The Importance of Developing Your Character

It used to be that when a person made a deal they would shake hands on it. The deal was guaranteed by a person’s character. You valued your character and what people thought about you. Honoring the deal was vital to your relationships. There are still people today who value a handshake more than a contract. The thing is your character is what people will remember you by. Whether it be after you’ve left a job, a relationship, or after you die, it will be your character that lives on. So it’s vitally important to develop a strong sense of your character to leave behind a good impression. One’s character is the building blocks to all relationships. At work it is your character that enhances your relationships with your teammates, leaders, and the people who work for you. We always say when we leave a job we don’t want to burn bridges. It is your character that keeps those flames away from those bridges. There are three elements to the equation that makes up your character. What you say + what you do + your values = character. In this equation your values are the constant that influences the rest of the equation. Your character starts with your values. Your values should be the guide to your every decision. If you don’t have your values listed out in priority then you might want to start doing so. I have my values written out in priority and I rewrite them in the same order each day. I have them memorized so that when a decision comes my way I can refer back to them to guide me. In other words your values should stabilize what you say and do which develops your character. If you want to be a great teammate, friend, or leader it all falls down upon your character. The only way someone can judge that character is based on what you say and do. So identify those values that matter most to you and let them guide you in every aspect of your life. So when you do leave a lasting impression, it will be a good one.

Three Lessons on Leadership

For the past 16 years I have been a youth hockey coach. For the last 6 years I’ve coached 18 and under teams whose age range from 15-19 years old. These are three valuable lessons I’ve learned along the way. When I coached younger players I learned an anecdotal trick for determining players' positions. It’s not something that I have actually applied but it emphasizes a point. At the first practice of the season you shoot the puck down ice. The kids who race after it are your forwards. The kids who hang out on the periphery are your defensemen. Finally that one kid that just stands next to you is your goalie. The point I’m trying to make here is to learn what your team’s strengths are. Understand each member of the team and what they can bring to the table. Utilize those strengths whenever possible. Now another part of any youth team is the parents. For anyone who has ever coached or had a child in youth sports, you know full well that you need the parents on board as well. When I have my first parent meeting at the beginning of each season I always ask them three questions. I first ask how many of them see their child going to play professional hockey. Usually a few brave souls will raise their hand. I then ask how many think their kids will play for a college hockey team. A few more are willing to raise their hands. Finally I ask how many want to see their kids coaching youth hockey when they get older, at this point everyone raises their hands and nods their heads. I tell them, those are the players I’m coaching. The next generation of coaches and leaders. Now my point here is subtle. I am establishing common values within the team. Values that they all agree on and use as their guiding light. A team with a set of common values will make better decisions based on those values. The final lesson I want to talk about comes from the most talented player I have ever coached. He was amazing on the ice, however his problem was he wouldn’t pass. He was not a team player, he wanted to score all the goals. He was 17 at the time and we made him an assistant captain. Not for his talent but because we knew we could teach this kid how to be a leader. The other coaches tried pleading with him to pass and sometimes lecturing him. I took a different approach. I took him aside before a game and said to him, “Look, you know more about hockey than I will ever know. You are the most talented player I’ve ever coached. There is nothing I can teach you about hockey. But what I can teach you is how to be a leader. Your team looks up to you as an assistant captain. As a captain you want to lead your team and see them grow to their fullest potential. Their skills will never grow if you score all the goals. So could you be the leader I know you can be and pass the puck?” That game he got three assists and was more proud of those assists than he ever was of any goals he had ever scored. This final point is something that I learned from John C. Maxwell. Develop your leaders. You should want to make each member of your team better. You want to see them grow and learn as if they were your own children. When your team sees you are putting value in them, they will want to give value back. There are many more lessons I’ve learned from coaching youth hockey, but these three have been the most successful for me. Go out there and be the best leader you can and invest heavily in your team.

