For those of us who want to improve ourselves we need to do some reflection. I recently attended a Joe Polish’s super conference 2007 and I wanted to share with my readers a quick exercise they had everyone do while attending the conference. It’s a quick way to improve yourself as well as think of your plan on what are you going to do next.
Grab a pen and paper and sit down. Read each of the topics below and rate yourself (just like in school) and give yourself a letter grade (A,B,C,D,or F) for the following:
- Income
- Savings and Investments
- Wealth
- Close Personal Relationships
- Friendships
- Health and Fitness
- Knowledge and Skills
- Wisdom
- Spiritual Development
- Overall:
Now take a moment and look at what you gave yourself and think about it. Take a minute or two to talk to a friend and tell them where you are in life and discuss where you want to be. Once you have discussed and reflected on your grades above, lets move on to the next step, taking action.
To take action, we need to think about and answer 3 simple questions. For each of the questions below, write down (YES ON PEN AN PAPER, DON’T JUST THINK IT, WRITE IT DOWN!).
- Where am I?
- Where am I going?
- How do I get there?
These 3 simple questions can allow you to reflect and take in what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong, and how you plan to jump to the next phase in life. I find that I am constantly reevaluating myself and my plans. Doing a simple task of where I am and where I am going can help put my mind in place, but the tough part is how do I get there. You can also look at your where am I going as in next month, next 6 months, next year.
One thing that I have learned is that as long as you write down (yes, not thinking, writing) you have a high success rate of them happening, rather then just thinking them. Goals are important and I will be the first to say that I have a LOT of goals that I have not hit. Many of my previous personal projects get 80% completed 100% of the time, meaning I do NOT get them done that much. This is a challenge for myself, but attending this conference and hearing how Joe Polish is a starter and not a finisher (like me) surrounds himself with finishers. This is eye-opening ideas for me because I NEED to finish and reach my goals.
One thing that my Dad always told me is 80% of 5 projects means nothing is finished compared to 100% of 1 project. One story he told me was about how bonuses are determined at a job he once had. The bonus is dependent on how many separate projects you complete, so if you have 5 projects that are 80% done, you get NO BONUS! Now, for the person who gets 1 project 100% done, they get a bonus. Think about that, you are better to slack and have 1 project DONE, rather then 5 projects in the pipeline, but nothing FINISHED. Having FINISHED SOMETHING is MORE important then having a LOT of projects almost finished.
I hope this little assignment has helped you with life and plans for the future because it has already helped me. I find that you need to sit down once every 2 weeks (if not more) and reflect on life, where you are, where you are going, and how are you going to get there.
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John,
I’ll one-up you on this challenge John- I’ve tapped you for the “Open source goals meme” that I started many months ago- read the details here:
http://www.scrollinondubs.com/2006/03/03/opensource-goals-meme-a-social-experiment-in-becoming-write-brained/
sean