Achieving Personal Goals

Being Persistent

Mike Warren — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 21:41:05 +0000

There seems to be a renewed wave of respect or recognition in some of the material I’ve read lately related to the value of determination, grit or being persistent.

When I read that initially I though “sure, I know” but then it occurred to me that it shouldn’t be brushed off.

Being the esssential qualities, the blocking and tackling, of achievement. Sometimes it’s easy (for me at least) to get caught up in some of the “techniques” of achievement, better, smarter approaches. But at the end of the day, is anything ever more proven than the simple, basic qualities of grit and persistence.

As Jim Rohn said, “there are no ‘new’ truths”. The idea that being persistent is essential to achieving one’s personal goals is certainly not new, and I found this reference by personal development giant Napoleon Hill to illustrate my point. Hope you enjoy it:

1. Start with a definite purpose backed by a burning desire for its fulfillment.

2. Have a definite plan, expressed in continuous action

3. Close your mind tightly against all negative and discouraging influences (including negative suggestions from relatives, friends, etc)

4. Form a friendly alliance with one or more people who will encourage you to follow through with both your plan and purpose.

No “new” truths. Thanks, Napoleon.

Can Having Goals Make You Happy?

Mike Warren — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:54:39 +0000

Kinda seems like a strange question, doesn’t it?

I think of goals as a way to insure I’m focusing on what’s important, chosing the right tasks to spend my time on. But it turns out there is research that shows goals can have alot to do with how happy we are, too.

To me, the two main points are these:

Understanding exactly what it is in goal setting that affects our happiness, and
Knowing which kind of goals can make us more happy.

First, the What

Your first thought might be that the way goals make us happy is by reaching them, right? What’s the point of grinding to run a marathon if we don’t actually run the race?

But it turns out that specific events don’t really have that much affect on our happiness, long term.

Research shows that we each have a “set point” for happiness, kind of like a thermostat setting. It may be higher for some, a little lower for others. We can do things to affect our set point, but it represents a “level” of happiness where each individual starts.

Specific events will generate temporary spikes in our happiness (such as getting a promotion, running your first 10k race or reaching a saving goal), but eventually (and it doesn’t take too long) we tend to end up back at or near our set point.

What provides a more lasting impact on our happiness is the journey, the recurring process of doing something that’s meaningful to us, that moves us forward toward something we want, and ideally involves something we can enjoy doing.

That’s why many psychologists recommend that everyone have a bucket list” or life list, a list of things that are meaningful to you that you can focus your time and energy on achieving, experiencing or accomplishing. It’s not that the outcome won’t be good, just not necessarily long lasting. But the time spent on the journey keeps us in a good place, doing something that matters to us and in many cases changing who we are in the process.

Second, the Choice

We can look at goals a number of different ways, but when happiness is the subject, a useful way to categorize goals is “Intrinsic” vs. “Extrinsic”.

Intrinsic goals are those that we have chosen for ourselves, based on what’s meaningful in our lives. These are generally related to personal development or growth, life experiences, involvement with others, etc.

On the other hand, Extrinsic goals are things like buy a new car to impress your friends, or get elected to some position that you may not care that much about but you think will impress others. These types of goals don’t provide the satisfaction along the way that Intrinsic goals do, and the end result is not so rewarding either.

Studies show the pursuit of intrinsic goals is the way to go. They’ll leave you looking back on your life someday saying the time was well spent, rather than wasted on garnering the praise or approval of others.

Makes sense to me!

Goal planning calendar

Mike Warren — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 02:57:01 +0000

All the goal related advice you’ll find tells you to write your goal down, that it must be written, clear and specific. And that’s good advice.

The next property of a good goal is that is has to have a deadline, a time when you are planning to reach it. Again, good advice.

