why i don't hate setting GOALS anymore - an epiphany

[Delta]

i think all my life, because of upbringing and background, the idea of having a GOAL was always a terrible, odious thing to me.

a goal was always about what i SHOULD be doing, and about what OTHERS deemed appropriate for my life.

i've come to realize that this is NOT how the notion of GOAL should be construed.

a goal should be SOMETHING THAT I REALLY *W*A*N*T* !

it is IDENTIFYING a desire and then EVALUATING everything that i need to do to get it and then DETERMINING to do everything it takes.

this REDUCES hopelessness of DEPRESSION. it eliminates "I CAN'T" and replaces it with "WHAT" and then "HOW CAN I".... it replaces static despair with a LOT OF STEPS YOU CAN BE DOING to get what you want!

A GOAL is simply, WHAT DO I WANT?

there are a lot of socializing agents, well meaning parents and religions (both eastern and western) that try to stamp out desire... and GREED. but in many ways, men have become much too UNGREEDY. we need more of it back. without it, we are without ambition (another dirty word that gets cleaned up if you hook it back to what YOU WANT).

develop MORE desire. MORE want. MORE greed. and we should TRY LIKE HELL TO GET IT!

and to the point, greed is not only good, it makes us attractive to women.

and as i have theorized before, it is in this capacity that women are the ULTIMATE socializing agents that may drive the cohesion of society and propulsion of economies... without whom, vast legions of men would be perfectly content to live in their shacks with their xbox360s.
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another point, we should REFINE OUR GREED, our wants, our desires.

men still have desires but sometimes, it has become so trivial as to be laughable.

we really want that xbox 360 or playstation3 with the blue ray player. make it BIGGER! less trivia. more substantial. make BIGGER WANTS. BE REALLY GREEDY!

i live in a tiny place but i don't have to. so my goal is:

- I WANT A REASONABLY SPACIOUS, NICE, COOL PLACE TO CALL MY OWN. i'm not going for a mansion yet but trust me, for me (and for being in california), this is big! that's my goal. and i guess i can use this small place, with proportionally small rent to save up for it!

delta

 

[WC2]

Setting goals is the only way to achieve what you'd like to do. There's a difference between WANTING a lot of money and setting a goal to start up a company let's say, that will make you a lot of money.

Sometimes goals we need to set, are not always what we want. Sometimes you have to rethink your life and reaffirm what you want out of it.

Every year or so I proof read something I call a personal mission statement. I started it a few years ago. Basically, it's a statement that generally lays out what I want to do with my life.

They say it's always good to begin with the ending in mind. If you don't have a vision of what you want, you will never achieve it.

All this is a tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more helpful information on goal setting, executing, and living a successful life (in your own eyes).

 

[PUA in Training]

2 times I have heard about this, once from Tony Robbins and once from Brian Tracy.

A study was done in 1953 at Yale University where they interviewed the graduating class just before they left school. They were asked amongst other things, how many of them had a clearly defined set of goals with a written plan for it's attainment. Only 3% had a clear plan for their lives with a specific set of goals. In 1973, 20 years later, they went back to interview the surviving class members of 1953 and they found that the 3% that had a set of written down goals seemed more happy, more well adjusted and more excited about their lives. The one very measurable thing was that the 3% were worth more financially than the other 97% combined.

I emphasized the part about written goals and plans because I now think any book, seminar, tape etc on goals that you come across will really try to drive into your head the importance of having your goals in writing. I was watching a Brian Tracy video that I rented from Blockbuster years ago (if you can believe them having Brian Tracy at Blockbuster), and in the video he gave a method for goal achieving that he said at the time was the most amazing he'd ever seen in his life.

Write down all your goals preferably in the morning, in the first person singular as if it already existed right now (example: "I earn $50,000 a year"). Then at the end of the day, take a look at your goals and ask yourself 2 questions: What did I do right today, that moved me in the direction of my goals? And what would I do differently, if I had today to live over. If you do these things every day he said, you'll accomplish more in the next 30 days than you have in the last 6 months.

