Getting What You Want

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“If you want to keep on getting what you are getting, keep on doing what you are doing”!”

-Unknown

It stands to reason that if you live your life moment by moment then at least one of those moments is going to leave you in the red.  The problem is that if enough of those moments are not positive then you’ll quickly find yourself either stagnating, or worse, moving backwards and losing ground.

How do you get what you want out of life and move forward towards you goals?

Believe it or not, the first necessity is “Having Goals”, I mean, What do you want anyway?  To most people, goals are something they think about in passing, maybe in bed the morning as they wake up just before they drift off to sleep at night.  Yeah.  You need more than that and just “knowing” them isn’t enough – you really need to write them down.  You don’t have to write them in a blog or anywhere public (although publicly stating your goals does invoke a certain amount of peer pressure to keep up you work towards them).  You can just write them in a notebook or on a few 3×5 note cards so that you can refer to them.  The 3×5 card idea is good because you can alter them from time to time and it makes them easier to keep with you. You should keep these with you and whenever you have a free moment and at least once per day, pull them out and review them.  They don’t have to be perfect – they just have to be enough of a scribble to give you some direction.  You’ll never reach a target that doesn’t exist.

Now that you have goals or you’ve scribbled some down, how do you obtain them?

One way is Persistence.  Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of the United States, said:

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Brute force, that’s one way to do it.  Note that this will sometimes include “Being Rude”.  You can’t always be nice and get ahead.  There is a little truth to “Nice guys (and girls) finish last”.  This goes back to the moment-by-moment mentality.  There are only 24 hours in a day.  If you remove sleeping, eating and any other non-goal usable hours, you end up with a number of moments – let’s say 12 hours at 60 minutes per hour, or 720 minutes.  Imagine a countdown timer that starts each morning of “goal-oriented” minutes.  If someone calls you and you can’t get them off of the phone, they aren’t just keeping you from nothing, right?  They are taking away your goal minutes.  Be rude – explain that you have something else you are in the middle of.  Maybe you can fit them into your non-goal minutes of the day – that’s up to you. It’s okay to say “NO”. There are also other distractions such as Facebook and Twitter that rob you of your goal moments.  You can’t change in a single day, but you should start being aware of how little time you really have to make something positive happen in your life.

Another way to get what you want and achieve your goals is help other people get what they want.  Sounds confusing, right?  How does helping someone else get what they want help me?  Honestly, it might not – you’ll need to examine each relationship and occasion to weigh the benefits.  This process is like a puzzle.  For instance, your goal is to get a new bathroom floor in place.  You aren’t really adept at putting in flooring and you don’t have the tools.  After research, you determine that you can probably get by and get the floor in because you’ve seen a number of books and you’ve found out that you can rent the tools necessary to do the job.  However, you just happen to know someone who does flooring for a living.  Just maybe you have the technical know-how to help them with a problem they are having – say, changing the starter on their car.  You know they’ve been having trouble with it and you have done the job yourself before but until this moment you didn’t make a connection.  You could help them with changing their starter in exchange for helping you work on your floor.  It’s win-win and it’s cheap.

You can also often get what you want by letting someone else take credit for the work.  That’s a tough one.  This could happen at work or in your personal life.  A great work example of this is making your boss look good in order to move forward.  You have a great idea and during a meeting with other company senior staff, you hear your boss mention the idea as if it is his.  Immediately you might freak out at that, but it really depends on how ethical your boss is.  At some point, he is either going to say that it was YOUR idea, HIS idea, or a conglomeration of both of you.  Of course, one ideal answer is that it was your idea, but it’s okay if he opts for the conglomeration option.  (sorry – if he goes for the HIS idea, you’ll have to watch close to see what happens.  He might not be playing fair, but that’s for another post).  Mutual ownership of the idea, even though it was yours, is a good thing because it shows a level of trust between both participants and it could help you progress toward your goals as well (say, more money at work: a good boss should reward you for good ideas that help him look better to his superiors).

That’s only a few of my ideas.  Maybe you know other ways to obtain goals – if so, please post them in follow-up comments.

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Tags: diy, goals