I Will Not Die

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Zero. That’s how many times in my life people I’ve asked what goals they have, have given an answer that was clear. Zero. Unclear goals then, must be pretty popular. But an unclear goal isn’t really a goal, it’s a pseudo-goal, an idea, a dream, a myth, a hope, a wish. The problem with clear goals is twofold:

1) They are hard.

2) They forcefully extract honesty.

In other words, it’s a lot harder to specify the particulars of a goal and the route to that goal than it is to imagine the final stage, the end zone. Also, the clear goal might simply tell you something you do not want to hear, namely, that the goal might not be reachable. In both cases, they can bring about some pain. The good news is that the pain that making clear goals brings is insignificant when compared to the pain of an unachieved dream.

So how do you clarify a goal?

The way to make a goal as clear as possible is to make it as numerically precise as possible. Turn it into a math problem. It doesn’t have to be the kind of 18-foot chalkboard scrabble, pondering each night under the candlelight, earth-changing new theorem kind of math; addition will do just dandy.

For instance, if your unclear goal is to own your own business, then decide exactly what that means, because honestly, once you sell your first widget, you’re now in the business of selling widgets and technically you own your own business.

However, if owning your own business really means not having to work for someone else, then now we’re talking. Now we mean making at least as much as we are at our current employer’s business, but perhaps being able to make our own hours (more or less) and being able to make our own decisions (not to mention that if it really takes off then we can keep the booty).

So let’s say you felt you were business savvy enough to flip cars (something I think about sometimes-a very smart friend of mine does sell them, successfully). Let’s also say that you make $40,000 a year at your current job, or even if you make more, that you could live off of $40,000 and that this would be the minimum needed to be free from your employer. If you made an aim to average $1,000 profit per car, quickly you can see that you would need to sell a car 4 out of every 5 weeks to make it. To see if that was even feasible, you’d have to start monitoring the used car market, both the supply and the demand. Going back to my 2 points from earlier, this research would be the hard part.

Once you do the research, you might find out that there just doesn’t seem to be enough cars being sold in the aftermarket in your area that you could buy at a $1,000 discount needed to sustain the 4 every 5 week average you would need to quit your job. This problem is the second point from above, the honest part. You might realize that you’d have to try for an $800 average profit per car, or you might even decide that flipping cars is just completely unreachable.

But at least you’d know. Now you could refine your goal, make it even clearer, or even try for something else. Your act of clarification though, would constitute an act of wisdom that is wholly lacking in the vast majority of the goals of your friends and your coworkers. Try it sometime. Ask some people you know what their goals are.

Do you have a goal you want to talk about? Send me an e-mail (or if I am unable to respond to yours individually, go to the forum and bring it up). Then, the next time I write an article like this one, I can start instead, with One.

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Dereck :: Apr.13.2008 :: Success :: 2 Comments »

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