What are the odds that two men born on the exact same day would have so much influence on history?

At the beginning of the year, I started a series of posts about my New Year’s Resolutions. Here is a look back on the project.

As you may recall, I divided my resolutions into two categories: Personal Growth and Goals. The first being general habits, behaviors and attitudes I wanted to work toward, and the second being concrete things I wanted to achieve. All-in-all, 2008 was a good year for me. I made many positive changes in my personal and professional life, and I achieved one major goal while making good progress toward two more.

Personal Growth

I started this project in part by finding a handful things I wanted to improve on in 2008 and using Joe’s Goals to track my habits and form new ones. It was a pretty fun thing to do, and I definitely found keeping track of my progress to be a good motivator. It’s kind of like a score card for the game of life. I stuck with Joe’s Goals pretty well for about 9 months, then fell out of the habit. I only recently got back into it, and while I don’t know whether my behavior changed during the time I was not tracking it, I do know that I feel better just being aware of how I’m doing.

One cool feature of this application is the ability to run reports. Here’s what the report looks like for January through September.

The main thing that makes interpreting this data difficult is that I did not record my behavior everyday. I was quite sporadic, so the raw numbers for a long period of time are not that useful. For example, I’m certain that I had more than 81 productive workdays in 9 months!

Comparisons between behaviors are probably pretty accurate because on days that I remembered to check in with Joe’s Goals, I usually reported everything for that day. For example, in this particular time period it looks like I went out to eat on more days than I exercised. That’s something I’d like to improve upon.

My total score was positive, so that’s a good thing. There is no benchmark to measure against though, and the scoring criteria and weighting is pretty random, so it’s hard to say just based on the numbers how the year went. For Example, I set ‘drink’ as worth negative two points one particularly hungover morning but then I checked the box every time I had a beer or wine with dinner. ‘Get Organized’ was not really defined at all and wound up being checked whenever I just felt like I deserved a point. Taking some time to fine tune my scoring criteria would be beneficial. I’ve added a ‘Set Goals’ goal so that I can track how many days I actually checked in and do some averaging, this will help solve the missing data issue in the future.

If I settle on a scoring criteria, I could run reports on a month-to-month or week-to-week basis, and strive to improve my score from one report to the next. I think I will try something along these lines for 2009.

Goals

My goals turned out to be much bigger than perhaps I realized when I set them as goals for the year. They were the kind of “Life-Moment” things that achieving more than one of would make for a really special year. The one goal that I disclosed publicly happens to be the same goal I achieved this year: Owning a Home. I have made progress toward two more goals, and I will certainly keep both as goals for 2009.

I think a major reason the Homeowner goal was a success while the others were not was the fact that it was made public. This makes sense. Encouragement from other people is one of the best motivators for me. I still can’t publicize these goals since they are more personal than I would like the whole world to know, but I did decide to share them with some trusted allies who I am confident will help encourage me in 2009.

Since Joe’s Goals was so helpful to me in my Personal Growth project, I decided to try to find some way to leverage technology to assist me in my major Goals as well. I used FutureMe to send myself an e-mail in four months checking on my progress:

Dear Gabe,

How are things going with ___________ and ___________ ? If you haven’t done those yet, get to work. Also, be sure to send your future self another e-mail.

Love, You

I think four months is a good time frame for my first formal reminder, much sooner would lose effectiveness as the creation of the goals would still be pretty fresh in my mind. This way, when I get that e-mail I can be motivated by the jarring realization that it’s already been four months. We’ll see how it goes.

I also want to set a third goal for 2009. I feel that since I achieved one thing this year, I should add another to the list. In fact, I should have added it as soon as I moved into the condo. I kind of like the idea of always having my queue of three goals pulling me along in life. I will try to have my next major “Life Moment” goal set by the end of January.

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

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:

Ed sent me this video he found on Seth Godin’s Blog. I love it. It’s about one of the most important and often overlooked human characteristics: curiosity. It’s a trait we should all strive to develop.

The film was made by Nic Askew of monday9am, a film-maker from Minneapolis. There are a bunch of interesting shorts on his website.

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.

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.

According to this story on CNN.com, Bush recently responded to people in opposition to his terrorist-surveillance program by comparing the threat of Al Qaeda to the threat of the rise of Lenin and Hitler and saying that Americans are making the terrible mistake of “underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men…”.

Hitler and Lenin used fear to manipulate their followers into granting them unchecked power. That Bush would cite these men as examples in order to convince Americans to give up more of our civil liberties is beyond ironic.

I watched a good portion of the Democratic Presidential Debate last night. One question that really struck me was “What is your favorite Bible verse?”

Joe Biden said “Christ’s Warning of the Pharisees.”

I thought this was an interesting answer, so I did some research this morning. While there are different interpretations of what Biden may have meant by this, I really like the explanation given by Ann Althouse:

If you understand the reference, it actually is a subtle way to imply that religion should not be used publicly for the purpose of achieving worldly goals. It’s good to remind religious people — especially religious people who crave more religion in their politics — that Jesus set his religion apart from politics and gives Christians a religious basis for the separation of church and state.

It’s more than a bit strange that this question was even asked in a Presidential debate in a country built on a foundation one of the cornerstones of which is the separation of Church and State.

There is lots of good discussion of this particular question on Ann Althouse’s Blog. It’s also a great look at some of the answers that could have been, including Samuel L Jackson’s recitation of Ezekiel 25:17 from Pulp Fiction.

On September 3rd at around 7:00 PM Mountain Time, I wrapped up my 25th year of life on this planet. It’s pretty crazy to realize I’ve been alive for a quarter of a century.

Here are some things I think I’ve figured out in my 9131 days:

Travel as much as possible to places as far away as possible. There’s nothing better than a change in scenery to give you bit of perspective on the world. The older you get, the less time you seem to have, so travel a lot when you are young.

The best way to be successful in life is to surround yourself with people who’s skills, talents and virtues compliment your own. Partnership is very powerful.

Try not to have enemies, they’re rarely worth the time and energy spent avoiding them.

The traditional way of doing things is not always the best way.