Do you set personal goals for yourself?
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I set goals the way I set a ladder: against something solid, at the right angle, and only after I have checked what is above me.
People hear “personal goals” and picture a vision board. Mine is a work order. Show up. Do the sets. Write it down. The gym four days a week is not a goal, exactly. It is a standing appointment with a barbell that does not care about my excuses, which is why it works.
The trouble with the word “goal” is that it sounds like a wish with better stationery. I have spent twenty years watching wishes leak. A goal that does not survive contact with a Georgia July is not a goal. It is a poster.
So I run everything through Kirk’s drill. Does it last? What does it cost when it doesn’t? The gym lasts, because my knees and my back are the business. Skipping it costs me the roof the next day, and then the next. That is not motivation. That is arithmetic.
The same drill applies at home. I want to be the man who is awake before his house is. That is why the 4:45 alarm exists, and the Mr. Coffee, Folgers, black, loaded the night before because the 4:45 version of me cannot be trusted with measurements. Two mugs before anyone else is awake. Giang has informed me, gently, that I am not a person until the second one.
She is right.
By the time three kids under seven detonate like smoke alarms, I have already had the one quiet hour that is actually mine. That is a goal too, even if it never makes a list: get up before the storm. The storm, in this case, is small, loud, and wants breakfast.
At work, my goals are even less romantic. Do it right or do it twice. That is not a slogan on a truck. It is the cheapest business plan I own. A roof done twice costs twice, and the second time it costs your name as well. So the goal is not “grow the business” in the abstract. The goal is: no callbacks this month that were my fault, material ordered before the truck leaves, and a proposal a homeowner can actually understand.
I am terrible, though, at the kind of goal that lives only in January. Lose weight, read more, be better — all of it sounds noble and evaporates by February, the way resolutions do when a real roof shows up. If a goal cannot be turned into a Tuesday, I do not keep it. Tuesday is where goals go to get honest.
That is also why I keep them small and physical. Twelve posts in the ground. Eight hundred ten square feet of chicken run. One more rep than last week. One proposal written before dinner instead of after it, when my brain has already clocked out and started watching the ceiling fan.
The biggest personal goal I ever set was not on a list either. It was to be the man who signs the proposal, not just the man who carries the shingles. That took a year of terrible math, paperwork that nearly broke me, and Giang packing my cooler like it was already decided. It lasted because I built it one job at a time, the way you build anything that has to hold water.
So yes, I set goals. I just set them like ladders — against something solid, at the right angle, and close enough to climb.
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