Going over my six month goals

So... a month or so after a really serious hospital visit last spring, I set some 6-month goals and made my first vision board.  I was out of work and had no income whatsoever.  I set an income goal that would have been my second highest income for six months in my life.  I didn't even come close to that goal.

I set a goal to dump my old, refurbished, "Fred Flintstone" laptop, and get an up-to-date laptop.  That didn't happen either.  In fact, the hinge broke on my old laptop so it's out of commission for now. 

I set a goal to have 10,000 pageviews on my three blogs by now.  I have about 1700 total.

I set a goal to buy a good digital camera.  Nope.  That didn't happen either.

I set a goal to lost 47 pounds in six months.  Why such an odd amount?  Because I weighed 347 at the time, and I wanted to get under 300 pounds.  I lost ten pounds and kept it off.

Oddly, the only goal that I did come close to was, "Help the homeless in Forsyth County as much as I am able."  A couple months after setting that goal, my mom and I met a family teetering on the brink of homelessness while living in a single room.  We sold them a cooking appliance, and gave them some basic items like dishes, food, and a list of local agencies that might be able to help them.  Then we went to our Sunday School class, and were able to get the family some shelves to store stuff, more food, a coffee maker, and a few other needed items.  Their needs were far beyond what our class could offer, but we helped them stabilize their situation a bit. 

So... I basically failed at most of my goals.  I'm at the point where many people think, "goals are stupid, I'm not going to bother setting goals anymore."  But I come from the action sports world.  If you've ever watched a BMX freestyler or skateboarder, you probably noticed that they seem to fail time after time while trying to learn a new move.  I don't see failure as an end all, be all.  Failure is just part of the process.  My biggest lesson from these six month goals is that I set way too big of goals for the position I was starting in.  I've learned over the years that that is a way people will self-sabotage to keep from sticking to their goals.  If you set a huge goal that is just plain ridiculous, you start thinking, "What's the point?"  And you give up on it.

So I just set a new series of six-month goals and made a new vision board.  The goals are smaller, and even more important, they're broken down into even shorter term goals that I can use to chip away at the bigger goals.  So I don't see missing my goals as a failure, I see it as a learning process, and I've reset my expectations to a more reasonable level.  Most important, I've made some progress in my everyday situation.  We'll see how it goes this time.

How To Get To The Top Of The Mountain

As I've mentioned before, I'm basically starting all over in life.  I'm seriously overweight after years as a taxi driver, and I need to lose about half my body weight.  That's a big challenge.  I'm unemployed, and with my "eclectic" job history, I've realized that it will be real hard to find a good paying job here in conservative North Carolina.  So that means I have to start a business with literally no money.  That's also a big challenge.  I don't have a working computer of my own at the moment.  That's another big challenge in the information/connectivity age we're in now.  There's a list of other things that "normal" people have that I don't.  Perhaps most challenging, I have to keep my spirits up in this time of facing multiple big challenges.  Many people out there are dealing with one or more of these same issues.

There's an old story that's been popping into my head recently.  I'm not sure where I heard it first.  But the basic story is a young seeker asks a wise old man (or woman) how to get to the top of a certain mountain.  That mountain, of course, represents your big goal in life.  The wise old person says, "To get to the top of the mountain, make sure that every step you take is in the direction of the top of the mountain."  Simple yet profound advice.  But we rarely take it seriously.

If I want to lose a lot of weight, then I have to make sure every action I take leads towards that goal.  That means eating only things that are healthy and exercising daily.  That's hard.  It's a simple idea, but it's hard.  But that's the nature of life. To start a business, it's the same thing, weed out the things in life that aren't part of that goal, and focus on building the business.  In other aspects of life, the same formula applies.

Do I do this right now?  No.  But I know the idea is out there, and I've begun to focus myself in different aspects of my life.  It's hard to just quit "normal" life and start a completely new lifestyle immediately.  Some people, in certain situations can do that, but it never seems to work for me.  So I'm slowly trying to delete bad habits and build good habits.

So what is your big goal?  Do you even have a major goal?  Or a series of goals in different aspects of your life?  If so, does each of your daily activities lead you towards that goal?  Or away from it?  Most people spend a huge amount of their time doing things that don't specifically lead towards their goals.  Now I know that if you have kids, you have to spend a lot of time caring for them in many different ways.  Don't neglect your kids or spouse to accomplish your goals.  But how do you use the personal time you do have?  Are you making steps towards the top of that proverbial mountain?  Or are you going in circles around the mountain?  

An Easy Way To Start Setting Goals

This simple technique goes back to when I was in high school.  The summer after my junior year, a friend helped me get a job at the Boise Fun Spot, a tiny amusement park located near downtown Boise, Idaho, in Julia Davis Park.  The Fun Spot had three kiddie rides, a kiddie roller coaster, a Tilt-O-Whirl, a Ferris Wheel, a miniature golf course, and a snack stand.  Basically, parents with small children would bring their kids there in the summer to let them ride some cheap rides and blow off steam.  A month into working there, for the incredible wage of $2.05 an hour, I was dubbed assistant manager.  That meant I ran the park on the manager's day off.  A month after that, my friend Doug, the manager, found a construction job, and another 17-year-old and me became co-managers.  The next summer, I was the sole manager.  Yes, I ran an amusement park, at age 17.  With that, of course, came responsibility.  The manager before me showed me his technique for dealing with the responsibility. 

