Goals Are Powerful

On one hand, setting goals can be incredibly simple. On the other hand, setting goals is an intricately complicated and difficult process. Once goals are set, however, they can lead to some highly powerful results.

I’ve subscribed to ThinkTQ for more than a year and a half, and last September I broke down and bought their system. I’ve mentioned before that I really like ThinkTQ because the system is position agnostic, as in, it’s not written for salespeople or executives like some of the other popular time management books. I have a hard time translating a lot of what The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People says about executives to my own life, although a lot of the book does make sense. I’m just not creative enough at this point. Getting Things Done is written to people a lot higher up in corporations than me and to salespeople, and again, I don’t have an easy time applying the book to myself. This is probably common, judging by Merlin Mann’s post How Does A Geek Hack GTD? ThinkTQ is rather a summary of all of the popular time management books broken down into 100 affirmations that are the most common to success in any system.

I’m still learning to apply many of the concepts to my life and follow them regularly. I’ve been working for weeks on a mindmap of my roles and visions and my highest level goals. I’ve found this process to be slow going. In some ways, I’ve been at this for years, since in 1996 I came across The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management and I began to craft my first ever personal constitution.

Though I haven’t been an expert at goal setting, I have had times in my life when, even though I didn’t realize it was goal setting, I decided that I was going to accomplish something and I refused to stop until it was done. Buying my first property is an example. I realized that, although single, for what I was paying in rent I might as well just own a home and get a tax break and equity. I ended up buying a condo. After getting married, my wife and I set our sites on selling that condo and buying a house.

I’ve had a few pivotal moments when defining a goal seriously changed the course of my life. The first major moment was in 2004 after my son Joshua was born. I was working a job supporting program testing at a development site. Although a lot of the systems I was around were interesting, it was a hectic, thankless and frustrating job. We worked for one company that was a subsidiary of the other company and it seemed that a major part of our contract was accepting blame when the other company screwed up. Our administrative management didn’t really care much about us so they left us to the whims of our operational management which happened to be the other company and by extention our customer. We were whipping boys. We went through a transitory state and the organization kept getting worse. When my wife went back to work after Joshua was born, I was on the swing shift. This arrangement worked out fine for child care, because I would get up with Joshua in the morning when my wife went to work, her sister would come by after school so I could go to work, and my wife would come home from work and take care of him the rest of the evening. I liked the swing shift because I got paid a differential and there was less frustration because management wasn’t around. This didn’t do much for my marriage though, because in addition to the stress of a new child we never really had time together.

I was convinced that without a degree, I couldn’t do any better than that job. I’d floated resumes a few times, and always ended up with calls from head hunters trying to get me to take some job in north Jersey or Syracuse. The pay at my job wasn’t too bad, and at least I had a job so what’s the big deal, right? One of the guys on the swing shift was actively seeking a new job. I got to talking with my coworkers and they mentioned something called a “5 year plan”. I asked what that was. I’d never written one before. They basically told me to write out where I would like to be and what I would like to accomplish in the next 5 years. I’ve always had a hard time with that, possibly because I’m not always very imaginative, or I’m too anal to “predict the future”, but this time I took them seriously. I sat at my desk one night and prayed about it, then opened Outlook Notes, and started typing ideas of how I wanted my life to be in the next five years. One of the goals my wife and I had set was for her to be able to come home and take care of Joshua and any more children we happen to have (this is not without it’s challenges and conflicts, but that’s for another entry). I knew we could not do that at the salary I had, even with the night shift differential. I also knew that for the sake of my marriage, I would have to go back on day shift, but I also couldn’t do it on that job because I would lose the night shift differential pay. I didn’t want to stay there anyway.

I began applying for other company jobs internally, but got nowhere. I also decided that I had nothing to lose by floating resumes. If I got any calls from head hunters, I decided that I would just hang up on them, as they have never really done me any favors. The last head hunter I dealt with was as bad as the car salesman I wrote about here. I had just gotten married and I was trying to find a job in the south where my wife wanted to go. I told the head hunter that I wanted to go to the south, but he kept calling me up with offers for Massachusetts, north Jersey, and upstate New York. I’m sure those are fine places, but what part about IN THE SOUTH did he have trouble understanding? Obviously all of it, because I still live in south Jersey.

After floating my resume on a local site, I actually got a call from a company that was interested in my experience in my current industry. They had a job for me. I got the call on Thursday, had a phone interview on Monday, and got an offer back within 10 minutes. I put in my two week’s notice that afternoon. That was amazing! I had to work on a contract for three months before being hired directly, but it’s a much better job and the pay was enough for my wife to stay home. Setting the goal led me to the action, floating my resume, which led me to the job. There was a lot of “right place, right time” involved, but had I not been encouraged to work out that five year plan, I would probably still be in that old job.

Another time when a goal steered me to some life altering action involved a non-accredited Bible college. When I first became I Christian in 2002, I made a decision that I admit was more emotional than rational to pursue ministry work. I applied to the first distance learning Bible college I could find and enrolled in their Biblical Counseling program. I’m not knocking the school or the program, but the school turned out to be non-accredited. I admit at the time to not knowing what that meant at the time I enrolled. I didn’t take the program seriously, fell behind, and had to pay for an extension. I had two years to complete five classes, and I was not keeping up with that. I learned a lot, but as time went on I found some great sources on the internet for learning about the Bible and I also realized that the ministry might not be the best fit for me. Once I found out what accreditation was I realized that this program wouldn’t do me much good. I’d never get certified as a counselor and I couldn’t really get a job at a church with it either. I went through a phase where I was actually consciously planning each day, so I would look at my list of values and goals as I planned my day. I wish I could say I did that more. When I saw that goal every day to complete the Biblical Counseling program, I realized that the goal may not be inline with my vision. After some prayer and a few more events transpired, I ended up dropping out and enrolling at the University of Phoenix in their Information Technology program, which I find to be a much better fit with my vision, interests, and gifts. Me, a counselor? I think the world is a much better place when I’m troubleshooting computers rather than people.

ThinkTQ often says “A dream without a plan is a wish without a hope”. If you want to go far in life, you have to figure out what your vision is, what your roles are, and then set realistic goals in line with your vision and roles. Sometimes goals will lead you to greatness, and other times they might lead you to a major course change. You’ll never know until you do it.