Blueberries and Goals

How meeting your goals is like picking blueberries.

I went blueberry picking a few weeks ago, we go blueberry picking every summer, it's something that we look forward to every single year. And last year, we picked 108 pounds of blueberries in one day. Straight out, we stayed for about five and a half hours. And we just picked and picked and picked until we had 108 pounds of blueberries.

This year is a little bit different. We picked COVID style. So the blueberry farm is open for a certain number of hours and they closed to kind of wash everything down as much as they can. Obviously not in the field. But like where people check in and out and all that. And then they open up again. So we were more limited in time, we knew we were going to have to go twice.

So we did our first picking this week. And we were our goal was 50 pounds, we were a little under that I think we had around 42 or 43 pounds, but still a lot of blueberries. And when you go into the blueberry field patch, I'm not sure what the term is. But when you go in to pick blueberries, and you have these big huge buckets, you're looking at these blueberries on the bush and I don't care how big and sweet the blueberries are.

When you're picking over 100 pounds of blueberries. It's a lot of blueberries. And those little blueberries no matter how big they happen to be, are very little in relation to these big huge buckets that you're filling.

This year, I walked in with one of those big, those big painter's buckets, that was the bucket that I had to fill, it held about 25 pounds of blueberries, 25 pounds of blueberries Is it a lot. It is a lot of blueberries a lot. So I when you start to pick and this happens to me every year, it's a mindset shift that I have to go through. Because when you drop your first blueberry in the bucket, and it goes ping, it's almost like, Oh my gosh, this is going to take forever. And it's hot, and it's muddy and there's bees flying around. And there's not a lot of birds because they have bomb things that go off and make noise and it scatters the birds. But there's definitely flies and there's definitely bees and and it's a lot of blueberries to pick. And this bucket seems massive, massive when you've put that first blueberry in there. And you see you look in the bottom of the bucket, and you see one blueberry and a whole bunch of the white part of the bucket, right?

And you can pick it up and you can swirl it around. And that one blueberry can go around and around and you're like how am I going to fill this whole entire bucket with blueberries, it's empty, this is going to be impossible. And it's a mindset shift.

And this is the shift.

You can't get the blueberries in the bucket, you can't have 25 pounds of blueberries in the bucket until you put the first one in. You have to put the first blueberry in, in order to put the second, third, fourth, fifth, and however many it takes I should do that sometime count the blueberries or maybe I won't. It's a lot. But you can't, you can't. You can't begin to fill the bucket until you begin to fill the bucket.

You're never going to end up with 25 pounds of blueberries in the bucket. If you never put the first one in there. You've got to start somewhere. And it is like your goals unless you take your first step, and the next and the next and the next and the next in the next in the next. You can't ever reach your goals.

I recently drove to Georgia, it's almost 900 miles away where we went in Georgia from where we live in New York. I never could have ended up in the mountains of Blue Ridge, Georgia. If I never left my house in New York, I had to drive the first mile, second, third, fourth and so on in order to get to that 900 almost mile to be in Blue Ridge, Georgia. And the same thing with coming home. And you can sit I could have gotten the car and sat there and thought Oh, this is this is going to take us 16 hours to get there. I'm just not even going to do it. I'm just not even going to start. I definitely wouldn't have gotten there. We got there and we got home by driving one mile at a time. Gabe and I picked almost 50 pounds of blueberries on Thursday by picking one blueberry at a time and putting them We've filled our shirts and then kind of dumped them into the bucket. It was quicker that way, but you're still picking one blueberry at a time. And then you eventually have the bucket filled. But you can't fill the bucket. If you don't pick the first one. You can't reach your goals until you take your first step towards them.

It is a mindset shift.

If you sit at your desk, in your house, in a car, if you never take the first move, you never make any progress. You are worth more than sitting still. You are worth every single step you take.

You are worthy of every single goal you have set for yourself. So start filling the bucket. You're worth it.