Goals

previous - next

Take-aways:

• For a full life, do the following:
• Disobey the rules holding you back
• Define success for yourself
• Do the thing you are afraid of
• Let go of greed (not just monetary)
• Nourish your body
• Make specific goals
• Don’t be satisfied with the status quo
• List your goals freely.
• Get the charitable goals out of your system.
• List selfish, nasty, short-sighted goals.

Goals

Enough with positive thinking for the time being. Let’s move on to goal-setting. Why goals? I’ll let someone else answer that question. Please take a moment. Click on this link and read the article.

Goal Setting

Henri (the author of the linked article) spends a lot of time talking about goals, so let’s set some goals.

Let your mind be free to possibility. Let your goals be wild and delightful. If the mere thought of achieving the goal does not excite you, then why is it one of your goals? Is it because someone else thinks you ought to have that goal, perhaps a parent or some other authority figure? If so, then throw the goal out and write down the opposite as a goal. How does that feel?

Write down malicious goals. How do those feel?

Now is not the time for the inner critic or moralizer to filter your thoughts. Write down all your goals. Maybe you are angry like the Narrator in the movie Fight Club:

"I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all those French beaches I’d never see. … I felt like destroying something beautiful."

Now that’s honest goal-setting.

List as many goals as you can. Don’t worry about not having enough time, money, energy, or anything else that stands in the way of your goals.

Here are some questions to help you freely create your list of goals:

What would you do if you had a billion dollar annual income?

What are some charitable goals on your mind? Maybe you’re naturally altruistic, maybe you should list them just to get them out of your system.

List some emotional goals. How would you change your emotions if you could? How would you change your family or friends? What fear do you want to overcome?

Now list some purely selfish goals. See if the following questions help:

What would you do if you were Darth Vader?

What would you do if you were a bond villain?

What did you want as a teenager?

What did you want as a child?

Here are some of my own goals, for example. Note they begin with emotional-type goals and move to the deliciously selfish goals later on:

• Form a stronger bond with my dad.
• Remove the stress from the lives of my mom and sister.
• Remove the stress from my own life.
• Speak my mind at all times, especially when it is unpopular.
• Find a beautiful woman to love and be loved by.
• Convince all people that real progress is possible.
• Institute a global genetic program to extend human life, health, and mental and physical capabilities.
• Publish books and short stories.
• Create a video game.
• Never do something solely because I need the money ever. Give my family the same freedom. Then free the world.
• Enjoy life.
• Have a harem.
• Live forever.
• Build an interstellar star ship.
• Create a human-level AI.

You may be offended by some of my goals:

Have a harem? How misogynistic!

Institute a global genetic program? This guy sounds like a Nazi!

I hope that some of your goals would be offensive to others, that they would make my goals look tame and polite by comparison. I don’t want you to implement any of your goals that would cause pain and suffering, but if you don’t at least list them, then you aren’t being totally honest with yourself.

Goal-setting is a multi-pronged activity. It continues to free the mind, it provides insight into one’s self, and it lays out objectives that can be pursued with real action.

Once you have your long list of goals, the next step is to determine what is the first step towards each goal (except for the brutish, cruel goals). This first step should be bite-sized, measurable, and concrete. David Allen’s Getting Things Done can help you create the proper next steps.

In the next few sections we will address organizational and productivity tips to complete the steps that will take us to our goals.

Tip:

After copying down the goals you want to aggressively pursue this year, file the original list of goals in a folder that you won’t check for a year. After that time, make a new list of goals, including selfish and mean goals. Then re-read your older goals. Think about how you have changed and remained the same.