My 2018 S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Two years ago at this time, I was feeling a constant sense of tension: I coveted free time, but when it occurred, I felt paralyzed by possibility. There were so many things I could do, I’d feel completely overwhelmed by choices. Rather than doing anything, instead, I’d spend whole afternoons and nights staring at my phone, mindlessly texting or delving into the cesspool of Twitter. Each session ended with me feeling anxious, regretful and angry (mostly at myself, but also at the Twitter community at large and President Trump).

So, I borrowed from corporate life and adopted personal “S.M.A.R.T. Goals”. (For those not familiar, S.M.A.R.T. goals are goals that are specific, measureable, achievable, relevant and time-bound; here’s the Wikipedia page.) My hypothesis was that the structure of a set of highly measurable goals in areas that either served my passions or generally improved my physical and mental health, would help cut through indecision and get me moving. As you can read here from a year ago, it worked!

I always intended to publish my results because I felt that the end product of a public “report card” would serve as an essential measure of accountability. What I didn’t anticipate was the number of people who were also struggling with the sense of feeling simultaneously paralyzed and overwhelmed, and who wanted to apply S.M.A.R.T. goals to their own life. So, I’ve decided I’ll make an annual habit of sharing this post, both because I do find it motivating (if clearly naval-gazing and self-indulgent), and because it seems to have an ancillary benefit of providing value to others. If you are one of those people, great!

Below you’ll find a snapshot of how I performed in each of nine goal areas this year, as well as some deeper reflections/reporting/lessons/advice in case you are interested in setting some goals in similar areas.

OVERALL 2018 REFLECTIONS

As was true last year, what I’ve learned is that these goals are great at addressing the free time in our calendars, but they in no way address the more important aspects of our lives. By any measure, 2018 was an enormous year for me, and before I talk about the more frivolous things like the books I read, recipes I cooked, or golf I played, I’d seem like a robot if I didn’t start with the following events that happened for me personally in 2018:

· I got married! Needless to say, this was the greatest focal point of our year and an enormous subject of our time and energy. The experience exceeded my expectations in ways I never could have anticipated. Among the thousands (truly thousands) of vivid memories of that day, two things stand out that I wanted to mention here.

o The number of congratulations and well wishes we received from strangers as we took pictures with our wedding party outside the Goodman Theater (if your last name is Goodman, you have to) and around the Loop. If you ever see a wedding party taking photos on the streets of the city, congratulate them. For reasons I can’t explain, feeling the city’s love means a lot.

o Second, Meghan and I really wrestled with how much comedy/creativity we wanted to feature in our wedding weekend. Comedy is such an important aspect of our life, our gut told us to make it a prominent aspect of our wedding weekend. While it felt authentic, we were nervous our friends and family would think it seemed silly, trite, inappropriate, or worse yet, bad. We trusted our gut and I am so glad. From the improv show we did the night before our wedding to our friends’ readings during our ceremony, I am so glad we resisted the pressure to do something “normal”. If you are getting married, my advice would be, whatever you and your significant other are into, lean into it.

If you’re interested in seeing pictures, go here and use the guest password “ChandlerMeghan”.

· We bought a house* (*condo, but house sounds more exciting). People talk about the pressure of wedding planning (and they’re right), but I actually found the home-buying process both more confusing and more stressful. I learned a lot, primarily that mortgages are obscene and the amount of interest you pay your bank every month mostly makes the idea of home ownership an illusion. Regardless, a major life development, even if Guaranteed Rate is my new daddy.

· I became an uncle! My sister had a baby, Holden. Personally, I think he’s a #ChipOffTheOldChan, and most people who look at him agree. As I’m sure many of you have witnessed, it’s very surreal and exciting to see your siblings become parents and your parents become grandparents.

· I did 92 improv shows. I’ll talk more about comedy when I get to it into my goals, but I wouldn’t be honestly assessing the year without mentioning improve (I didn’t set a goal specific to this). In particular, I did:

o 28 Horsefly shows

o 25 Told shows

o 29 MacBeth shows

o 7 Smokin’ Hot Dad shows

o 3 “other” shows

Some of these shows were great, others were bad: most were both at various moments. Nonetheless, this was probably the happiest improv year I’ve ever had. For the first time, I am part of three groups I enjoy on a personal level without exception, and also feel do work genuinely worthy of an audience. Even if I’m not getting “better” at improv per se (I’m not), I am certainly getting more confident and less neurotic. More importantly, over the last year, I’ve really made peace with the fact that improv is something I love and require in my life. It’s easy to become cynical about improv (it does not pay, it is nerdy, it is often bad [frequently unwatchably so]). That being said, it is enormously challenging and very few people can do it at even a passable level. Going on ten years after starting improv, I still love the intellectual challenge of making people laugh out of thin air, and I am less ashamed of taking pride in my abilities.

