It’s been over a month since I said in this post that I would take one week to come up with a concrete list of goals and personal growth paths for 2008. I hit a pretty big bump in the road with the death of my Mom, but I’m not going to let any bumps stop me.

If you haven’t read the post linked above, you should read that one first. In it, I broke down two different types of self-improvement that I would like to focus on this year (and if all goes well, throughout my life). The first is Personal Growth: general directions in which I would like to move. The second is Goals: concrete things I would like to achieve.

Personal Growth

I have been tracking my personal growth on Joe’s Goals and it has been working pretty well. I have a handful of things I’d like to do more of like exercise and reading, and I award myself points if I do these things. Things that are more difficult for me to motivate myself to do, like exercise, are worth more points than things that are easier. I also have a handful of things I’d like to do less of, like eating out and drinking. These things are weighted based on how much they negatively affect me, and how difficult they are for me to avoid.

To the right is a graph of the last few days. I’ve found that over the last month or so, my average has been close to zero. I think this means I have picked a good balance of positives and negatives that I can improve on. As I continue to work on behaviors and habits, I will be able to see my average over weeks and months improve. This method will allow for mistakes without getting frustrated. I am now even more confident confident that this method is an improvement over new-years-resolution-type artificial goals like “Work out three times a week.”

Goals

The creation of goals has been much more difficult for me. Coming up with specific things I want to achieve, goals that are authentic, is hard. As I think about it, I begin to realize that it’s because most goals are artificial, and artificial goals just don’t work for me. I need to focus on means oriented improvements as paths and on ends oriented improvements as goals. I have come up with three concrete goals that I would like to achieve this year. The one that I would like to make public is owning a home. Specifically a condo, loft or flat in downtown St. Paul or Minneapolis. I am in a lease that expires on August 15th, so this will be my due date.

Next Steps

I’ve already begun forming some new habits, and Laura and I toured our first condos over the weekend. My plans for the next few months are to organize my life in a way that is conducive to the growth I am trying to achieve and to break down my long term concrete goals into shorter way-points so that I can check my progress as the weeks and months go by.
I will continue to write about my progress, as I said before, for encouragement and accountability.

Previous posts in this series:
2008 Personal Growth and Goals part I

Obama’s speech last night was awesome.

His ability to engage us as citizens is far above that of any other candidate. I’d like to share the following line that really stuck with me:

You see, the challenges we face will not be solved with one meeting in one night. It will not be resolved on even a Super Duper Tuesday. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

A bit reminiscent of Kennedy’s what you can do for your country speech, don’t you think? It really touches on what I think real leadership is about. It’s not simply about being the boss; it’s about creating passion and empowering those you lead. It’s about making people WANT to work together towards mutual goals.

The complete transcript is available here.

Here’s a video: