It’s About the Journey
I was on my way to work today and while I was driving I was just enjoying the sound of my car's engine and the feeling of the steering wheel in one hand, the shift knob in the other. Cruising down the street listening to Dragon Force and feeling the early day heat of the of the summer sun.
I found myself thinking about an exercise I've been making a part of my morning routine. I wake up and think and feel how much I love myself. I've been noticing a lot of internal tension gets released during the exercise.
It hit me, one of the things that has been holding me back is that I keep doing these exercises (somewhat sporadically I might add) expecting to just arrive at something great one day.
That thought process leads me to what feels like an eventual wall.
I've only been letting myself go so far with self development because I feel like I should see some tangible results in life. Which coincidentally I have been, it's just not quite what I've envisioned. At least not yet anyway.
I keep coming back to: "Life is not a destination."
Something that seems to be deep rooted in my thinking is that one day I will "arrive" at life. It's just not true. After all life is what happens to you while you're planning.
So I'm taking that as my most recent kick in the pants and using it to be more present in what is happening within my life, while being ever more present and an active participant in my life.
Wisdom and Knowledge
I was watching Peaceful Warrior the other day and there was a line that stuck out this time around. It's from the scene where Dan is talking to Socrates.
Soctrates: "Do you know how to clean a windshield?"
Dan: "Yeah"
Socrates: "Wisdom is doing it!"
I've been thinking about it and seeing all the areas in my life where I "know" how things should be done, but that's the extent to which I do them. So I'm making a conscious effort to gain wisdom and do those things I "know" I should be.
One of which is that I'm learning how to customize/create WordPress themes, I'm doing that at the same time I'm trying out WordPress 3.0.
Wish me luck!
Solving Problems at the Lowest Level
In Think and Grow Rich, Wallace D. Waddles points out that people who are in poverty should not be pitied. Instead they should be thought highly of and welcomed, as they are on their way up toward prosperity.
I've talked with numerous people who seem to write this way of thinking off as people who don't want to give to charity or some such nonsense.
But if you look at things from the perspective of people creating their own realities, we can see that if people are felt sorry for it's only strengthening the notion that they are where they are "meant" to be.
If we turn this idea on it's ear and instead treat people like they are in fact meant to be treated (like the universe is their playground, if you're wondering), we will instead strengthen the idea that they can in fact do anything they want. The biggest thing that anyone needs is someone to believe in them. Eventually it has to be themselves, but it never hurts to give someone help.
I saw a video that summed up the current economic state in the world. That is not my focus, as it would only feed the idea that we are victims of circumstance.
My reason for writing this is to propose that if we were to look at our lives part of a greater whole and understand the a whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. In this context, part of a country or in a much larger scope as a part of a species.
I had a thought (no, it didn't hurt 
) about faith recently. If there are only two base emotions: love and fear. Then faith must be the absence of fear, because with faith we overcome the "uncertainty" (see fear) of life.
Simply imagine what the world would be like, if everyone lived their lives with faith.
Goals, and a Spiffy Utility to Help You Write Them
Goals are an all important part of getting anywhere in life, talk to any successful person and I'm positive they'll tell you started with a goal.
Think about it, anything you want to accomplish, to do, any place you want to go, anything you want to read, etc., is a goal.
A great quote said I heard once says: "A goal not written down is a wish."
That's all fine and good, but writing down something like: "I want to be the world's best hopscotch player." is pretty vague. It's a start at least, but where do you go from there?
I'm glad you asked because I'm going to tell you.
Once you have an idea for something you want to do and have written it down you need to need to figure some other things out. They follow the acronym: SMARTY. Real, challenging, goals need to be the following:
- Specific (What exactly is it that you want?)
- Meaningful (Why is this important?)
- Achievable (If you want the moon, you're going to need to build up to it)
- Time Bound (You need a reasonable but challenging time frame to hold yourself to)
- Yours (Is this something you really want?)
So once you've decided on something and run it through your head and listed why things are important and why the goal is yours, where do you go from there?
Well it's time to start on an action plan, what are you going to do to achieve your goals?
Be specific, If my goal was: "After 30 days I want to be able to do 100 push-ups without stopping." The things I would need to do would probably be along the lines of:
- Take a baseline of where I'm at presently
- Everyday do as many push-ups as I can at one time
- Once I can't do anymore push-ups, do at least 10 negatives (letting myself down slowly)
- Re-Assess where I'm at every week
That seems to be a specific list of actions to take. I even gave myself places to re-assess where I'm at, that way I can see just how far along I am.
Which brings me to another important part of achieving big things, you need to have places to check your progress and see how far along you are. That way you can see if you need to push yourself a little harder or maybe you'll come to the realization that your timetable needs to be changed to allow for unforeseen requirements to meet the goal.
In my example goal I would would say the first milestone would be the day I start, the things I would need to have achieved that day would be to do a baseline set of push-ups and record the results. From there I could extrapolate the needed increases in the number of push-ups I would need to be able to do at the end of every week. Say, when I started I was able to 27 push-ups. So I would need to increase that number by 73 at the end of thirty days. That rounds out to a little over an 18 push-up increase every week. So at the end of the first week my milestone could be to be able to do: 45 push ups. If I don't quite reach it (or not get anywhere near it) I could stop and evaluate where I'm at. If I didn't quite hit the milestone on the first week, I'd probably just brush it off and push harder the second week. If I didn't make the second milestone then I'd look a the goal and reassess whether it was achievable in the month time frame I set.
At that point, depending on how far from the 2nd milestone I was I might keep pushing or I might push the finish line back a week and see what happens. There may also be other factors to take into account, perhaps I might see that my nutrition isn't up where it could be and I might need adjust things there. Then *BAM* suddenly I'd be on track.
If you don't hit your original target date, but do follow through and hit your goal, are you a failure? Well it might depend on what the goal was, but 99.9% of the time it still makes you a success in my book.
Now I did skip the emotional importance of this goal, so lets cover that.
Why on earth would I want to be able to do 100 push-ups without stopping? In my case, the muscular endurance would be great. There would also be an increase in strength. That and it would be cool to be able to do well beyond the normal amount of push-ups that the average male can do (I think it's 23). It would also mean I was well past prepared for the next Black Belt test I take, well at least that portion of the test.
Being able to look at something to evoke the feeling that you will have when you look back knowing you completed your goal is crucial. It will keep you motivated to keep going toward your goal until you ultimately accomplish it.
So now that we've talked about how to set a goal that you'll follow through with, I want to present a little form that I've been working on. It will allow you to give a basic description of your goal and describe what the goal with do for your life as well as what you will feel like when you accomplish it. There is a section to lay out a basic action plan and a section for milestones and dates. For the finishing touch, I set it up so that when you go to print the output it hides the data entry portion.
If you go to: http://www.hitchhiketheuniverse.net/utilities/goal_setting.php you can use the form. I'll have a version up that you can download and edit in a word document soon.
Until then, everyone enjoy!
P.S. If you guys have ideas for improvements, let me know and I'll see what I can do!