|
Friends,
Quick reminder if you’re new to the series. Over the past twenty-four years I’ve run seven marathons, and the more I look back, the more I think those races taught me more about how people and programs develop than just about anything else in my life. We’re four weeks in.
This week’s race is the Dallas White Rock Marathon, December 2010. The race that qualified me for Boston.
The full blog version of this piece is about the lie that the right time is coming (available Friday at www.ianpalmerleadership.com/blog). This week’s newsletter goes after a related question that I think matters more for the daily work: how do you fit the pursuit of a big goal into a life that’s already full?
Quick context. In the spring of 2010 I decided to qualify for the Boston Marathon. The qualifying time in my age group was 3:15, more than thirteen minutes faster than I had ever run. That same year, our family bought our first house, our son Adam was born (fifth child, first son), I moved into a brigade XO role, and the brigade started ramping up for the next Iraq deployment.
By every reasonable measure, it was the worst year I could have picked. I qualified anyway. Eight months of training. 3:15 on the nose.
Here’s what made it possible, and what I think translates directly to anyone trying to develop themselves or a program inside a full life.
You’ve probably heard the big-rocks-in-the-jar thing. The idea is: if you fill a jar with sand and pebbles first, you can’t fit the big rocks in. If you put the big rocks in first, the pebbles and sand still find their way around them. The big rocks have to go in first or they never go in at all.
That’s what 2010 was for me. I didn’t have more time than anyone else that year. I had less.
What I had was a decision. The 3:15 was a big rock. It went into the jar first, which mostly meant early-morning runs before the kids and the staff were up. Everything else that year got fit around it. Some pebbles didn’t fit. I made peace with that.
Here’s the rhythm that worked, in case it’s useful:
Dream big. The goal you choose has to be worth what it’s going to cost. The safe goal calibrated to your busy year won’t survive the busy year. The big one might.
Make a plan. Vague intentions don’t survive a full calendar. The plan doesn’t have to be elaborate, but it has to be specific enough to put on the calendar.
Make the plan fit your life. This is the part that’s the hardest for most of us. The plan has to be the version that works inside your real conditions. Not the version that would work in some idealized life you don’t live. And be honest about what it will cost, including who in your life will be carrying some of that cost. None of 2010 would have happened without my wife agreeing to the plan. Big rocks require help. They almost always do.
Be consistent. The big rock gets reached through accumulation, not single big efforts. Stack the days. The work compounds in ways you won’t see until much later, and by then it’s already done what it was going to do.
The most important things in your life get time first. Then you do the best you can with the time and the activities that are left. If you reverse that order, the big rocks never make it into the jar. There is always more sand.
With this experience, I found that I had been welcoming too many pebbles and too much sand into my life, anyway. Even though I was pursuing a big goal, and needed help doing it, I learned to trim away some of the unnecessary. The important stuff always got its due attention.
And here’s the part I want you to sit with. You probably have time for the thing you’ve been telling yourself you don’t have time for. You don’t have unlimited time, and you may have to sacrifice some pebbles, and you may need help carrying the load. But the seemingly impossible thing is, more often than not, actually possible. It just requires putting it in the jar first.
What’s the big rock you’ve been treating like a pebble? And what would it look like to put it in the jar this week?
Talk soon,
Ian |