Each morning, we'd get there a little bit early, get a Pepsi from the machine, and sit under the tree outside planning the day.  He folded up a piece of notebook paper, wrote Stuff To Do on the top, and listed the things that needed to get done that day, such as mowing a section of the big lawn, putting pine tar on the Ferris Wheel cable, or weeding the flower beds in the miniature golf course.  When I took over, I started making my own list, which soon became my "Stufftado" list.  In essence, it's a series of goals that need to be accomplished that day.  You know what's weird.  If you start using a list like this, it soon becomes fun to scratch things off the list.  The prior manager also told me to put at least one or two easy things on the list, like "going to the bathroom," or "getting a Pepsi and writing my stufftado list."  Why?  Because then you get to immediately check a couple of things off the list, and there's a small sense of accomplishment in doing that. 

When I started getting my act together a few months ago, after a couple years on medication that pretty much turned me into a zombie, I started making my Stufftado list each morning.  At first, I had only a few simple things on it, and a rarely checked them all off.  But it was a start.  Now I look forward to making my list each morning, and I've started making a Stufftado Big List for each week, with goals I need to accomplish in that week.  It's a natural progression, and it gets me psyched to get something done that day.
So... what's on your Stufftado list for today?

A couple of thoughts about goals

As a kid, I wondered what made rich and famous people different from the people I grew up with moving from town to town in Ohio.  Why were some people making lots of money as actors, for example, something they actually seemed to enjoy doing?  Meanwhile, the adults I knew worked jobs that most of them didn't like all that well.  What was the difference?

The main difference, I found out over time, was goals.  The people who set themselves apart from the crowd set bigger goals, and then worked to achieve those goals.  I also learned, over many years, that there's a fine art to setting goals.  Some people (like comedian/TV and radio host Steve Harvey) say you need to have HUGE dreams, and then break those dreams down into a whole bunch of small, manageable steps.  Then you make each step a goal.  "Inch by inch, everything's a cinch," is one of Harvey's mantras.

But in my decades as a BMX freestyler, I saw lots of riders set short term goals that they didn't even thing of as goals.  For people in the action sports world, a goal is more like, "Man, I want to learn this trick."  But most of them didn't set HUGE lifetime goals.  By setting short term goals, usually without even realizing they were setting goals, these people opened themselves up to new possibilities.  This brand of thinking carried over when some of these people started their own businesses.  They made things up as they went along, breaking new ground as they went.  Some of these people, like Spike Jonze and the Jackass crew, Travis Pastrana and the Nitro Circus crew, Steve Rocco with World Industries, and Pierre Andre Senizergues with Sole Technology created empires, sort of by accident. 

No matter which way you do it, setting and working towards goals moves you into a different realm then the average "working Joe" (or Jane).  So... do you regularly set goals for yourself?  Are you working towards some goal right now?   

I Made A Vision Board

In this clip above, entertainer Steve Harvey is interviewed by Oprah on the subject of vision boards, goals, and success.

In the three months since my hospitalization, I've started working on getting my life going again.  I'm on new medicine that allows me to actually function again.  But I'm starting over at a really low point.  I'm unemployed.  I'm severely overweight.  My resume' at this point only includes taxi driving, which pretty much excludes me from any "normal" job.  My teeth are in really bad shape after years of being homeless and not having dental insurance.

I've read dozens of self-help books and listened to hundreds of books on tape over the years.  I had to sit down and ask myself, "What do I know from all I've learned?"  The answer was that I needed to start dreaming big dreams again, and I needed to set goals for myself to focus on.  When I started looking online for You Tube talks about goals, I saw some clips about Vision Boards.  The idea is simple.  You dream about where you want to go in life and what, specifically, you want to accomplish.  Then you take a piece of poster board and some magazines and go through and find photos and words and sayings that describe what your goals look like.  Then you tape or glue all these things onto the poster board and hang your vision board where you will see it every day.  Then you look at it, and visualize your goals.  Then you focus your efforts and start working towards your goals.  When you fail at something, like Steve and Oprah say in the clip above, you learn the lesson in that failure and you get back up, dust yourself off, and start working towards your goals again.

I couldn't even afford a piece of poster board to get started, and I couldn't afford magazines.  So I took a couple large pieces of sketch paper, and I pulled black and white photos off the internet to describe my goals.  Nothing is really exciting.  I have a financial goal that seems impossible right now.  I have a health goal that seems hard, but possible.  I have a few other material goals, and one goal to help others.

Nothing exceptional has happened yet.  But since I put my vision board on the wall next to my computer, I'm constantly reminded of them.  I've realized I need to extend those goals farther in the future and find a grand dream that's really worth working towards.  So I've been thinking about that.

If you're interested in making your own vision board, there are several clips on You Tube that describe how to make a vision board.  There are also clips from people who have used vision boards and have achieved some of their goals.  If you don't already have a sense of direction in life, I recommend making a vision board to get started.