If you’re going to make a goal, why not make it SMART? Making your goal smart increases your chance for success. By limiting the ambiguity in a goal, you can focus your efforts on exactly what you want to achieve. SMART stands for:
Specific – Answer as many of these questions as possible: who, what, where, when, why, how. Explicitly state the details of what you what to achieve in a clear and easy manner.
Measurable – If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Figure out exactly how success will be measured. Establish the key metrics to track while you make progress.
Attainable – Set a goal that is ambitious, but still realistic. You want to challenge yourself while knowing that success is possible.
Relevant – Make sure your goal is relevant to your needs. A deep internal motivation must drive you forward in the pursuit of your goal.
Timely – Put your goal within a time frame. Make a definate start and end point to eliminate procrastination.
Some not so SMART goals:
- Get in shape
- Stop smoking
- Spend more time with the family
And some SMART goals:
- Lose 10 pounds within the next 2 months
- Only smoke one cigarette per day
- Dedicate 2 nights out of the week to be with the family
Try your best to make your goals SMART!
When you first sit down and begin thinking about how you want to improve your life, the task can seem pretty straightforward at first. Most people want a balanced approach that will improve the quality of their life as a whole. A common strategy is to break your life into different categories, and set a goal in each of these categories. These categories are usually very general in nature and appear to be mutually exclusive, such as:
Now we can set a goal in each category:
- Career – Find a better job
- Physical – Lose 20 pounds
- Emotional – Become less stressed
- Financial – Get out of credit card debt
- Family – Spend more time with the kids
- Spiritual – Find ‘Inner Peace’
As we start to look at these goals together as a group, we can see how the categories that we created are not so clear. Most, if not all, of these individual goals depend on other goals to be completed. For example; to lose 20 pounds, we may have to adopt a lower stress way to live (since excess stress can lead to weight gain). To spend more time with our kids, it may require us to get a better job that gives us more free time. Finding inner peace may allow us to come to the realization the we don’t need to use our credit card for trivial purchases as much.
Even if your goals aren’t strictly mutually dependent, adopting a holistic approach to life improvement is much more effective. When you are working on multiple goals at once, you experience success on a more regular basis. Regular positive feedback and balanced life improvement creates a more sustainable environment for achieving your goals. So make sure that you take the time to think about how your goals are related to one another before developing a plan to start working on them.
As we go about our day, we are constantly following different streams of data. This could be the temperature outside, stock performance, time to commute to work, or price of gas. Keeping track of the change in these numbers allows us to make informed decisions from an objective point of view. We know for certain that is warmer today than yesterday because the temperature is 5 degrees higher, not because we simply feel warmer. Likewise, we know that paying $2.20 for a gallon of gas is a good deal, because we are aware of the differences in price of gas in our area.
There is plenty of data to guide us through decisions about our environment and the organizations within it. But what about personal decisions? How are we able to make truly objective judgments about our own body? The answer is through tracking personal data. The cover story of Wired magazine for July 2009 touched on this. By recording personal data we can see trends over time, and be more informed when making a self based decision. Statistics such as our weight, how much water we drink, how much we spend on groceries, and how far we run all give us an objective look about our true behavior. This information goes beyond what we simply ‘feel’, and allows us to see trends that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent.
After watching different news channels detail Micheal Jackson’s life, I was left quite disturbed. A lot was wrong with the whole scenario, but I will only focus on the one part that frustrated me the most; the common depiction of the ‘American Dream’.
Each channel kept saying that Micheal had achieved what most Americans aspire to be. They were not talking about his fame, art work, family, friends, or philanthropy. No, they were talking about his wealth. They kept showing pictures of his $400 million dollar house, and comparing it to where he grew up in Gary, IN. They were defining the American Dream as going from humble beginnings, to massive wealth.
Seems pretty nice right? But there is something much larger missing from this picture. Is our only motivation in life to accumulate the most ’stuff’ and keep it all to ourselves? What about our fellow Americans who were just as capable as we are, but were never given the opportunities that we were? Today Gary, IN is no better off than they were before Micheal became wealthy. Instead of sharing his fortune to help out people in his community, he created a personal paradise that ignores everyone else. It is not only his fault, but rather a larger reflection of our values. George Carlin had a good stand-up about this phenomenon:
There has to be something more that we as Americans can aspire to. Almost every religion teaches that wealth does not lead to lasting happiness. Hedonism creates momentary happiness that quickly fades away. It also increases the amount that it takes to truly make us happy. Right now my car is an old Honda Civic. If I were to buy a Bugatti Veyron tomorrow, the Honda I have now would no longer make me happy. Its sunroof would seem insignificant compared to 1000 horsepower Bugatti, despite the fact that I truly enjoy the sunroof now. I would now need to drive a car similar to the Bugatti to reach the same level of happiness that I used to enjoy in my Honda. Studies have even shown that the happiest people on earth are usually the poorest. Many people say this is because of the very low threshold for happiness that poor people have.
I’m not saying that the American Dream is to shed all personal wealth. Rather we need to start viewing wealth not as an end goal, but as tool that has the potential to bring happiness to a large number of people. The American Dream should be for each person to aspire to make a lasting positive change in as many people’s lives as possible. The American Dream should be based on how we can all succeed, and building a community (and country) that is better for everyone. Personal wealth and the stockpiling of insignificant material goods will only get us so far. For us to truly live to our potential, we must focus our efforts on improving the lives of everyone around us, and not just ourselves.
On the first day of my Business Ethics class, our teacher handed out a piece of paper that said:
Ready or not, someday it will all come to an end.
There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours, or days.
All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else.
Your wealth, fame, and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.
Your grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will finally disappear.
So, too, your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will expire.The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.
It won’t matter where you came from, or on what side of the tracks you lived, at the end.
It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant
Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?
What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave.
What will matter is not your success, but your significance.
What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught.What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage or sacrifice
that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example.What will matter is not your competence, but your character.
What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone.What will matter is not your memories, but the memories that live in those who loved you.
What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice.
Choose to live a life that matters.
Its in this spirit that we have started Dreamdone. Together we can improve our lives, our community, and fulfill a new American Dream.
About one month ago we were accepted into the USC Columbia Technology Incubator! This is a great program that will provide us with office space, capital, relevant contacts, and mentoring. Our new offices will be located at 1225 Laurel St. in Columbia.
More information about the program can be found here:
http://incubator.research.sc.edu/
This is a big step forward for our company, and will greatly help us create an amazing product!
