Midyear Wake-Up Call | Part 1
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Why is grading January goals in July the least useful midyear check?
So we're at the middle of the year and most of us, if we mark this moment at all, we mark it by pulling out the goals that we set back in January and grading ourselves against them. Did I do the things? Am I on track? Over these next two episodes, I want to make the case that this is close to the least useful thing that you can do at the halfway mark of the year. January is aspiration. July is evidence. And the whole grading yourself against January move neatly hides one piece of information. This moment is actually trying to hand you. So here's where we're going. I'm going to tell you about a year of mine that looked from the outside like one of the best I've had and felt from the inside like something had gone a little bit sideways.
I'm going to make the case for why the thing that looks most like success in your year might actually be the exact thing that is draining the rest of it. And I'm going to give you three questions that tell you the truth about what's going on in your life. Maybe not the whole truth about everything, but a lot of truths, not one of which involves your goals, your step count or your net worth or anything else that you might be inclined to measure against. So excited to share this series with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back with that right after this short break.
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So let me tell you about this past year. And I'm going to tell it honestly, which in my case means a little bit of telling on myself, not because it was a bad year, just the opposite. It was one of the richest, most rewarding stretches I've had in a really long time, which it turns out is exactly the kind of first half of the year this whole episode is about. And by any measure I'd have set for myself, it was a genuinely good run. I mean, of course there were challenges along the way, but good things happening. They came together at once. One was a major transition in my work life that I'd been building towards for years. A real accomplishment and honestly a privilege, one I'm proud of and grateful for, handed off to exactly the right people and one that I won't bore you with the logistics of.
Another was a whole season of building and momentum in business. And the one I loved most was maybe the smallest, but the most meaningful. Every morning from about 7.30 to 9 a.m., before the world could get its hands on me, I was writing a novel, my first. And late spring, I finished the first full draft, which was gloriously, magnificently bad, exactly the way a first draft should be. And I loved every minute of making it. So that's the picture from the outside. And here's what matters about it. It was also a good picture from the inside. It wasn't miserable. I wasn't burning out in any dramatic, cinematic way. A lot of it felt genuinely solid, which is precisely why the thing I'm about to describe was so easy to miss.
Because underneath all that good, there was a current kind of running the other way of All of that work, the transition and the building and a dozen other things that a business asks of you, it leaned heavily on the kind of work that for me drains rather than fills. In my own framework, I call that your anti-sparketype. Mine is what we call the essentialist. That detailed, operational, get every last item into its box kind of work and really valuable work. And the thing about your anti-sparketype is not that you can't do it. I can and I did and I think I did it reasonably well, arguable maybe. It's that doing it, it costs you something that it wouldn't cost someone who's actually wired to be lit up and energized, sparked by the same work.
It draws down on a reserve that for me is mostly mental. And for a good long stretch, I found myself living almost entirely on that side of myself.
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