· I was in two weddings for two of my best friends from high school. I’ve been in several weddings over the last decade, but getting married myself really brought to light how significant it is to have your best friends at your side on that day. They’re an essential feature of the experience, or at least were for me. As I’ve gotten older, it’s also become more clear to me how rare is it to have so many lifelong friendships, and I’m grateful for all of those.

So, just on account of these events alone, it was a momentous year. It’s important I take stock of that (I tend to glaze over what did happen in favor of what didn’t happen).

Now at the 1,200 word mark of this post, with the important stuff out of the way, I’ll delve into how I did against my goals.

2018 RESULTS

Below are the S.M.A.R.T. goals I set for myself in 2018. While you’ll see a few areas where I basically performed at or above expectation, there are more areas where I came up short (sometimes woefully so).

In all honesty, some of these goals were lofty in retrospect, not because the numbers themselves were unachievable in a vacuum, but because finding and buying a house, moving, and planning a wedding were just far more time consuming than I expected. I went into 2018 with laughably naive notions about how each of those processes would play out, and while both netted results I love, they limited many other activities. 92 improv shows also didn’t help.

LOSE 20 POUNDS

It was a mixed bag of a year for me from a weight loss/exercise standpoint. Some of the positives and negatives:

I gave myself a C+ here, because Fs and Ds were reserved only for the event that I either gained weight or lost no weight at all. A C+ felt appropriate because while I did make a little progress, I was down 9 pounds on July 4th, meaning the second half of the year has been a net four pound weight gain. Not good. While I expected some slowdown in the fall/winter, had I just held the line at a 9 pound loss I’d likely have given myself a B.

There are two areas that are most vexing for me.

1. The extent to which I hate exercising is still very limiting. As I mentioned last year, I am really only interested in weight loss as an extension of health, and I know that the best way to be healthier (regardless of weight) is to engage in consistent high intensity workout. This is hard for me. In January, I actually set up two appointments with a personal trainer at my gym (they were on sale). When she asked for some background on my goals, I gave her the following guidelines:

· I don’t like (and won’t attend) group classes

· I don’t want to be at the gym for more than an hour, shower and sauna included

· I don’t want to do anything that requires a “spotter” (or talking to anyone else at the gym)

· I want to experience as little physical discomfort as possible

When these are your guidelines, I recognize that it’s very difficult to get much high intensity action going. She gave me some weight activities I could do on my own during our first session. They’re fine. I never scheduled the second appointment.

2. I still eat too much. I’ve found it’s much easier for me to improve my diet than to reduce my intake (falafel is better for me than hamburger, but 10 falafel is five falafel too many, ya know?). At this stage, the only way I’m going to make real progress on weight loss is to reduce calories, not just avoid bad calories. This is hard for me. A point of emphasis in ’19. We’ll see how it goes.

235 MEATLESS DAYS

While this goal may seem associated with the previous goal on weight loss (and while that was an ancillary benefit), this was really motivated by my desire to reduce my carbon footprint this year.

Not to be too high and mighty, but being environmentally responsible is really important to me. While I’ve always tried to be conscious of my environmental impact, I wanted to apply something more concrete to quantifying or focusing my efforts. Originally, I wanted to set a carbon footprint benchmark from 2017, and reduce my footprint by 20% in 2018. However, this became cumbersome to calculate, so I decided to look in another direction.

Overconsumption of meat — especially of red meat — is quietly one of the biggest strains we place on the environment. This felt like an easy place where I could shift my behavior and easily measure my progress.

I knew that my trap would be over-ambition. While perhaps someday I will convert to full vegetarianism (or near vegetarianism), I know that I’m not mentally at that point yet. I wanted to set a goal that would require concentration and effort without a wholesale behavior change that was unlikely to materialize. So I decided that my goal would be to isolate meat to dinner, while providing for enough daytime allowances that I wouldn’t become resentful of the goal’s existence. My goal therefore was to eat vegetarian by day 4 days a week, plus once on the weekend. I also reserved some allowances for vacation (the prospect of being vegetarian in New Orleans, for instance, seemed tragic). I multiplied 52 weeks by 4.5 days, and set the goal of 235 meatless days.

