it is important to have a road map.  There is great power in identifying and articulating your dreams.  There is even greater power in recording them.  Writing them down.

Even if you scribble your goals on a sticky note and then stuff the paper in a drawer and forget about it for a year, the simple fact that your goals exist out there, in the universe and in your junk drawer, makes them more likely to come into being. But you do need to physically write them, pen to paper.  Typing doesn’t work the same magic.

I don’t know exactly why this is.  Maybe it’s some sort of cosmic hocus pocus. More likely, writing your goals down might lodge them into your subconscious so that you are always working toward them, without even realizing it.  Perhaps there is another reason entirely. I don’t know.  I didn’t feel the need to study the science here.

The experts who do study these things will tell you that folks who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them by some percentage or another (These experts absolutely will not agree on the exact amount, however.  Have you noticed that the experts never seem to agree? Sometimes 3 out of 4 will agree, sometimes even 9 out of 10 will agree, but they just can’t all get on the same darn page.). The experts will probably also tell you to revisit your goals often and write them down repeatedly to achieve maximum benefit.  I won’t push that hard. Let’s be reasonable here.  I have laundry to do.

But there’s no good reason not to do it once, assuming you can find a pen and five minutes. I can tell you that the technique has worked for me in the past, even when I doubted its power. It really has helped me accomplish multiple things I never expected I would.

Some folks say that writing your goals down as if they have already happened makes them even more likely to come to fruition than just writing them down (e.g.,  “I am a marathoner” as opposed to “I am going to run a marathon” or “I only drink hoity-toity IPAs” instead of “I am going to drink better beer.”).  I don’t know if that holds true or not, as I personally haven’t tried it yet.  But, again, it can’t hurt.

So, I am off to write down “I am skinny and independently wealthy” 100 times.   🙂  Not really.  But wish me luck.