Something that I think really helps the process is to take that deadline or date when you are working to reach your goal, as well as the milestones or short term goals along the path to the major goal, and put them on a calendar. The bigger the calendar the better, but at a minimum it needs to cover the entire period you plan to spend reaching the goal

I’ve done this in the past, but I recently purchased the calendar shown below from ____________. They’ve done a great job of putting an entire year on a single, large calendar that’s easy to write my goals, milestones and due dates on.

It’s not only helpful to see your goal plan in total, but the biggest benefit in my opinion is that it makes it easy to see the days being checked off and your goal deadline looming nearer. That’s a great motivator, to see both the starting line, where you are today and how much time you’ve got left all in one view.

It particularly helps deal with procrastination and letting things sneak up on you. When you see it in black and white right in front of you, you’re better able to start focusing if you’re starting to slip a little (which we all do from time to time).

So whether it’s the ____________ calendar or one you create yourself, a great way to be sure you are always aware of where you are in the process so that you’re making the progress you should is to make it visual, something you can easily see and relate to.

Great Weight Loss Goal Tool

Mike Warren — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:45:16 +0000

I ran into a new tool in the ongoing process of managing my weight, and it’s a good one that I don’t plan to stop using anytime soon!

Don’t recall where I first learned about this, but I started using www.MyFitnessPal.com about a week ago. This is a simple, online website where you can enter every morsel of food you eat in a day and it tracks your total daily calorie intake.

The genius in this particular site is it’s ease of use. It’s got about 80% of the things I eat already in their database, including such obscure items as Target Archer Farms smoked almonds, Kashi Go Lean cereal or Atkins Daybreak Protein bars.

For anything that’s not in their database, you can manually add your own entry manually (for instance, my own homemade protein shake for breakfast) and it will be available to you to simply select in the future.

The site is free, and it includes a simple initial interview where you state your height and weight, and desired weight, and when you want to reach that weight. They then calculate what your average daily calorie intake needs to be to reach that weight, and that’s the benchmark that you see as your actual daily calories are accumulated. See below:

I love this site, and don’t plan to stop using it any time soon.

Productivity “Magic”

Mike Warren — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:15:20 +0000

It’s pretty rare that we come upon something that seems magical, even miraculous. Something that seems to defy logic, that doesn’t exactly make sense but it works every time. This post is about a principle that fits that description.

If you read this website and blog, you know I’m a student of productivity. I enjoy looking for ways to accomplish more with the time, knowledge and resources I have. Well, this may be the greatest simple truth about productivity I’ve encountered:

Less is more

It never seems to fail that when I finally quit trying to do 3 things at once, get more done.

Like most of the information on this website and blog, this isn’t news. It’s just something I have to remind myself about frequently, kind of like an addict who has to take it day at a time and just try to get it right today.

When you try to chase two rabbits, both escape.

Here’s a list that a marketer I follow published on his blog, which you can read here. It’s a list of suggestions for simplifying so you can get more done. In getting more done, hopefully that translates to reaching your goals sooner, and in reaching more of them.

Join me in getting more done, by focusing on “less”.

delete contacts from phone
cancel appointments you are not looking forward to
stop recurring services you no longer use
shred paperwork and dump it
remove some of the ToDo items from your list
donate unused clothes and toys to charity
purge your inbox and unsubscribe to ‘gurus’
declutter your office
remove excess furniture
clear whiteboards
sell assets you no longer use
empty your wallet
clean out your glovebox
tidy the house
avoid people who waste your time or mess your mind
delete files on your hard drive
uninstall apps you no longer use
delete browser bookmarks
clean up your desktop icons
empty the bins
give away books or courses you have used

Three Good Ideas for Fitness Goals

Mike Warren — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 04:14:18 +0000

We know that one of the keys to staying fit is to keep moving, and the other is to eat well. Whether it’s jogging, working out at the gym, walking in the evening or just cleaning the house, the more we move the more fit we’ll be. Eating good foods, in the proper proportion, is also essential.

With those two ideas that in mind, here are a couple lazy suggestions for staying fit. Maybe one of them will strike you like a good idea:

1. Eat By Design
We eat for a hundred reasons, but most of them aren’t related to hunger. We eat for social gatherings, for distraction, to console ourselves when we’re down, to connect with others, and many other reasons.

