If you are not careful, your life will pass by in a flash. Your career will be over in a snap. Your kids will be grown and will have flown in a Blink-182. Because time is a crafty thief that lulls you into someday thinking. Like Sugar Ray. And then it yanks that someday away just like your prankster friend, pulling your chair away just before you’re about to sit on it, Potsy.
Milestones
One of the great ways to create a far more enjoyable and successful life and create memorable experiences is to utilize the power of milestones.
Milestones are those moments on the calendar that humans have made to mark the passage of time. Those days or events offer valuable markers for accomplishments, challenges and traditions. They are there to host rites of passage and other memory-making events. And without milestones, Hallmark would have a hard time selling you paper.
You know the big and obvious milestones. At Halloween, you dress up in a costume and do candy things. At Thanksgiving, you gather with family or friends, feast, and get thanky. At Christmas, you exchange gifts, eat, drink and praise Mary. At New Year’s, you celebrate and create lists of how the next 2 weeks will be different.
Deadlines and Opportunities
But milestones also create deadlines for accomplishments and opportunities for memorable experiences.
I sit down to write every morning by 6:10am. But Tuesdays and Thursdays are milestones to publish blog posts. Every 3 weeks, I publish Adam’s Good Newsletter. And every five years, I want to publish a new book. Those are all random and arbitrary deadlines. But they become useful milestones that make my elective activities time-bound. Milestones offer navigational markers on the naked landscape of time. Which ramps up your self-imposed productivity.
I had a major speaking event yesterday, and I used it as an opportunity to get in better shape. I committed to doing 30 minutes of cardio every day for 30 days leading up to the talk, so that I would look and feel more fit on stage in front of 1,000 people. (And I requested to have no cameras in the venue, because the camera adds 10 pounds.)
I always use my birthday as a motivating milestone. I’ve also used class reunions, New Year’s Eve, and the birth of my children as important starting points, end points and exclamation points.
I have used milestones to gain traction towards health and fitness goals, to measure my business success, and to create deadlines for my entrepreneurial launches. (Which are a lot less launchy than Elon Musk, Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos’ entrepreneurial launches.)
I used the end of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 as a milestone to finish the first draft of my manuscript for my first book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? Then I used Thanksgiving of 2021 as my milestone to publish the book. I made both of those goals happen, thanks to the power of milestones. (Since then, I have learned how to write a manuscript without a worldwide pandemic.)
I use milestones to schedule big travel. For my wife Dawn’s 40th birthday, I surprised her with a trip to Europe. We scheduled a trip to Europe in the summer before my daughter Ava’s senior year of high school. We realized that the milestone provided the last summer opportunity for us to all travel together before college obligations made summer travel problematic. Using milestones is one of the best ways to visit the big places on your life-travel list. (Using airplanes is the other best way.)
I used a milestone to plan a major move. My wife and I wanted to find a place where we could settle to allow our children to finish their schooling without moving by the time my daughter Ava entered middle school. We moved from Atlanta to Mequon, Wisconsin, a large-yarded, low-taxed, great-schooled northern suburb of Milwaukee that sits on the Western shore of Lake Michigan. We called this our 13-year home. Which meant that we would stay in Milwaukee for 13 years, until we hit another major milestone: our son Magnus’s high school graduation. Then Dawn and I are free to hit the road again and take on more adventures.
Key Takeaway
Your greatest ambitions, experiences and traditions are far less likely to happen if you don’t tie them to a milestone. Use those special days to inspire your work, to create deadlines, and to force urgency. Use them to create regular events to bring your people together. Or to reset your ambitions, spark your goal setting and help you accomplish more elective activity than you could without them.
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+For more of the best life lessons I have learned, check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media. And consider subscribing to Adam’s Good Newsletter.
Adam Albrecht Blog 