What knitting taught me about goal-setting… And myself
How 3 weeks and a ball of yarn can change your mindset for the better
Shortly after Thanksgiving 2020, just a few days off quarantine after not one but two positive COVID tests in the house, we’d had it. We had been locked up more or less all year, and by gum, we were going to take socially distanced staycation away from our home come hell or high water (and hell wasn’t far off).
After some deliberation about what was close, safe, and doable, we selected, and later that day landed in a comfy resort-side condo in Park City, Utah, not too far from our winter home. Well, our only home, but if we’re talking Park City, we’ve got to get our pinky’s out for all the highfalutince.
During our stay, we opted to binge-watch the Harry Potter series of films with our kids. Good clean fun. However, midway through The Sorcerer’s Stone, my kids were absolutely appalled by what they saw on the screen. “What!?” They said, “sweaters and scarves for Christmas!?” They groaned in response to a scene in which the Weasley crew are gifted hand-knitted treasures from their adoring mother. I replied with a snark, “Of course! And that is what you two will be getting this year.” And so it began…
From that moment, I crafted my plan. I would learn to knit, and not only that, but I would create fine woolen objects for my boys and present them as the only gifts they would receive from their dear old Dad this year. Muahaha! At the first opportunity, I took to YouTube. Instead of my typical search for MBAMBAM animatics and Crafsman videos, I set to searching up tips and tricks on how to knit on the quick.
What I didn’t realize at the time, and it didn’t occur to me until much later, is that I had stumbled on the first of four aspects of this seemingly flippant project that would change the way I think about goal setting.
K — Knowledge. To get this show on the road and to deliver in time for old Saint Nick to squeeze his tubby backside down the chimney, I had to learn something. I didn’t need to learn EVERYTHING, but I needed some foundational knowledge before I could get going. I began a data collecting rampage that started with how to knit and ended with how to hire someone to knit. But ultimately, I stumbled on the wildly helpful Ms. Yarn, and under her tutelage, I decided that the quickest path from A-to-Scarf was to get a loom, get some yarn and get busy hooking and looping.
N — Now. For many, the data collection step is the easy part. And for many more, that is where their road ends. But when it comes to accomplishing a goal, you’ve got to get to stepping before fear or distraction keep you from moving at all. So much of life is about momentum, so you have to start. Now is the time, don’t delay.
Admittedly, as I streamed one grandmother after another, knitting furiously on YouTube, I was intimidated. I had thoughts that maybe all this headache wasn’t worth it for the joke, that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, so to speak. But after refocusing my attention, and visualizing the joy I’d feel in seeing my kids smiling faces dashed when they opened up their wooly goodies that Christmas morning, it became clear to me. I had to proceed, and I had to proceed now.
I — Iterate. Lest you think that achieving goals is all fun and games, you should know that my knitting adventure was maybe one of the most challenging things I’d taken on in 2020 from a project-based perspective, as dumb as that sounds. While the task itself only required much repetition and a few new skills, it didn’t go well the first, second, or even third time. I made dumb mistakes and didn’t know how to fix them. I made yarn too tight, then not tight enough, I missed loops here and there and everywhere. But if I was to achieve my goal of crushing my children’s holiday hopes, I had to go full Bill Hickson and “Try, try, try, again.”
T — Time. As echoed in the less warm-and-wooly but more widely-known goal-setting acronym S.M.A.R.T., we too close with time. If you hope to see more dubs than L’s in the goals column, the simple fact is that your mission must be time-based.
In the case of my knitting, I had a hard stop. Christmas was coming, and from epiphany to execution, I had a little more than three weeks to deliver on two joke-based knitted items and a cozy something for my sweetie. If it hadn’t been for that deadline, in this case, set by old Kris Kringle and holiday travel schedules, it would have been remarkably simple to walk away from the project or abandon the idea altogether. It was the schedule, and the focus it required to keep it that made success at all possible.
Epilogue
With only two hours to spare before the kids were released from school for winter break and holiday madness ensued — at which time my private knitting time would vaporize — I bound off my last scarf, boxed up the goodies, and slung them under the tree. I had done it.
It wasn’t until afterward, in my post-knitting refractory period, with my wrist cramps and sore digits, that it occurred to me all I’d accomplished.
In setting my goal, I had settled on making scarves as an achievable output.* Sweaters and hats we’re a bridge too far for my skill-set and schedule.** I put somewhere between 5–8 hours into each of the three scarves I completed for the big day. I had to do all that work plus overcome my many, many epic fails while the kids were at school and my wife was at work, which gave me a very tight window to work the loom, keep up my day job, and field client obligations.***
Sure the scarves weren’t without their flaws, but to be perfectly honest, they were pretty fetching good for my first foray into the wild, wonderful world of needlecraft. While Christmas smiles were expectedly replaced briefly with puzzlement and furled brows, they were followed after with giggles of joy and giant hugs. It was all worth it. The work, the struggle, the telling my male friends I was knitting. All of it.
I had set a goal and achieved it, to much acclaim. These stupid little scarves, done up in the families’ favorite NFL football teams’ colors, quickly became the star of the show and prized possession of the morning. Well, that is until Santa dropped the Nintendo Switch, then the mic. I guess we’ll circle back to scarves eventually.
The bottom line is that anything is achievable. You just have to K.N.I.T. it.
Let’s get goalin’
What are your tips and tricks for achieving what you set out to do in work and life? Have you been stumped by goal setting in the past but are ready to hit it hard this year? Have you tried other goal-setting acronyms and found them to contain too many letters? Then I’d love it if you’d share your two bits and get involved in this conversation. Join our community here in the comments or feel free to find me on the socials to take this conversation wherever the audience most suited to hear it can get involved — I am @ryanroghaar on Medium, Twitter, and Instagram, and click here to find me on LinkedIn. Also, visit ryanroghaar.com
Meet Ryan
I am an entrepreneur, creative director, podcaster, remote work advocate, consultant, author, and speaker committed to building authentic end-to-end relationships for my clients — from top management to top consumer. My unique philosophy puts specific importance on human relationships and their inherent value in both business and in life. I believe that as a society, we are reaching a kind of technological saturation point, which is leaving consumers anxious and yearning for tactile human experiences, and it is that core ethic that fuels my purpose — to bring people together.
From my office in Salt Lake City, Utah, or occasionally from my office-away-from-home in Barcelona, Spain, I offer enlightening insights on a range of topics. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to share my insights and experiences to help others explore fresh perspectives on business, lifestyle, and new ways of working.
* In my case it was scarves, but it could have been anything. Insert your goal here.
** Make your goal attainable. It’s ok to go big, just don’t go so big that you set yourself up to fail. Make your goals bite-sized and just set more of them instead of having one giant-sized out of reach idea.
*** Goals take time, effort, and will no doubt be rife with challenges to overcome. But by setting a reasonable, but challenging timeline, you can achieve great things in less time than you might have thought initially.