What if you made a conscious choice to only eat when hungry, and do something else for those other occasions. Want to get together with friends? Women: Go shopping, go to the gym, do a spa day. Men: play golf or tennis. Picking some other activity instead of going to a restaurant will make fitness an easier goal.

2. Make Exercising Convenient
Instead of always planning 1 1/2 hours out of your day for working out (which makes it a major event), try adding mini-workouts throughout the day. When you’re on the phone at work, stand up and stretch. If you have a wireless headset, walk around while on those long conference calls. Watching TV at home? Do a few situps, pushups or toe raises. There are a hundred options to do things that can help us stay fit, if we look for them.

3. Get Enough Rest
There are plenty of studies that show when we’re tired, our bodies don’t function optimally, we don’t think we well, we don’t move about as much. We’re a sleep deprived society, and that helps neither fitness or productivity. Get your rest! You deserve it, you’ll make better choices and you’ll get more (and better) exercise.

Goals and Clarity

Mike Warren — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:33:44 +0000

Clarity

The clearer we are about the goals and objectives we set for ourselves in life, the more efficient, and effective, we will be in achieving them. Clarity has as much or more to do with success and happiness as hard work, because once we’re clear about exactly what needs to be done, we produce far less wasted effort and motion. Having clear, written goals allows us to accomplish far more in a shorter period of time we would otherwise ever imagine.

Setting Priorities

Our ability to set priorities on our time (and again, they should be clear and specific) greatly impacts the entire quality of our life. To achieve great things, we have to concentrate on the small number of activities that contribute the greatest value to our life and work, and pursue them one at a time. See my recent post on the myth of multi-tasking for more along these lines.

Making Choices

Here’s another truth I believe: Before we start something new,we need to discontinue something old. Our ability to get control of our life occurs only to the degree to which we stop doing things that are no longer as valuable or as important to you as other thing you could be doing. There simply are only so many hours in the day, and as we learn to replace less important activities with more important ones, we move closer to the outcomes we desire. This leads to a sort of continual improvement of the investment of our time, replacing less beneficial activities with more beneficial ones.

Types of Goals

Mike Warren — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 23:21:30 +0000

What type of goal are you pursuing? I classify goals based on the activity I must perform to achieve them:

Progressive activities (performed step-by-step, like working on a project)
Recurring activities (performing the same behavior daily, like exercise)

Each take a different approach, but once you get the approach figured out it becomes a matter of following the plan. I like that; just know what I need to do each day and then hold myself accountable to getting it done.

Progressive Activities

Progressive activities, like planning a vacation, buying a house or learning a new skill, are accomplished by moving from one task to another. It’s a step-by-step walk, and the great thing about these kinds of goals is that we can easily see our progress with each step we take.

The key, for me at least, is to know every day before I walk out the door what those specific steps or actions I must take are. If I know what I need to do, and keep that task or list of items in front of me, I won’t feel right if the day ends and I didn’t get it done.

Recurring Activities

Recurring activities are a little trickier for me. These are things like losing weight, which require that I do the same thing every day. Take a walk, be sure I record what I ate, and record my weight. Same thing … every day. Those can be easy once they become regular habits, but they are also tough because they can get mundane. Jerry Seinfeld came up with a good approach to handling recurring activities that I wrote about here.

This Will Accelerate Your Goal Progress, Guaranteed!

Mike Warren — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 16:21:04 +0000

You know your goal. You have created a plan to reach that goal. You spend time every evening planning the next day, laying out the next task(s) you need to perform to reach your goal, and you do this activity daily. But what is one thing that could be added to this process that would make it even better?

In fact, what I’m thinking about can make it seem like you’ve put your goal seeking efforts on steroids (if that were legal, which of course it’s not – nyuk!).