Continually Learn

The advice I’m going to give you is not necessarily mine. It’s a mashup of a few ideas I’ve heard over the course of the last couple of years. The advice is to continually learn. If you have aspirations to grow in your career then spend a little time each day learning new concepts and ideas that will help with your work. The rate at which knowledge is growing in your field seems to be exponential. You can’t just sit back and rely on what you know so far. You will grow stale in your field of expertise. This happened to me when I worked for the Air Force Research Laboratory. I was starting to get assigned more and more managerial projects and paperwork as opposed to doing actual research. I stopped learning about technical things and started learning bureaucracy. I was lucky that I recognized this and switched to a job where I could challenge myself technically again with Talkdesk. I became a Site Reliability Engineer and have loved every minute of it ever since. Yes I had to beat off some rust and learn quickly on the job, but my manager and team had faith in me. Now I spend a little time each day reading in my field. Whether it be learning the Bash Shell, Linux Administration or improving my Python skills. I work to absorb and practice what I need to learn to better myself for my job and career. I have already started to see the rewards paying off for doing this. I refuse to grow stale again. No matter what field you are in, you should be learning a little every day. I’ve heard it said that you should be investing 3% of your income into yourself and your education every year. I thoroughly believe this. My wife might beg to differ though when she sees how much I spend on books and audiobooks. The main point of this is, if you want to advance your career, take the time to care about your career and improve yourself. This post isn’t just about how to grow in your job though. It’s also about how you can grow as a person, a teammate, a leader, and much more! I had always been interested in motivational speaking, however I was ill equipped to do it. I didn't have the ability to present very well, I also didn’t have any material to present, and I didn’t know where to begin. I thought becoming a speaker would be a great side job and a great way to improve myself. So I started reading all kinds of motivational books. I have applied a lot of what I have learned in the last couple of years and have found great success. However, there was one thing I learned that topped all other things. It was how much time you have to spend listening to audiobooks. The books I read said the average person spends thousands of hours in their car each year. Most people listen to music or nothing at all! They suggested that you listen to audiobooks while driving and turn your vehicle into a mobile university. I started doing this not only when I drive but when I work out. I spend most of my time listening to more motivational books. I particularly like the books written by John C. Maxwell. This has changed my life! You see, I’m a slow reader compared to most people. So audiobooks speed up the process. I know that I need to take a speed reading course to improve or I’ll never get through all the books I’d like to read. That being said, the time I spend listening to these books has been invaluable to me. They have sparked many ideas and topics to talk about in my blog and later as a speaker. I even went as far as presenting to my team the topic of overcoming the fear of failure at work. Now I am by far not ready to become the speaker I want to be, but I’m taking little steps each day to get there. The key takeaway from this post is to take action and learn what you can when you can. Learn about your career, your personal growth, and even biographies of the people you admire. It will pay off enormously in the end.

Taking Action

The timing is never right. If you wait for the perfect time then you’ll never do what you want. When I told my wife that we should start thinking about kids I said, “No matter what you are never prepared for kids.” I wasn’t very far from the truth. There was no perfect time to have them. The first step toward getting something you want is to take action. Even if it’s just a little step it is better than nothing at all. I have always wanted to write a book or a novel. I finally decided to take action and not wait for the right timing. I wasn’t going to wait for my writing skills to magically improve. I was just going to do it. I have talked about being creative in solitude before and now I have put it to action. I sat down for an hour and wrote the titles to all the chapters I wanted to write. They may not have been in order but they were the key points I wanted to talk about. Have you ever heard of someone being frozen with fear? Waiting for the right timing is kind of like that. You are frozen with the fear of failure. I’ve talked about the fear of failure extensively already. I was training with the Air Force once as a civilian. It was a mini boot camp for scientists to get an exposure to what it was like to be in the field. We were doing a training exercise with guns that had lasers on them that could trigger a vest just like Lasertag. We were walking to a mock village when all of a sudden special forces pinned us down in an ambush. We all hit the ground. I dropped down into a puddle and froze with all the other people I was training with. When the training was over they taught us that if you are in an ambush the only way to have a chance of surviving is to push through it. I did not know this. This was a valuable lesson in life for me. When life gets you down you need to take action and push through it. If there is something you want in life, something you want to accomplish then start taking actions to do it. It’s like I learned when trying to lose weight. Don’t wait till Monday or New Years to start a diet. Start right now!

