Goal based thinking

In life, it’s very easy to get lost. To slip into the fog of daily life without the pursuit of a greater thing is the ultimate mediocrity.  If we as people are to rise above to find success, there must be higher goals. A lot of people I interact with seem to be stuck with a particular mindset, or live in a very typical setting without a lot of ambition. It’s not as if I’m trying to pass judgment on people, but rather that if we try, we can do so much better. Look at yourself and ask “what is my biggest goal right now?” If you’re one of the those who has a better goal than to make assistant manager somewhere, then congratulations. If not, then maybe you should re-examine what you’re currently doing.

The better path would be to turn your life toward “Goal based thinking”. From this viewpoint, your goals and ambitions drive you forward. Your life comes first, you act on your desires and interests and are always challenging yourself to do and be better. With your driving force you become capable  of accomplishing greater tasks, attracting interesting people, and acting with a clearer mind.

Finding your goals

You must start with your interests, your desires.  Should you have no idea what those are you must find them. Do you have a camera with a slight interest in photography? Then maybe your next goal should be to enter in photography contests. From there, to become published. This is an interest of mine and theses are actually things I’m working toward with my photography interest. I don’t actually have any desire to make it my career or anything like that. But I’m trying to progressively challenge myself to do better at it, even if it’s slow and I can’t devote a lot of my time to it. A side benefit would be a small potential for money, which could be a small income stream.

This website is the perfect example of having goals. It started out as a small website (Alyks-rant) that was limited to the community of Japanese learners. But in that website I realized that I was actually writing content that people cared to read. From there I desired to have a fully-fledged website with better content. Right now my goal is to write enough really good articles to bring in traffic from outside my original blog’s base, even if it’s not a lot.

Making the switch

You must start out small. While “make a million dollars as CEO of a big company”, or some similar grandiose idea, is an appealing idea, you must keep yourself grounded to reality. Each goal you meet needs to be a stepping stone to the next tier. In this sense, it’s perfectly fine to have only small goals. These small goals will slowly become bigger goals as you pursue them. In fact, most of the goals I work on daily are very small.

The million dollar CEO idea is a terrible example. Let’s start with the more realistic example of an average guy who has an interest in programming computers. He’s taught himself Java, or some other computer language, and is in a normal life with a normal job. Well what would the next action be? Maybe from his base language he could learn something that compliments it, work to develop applications on the web. He could find little jobs as a contractor over the web, start a website to market his content to the rest of the world. It’s small, but it’s a beginning.

But even these goals aren’t so small, don’t think they need to be as huge as in the example. If cooking strikes your fancy, then you could try new and different recipes, research the chemistry behind it, find local food events.

As you can see, it’s about using little seeds of interest to develop bigger and bigger goals. The more little seeds you plant, the more returns you’ll get as you pursue them. It’s this way that people go out and live life, finding new things to try, experience and do. It’s also nice to be able to meet new people, and it should be obvious how this helps.

Where you take all your small little interests depends on where is interest take him, which is itself dependent on the “next action”.

Next action

My favorite trick that always pushes me is what I call the “next action”. What I’ve learned is to always be asking myself “So what’s the next action?”. Example, I was in an antique shop recently and found a really nice fountain pen I liked. So I bought it. It’s my first pen, so I come home and fix it up, ink it up, and sit down to write. It’s so wonderfully smooth and I love it. After the initial wow has worn off, I ask myself “what’s the next action there, Alex?” The answer was “I wonder if I can teach myself some better handwriting.” I research online calligraphy and different types of handwriting styles. I find myself a really nice style that I want to learn, Spencerian. So at this very moment my next action is to go to the library and find a book that talks about it and has practice exercises.

The beauty of it is every time you ask yourself this question, you’re pushing yourself to do better, to form goals. Many pathways have a potential to meet new people, develop new skills you didn’t think you would, and even to make money with (though it’s generally best if this isn’t the goal).

Almost in a way it’s like a simple flowy thing:

Slight curiosity -> little bit of interest -> buy a pen, read a book on the subject, find a local event -> next action -> goal -> next action

When you look at it from a linear perspective, it becomes easier to see how almost anything in your life can turn into something interesting about you.

Maybe you should too?

The effects of the “next action” type of thinking within my “goal based thinking” have had extremely good effects on my life. Instead of wasting time with the television, reading comics, or goofing off, I will spend a good majority of my day working on different goals and completing my next action sequence. I keep track of where I am at all times with a todo list stemming from the plans I organize. All of this being bound together by my goals.

So go out there and and live a life oriented around your ambition, you’ll be much happier.