Kim Gaskill uses a growing pine tree as a metaphor for long-term goals, arguing they need regular maintenance, checkpoints, and adjustments to stay on course. Pick one focus for the week and tend to your goals like you would a tree.
It's a new day. I'm Kim Gaskill, and this is the Daily Spark. It's my One Thing Monday. What are you doing this week? What's that one thing that you're working on this week and you're going to focus on, keep yourself going in that direction until that's finished and completed? I'm working on my content calendar right now, planning out what I need to be putting out this week on a timely fashion, get a little more structured in what I'm doing. And I'm looking out the window and I'm looking at a pine tree here out the window. It's about 15 years old, it's about 15 or 18 feet tall, and it is kind of growing out of control. It's pretty close to the house and I'm thinking Man, it's in a flower bed, this stone flower bed that wraps all around the house. And I'm thinking the roots have got to be huge on this thing. At some point they might even break through those stones and do some damage. And at this point the tree is too big to be moved. It would kill it. And it would be a shame if they had to cut down this tree because it's getting too close to the house or it's gonna the roots are growing down into the foundation or something. Now you can trim back the branches, that's not a problem, but underneath where the group— the roots are, that base of the tree, what, what keeps that tree alive, there's nothing that can be done about that at this point because it's too late, it's too big. And I'm thinking there's a lot of stuff, a lot like our goals, stuff like that, that might be a 5-year goal or a 10-year goal. We can't just make that goal and then just let 5 years go by and, and then be surprised when we don't meet that goal 5 years down the road. We're like way off base, not even close to what that goal was. But if you don't have a tree trimming maintenance plan along the way for that goal It's not just gonna happen. You're gonna look at 5 years down the road and, and just like the tree being too close to the house, there's nothing you can do about it at this point. They're gonna have to cut down the tree if they ever have a problem with it because they planted it too close and it wasn't maintained properly over the years to make it grow in the direction that it needed to grow. And now you can't go back. So if you've got goals written down or you have objectives that you're trying to meet and you're not checking in, you're not guiding the completion of those— everything you do should be moving you toward that goal and you should be checking in to see if that's the case. If not, time's going to go by and it might be too late. You might not be able to do anything about it at some point. So do what you can early to guide the process, whether it's planting a tree and boosting it up or putting wires on it to pull it in a different direction until it starts growing straight, or whether it's goals written down and putting a roadmap together and a time chart and a periodic check-in to make sure you're hitting those time spots and those road markers along the way. Put that stuff in place today. Think about that and join me again tomorrow for another Daily Spark.