Being Creative

Creativity is like a muscle. The more you use it the bigger and better it gets. Many people feel they are not creative at all. However, I argue that you just forgot how to be creative. All children are creative at first. Their imaginations run wild. You used to be this way. I’m not saying tap into your inner child, but you do need to remember that you can be creative. So as I said, like a muscle the more you use it the more creative you get. My daughters spend a lot of time being creative. They are currently 15 years old and yet they have started writing novels, drawing, and creating the most amazing things. I encourage this kind of activity even if it does interfere with their homework. I can’t complain because their grades are great. But as long as they are using their creative muscles I’m happy. In a previous post I talked about sitting in solitude for an hour and just thinking. I still do this with one change. I take notes about the important things I think about. I try to think about what I’m going to do in the future and how I’ll get there. Then I take notes of the ideas that come to me. This is creative thinking! I can’t emphasize enough how important sitting in solitude is to me. This blog is another creative outlet for me. It doesn’t take me long to write a blog post because I do it so often. It’s interesting because I’m just as much a reader of my blog as I’m a writer. I don’t know what’s going to come out of me until I’ve typed it. I will someday use this blog to feed my book that I’ll eventually write. It will be some sort of motivational book. I also like writing stories. I have a novel that I started to write a couple years ago and abandoned when Covid hit. I often use what is going on around me to inspire my creative writing. I didn’t want to write about Covid so I put it down for a couple of years. Now I’m ready to pick it up again. Why is being creative so important? Creative people can solve problems. Creative people can also come up with new ideas. Imagine what kind of products you can come up with if you started being creative. Creativity gets easier and easier the more you do it. My daughters can write a story very fast because they do it so much. Interestingly they write their stories on their phones rather than a laptop. The key to being creative is believing in yourself that you can do it. Find the area you want to be creative about and start thinking about it. I recommend sitting in solitude and start imagining the what if!

Taking Responsibility

I’ve heard it said that if you make a mistake for an excuse you have made another mistake. I firmly believe this. You need to understand that you are to blame for all that has happened to you and where you are in life. Your choices or lack of choices have put you right where you are. There is no one to blame but yourself. So take responsibility for yourself and start making the right choices. As an example, before I met my wife I was a healthy 185 lbs. Shortly after meeting my wife I gained a lot of weight and have been hovering at the 240-250 lb range ever since. I made the unfortunate excuse that I was content with life and didn’t need to worry about it anymore. I stopped playing sports and ate what I wanted. I chose to put myself in that position. It is my fault. Not my relationship with my wife, not with the fact that food was readily available. It was simply my fault. I own up to that. As mentioned in a previous post I dropped out of my Master’s program in computer science. I had multiple excuses and none of them had to do with me. My father-in-law died, I had 4 year old twins running around, I had a full time job, I was a hockey coach. The list was endless. The real reason was I feared failure, which was also in another post. It was my fault and my fault alone. Fortunately there were not any negative consequences for dropping out. I still had a job and I was still considered a decent computer scientist. The point I’m trying to make is that we need to admit when we are wrong and do the right thing and agree that we are the cause of where we are in life. Once you have done this you are liberated from where you are. You can start making progressive steps to where you want to be! The economy is not crushing your dreams to start a business for example, you are. Your perceived lack of education is not why you can’t get a better job, it’s your lack of motivation to educate yourself that is holding you back. These are just a couple of examples. Now for the key to all of this. You need to forgive yourself of all the mistakes that put you in this position. There is no need to beat yourself up over it. The thing to do is forgive and move on. Start taking those steps that will get you to where you would like to go. Trust me you will be free!