I am extremely proud of my results — 242 meatless days — because not only has this certainly helped me achieve my initial goal of reducing my carbon footprint, it also showed me that I am capable of the discipline necessary to change my diet. There have been DOZENS of days where we’ve brought Blackwood BBQ in to cater an office lunch, or where I’ve stared down the chicken at Chipotle, and I am thrilled that I’ve so consistently told myself no.

I am hopeful I can build on this, both in finding new ways to reduce my carbon footprint and also improve my diet.

READ 10 BOOKS

As I mentioned in my post last year, my biggest obstacle to reading more books is my devotion to reading the newspaper (pat on the back for being an informed citizen!). Unfortunately, over the last two years, reading the paper everyday makes reading fiction like more of a necessity all the time (it’s nice for a half hour a day to mentally live in a world that does not include Trump, Brexit, Viktor Orban, Mohammed Bin Salman, Tayyip Erdogan, the Five Star Movement, etc…).

Unfortunately, because the newspaper is time consuming, I read inexplicably slowly, and I’m embarrassingly addicted to Twitter, I never read as many books as I want. I made some progress this year and read nine. This is partly because I mixed in a little non-fiction and some lighter/pulpier fiction, which helped speed things along and made the heavier fiction feel more rewarding.

The nine books I read:

· The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. I read a short story by the author that I loved last year and decided to read a full novel. I was underwhelmed. While many critics (and Barack Obama!) loved this book about a woman’s search through her family history to identify her father’s identity, I found the characters very artificial and the plot annoyingly corny.

· A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley. I read a New Yorker article about the author, who was a bit of a one hit wonder as a young writing prodigy in the 50s. The concept of this book — a fictional southern state where the black population coordinates a sudden exodus overnight — is fascinating, but I found it clunky to read. Considering how much I liked it, I should enjoyed it more, if that makes sense?

· Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. I loved this. Perfect. Should be taught in school. Such a perfect picture of New York, Wall St. culture, and immigrant hustle. I had been meaning to read this for years and I am so glad I did. Resonated with me on a major level.

· The Power & the Glory by Graham Greene — Hard pass. Was not into this at all.

· The Known World by Edward P. Jones. This and Netherland were easily my two favorite books of the year. Beautiful, gut wrenching story about a freed slave who becomes a slave owner himself in early 19th century Virginia. Unforgettable. I finished this six months ago and it’s still vivid in my mind.

· The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I loved the first 150 pages. I liked the second 100 pages. I could barely finish the final 100 pages. The scenes in Vietnam at the end of the war and the scenes of Vietnamese refugees settling in the U.S. in the mid/late 70s are amazing though. (The story then falls apart for me.)

· Janesville by Amy Goldstein. Very interesting non-fiction look at the evolution of the Midwestern economy as told thru one town.

· The Greatest Trade Ever by Gregory Zuckerman. Profile of John Paulson, a hedge fund investor whose rise and decline I’ve always found interesting. Very good, though you have to really like the subject matter.

· The Hellfire Club by Jake Tapper. I think Jake Tapper is outstanding as a journalist/newsman, and I so admire him for taking on something as challenging — and potentially embarrassing — as writing a novel. While the characters are drawn in broad strokes and the dialogue is scripted in a way that feels amateurish and on the nose, it’s got the bones of really a good, tight political thriller and reads very easily. I think it’s awesome to see people in this lot in life take risks.

HOST 8 DINNER PARTIES

In 2017, my cooking goal was to make 30 “complex recipes” (essentially defined as requiring planning, specific shopping/ingredient list, and particular techniques). This proved to be a fantastic way to become a better cook and learn a lot of new skills, but also extremely time consuming. This year, I wanted to take that foundation of skills I learned in ’17 and focus them on less frequent, more intensive menu preparation for 2018. My goal was to host 8 dinner parties (or equivalent, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner). I hit it at 8 on the dot, but can’t say I felt like I got much better as a cook or took a lot out of focusing my cooking more on entertainment (I actually think I better enjoy cooking for myself and Meghan).

My eight menus:

· 2/11/18 — Anthony Bourdain’s “Sunday Gravy” rigatoni recipe with homemade Caesar salad. I’ve made this recipe many times and I just find it to be unfailingly good. Time consuming, but good.

