I have this goal in mind. I want to rent a house in a major European metro city for the summer. You could give me a list to choose from that would include any of the following: London, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon; the list goes on. You pick a major city, and I’d love to spend a summer there. I think it would be a lot of fun to live in an Airbnb, be like one of the locals, shop at the local farmers’ market, find your corner coffee shop, and more.
I think part of it is the fact that the summers are limited with my son, knowing he’s going to be off to college soon and off on his own life, and I want to capture as much time together as I can. I also think it would just be fun to mix up life and try some new stuff for a few months.
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So yesterday I started looking at the Airbnb site as well as Blueground Apartments, which is an international apartment rental group. Turns out, it’s way more expensive to do than I thought. On the low end, it’s going to be anywhere between $8-10K a month, but if you want to stay in the areas where you really want to stay, it’s closer to $18-20K a month. That doesn’t include flights and living expenses while you’re there.
Not cheap.
But that’s the point.
It’s a goal, and it gives me something to work towards that’s tangible, and we all need something to work towards that’s tangible.
A vague goal is easy to ignore because it never really asks anything of you. Saying, “I want to travel more,” sounds great in conversation, but there is no real commitment behind it, no date attached to it, no number that makes you uncomfortable, and no reason to change anything about how you are living today. The moment you say, “I want to spend next summer living in Barcelona with my family, and it is probably going to cost me somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000,” the entire thing becomes much more real.
That number may be scary at first, especially when you start adding up the apartment, the flights, the meals, the transportation, and all the other costs you somehow convince yourself will not exist when you are daydreaming about walking to a coffee shop every morning. Still, that is probably what makes the goal valuable, because meaningful goals should force you to think differently about the money you are making, the work you are doing, and whether the life you are currently building can eventually support the things you claim are important to you.
We are all incredibly skilled at shrinking our goals until they fit neatly inside the life we already have.
Most people work incredibly hard without ever deciding what all of that work is actually supposed to unlock. They want the promotion, the raise, the larger bonus, or the next title, but they rarely stop to ask what they are going to do with any of it once it finally arrives. More money sounds great, but more money for what? A bigger role sounds impressive, but what does that role allow you to create in your actual life outside of another line on your resume and another set of meetings on your calendar?
The goal does not always have to be practical, responsible, or connected to some long-term retirement plan that you may not enjoy for another twenty-five years. Sometimes the goal can simply be to spend a summer eating pastries in Paris, getting lost on the trains in London, sitting outside late at night in Barcelona, or becoming a regular at some small coffee shop in Lisbon where the person behind the counter eventually knows your order. There has to be some room in life for wanting something simply because it would be fun, memorable, and different from everything you have been doing.
There is also something powerful about allowing yourself to want something expensive, inconvenient, and slightly ridiculous without immediately finding ten reasons why it will never work. We are all incredibly skilled at shrinking our goals until they fit neatly inside the life we already have, which is usually how we end up living the same year over and over again while telling ourselves we will eventually do something different. Sometimes the better decision is to leave the goal exactly where it is and start figuring out how to make your life big enough to hold it.
Maybe I never spend an entire summer living in Europe with my family. The cost may continue to be outrageous, the timing could be terrible, and my son may decide that the last thing he wants to do before leaving for college is spend three months walking through farmers’ markets with his parents while I pretend to be a local. Still, I would rather have a goal that gives all of this work a purpose than look back on another year and realize I stayed busy, made money, checked every box, and never once decided what I wanted any of it to create.