The EBER Project is a massive three-year project that I announced in the summer of 2017 and kicked off September of that year. EBER is Early to Bed, Early to Rise — because the project is for the health, wealth, and wisdom of our household. If you’re curious, you can check out all the previous posts about the project — many of which form a sort of “quick start guide” to large project planning — by clicking the link at the right.
The way this project has been working is that, while I check up on tasks every month, there’s like a quarterly internal alarm that reminds me to do a reset at a higher level. So every few months, I get the itch to revisit this thing. And this time I realized that I was looking at the halfway mark.
This is a major milestone. I talk to a lot of people about large goals and one of the things I’m always repeating is that you need to start now and keep going… because a year or two will be over before you know it. Want to write a novel? Write a page today and a page tomorrow and then keep doing that. In a year, you will have a fat novel to call your own (maybe a bad one, certainly in its current form an unpublishable one, but a novel nonetheless).
It’s the same with any major goal you want to accomplish: get started and keep going.
Having reached the halfway point, I want bluntly reassess our progress on each of these goals and determine where to go next…
Early to Bed and Early to Rise, Makes the House…
Healthy
One big achievement here was in early 2018, where we all lost weight on the Keto diet. This was particularly beneficial for the kid, who’d eaten his way through a difficult time and ended up overweight. Being on strict keto for only a month or so was all it took to reset things. He’s back to being a typical teenager, eating all kinds of food and burning it right off. I’m not quite so lucky, but can easily avoid carbs for a couple of days and feel better and less bloated again and I’m only five pounds away from my absolute goal weight.
The husband has made great strides in his own health, launching his forge and catching up on all kinds of household projects. His progress is slow and incremental, but more sustainable for all that.
A big one for me is having to come to terms with my headaches. This will be an upcoming challenge, but one thing that’s helped is cutting wheat out of my diet. It’s clearly a migraine trigger for me. But physical fitness is still a challenge for me. I spent this weekend doing major outdoor work (hauling and spreading woodchips and helping install stone footers for our new shed) and it felt great! If only there were a never ending list of yard work to do all summer… oh wait.
Wealthy
One big goal has already happened, and now we’re in maintenance mode. This includes spending money wisely, avoiding debt, saving, and preparing for the future in monetary and non-monetary ways. This in addition to our work to increase household income through our various businesses.
The other major goal has been to get the kid through college without any debt on his — or our — part. We were stunned to hear that he should have all his high school credits by the end of this year (two months shy of his 17th birthday). He was equally surprised, and wants to take a gap year in order to identify where he might go to school. Tuition cost will be a big part of his decision.
Finally, we are looking longer term for where we want to settle in our post-kid years. Weather that doesn’t aggravate old injuries is going to be important.
Wise
There are a couple of different elements to this goal. The first has to do with prediction and divination — we want to know what’s coming in the future — and I think I’ve made great strides here. I’ve found my way through the fog to a series of clear-eyed and trustworthy people I look to for insight on weather (astro and climate-related), politics, and society. The result is less fear, but also less commonality with the standard operating worldview.
The second has to do with flexibility and optionality. That’s the message I keep getting over and over — don’t lock yourself into any one plan, instead keep ideas flowing and your options open. Plus prepare in practical ways for the most common outcomes (for example, we are now the proud owners of an earthquake policy, which surprisingly isn’t covered by normal homeowners insurance).
In terms of goals for the next 18 months, I can see some obvious contenders:
- Getting the kid through a gap year and settled into college
- Determining where we will live and getting there
- Turning CircleThrice into less of a boutique enterprise and more of a sustainable business
- Launching Aule Forge for my husband’s beautiful magical blades and keys
The Takeaways
You probably don’t care that much about my personal project, and I get that. But what I want to express is how important is with this kind of long project to keep checking back in with yourself.
Over the course of three years a lot of things can change. You either ignore the change and risk your project failing — or worse succeeding, but in the wrong way — or you embrace and acknowledge it.
If you are looking at a big project, whether it’s well defined or very nebulous “I need to change my life” it’s worthwhile taking some time out to plan both up front and as you go. And if that sounds more terrifying than the project itself, well, I can help.