· 3/18/18 — Publican’s fish fry and BBQ carrots. Tasted pretty good but it’s extremely messy, requires a lot of space, and makes your house smell like fish for a week. Not ideal or worth it for apartment cooking.

· 5/26/18 — Alison Roman’s linguine with chorizo, walnut and clams. Giada De Laurentis’ chicken piccata. Alison Roman’s brocolini. Glazed carrots. The linguine recipe might be my single favorite new recipe I made this year.

· 7/1/18 — Anthony Bourdain’s pork au poit, pommes anna, and glazed carrots. I don’t think I made the pork right because it didn’t seem to take richness or flavor from the milk it was cooked in? Maybe it’s just not a recipe I like. Also, pommes anna is supposed to come out looking like a potato cake, but mine took no form (tasted good though!).

· 8/20/18 — Alison Roman’s trout, brocolini, Alison Roman’s kale salad, Alison Roman’s corn salad. I think I bought a bad piece of trout because the fish had little to no flavor and seemed very oily to me, but the kale salad and corn salad are absolutely phenomenal recipes. Staples in our house now.

· 9/22/18 — Anthony Bourdain’s braised pork shoulder. Made this recipe three times last year and it is unequivocally the most delicious way I know to make a lot of meat in an afternoon.

· 11/22/18 — Thanksgiving! I learned the hard way why making a turkey produces so much angst. It’s hard to know when it’s done! While I had to hack it up and put parts back in, it was ultimately success. I also made bad mashed potatoes, solid stuffing, decent carrots, good mac & cheese, excellent shallots, and a broccoli Caesar salad that opened my mind to new parts of the universe (it’s so easy and tastes so good !).

· 12/25/18 — Christmas! While I thought that my Thanksgiving cooking didn’t fully hit the mark, I crushed Christmas. This pork rib roast recipe from Esquire tasted fantastic, as did Anthony Bourdain’s sesame roasted cauliflower, these simple braised potatoes, and the broccoli Caesar (I made it again because it’s a revelation). Also, if you’re hosting a large number of people for a dinner party, the whole rib roast cost me $41 from Gene’s Sausage Shop in Lincoln Square. From what I understand, a similar beef tenderloin might have cost more than $150.

This year I’d like to swing back to a cooking goal that is focused more on frequency and skill development, since this year’s goal was fun but a little unsatisfying.

SAVE X DOLLARS

I won’t spend a lot of time here since it’s obviously a more private subject than the others. As I had in years past, I set a straightforward savings goal. Of course, with a wedding and home purchase, the year turned out to be anything but financially straightforward. While it was hard to calculate savings in a clean way, I feel good about where we ended the year, and continue to realize that financial health is 99% willingness to take a couple minutes a week to take stock of where things stand.

MAKE 30 BIRDIES

I’m fairly obsessed with golf. After not playing for roughly 9 years (no car, living in city) once I took the game back up in 2017, it has essentially overtaken my summers.

I set my annual golf goal around birdie-making rather than lowering my handicap because birdie-making feels more motivational and positive. Even when I’m playing badly, a birdie can salvage a shit round. And when I wake up at 5:30 to contemplate a pre-work 9, the dangling promise of knocking a birdie off the list is surprisingly encouraging.

The flaw in my birdie-making goal, however, is my weak psychology. While making birdies was supposed to motivate me to play more golf, it has often ravaged my fragile mind.

While my handicap stayed relatively stable this summer (I think I started at a ~10.5 and ended at an 11.5 after some awful play in August/September), there are two areas where my golf game is in ruins: The ability to drive the ball in the fairway, and the ability to make short putts. I snapped roughly 1,000 drives this summer into the left rough/trees/neighboring yards/nearby shopping centers and commercial districts, and I am at the point where every putt between 2 and 5 feet is a poke and prayer. When you can’t get the ball in the fairway and you can’t make short putts, you can’t make birdies. Period. Nearly every birdie I made on a par 4 this summer was a happy accident or started without a driver in hand. I’m mad at myself just thinking about it.

In 2017, I made 20 birdies. This year, despite posting 26 rounds (in addition to about ~25 9 holers I didn’t post), I managed to somehow make two FEWER birdies. I hope my insurance covers the online putting psychotherapist I found on Instagram.

My birdies, them being far too few:

You can really see where my season started to fall apart at the end of July! Also, you might be wondering what I shot on that 9 with two birdies at Calumet before Labor Day. 36, you say? 37? Surely, no worse than 38? Actually, thank you for asking, I shot 46! Yippee!

