Today, I turn 40.
Damn.
When you’re little you don’t even think about 40. 40 seems like when you’re whole life is supposed to be figured out and you’re almost to retirement.
At least, that’s how I saw it when I was a kid.
40, for some reason I can’t explain, has always held some mystical aura around it. I think it’s because I see it as the halfway point of my life.
Again, no idea why I see things like that but that’s just how it is.
In my 30s I was always scared of reaching 40 because what if I hadn’t accomplished the things that I wanted?
How much time would I have left to accomplish them?
I know, that sounds pretty dramatic as if I’m going to be gone tomorrow. I don’t plan on it.
But what I’ve come to respect in my super old age is the journey. I still have the big goals that I want to achieve, but instead of just staring at them I appreciate my own growth along the way.
It’s fun to learn something new everyday. It’s great to reach a goal, but things never stop there because I want to keep on moving.
I understand that I have the luxury of being able to do this because we do make money here to support a small lifestyle. If you’d ask me to write this post 5 years ago I’d probably tell you to fuck off because I’m too busy trying to pay rent.
But I’m no longer at that point.
Maybe we all have a minimum viable goal that we can reach that will allow us to look at the world a bit more than usual.
For example, if all of your expenses are $2,000 a month, then your minimum viable goal might be $2,200. Once you get there you don’t take your foot off of the gas, but at least you get to stop at roadside attractions from time to time.
The funny thing is, that minimum viable goal is the hardest goal because it requires you to be a completely different person.
Before you started an online business you were someone else. Now you have to be the person that can achieve that $2,200. And that’s hard for people to grasp.
It was hard for me to grasp.
Up until last year I lived under the idea that I just had to be more ME to reach my goals. The problem was the more ME I was the more the results stayed the same.
Now I’m able to take a step back and see what the next version of Scrivs needs to be to achieve a result.
It’s kind of like software. Version 1.0 can only do so much. If you want it to do something else (achieve a new goal) you can’t pretend that smashing the keys harder will change it.
You have to upgrade the software.
So that’s what I’ve been working on these past couple of months and the funny thing is it feels like Scrivs 2.0 is almost ready to be released.
It only took 40 years to develop.