Goals Are Like Assholes…

So the fourth chapter of No Excuses: The Power of Self-Discipline, titled “Goals”, was a bit of a stinging chapter… Only briefly, and only for the fact that I should have read and written this yesterday, not today, and I’m now potentially a chapter behind. I had resolved to read both this and the next chapter at the same time to double down and catch up, but considering how personal this one was for me, I chose to give it its singular attention and feel the wrath of my conscience for neglecting the one new goal I thought was so easy to achieve. That’s very ironic considering reading one chapter a day and doing an ungraded mini-book report about it isn’t very hard, I guess I’m just living the life of least resistance right now! Oh well!! (But really, I promise, sorta, to be better).

This chapter felt like home to me because my rising Capricorn and moon in Sagittarius make me a conscientious dreamer and goal-making is a great pastime of mine! I have made goals for myself for a while, and I’m sure many other people I break bread with have as well. New Year’s Eve aside, making grand goals is easy, follow-through is…well you’ve been reading, you know my track record. Sometimes, I’ve met the goals I’ve set, sometimes I’ve failed. I have been able to lose weight and exercise when I set out to do it, only to inevitably fall off the wagon into a trough of cheese fries. I had always wanted to go to France and visit the places I had been learning about in French classes for 11 years, and in 2012 I finally got the chance to!

Brian Tracy said, much to my pleasure, that attaining all the goals you set for yourself at once isn’t always feasible, but if you prioritize, you can meet them eventually.

The big key, Brian says, is writing the suckers down! Without written goals, what we think are goals are just hopes and wishes — which makes complete sense to me. Like I said, I’m a dreamer of the grandest kind, all my dreams and “You know what I want to do…”s are nothing until I write them down. The cork-board that I’ve nailed to the wall, on which reading this book in 21 days is written, is exactly what I mean. I have several goals and projects on there that I hope to complete, some with deadlines, which is also something Brian says a good goal needs (duh!), others with a list of next steps and priorities, but all written and in my face. Unavoidable.

He says in the section named, “Discipline of Writing” that writing is a pyscho-neuro-motor activity (I’d love for this guy to cite just one study where these words come from!), which forces thinking and concentration. Personally, writing helps me collect my jumbled thoughts and make sense of the mess in my head — sometimes with great humor, so I share it, other times with a sense of introspection that makes the problem/concern/challenge seem easier to tackle. I enjoyed very much Brian Tracy writing about practices I already do, because it made it seem like I wasn’t so off on the self-discipline track as I had originally thought. Of course, what came my way…?

The failure mechanism. Tracy called me out, big time. This thing is default on in our heads all the time, like the computer monitor you are too lazy to shut down everyday. It allows us to mindlessly go for what’s fun and easy rather than what’s hard. (Calling it the failure mechanism was pretty stinging, and I don’t know if I’d call it that, but the point was sorely conceded). Compare this to the success mechanism which is fed by goals, and more so achieving them! Like me, many people make goals and never meet them, well that’s because saying (and writing) that you want to do something is easy, doing it is hard. Brian came through, however, and gave some real-world activities to help break that big behemoth of a goal down.

I’ve definitely heard of variations of the Seven Step Method to achieving goals, I’ve also heard of SMART goals. Putting things into simple steps makes them digestible and smaller hills to climb, that’s why when I run a few miles on the treadmill, I huff and puff counting down one one-minute increment to the next. (Still hate running, but my heart thanks me). The Seven Steps according to Mr. Tracy are as follows:

1. Decide exactly what you want — make your damn goal.
2. Write it down — which you would think would be in 1, but seven steps sounds better than six, I guess.
3. Set a deadline — What’s that quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Something about whooshing past? Either way, Brian says to set a definitive deadline, but let it serve as a guess. If you miss is, adjust. (In my last job when I had to plan out a quarter’s worth of marketing initiatives at a time, I found meeting deadlines was the best ego-boost. So I’m all in on deadlines.
4. List everything you can do to achieve your goal — makes sense and needs no explanation
5. Organize your list in sequence and priority — also makes sense, but historically, I have had an issue with prioritizing because I tend to do what seems the most fun (failure mechanism…)
6. Take Action, Plan Immediately — I’m getting a poster printed with this one on it!
7. Do Something Everyday — doing it everyday builds momentum, momentum builds confidence, confidence builds success, boom goal completed!

I like these seven steps because I’m superstitious and seven is a lucky number. But on a serious note, these are things that in many cases I’ve done to help achieve a goal without consciously doing them. Now that they’re on paper, I’m very much signed into them. One activity just after this that Brian had me do was make a quick list of ten goals I’d like to achieve in the next twelve months. After that, I had to ask myself, “Which of these ten will most improve my life, or help me achieve the other nine?”. Once that’s done, you transcribe your new top goal on a different page and reorient it as a question. Now find twenty answers to that question as a means of finding ways to achieve the goal. That’s hard, and I haven’t gotten to twenty yet from my top goal, but I think that’s the point. As you work harder trying to solve your goal-question, you see the creative ways you can get yourself there. This is called “mindstorming”, which is a term I’ve never heard before, but will definitely pass on to others.

The after-chapter exercises were just a rewritten version of the ten-goals-to-one followed by mindstorming, so I won’t share my full exercise, just be prepared to see (hopefully) within the next twelve months a published book by Shawn Meade! The biggest takeaway I took from this chapter was that dreams are dope, goals are better, and meeting those goals obviously takes work and few people miss out on achieving them because they lack the self-discipline to get there. That’s why a goal can’t just be something like, folding all my laundry, it should be attainable but something that launches you. Writing is that for me. I wouldn’t let it roll around in my head so much if it wasn’t, and I would spend money on things to help me stay on track. This book is giving me a lot to think about, and I took “Goals” as the personal invitation to stay engaged. The next chapter is more than 30 pages on personal excellence, which sounds a little daunting, and I’m sure I’ll feel some kind of way after reading it, but I’ll ride this goal-setting high and hopefully just balance out! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back on track.

I picked up Brian Tracy’s No Excuses, and have decided to learn something about self-discipline. This page is going to keep me honest (mostly) as I tackle this book over the next 21 days! This is Day 4 of 21.