The final piece to this process of managing your goal seeking efforts is so simple that it’s easy to overlook, yet so critical that without it your chance of failing increases with the difficulty of the goal. The missing element?

Time for simple, undistracted, clear thinking. Setting aside time each evening, or the next morning, to think “big picture” about your goal, without distraction. Giving yourself time to consider the progress you’re making, recognize any new obstacles that may require a change in your plan, or just getting a new understanding of what’s required that allows you to improve the plan.

Thinking time is the most valuable time you can spend each day, yet “physical” busy frequently wins out over quiet thought.

Taking just 15 minutes each evening, maybe less, to focus in a quiet place, without distraction, on what you are trying to accomplish can be invaluable. It gives us an opportunity to consider new thoughts about how to do it better, faster, cheaper, easier or differently, and can be the best possible use of our time. It’s like your personal “board of directors” meeting, the time when you step back and think about the big picture and assess your progress toward your goal, the steps you are taking, etc.

If you keep a journal, you’re getting your thinking time then. That’s one of the huge benefits of journaling. But if not, you can vastly improve your progress and reach your goal sooner by spending time on a regular basis thinking about what’s working, what’s not, how to deal with problems and ways to overcome hurdles.

Franklin Covey calls it “planning and solitude”. Some call it prayer. Some call it meditation. Some simply call it quiet time.

Whatever you call it, it needs to be done daily. In my humble opinion….

Great Idea, What Next?

Mike Warren — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 20:46:10 +0000

Did you just have a ‘light bulb’ moment? You know what I mean, one of those “hey, wait a minute!” moments when things suddenly became clear? If so, what did you do next? Like most people, did you just forget about it and let it slip away, or did you write it down somewhere so that you could refer back to it later?

Today’s post is about two things:
1. The importance of capturing those ideas, by writing them down immediately.
2. The fact that ideas not manifested through action are worthless, no matter how great their potential.

These are important lessons for each of us to learn, to really “get” that ideas are things. Every great movement, every great invention, every cure for disease or solution to a problem, started with an idea. But the next step is to realize that ideas, without action, have no value. It’s only when ideas are married to action, and consistent effort is applied until they are developed, that the value of an idea is realized. Which leads us to a simple, but surprisingly powerful, formula:

Idea + Action + Focus Until Finished = Benefit

Simple, right? Let’s break the formula down:

THOUGHTS (IDEAS). This first step is sounds easy, but the fact is that most people don’t like to think. Henry Ford said “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” That’s why, when you are thinking and you get a good idea, it’s such a loss to let it slip away. That’s why many great leaders, inventors and successful business people carry a notebook with them all the time. But as John Maxwell tells us, most ideas are not conceived fully formed. Many ideas still require development to reach their full potential, and this step requires time and patience. The way to reach the goals you set, starts with ideas.

TAKE ACTION. For your idea to move from being just an idea, you have to begin taking action. For some, this is an exciting stage, but for others it’s stressful and they never reach it. Starting any new challenge may make you feel excited, apprehensive or nervous, but if you believe the idea is a good one, take action. Don’t let your good ideas go to waste.

Not sure how to start? Sometimes it’s best to just get going. When you actually begin to take action, frequently the path will rise up to meet you. If you can, it’s always better to make a clear plan for how you’ll start, but if not and you believe strongly in the idea, you must start regardless.

FINISH IT. If thinking is hard, and taking action is challenging, staying focused to the finish line can be downright difficult. In a way, it’s nature’s test to determine who deserves the rewards of the goal, by seeing who can not only take action, but stay focused, committed and on track until the goal is achieved. The good news is that most people don’t, or won’t, which means that if you are willing to be that person who stays the course until your idea is completed, you will have set yourself apart from the crowd.

Every worthwhile thing you have ever earned started with an idea and the willingness to take focused, continuous action. It requires hard work and perseverance, the determination to stay engaged until the job is done. This simple formula is effective though, and the good news about it is anyone can do it.

So, let me ask you again, did you just have a ‘light bulb’ moment?