Future Goals and Present Challenges and Maintenance

My wife wants to get in shape.  What’s relevant for the purposes of my personal development project is that she wants me to get in shape too.  The problem is that my project, as I designed it, is to limit my focus so that I am more likely to meet individual goals.  I have told my wife that I am willing to focus on fitness in three months.  I wish I didn’t have to make that promise because it alters my focus, but family first.

I have only committed to this project for three months as another method of keeping my motivation.  Who can’t keep up a project for three months?  That seems to be the theory behind several challenges in which people can partake, from fluent in three months, which I mentioned before, and P90X.  I would have preferred to not muddle the only-three-month nature of the project by committing to another project following this one. 

I guess it is impossible to not dream a bit on the future.  One of my goals for the next three months will be to get in shape.  By the time the goal gets set, I will make sure that it is far more specific (either by attaining some fitness milestone or losing a certain amount of weight or some combination of the two).  I plan to continue the blog at this point, but so long as I post twice a week until February 6, 2015 I will consider my project a success regardless of whether I post again.  I do think a change from language learning to a fitness related goal will provide some interesting food for thought on how to stick to personal development. 

My final concern is what will happen to all of the Chinese that I am now learning while working on my fitness, and whatever goals I set after the fitness goal.  I suppose I will either have to a.) do something to continue to maintain my Chinese after I move on to other goals, b.) set up future goals that build on what I have learned, or c.) some combination of both.  I honestly have no idea right now.  I will continue to ponder this.  If you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

As it stands, I am just completing my second week of blog posting and have studied Chinese every day for quite some time.  I do need to put a little more focus on the job related goal, but I do not know when I will have adequate time to address my shortcomings with that goal.