Why does this work? This may get a little metaphysical, but Brian Tracy's explanation was that for reasons we don't yet understand, our subconsicous mind sends out a vibrational field that attracts into our lives the people, places, and things that harmonize with our dominant thoughts. This is why you can be thinking of someone you haven't seen in a long time and then they call, or you get interested in a subject and spend time thinking about the subject and soon you start coming across books, magazine articles, tv programs etc having to do with that subject, without even looking for them.

Just don't make the mistakes I made when I was younger and tried to use this technique. I neglected the second part, asking yourself what you did right & what you wish you could do over each day, and just kept writing my goals every day cause well, I was lazy as hell. This caused some interesting coincidences to happen in my life, like writing down my goal every day of winning the lottery (so I could just be a couch potato the rest of my life LOL), and then coming across 2 different discarded Quick Picks for the lottery. I played the numbers, but gave up after a few weeks when they didn't win right away.

Well, I've rambled on long enough. Good luck and hope this helped.

 

[PUA in Training]

One more thing: many motivational speakers like Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, talk about faith when they talk about goals. Now if you have religious beliefs that's cool, but you don't have to in order to be able to use faith. When you decide what you want - and by the way most who teach about goal-setting say its better to not start out small but go straight for the big stuff that you REALLY want because that's the stuff that will get you excited - pretend day and night that you KNOW these things are going to happen. You're as sure about them happening as you are about the waitress bringing your food when you order in a restaurant. If your doubts get the best of you sometimes that's okay, just start over where you left off.

Tony Robbins talks about workshops he has done where different people decided to set their goal for winning a certain amount of money in the lottery. Despite his trying to discourage some of these people, I guess because he was afraid they'd run out and spend money they couldn't afford because they believed they were gonna win the lottery, they got to the point where they were telling friends and family they'd already won. It was so real to them that they couldn't tell the difference anymore. Shortly after, according to Robbins, they won the exact amount they had set for themselves.

I don't know if these stories are verifiable, but there are stories like this everywhere about the power of believing in something so strongly and then it happens. 2 books I can suggest reading for some examples is Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, and Mind Power into the 21st century by John Kehoe.

Science/metaphysics/etc tells us that there's a reason why faith works, and it has nothing to do with any one particular religion. It's just the way the mind works. John Stossel was interviewing John McCain once and asked him how he survived the POW camps in Vietnam for so many years. McCain credited a deep, abiding belief that in the end everything would be okay. Stossel said "but you didn't know that." McCain answered "but you had to believe that, you had to believe that." Sometimes hope is all you have, but its enough.

 

[Delta]

thanks guys,

that personal mission statement sounds like a good idea wc2.

PUAintraining,

interesting thing is, the techniques stated by your gurus work but may not at all be metaphysical... merely descriptions of the nature of how our brains and the psychosocial nature of most of our lives.

"your focus determines your reality" - things start falling into your life that relate to what you are looking for - it SEEMS that way because you start NOTICING! that's why it does not pay to be negative or pessimistic - if your brain is calibrated to see the world that way, those are the things about life that will jump out at you. i've noticed since i was a kid that if i became interested in even trivial topics like special effects or whatever, i'd start seeing that all over - at the library, tv, etc... i don't think it's because i'm sending out an "energy" that draws such things to me... rather, that stuff was already out there.... the world is rich. but i didn't see it till i started looking for it.

as for faith, you are much more likely to take positive steps to accomplish your goals if you genuinely believe you can do it. and in whatever aspect your work involves others, your faith in yourself will more likely motivate them to help you and believe in you as well... the world (i.e. people - not a mystical manipulation of the inanimate or natural world - ends up reflecting back to you what you put out - the world believes about you what you say about yourself through your behavior and actions [act like a loser, people will treat you like one]).
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delta