My Fear of Failure

When I was working on my graduate degree, I once signed up for a course in a subject I knew was hard. I went to the first class and the professor handed out a test. He said, “If you fail this test you will fail this class.” I was nervous, I usually am calm during a test. As the room went quiet I looked through each question. I didn’t know how to solve any of them. I simply got up and walked out of the class. I had feared failure to the extreme. What happened after that was something I have regretted for a long time. You see, the class was a requirement for my Master’s degree in Computer Science. I told myself I would take another class and study up on the hard class in my spare time so that I could pass the first test that evaluated the students. I loved the new class but something had changed within me. I was no longer the confident student I once had been. I usually passed my classes with flying colors. But my self esteem took a blow. So I continued on with the new class with success. But one day it got hard. The assignment wasn’t working out the way it should have. That lack of self confidence thing kicked in again and I dropped out of the class. I claimed it was because my father-in-law died, I had toddler twins, I was coaching hockey, I had a full time job, and any other excuse I could make. But the real reason I dropped and never finished my degree was that I was scared. I never admitted to myself that I was scared until I wrote this post. I allowed myself to believe my excuses. I had successfully passed most of the courses I needed to get the degree and yet I let my fears cause me to drop out. I began to believe the degree was just a piece of paper and it would not affect my career in any way. I was already working in my field. Even though it was just a piece of paper I had allowed the fear to get to me and that hurt more than not getting the degree. Now fast forward several years to when I took a new job that was high risk with high reward. I had a nice stable job working with the government for many years. I would have been able to stay with that job until I retired with a great pension. However, I felt I was growing stale technically. I needed something different to shake things up. That’s when a friend offered me a job with a pre IPO (Initial Public Offering) company. The project was very high risk and we might fail. However, the pay was more than I could have possibly made within a lifetime of working for the government. I had never done that kind of work before and knew that it was going to be a steep learning curve. It was so difficult at first that I was almost let go. The one thing that saved me was my boss who had complete faith in me. He knew I had a high learning curve and that once I got my feet under me I would become a powerhouse. He was right. To me the accomplishment wasn’t the money, or the work, or the challenge. The accomplishment was overcoming my fears that I had while working on the graduate degree. No one knows just how scared I was to take the new job. I put on a brave face for my wife but down inside I was almost sick with fear. From now on I refuse to let the fear of failure hold me back. I have spent many hours working on this blog and I try to practice what I preach. I have big plans ahead of me now and I have only touched the tip of the iceberg.

Fear of Failure

Overcoming fear is not easy. Now I’m not asking you to overcome your fear of spiders. That’s a rational fear, LOL! I’m talking about the fears that are holding you back. The fear of failure. The fear of rejection. The fear of looking like a fool. All of those fears that are preventing you from getting what you want. There is a strategy one can use to overcome these limiting fears. It’s looking at the facts. Are you afraid to fail based on opinions or facts? The facts are there is nothing to lose when you fail and everything to gain. Even if you fail you learn something. Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times trying to invent the lightbulb. When he was asked after his first 5,000 failures why he didn’t give up he said, “I’ve learned 5,000 ways that it won’t work”. I’m paraphrasing here but you get the point. So let’s take a deeper look at what failure means and what facts can help you overcome them. Fear of failure can be summed up like this. The fear caused by opinions can be outweighed buy the success of facts. If you have a fear of rejection, it is often based on your opinion that you will be rejected. The fact is there is no reason to think you will fail. In fact confidence is key to not getting rejected in the first place. It reminds me of Boomhauer on King of the Hill. There was an episode where Bobby wanted to see how Boomhauer got so many women. He watched Boomhauer approach every woman he could, often getting slapped, until one of them agreed to go on a date with him. Who knows what he said, but he didn’t give up. The worst that happened to him was that he got slapped, which I assure you won’t happen in your situation. However, in the end he was successful. Now think about someone you feared getting rejected from. It doesn’t have to be a love interest. Just what facts do you have that support your fear of rejection. If you can’t think of any then you should go for it. The fear of failure is what keeps people from obtaining their goals. You clearly want to get somewhere and do something with your life so find the reasons and facts that will allow you to overcome your fears and get what you want. If you fail, you have only learned another way that it won’t work. Just be thankful you didn’t get slapped.

