Advice For My Nephews: Part 1, Goals
This post was published in March, 2016, at https://compstat.co . I retired that server long ago, but I searched through the most recent database backup that I had and reposted the latest version here.
Overview
I have 2 nephews who will be in high school soon. We are geographically distant, so the purpose of this series of posts is to provide a running set of information and advice that will hopefully be useful to them as they navigate the next few decades.
I hope that this advice applies to my nephew who is already in high school, my niece who is graduating college, and my cousins, as well. But I also hope that it is useful for anyone who can benefit from it. I chose my 2 nephews as the subject of these posts, since I find it useful as a writer to have an audience in mind.
Throughout these posts, I will express my opinions on a variety of matters; much of my advice is informed through my own experience (both successes and otherwise), reading, and reflection.
I encourage my nephews to challenge any and all statements contained here.
However, challenges to my statements should be based on clear, sound reasoning, not intellectually-lazy guesswork, weak half-arguments, or repression sensitization.
Repression sensitization is a tendency to discount information that is counter to your own beliefs, so that your own weak rationalizations seem legitimate. I reject all of those challenges as baseless.
I encourage my nephews to look up any words that I use that are not inherently clear — expand your vocabulary.
Feel free to read these posts as many times as you like.
Learn from them.
Learn about yourself.
Learn.
Know Where You Want to Go
Fundamentally, it is imperative to have clear goals.
How will you get where you want to go without a goal?
You won’t. You’ll drift.
You’ll pay endless homage to the pagan god Xbox One.
You’ll have less resilience against bad influences.
On the other hand, with a set of clear goals, you’ll know what you’re working toward, and you’ll be able to make decisions that are consistent with achieving your goals.
Obviously, not all goals are equally good, or even equally effective. Even worse, some statements that you might believe are goals are actually vague hopes, wishes, and dreams.
Thus, you must spend enough time to really determine your life’s purpose.
If you read to here, then you probably thought that this post would be prescriptive in how to set goals. We’ll cover that in a homework.
Homework
- You need to learn how to find good resources. So, find, read, and understand 5 articles on goal setting. Two examples of what you’re looking for would be this MindTools article and this Brian Tracy article.
- You need to learn how to assess how good those resources are. For the 2 links that I provided, what makes them good? What makes them weak? Be detailed/thorough. Also apply this to the 5 or more articles that you found. You should save your work in either a notebook or a text editor; just thinking a little bit about it doesn’t count.
- Now that you have all of these comparisons, you need to assimilate this knowledge. What did you learn as a whole from this exercise? What is a workable goal-setting process for you?
- Put it into practice. Set 5 goals for this week, 5 for this month, 5 for this year, and 5 for the next 5 years. The longer-term goals should be harder than the shorter-term goals. When you achieve a goal, replace it with another well-thought-out goal.
- Review. Every morning and every evening, review your goals. Think about your progress, and how you can improve.
Posts In This Series
I realize that I should have probably set this up as a Medium Series, but I didn’t. Here is the full list:
- Advice For My Nephews: Part 1, Goals — set and achieve goals
- Advice For My Nephews: Part 2, Heroes — choose your heroes wisely
- Advice For My Nephews: Part 3, The Basics — focus on the basics first
Author
Connect with Jason on Medium, LinkedIn, Quora, AngelList, Facebook, and Twitter.
