On 20th August, I leave for California for a week. Los Angeles, to be exact. I will be staying with my friend Tiffany, and I couldn’t be more stoked. Before you get all down on me about how it’s not that exciting, remember that I’ve never been to California, ever.

Since there’s not very much time until I leave for LA, and since I start school again a week after I get back, there are some things I want to get done before I go. These include getting caught up on the whopping seven magazines sitting by the side of my bed that I have yet to read and trying to finish at least one of the three books I have started.

At the beginning of the month, I made a list of goals to help me get organized. It’s now a week later, and I’m realizing that I may have been a bit too ambitious with some of them. For example, who was I kidding thinking I would run 15 times between the first and the twentieth? It’s hard enough to get myself to run two or three times a week, let alone five.

I have a weird relationship with goals. I love the feeling of completing them, and writing them out definitely does help motivate me. The feeling of crossing something off the list and thinking, “I did this,” is one of the most satisfying. However, I’m also really into challenging myself. I tend to subscribe to the idea that we can’t progress unless we do so. I set the bar high and make goals that I know may be difficult to reach. Then, when I don’t complete them, I feel like a failure.

I need to find the happy medium between challenging myself and setting realistic goals. My biggest problem is that if I set a realistic goal that I know I can reach, I feel like it’s not good enough and that there’s no point in setting it as a goal in the first place. This is obviously something I need to work on. Unless of course my willpower is just too weak. I mean, I obviously could have run 15 times in 20 days if I had applied myself to the cause.

Now that there are less than two weeks until I leave and I’ve only gone running once so far, it’s going to be impossible for me to complete that goal. I could run twice on one of the intermittent days, but that seems a little ridiculous, if you ask me. Therein lies my other problem. Once I realize there’s no way I can complete a goal, I tend to just let it go. Rationally, I know it’s still better to come as close as possible, but it becomes even harder to push myself.

My challenge to myself for the remaining days is to try as hard as I can to complete my goals, but also not to get too down on myself if I don’t do as well as I would have liked. It’s going to be easy to fall into the trap of not trying if I know that I’m supposed to be okay with failing, but I need to remember that I can only really be okay with failing if I actually try.

Maybe I’ll even surprise myself. That should be one of my goals.