The Growth Mindset

A growth mindset, as conceived by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and colleagues, is the belief that a person's capacities and talents can be improved over time. Basically if you believe you can learn or change your capabilities or talents you will. If you don’t believe you can grow then why can you learn a new game? Why can you remember new routes to locations you go to? Why can you with practice learn how to play an instrument? You simply need to believe in yourself and that you can change or learn anything you would like. You can pick up new good habits or put down old bad habits with time and work. For example my wife quit smoking when she became pregnant with our first child. She hasn’t touched a cigarette in over 20 years. She learned how to remove a bad habit. That proves that change is possible. People with a growth mindset are constantly striving to improve themselves and learn new things. They read books, listen to audiobooks, read magazines, and newspapers. They have a hunger for life and learning. They do not feel that they are stuck in a rut and cannot improve themselves. If this is the case how do you begin to change yourself to have a growth mindset. It’s simple, believe in yourself. Pick up a book or listen to an audiobook on motivation and start to live what you learn. Expand your mind to all the new things that are out there for you. It won’t happen overnight but with determination and discipline you will begin to grow in leaps and bounds. The benefits outweigh any negative belief you have. You’ll improve your life, your career, and your relationships when you start learning all you can about things like how to change your perceptions, how to improve yourself, and how to learn new skills for your job. It’s amazing what you can put your mind to when you believe in yourself. All successful people have this growth mindset in common and work hard to change who they are and what they know. The world is ever changing and new ideas and concepts are being developed all the time. The expanse of human knowledge is growing exponentially every day. You need to constantly improve and learn to keep up. So what have you got to lose?

The 40 Percent Rule

This is an explanation of the 40 percent rule found on the internet. “The 40 Percent Rule is a mindset that Navy SEALs use to push through physical and mental pain when they think they have reached their limit. The idea is that when your mind tells you that you are done and can't go any further, you are only at about 40 percent of your actual capacity” I use this rule to motivate me to push myself further than I thought possible. When I started working out I was 254 lbs. I hadn’t done exercise in well over a year. I heard of this rule before starting to work out again. I used it to fuel me to go even further than I thought possible. I started off doing 15 minutes on the stationary bike. That seemed too easy to me, so I upped it to 30 minutes. That was a little bit more trying for me but I did it without reaching my limit. I pushed it to two 30 minute sessions and felt that I was cheating the rule by breaking it up. So Then I tried an hour at once. By the end of the first week I was riding 90 minutes and going 25 miles on the odometer! I have yet to reach the point of which my mind says give up. However my butt certainly complains. This has made me want to find out where my mind will say I’ve had enough. I want to go beyond that 40 percent! I need to see for myself if I have that 60 percent reserves in me to go on. I have a goal of riding my bike 100 miles. Not just my stationary bike but my real bike. Knowing this rule I know that I just have to reach 40 miles without my mind saying I’ve had enough. Then I can tap into those reserves and prove that I can do the 100 miles. I recommend you think of this rule anytime you are working out. Let it be a driving factor to pushing your limits. It will allow you to go the extra mile, or in my case the extra 60 miles. Set a goal for yourself in your workout routines and break it wide open!

Solitude

I’ve heard it said in a couple audiobooks that there is great benefit from sitting in solitude. What is sitting in solitude? It’s sitting with no distractions at all in silence with your own thoughts. No music, no kids, no phones, no taking notes, no reading, etc. The recommended time for this is 1 hour. Holy cow! You might say. A whole hour of doing nothing? Yes. Now we are not calling this meditation because it isn’t. It’s just letting your mind wander and think about things. Good things to think about are how you are going to achieve your goals. Maybe think about some of the tasks you would like to get done. Or just thinking about the future in general. Someone once said we live in the future. Or something like that. Why do this? There is something that many believe is our superconscious. This is the part of our consciousness that when tapped into can help you along your journey by giving you the answers you need without thinking about them. Let’s say that you are trying to reach your goals but you don’t know how. If you can tap into your superconscious it will give you the exact answer you need. Have you ever had a light bulb moment where an idea comes to your head unexpectedly and it’s exactly the idea you needed or didn’t know you needed? That’s your superconscious talking. One way of tapping into this superconscious is to sit there for an hour doing nothing. I thought this was a bunch of mumbo jumbo until I gave it a try. I told my family I didn’t want to be disturbed. I sat in a comfortable chair in my office. I put my phone in airplane mode. Then finally set a timer for 1 hour. I didn’t touch the phone or look at the clock the whole time. I just sat there with my thoughts. The results were amazing! I was able to come up with ideas to get me to my goals with plans that were perfect. I didn’t have to think about coming up with a plan, the ideas just came to me. After a while I was beginning to enjoy myself in solitude. Like I said, you don’t take notes. But the ideas were so good that I didn’t need to. I just knew what to do. Before I knew it, the alarm went off and I was refreshed and ready to implement my ideas. Another benefit I found is that I was able to fall asleep faster at night. I have always had a hard time going to sleep because of racing thoughts. The solitude seems to have cleared this up for me. It’s like I took care of all my racing thoughts before I go to bed so that my mind can quickly shut down and go to sleep. I will attempt to do it daily if I can. I put it on my task list every day and make it one of my top priorities. I find that doing it after work was the best time for me. It is kind of like a barrier from my work activities to my home activities. It allowed me to leave work behind and focus on other things. So make time in your schedule to practice solitude. Just try it a couple days and see if it helps you. It will especially be beneficial if you have goals written down that you want to accomplish. This is kind of like a funnel for your superconscious to focus on. So get to doing nothing!

