Check out this Mashup by DJ Earworm.

It’s a mix of all of the song on Billboards top 25 for 2007. Sad how much alike they all sound.

As a result of my growth and goals project, I’ve realized that I need to re-organize my online presence a bit. I’ve written some things here that I’ve wondered whether or not to post because of a struggle between personal and professional content. I’m going be making a shift of this site to a personal blog only, and start a new design blog and portfolio at another domain I own: intios.com. There are a few posts on the blog there, and I will be moving my portfolio over soon.

Maybe it’s the New Year, or maybe I’m having a quarter life crisis, but I’ve been feeling a strong need to evaluate my life and plot out some paths for improvement over the next few years. I’m incredibly happy and feel like things are only looking up; but at the same time, I know if I want to continue to grow as a person, I’ll need to work for it. This is the first post in a series about my voyage of self improvement.

I’ve been brainstorming for the last few days to try and figure out the best way to proceed with planning and setting my goals. I’ve realized that there are two general ideas that my plan should incorporate:

1. Personal Growth
Things that I want to improve on as much as possible. There is no goal in personal growth, just a general direction to move.

2. Goals
Specific things that I would like to achieve. These are things that I will know when I have completed.

Personal Growth

Motivation for picking up new habits has always been difficult for me as I tend to be rather disorganized and I have a short attention span. I think part of the problem is that in the past I have been setting goals for personal growth that are too concrete and too difficult or far away for me to catch. For example: last year I made a New Years Resolution to “Read More”. I felt that I needed to make this goal tangible, so I specified “Read 10 books cover to cover”. This goal was too lofty, and frustration with my progress led to a lack of interest. Failure to see results caused me to give up.

The spirit of the resolution was right, but the formulation was not. In retrospect, I should have just said “Read more.” With this focus I would have seen daily progress, and would have continued to gain motivation. I need to make sure my goals are authentic and not artificial (see next section).

So what can be done? I need a way to track my personal growth in terms of general improvement rather than concrete goals. Being able to see what I’ve done on a day-by-day basis might help keep me motivated in a way that distant, rigid goals don’t. Some quick googling led me to Joe’s Goals. This site lets me set simple things that I want to do more or less of and to add or take away points based on whether or not I do these things. It’s going to require a bit of an extra commitment; a few minutes a day to track my progress, but I think it might work out for me. If I drop out of the habit, the site will e-mail me letting me know I need to get back on the horse. I’m hoping that Joe’s Goals will provide me motivation for personal growth that works. Self improvement is a game that can’t be conquered, so the carrot must be desire to improve my personal high score.

Goals

There are a million resources out there on setting and achieving goals. It’s something that I’ve always known how to do, but never done as well as I’d like to. I’ve heard that writing down a goal is a huge step toward achieving it. Looking back through old notebooks, I’ve seen this to be true to an amazing degree. Part of this I think, is that making a list of goals requires you to really stop and think about what you want out of life, so the things you write down are the things that you are working for subconsciously all the time, and that you might well achieve anyway. But I think there is another side to the coin. The very act of writing down your goals, of aggressively thinking about what you want can help provide a clarity that is not readily available when you are caught up in the daily grind. I think it is an important thing to do every so often even if just for the sake of figuring things out.

I mentioned before that my goals need to be authentic and not artificial. By this I mean they need to be goals that exist as ends in themselves, not as a measure of success in something else. “I want to own an awesome condo in the city” is an authentic goal; it is something specific and tangible that I really want. “I want to exercise 3 times a week” is an artificial goal; it is used as a measure for the improvement of my physical fitness, and is unrealistic. Setting a personal growth path of “I want to improve my physical fitness” might work better for me because I do not have an authentic goal for exercise.

One thing that I have always had trouble with is setting and keeping time-bound goals. I guess this goes along with what I was saying about writing things down. I usually have achieved things that I have written down, but it often takes a long time (sometimes even after I have forgotten that I set the goal in the first place). This is something that I am going to try specifically to focus on – I want to have a when for all of my authentic goals.

First Steps

This will be my undertaking for the next few weeks: To figure out what I want to achieve and by when, and also what things I want to focus on continually improving. I hope to wind up with big picture goals and directions that can be broken down to format a formula for everyday living. I will probably not be completely transparent, as much of goal setting is very personal, but I will update this blog as often as possible for both encouragement and accountability as the process continues.

In the spirit of walking the walk. I will set out to have a list of goals and personal growth paths by one week from today: Monday, January 14th 2008.