Goals for a Decade

I am now sixty. I don’t feel any different and I don’t know that the change has many practical ramifications, though I am looking forward to skipping the line at Costco once out of quarantine.

For the past few weeks I have pondering a set of goals for the next decade. The set for my fifties proved surprisingly robust and helpful despite being formed in a time of turmoil. Now I have a more stable life and the process should be easier.

We are trying to do this as a couple, through some form of iteration. We can both produce priorities independently then work together to address any contradictions and trade offs. It feels like a constructive and productive way to talk through the possible dilemmas we will face in the next few years, and to make explicit all those assumptions that have been hidden before.

When I defined goals ten years ago, I wrote down that they were for two decades, which feels rather heroic and unnecessary now I look back. It would be quite a feat to produce goals that could remain relevant for as long as ten years, but twenty seems too far. Perhaps it was an effort to recognize that health is likely to become an increasing constraint from now on. One context of any goal for my sixties must be to maximize the chances of being able to enjoy life in my seventies. Fate will play its part, but good choices now improve the odds, to a greater extent than would have been the case earlier in life.

Thoughts about health give another clue. It is possible to come up with a set of goals that are generic and not very helpful. We call all subscribe to peace, joy, health and love, especially as we reach the years when such things are far from guaranteed. But what actions would such goals lead to, beyond taking no risks? The aim of any set of goals is to produce a life of fulfillment and one with all the other generics. The trick is to find some priorities that make them more likely to come about. A lot of corporate mission statements make the same mistake, becoming so generic that any company on earth could subscribe to it.

The other pitfall is to be too specific. Some people of my age go for bucket lists, but I don’t like the idea. The list can become too much like a checklist, and tends to be too dominated by destinations and experiences. There is a risk of such lists missing the point, and leading to lives without peace but lots of air miles to take to the early grave.

For my sixties, I’ve come up with four themes, which I hope can lead to the generic outcomes by offering clear priorities. The first is kindness. The coronavirus has allowed us all to take stock of what we miss most, and in my case volunteering at our old folks’ home comes near the top of the list. Visits to the home always leave me in a good mood that lasts several hours, and the reason is kindness. The home is a place of kindness, full of kind people, and where I can learn to be more kind myself.

I would like to seek out places and people of kindness, to take opportunities to be kind and to become kinder. The home is a good example, but the priority can also guide other activities and indicate what to avoid, for example the Trump twitter feed. I have some choirs that are kinder than others. I can practice being kinder to my family, and try to spend more time with its kindest members. If I am offered any work, paid or unpaid, I can check in advance how good a fit there is with this theme.

The second theme is enlightenment. I enjoy learning things, mastering some skill or finding an explanation for some event or behaviour. It also gives me pleasure to offer enlightenment to others. There is room in my life for projects, and I need a means for selecting good ones and some trigger to actually embark. Languages are a good option, so is history, especially history of music. I have recently tried writing something longer than a blog, and see this decade involving more reading than the last. I love coaching others when the opportunity arises. I love to travel, but at a slow pace so the travelling itself does not become too stressful. This could be a decade of enlightenment.

Early music is the third theme, and what I missing the most during the pandemic. The older I get, the fussier I become in terms of my tastes. I have been so lucky recently with the chance to sing the very best early music in quality groups and beautiful locations. This might be my last decade with a serviceable voice, so I want to use it while I have the chance. Studying early music is a promising avenue too.

Finally I envisage a bias towards simplification. A highlight of recent weeks in Portugal was an absence of clutter and an abundance of time. I have also recently made a big effort to unsubscribe from mailing lists and love my emptier inbox that has resulted. A life with fewer accounts, cards, passwords and files feels like a life with more space for enjoyment. It would also be good to reduce legal and financial ambiguity. Simplification can also help with the projects and the travel plans. Complex itineraries, short layovers and one night hotel stays feel like good things to target for reduction.

In many ways the themes work together, but there are some potential conflicts. A kind, simple life would probably spend most of its days in Portugal, but then where is the early music? The best enlightenment projects will involve people and places, and that won’t always be simple. Performing quality early music usually involves regular commitments, which might not always be simple.

There will also need to be trade offs with my wife and my family. Perhaps this decade will bring the gift of grandchildren, and spending kind time enlightening them and being enlightened by them feels appealing, but, with kids on three continents, hardly simple.

I believe that the trade offs are part of the point of the goals. If achieving the goals did not involve trade offs, then the goals themselves are probably too trite, and their value as a trigger for personal thought and for conversations with family members would be limited.

Are these goals SMART? They are not at all, really. But I don’t think that diminishes them. Team goals and short-term goals need to be SMART, because clarity of expectation and focused action are critical. But I have a full decade for these goals, and, while I will work with others, the key actions are only mine. At the end of the decade, it will be easy enough to assess how well I have achieved the goals.

The only theme where some discipline could help is the one of enlightened projects. It is too easy to be lazy and to become fixed in habits and to procrastinate. I need to make sure that I start enough projects – if they have been well chosen, it will be no problem to maintain momentum after that. Perhaps there is a role here for some resolutions each New Year.

I recommend the process of setting longer-term life goals, and not just for those of us nearer the back end of our working lives. And I’m happy that I had the idea of looking for a limited number of themes as a way to express the goals. No doubt the decade will throw up plenty of surprises, but I feel more ready than I did a few weeks ago.