My Father in Law’s Advice

As I go on my journey through life I am reminded often of my father in law’s advice on money. He always said, “You’ll never make a lot of money working for someone else.” I agree with this in most cases. For example there are many people who make a lot of money working for other people, but the good majority of people will never do so. This is when you have to tap into your skill set and figure out what you can do on your own. My father in law was an industrial plumber with less than average education. He early on went into business for himself and started doing large industrial jobs for places like steel mills. He made a huge success out of himself by daring to go off on his own and be his own boss. I have heard that a very small percentage of people realize that no matter what, they work for themselves. Whether they have a job or not they are in charge of their own lives and are the CEO of their own company. That company being themselves. When we approach life thinking in these terms it doesn’t really matter whether you are working for someone else or yourself. You have or can develop the skills necessary to branch out on your own. Dictate how much you make and how often you work. It will be a lot of work at first trying to get going on your own and you may fail many times. But the key is to learn from your failures and think forward to the next endeavor in your life. If you want to make the income you had always dreamed of, then you have to do it for yourself and not wait for someone (i.e. your boss) to do it for you. If you start your own business and work at something you love then the hard work will not seem that hard at all. It has been said repeatedly that if you do what you love then you’ll never work a day in your life. This post is not about teaching you how to be a success, it’s simply to give you the encouragement to be a success in what you want to do. So go to work for yourself and eventually you will start to make the money you have always wanted.

Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali said, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, your hands can't hit what your eyes can't see.” This is an amazing quote not just for boxing but for life as well. Now in this case we are not taking this as a boxing analogy. I don’t want you to actually hit someone (i.e. sting like a bee) but I do want you to be adaptable and take advantage of change. Floating like a butterfly can be thought of as being prepared for change. A butterfly flutters and changes direction with the wind. Change is inevitable, it’s going to happen. Even though a butterfly seems to flutter with the wind it survives the changes with the wind and still gets to where it wants to go. You need to be able to adapt to change and get to where you want to go. Sting like a bee is striking while the iron is hot so to speak. When change comes your way, look for how you can take advantage of it and grow. All change is an opportunity for growth. If you sting like a bee you will be in charge of change and not have change in charge of you. Now for the meat of the quote! “Your hands can’t hit what your eyes can’t see.” How do you survive change? How can you get to your goals if things are constantly changing on you. The key to this is having a vision of who you are, where you will be, and what you will be doing in the future as your goal. Let me repeat the important word here, “vision”! If you don’t have a vision of yourself you’ll not be able to see what you are trying to hit. This is why we all must envision who, what, and where we want to be in our future. Let’s say 5 years from now. Can you picture a vision of yourself 5 years from now? I can guarantee you successful people can! The people who can’t will not be able to control change to their benefit, but change will be in control of them. So just like goals and values you need to write down a vision of what you are going to be in the future so you can hit it. Take the time to write out a few paragraphs of what your who, what, and where you want to be in the future. Writing it down is the key to crystalizing it in your mind. You need to weather the storms of change and always keep your eye on the flower that the butterfly wants to land on.

