“Why Can’t I Get Anything Good All At Once”

You know who said that? Pete Campbell in Mad Men. The most unsympathetic character on that show. But after watching Mad Men for the 7th time, I realized that the present day millennials/quarter lifers ARE Pete Campbell. We want everything. We have no time to wait. We want the best now.

We are living our lives at the fastest pace in US History.

When I was 18 I thought my life would be “figured out” when I was 25. Now I’m 25 and I think I’ll have it “all done” by 30. If you’re 30, I’m sure you tell yourself you’ll have everything by 40.

Does this seem like the recipe for success? Constantly pushing the goal posts back just enough to seem like everything is within reach but in reality spinning our wheels. “We overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve over the course of our lives.”

Some of the best career advice I got was to set your goals backwards. Working from the end reveals that we put to much emphasis on the current year and not enough on the next decade. If you have everything figured out by 30, what do the next 50 years look like?

We create our ideal future-selves yet it is impossible to know who we’ll become in our time here.

We create the prototypical “perfect” life. Married, 3 kids, Range Rover in the driveway, waking up late and only working a few hours each day, lavish vacations to far away places, luxury handbags and watches. “The Works”.

We create these “perfect future lives”, not by digging deep and asking ourselves what we want to accomplish, but by consuming content from other people’s lives and allowing that to dictate what is “successful” in our own.

Should Instagram pictures and videos set the agenda for our lives? Because we see people we know travelling, buying expensive products, but never take the time to ask ourselves what WE want. Since the creation of social media we have become conditioned to “Keep up”.

It is impossible to know who we will become. Our lives will change dramatically between now and the next 25 years. Spending our time meticulously creating a plan, executing on that plan, and adjusting when necessary is the only true way to accomplish what it is we want for our lives.

Creating deadlines for our lives limits our potential to have everything we want.

The largest obstacle we deal with when accomplishing our goals is deadlines. I think of this photo every time I catch myself putting an arbitrary age limit on my goals. Why does your age stop you from digging?

As we grow older we begin to lose the optimistic outlook on life and our potential begins to shrink. We make less goals, we spend less time on ourselves, we let external factors out of our control dictate on lives. Responsibilities pile up, so we make excuses as to why we can’t live the life we’ve always wanted. We miss “deadlines” and tend to give up. This is why every January the same people in the gym are no where to be seen by March.

If you watch what the older generation is saying you’ll notice a trend. They unanimously wish they had their youth back. Some would even trade their entire fortune for a chance at being 25 again. Hundreds of millions of dollars for a chance at being the same age we are now.

Our future life of adventure, exploration, love, happiness, and wealth is full of limitless potential.

It’s ironic. After we take the time to ask ourselves what we want, we all end up working toward the same general things. Health, wealth, family, love, happiness, and adventure.

The most beautiful thing in the world is that our lives have limitless potential. If the pandemic has proven anything, it’s that millennials and the quarter-lifers have made it clear what they want in life. Many of us have re-signed and moved to a different city. We’ve began working remotely and decided that working with a purpose is more important than money.

So as the 20s move forward we need to continue building on that momentum. Never underestimating what we can do in the long-term. Spending our time meticulously creating a plan, executing on that plan, and adjusting when necessary is the only true way to accomplish what we want for our lives.