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.

In the left hand column of my blog, you can see 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.

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.

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 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.

I’m not sure how long this has been going on, but CNN.com now has a satire article on their front page every day.
I love The Onion, but I don’t think their fake news belongs on a legitimate news site, even if it is marked as “Satire”.

Is this worse than the other stuff that passes for news (Lindsay, Paris) these days?

I’ve noticed that different people watch movies in different ways, and with different attitudes. In the spirit of oversimplification, here are some handy stereotypes I came up with:

The Tourist
Just along for the ride. The tourist views a movie with little in the way of preconceived notions or expectations, and takes the movie as it comes. The tourist is rarely disappointed in a movie, but at the same time never gets the same emotional experience from a really good movie as other types.

The Cynic
Looking for imperfections at every moment, the cynic is very hard to please. The irony of the cynic is in his ability to overlook fictionalizations in the big picture while picking out unrealistic details with extreme precision. The cynic is most pleased with a movie that has no holes.

The Detective
This is a person who’s main goal is to guess what will happen next. The detective looks for significance behind every line of dialog and every turn of plot. The detective’s favorite movie is one that is not easy to solve.

I suppose that most people are some combination of these types. I myself tend to be a tourist. I’m just coming to the realization now though, that to get the most out of watching a movie, I should adjust my attitude going into it for whatever type of movie it is. For Transformers I should be a tourist; for The Bourne Ultimatum I should be a detective; and for whatever the Wayans brothers do next, I should be a cynic.

Do you adjust your attitude going into a movie based on what kind of movie it’s going to be? Also, What are some other movie watching attitudes and what does a person’s movie watching style say about their life living style?

I’ve been hearing this phrase more and more lately, and it’s really been getting on my nerves. It is what it is is the most meaningless 5 word sentence I can imagine.

Perhaps I’m a little behind on this issue. According to Urban Dictionary, this phrase was voted the #1 cliché of 2004. Apparently, it’s supposed to mean something to the effect of “The situation is not good, but we’ll just accept it and move on.” It’s really an expression of regret thinly veiled as acceptance. People say something is what it is when they want to avoid saying anything at all.

I suppose the phrase is what it is though, so maybe I should quit complaining.