Daily Tasks (Mini Goals)

In my previous post I wrote about goal setting. I explained how you need to write your goals down in order to solidify and act on them. Today is similar except we are talking about task lists and the benefit of writing them down. A task list is just a list of things you want to accomplish for the day. You check them off as you go along and by the end of the day you will have accomplished all that you wanted to do. Sounds like another thing you don’t really need to do, but I tell you it works. It makes you feel good at the end of the day when you have finished all the items. You don’t feel like you wasted the day. It kept you on top of yourself all day so that you were not distracted. It’s a general all round good feeling to have done it. Now here is the secret, and it’s not my secret. You write your tasks for the day down the night before. This is so that you can go to bed not thinking of all the things you need to do the next day and try to keep them organized in your head when you should be sleeping. You also won’t wake up trying to organize your day in the morning opposed to doing more important things that should be done in the morning (that’s for another post). I’ve started writing down my tasks for the day and find that I didn’t write enough tasks! Because I wanted to get them checked off as quickly as possible I just went and got them all done. This gives me more time to focus on my longer term goals. Ever since I’ve started doing this I’ve felt great! I have less clutter in my mind, I don’t feel overwhelmed, I have a clearly defined day ahead of me. It has been said that the most successful people in life have a plan and follow through with it. They make these task lists every day. They put time in there to work on their goals and add them to the list. The overall theme here is to set goals and accomplish them. You should always be working on your long term goals. By managing your time with these task lists you are assuring yourself the time to fit in those goals.

Set Those Goals

I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks on mental toughness as well on the psyche of successful people. A very common theme throughout all of them is actually writing down your goals. It sounds trivial and useless but it really works. It has done wonders for my focus for things I want to do. Whether it be long term goals like years, medium term goals like months, or short term goals like a week or a day. Writing them down helps you solidify what you are going to do and gives you a way to plan on how you are going to act on them. For example, a coworker of mine writes down his tasks for the day every morning. He tries to get every task done on the list by the end of the day. He is basically setting goals for himself every day. It helps him remember what the important things are and not get sidetracked. I’ve started doing this and you wouldn’t believe the results I’m getting. Even if it is as simple as getting a load of laundry done. Let’s focus on long term goals. The big aspirations in your life. It’s easy to say I want to be debt free or lose 69 lbs, but until you write it out it doesn’t solidify. It doesn’t allow you to plan. Now I’ve heard that goals need to be S.M.A.R.T several times, even my boss told me to use it. It means Specifice, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This is where your goals become a plan. To be specific you don’t just say I want to get healthy or lose weight, you say you WILL lose 69 lbs (side note, say will not want). That is something that is measurable. You can weigh yourself once a week or daily if you like and keep a chart of your progress. Achievable is being realistic. I could say I want to lose 100 lbs but that would bring me way under my ideal BMI and I’d have to continually starve myself to get there and maintain it. Then make it relevant to why you are doing it. For example, so that I can live longer. Finally time-bound. It shouldn’t be a goal that goes on and on. You need something that you can finish. It is reasonable to lose a pound a week so the time-bound could be 69 weeks. This is what the final goal looks like. “I will lose 69 lbs, at 1 pound a week, for 69 weeks so that I can live longer.” Now that’s a S.M.A.R.T goal. It basically tells me the plan within the goal! Now do you see why writing it out is so important. Because it’s a mouthful! Now that you have a goal or goals written out you need to do something else every day. This is not my idea. I heard it in an audiobook (sorry I don’t remember which). Now you get a notebook and write out your goals every day. You are tattooing them into your brain. It makes it so you don’t forget them. You won’t simply write them down once and never look at them again. If your goals are important to you then you write them down, every day. It only takes a few minutes, so what’s the harm? Finally, keep your goals to yourself. Yep! They are your secret. The reason is you could get goal fatigue. Your character is judged by what you do, not what you say you will do. Let it be a surprise to people when you hit your goal. Don’t forget to celebrate your goals as well!