SUBMIT 5 McSWEENEY’S PIECES

I wanted to submit 5. I submitted 1, and even that one was done in haste (one of their ‘today’s headlines’ pieces that need to be submitted quickly).

A total, abject failure.

From 2009 thru 2016, I programmed myself to write so much across so many platforms, I burnt myself out. In 2017, I told myself I needed a break from that schedule in order to pursue some other interests, get more sleep, eat better, work out more, and generally live a healthier lifestyle (writing comedy while improvising and keeping a full time job does not lend itself to healthy living on a mental or physical plane).

The problem is, inertia has set in. In taking a break, I seem to have unintentionally lost the discipline and self-faith to take a kernel of an idea and turn it into a complete project. The balance has swung too far in the other direction, and I am fairly desperate to get back to more non-improv creative production in 2019. (I am terrified the muscle has atrophied and died.)

F- for the year.

VOLUNTEER 15 TIMES

Volunteering is probably the activity that took the greatest backseat to house hunting and wedding planning in 2018. This makes me feel like a selfish, spoiled ass, but it’s the truth.

I don’t want to make any grand claims, but 15 claims still feels doable despite how short I fell this year.

Again, a plug for the two organizations I volunteer with: the Greater Chicago Food Depository (recently made famous by President Obama) and the Nature Conservancy’s Community Stewardship Days with the Chicago Park District.

Here were the six times I volunteered in 2018.

1. 3/10/18 — Chicago Food Depository (packed sweet potatoes)

2. 3/18/18 — Chicago Food Depository (packed pasta)

3. 4/21/18 — Nature Conservancy (cleared garbage and dead leaves from walking path)

4. 10/17/18 — Chicago Food Depository (packed bread)

5. 11/3/18 — Chicago Food Depository (packed sweet potatoes)

6. 11/17/18 — Nature Conservancy (planted wildflower seeds)

VISIT 6 NEW NEIGHBORHOODS

I set this goal because after 10 years in Chicago, it became more and more absurd to me how much of the city I had yet to explore. The problem is, this goal was hard to measure. While Meghan and I didn’t set out with explicit intention to explore new neighborhoods in the way I envisioned, I think I took the spirit of this goal to heart and really did experience many new parts of the city.

As a note of recommendation, the most effective way I found to explore new parts of the city was to avoid freeways. Since I am often driving into and out of the city on the weekend for golf, when possible, I have tried to avoid freeways and allowed myself to see the city from new angles by taking streets. Some of the areas I explored in greater depth this year:

· Austin (where our wedding was held)

· Rogers Park (where my main city golf course is located)

· Humboldt Park

· Sauganash

· Bridgeport

· West Town/Noble Square

IN CONCLUSION

To those of you who have made it this far, thank you for bearing with me. I’d like the just end my now annual screed with a few final thoughts that have registered with me as I have tracked these goals over 2018.

· In year two, I remain totally convinced of the value S.M.A.R.T. goals can bring to your personal life, but also their limitations. On the one hand, if what you want is a way to break (or at least moderate) your phone addiction, and a framework to make decisions on how to better allocate your time and energy, S.M.A.R.T. goals are a glorious device. Make a recipe, make a birdie, read a book, work out, volunteer….it really does help cut through indecision. However, it’s not a cure all. If you are feeling anxious, packing your schedule with self-improvement activities is not a silver bullet solution. You gotta dig deeper for that (or so I hear).

· While I presented these in the form of a “report card”, and I’ve been clear about areas where I came up short in 2018, it’s worth restating the true benefit of these goals: They make something happen where — in their absence — nothing may have happened at all. Over the last two years, I’ve volunteered 12 times. While this is well short of the goal of 25 volunteer engagements I set for myself over that time, it’s also roughly 1200% more than I volunteered in the previous decade combined (political campaigns don’t count). The same can be said for me in areas such as weight loss/exercise, cooking, and reading. While focusing on achieving the goals gives them important psychological weight and heft (the whole system is predicated on this mindset), in reality, there is no failure.

Thank you for reading this! As I work my way through these goals, this is a post I slowly write in my mind over the course of 12 months, and knowing that I’ll eventually share it is a powerful motivator that greatly influences me throughout the year. If you ever want to talk about how to frame S.M.A.R.T. goals in your own life in a way that feels positive and motivational, I am happy to lend an ear.

Good luck in 2019!

Chandler

WORD COUNT: AN ABSOLUTELY ABSURD 4,969