Yes that is right. Day 105 and I am up on Saturday morning really early contemplating how I am going to get closer to my goals today. This is what 105 days of this commitment has done to me. I do not even think about the fact that sleeping in on Saturday and doing nothing for several hours would be enjoyable. Rather I am up, and I am focused, and I am contemplating how to make myself and others better.
Actually, the truth is I really did think about staying in bed and doing nothing all morning. That was still tempting, even after 55 days of waking up at 5am every morning. However, the long term benefits far out weigh my temporary desire to be lazy today. Even if after I get everything done this morning and crawl back into bed and take a nap, I at least know that I got one step closer to where I want to be in 365 – 105 = 260 days from now.
What I want to be in 260 days. That is a sobering thought and I realized even more acutely today how much I really need to sit down and clarify and perfect my goal statements. I wrote a few blogs on this earlier. Using the SPAM method and the GROW method to help me get more clarity. Those exercises were great, but I have not revisited that in a while. I think it is time I do some refining.
I sat here and contemplated the gold refining process as an analogy to seeking to clarify my goals further. That is until I learned the leaching process that us used, and imagined myself in a vat of chemicals slowly extracting the very small deposits of goodness in my soul to try to collect event the faintest hint of something that could be great. So the gold refining analogy is not quite what I was looking for, maybe I will come up with one today sometime.
The point is that goal creation is not a one moment of epiphany. It is a clarifying process that occurs over time and goes through many processes until it becomes perfect. I am now realizing that revisiting my goals, objectives is something that must be done every day, every morning, every night. This is what prompts the inspiration for the 365 list and this is what you pray about at night. Have I got any closer today? No? Then what am I going to do about it tomorrow. If I just have enough energy to barely scrape one small little improvement out today – then what is it going to be and what goal is it going to help me get closer to.
Are your goals getting better and better over time? Are they getting more clear? I read a little on Einstein a while back ago. He really did have thoughts of space travel when he was a child, he mused on the properties of a magnet for hours. He also was a rebellious kid, who did not speak well, was told he would not amount to much, got kicked out of a school, and struggled with jobs not related to his dreams in his early adulthood. However, it is clear that he had goals and those goals became more and more refined as he got older. I wonder sometimes if the simple and powerful expressions that he came up with to define the most complicated topics were the result of a constant refining process.
Your goals will become simpler over time, but they will mean more. The goal statement you craft now will be ambiguous and may take some explaining to do but over time as you refine, craft, and chisel away at it the goal statement will become simple, clear, and represent years of effort. The statement will have powerful meaning to you and thus probably to others. I have often made the mistake of thinking I could craft a goal statement like this first and then set my mind to it. I have written hundreds of these – but I keep none of them. Some of them are very powerful, yet they are meaningless – because they are not backed by a bunch of Saturday morning contemplation!
So today I am going to start the goal refining process. Maybe I can extract a few ounces of gold over time from my original goal statements. However, I now know that each day I will make a slight alteration to my goals until at some point in the future I have crafted a statement that represents the entirety of my quest in a just a few short phrases. Think on it. What simple words represent the great ones of our past? Dr. King – “I have a dream.” Four words – but wow – they say it all right? Einstein – “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Jesus – “Love One Another.” Mother Theresa – “Peace begins with a Smile.” Buddha – “The Mind is Everything”. Churchill – “Never Give Up.”
You can encapsulate the entire mission, purpose, life, and will of a great person with just a few words. What are yours going to be?
Guy Reams (105)
365 Member
