Bingo

I know it’s July; but I’m thinking about my New Year’s Resolutions. It’s a mid-year habit where I review my progress to hold myself accountable. I never want to just make a list of goals with no plans for follow-through. That’s a waste of ink.

Some years I’m killin’ that list. Other years I still have a way to go. This year I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot, yet I still have 6 months to focus and complete what I set out to do.

As they say, the days are long, but the years are short. I oughta know.  I just completed my 1000^th week of leading at the Community Foundation of Grant County. 1000 weeks! I must have blinked.

And while I’d like to say I kicked butt all 1000 of those weeks; clearly some of those weeks kicked my behind!  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The thing is, when you really care about what you do, you wake up each day to relentlessly pursue your mission.

And I’ve done that. I do that. You do, too. Maybe, for you, it’s been 100 weeks or 1500 weeks. Either way, you deserve what intentionally setting, monitoring, and achieving goals brings you. However, one thing I have learned over those 1000 weeks is that you’ll have some big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs) to achieve. And when you have BHAGS, you also need to integrate self-care into your goal stack…think financial stack with a heart. And you need to do this on purpose.

This year, we did New Year’s Resolution Bingo.  My team filled out our 2024 Bingo cards with those two things in mind:  BHAGs and self-care. The card consisted of pink and white squares for self-care and green squares for BHAGs. In the end, we’re striving for a cover-all—that’s Bingo slang for covering the entire card before you can yell BINGO.

The reality is that if we’re doing these things on purpose, we win even if we don’t accomplish everything. Although I’m being a bit vulnerable here, I’ll share my New Year’s Resolution Bingo Card with you as it stands right now.

Maybe you will save this blog so you can use this idea for 2025—that’s great. But first, I want you to realize that you have 6 months left in 2024 that you need to leverage. And I want to challenge you with two pieces of advice that Seth Godin recently wrote that challenged me.

1. It’s ok to do something poorly on the way to doing it better.

Sometimes we go back and look at the marketing we sent out 10 years ago.  We have binders that contain physical copies of everything we send by direct mail. We look at them occasionally to spark other ideas or to recycle an idea in another way or for another audience. But often we find that we’re just so much better at marketing today than we were 10 years ago. Those 520 weeks of practice sure paid off. Start now, you’ll get better.

2. Work and share with others who support you and are committed to lifelong learning and continuous improvement.

The past two weeks my inbox has been exploding with emails from blog followers. Some sharing ideas with me. Some expressing how my ideas have helped them. And others who need help with content creation and are looking to hire a consultant with moxie! 😊

There is a great sense of mutual respect between those people and me. I’m sure when my husband bought me www.dawnbrown.com for my birthday three years ago, he had no idea that would be the real gift. I’ll be forever grateful.

Trust me, 1000 weeks goes by faster than you think. The two little boys we were raising when I started my job are now a self-sufficient software engineer and police officer, respectively. I really must stop blinking! The two of them going from boys to men is a physical representation of why we need to do our life and our career on purpose. If you don’t believe me, you can trust Ferris Bueller who said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Never forget, you have agency. Doing nothing, or doing nothing different, is a decision. But that is a decision that lets your conditions and circumstances drive you. Don’t wait to react to the world or the ringing phone or even your growing inbox. Resist those Pavlovian urges. Accept responsibility, think big, and take the initiative to make things better than you found them. Proactive people win by acting rather than being acted upon. Bingo!

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily,

Dawn
[email protected]
dawn brown creative, llc.