the goal is the challenge
I have a challenge for all of you kind blog readers out there. First a bit of background:
I couldn’t do this without goals. I’d be lost, plain and simple. It’s setting goals that keeps me driving towards something without being overwhelmed by the idea of spending 10,000 hours hitting golf balls (when it took about 8 months to get to the first 1,000…). Goals allow me to break up the project into whatever timeframe I need at that moment.
At any given time, I have a spreadsheet full of different goals to keep me focussed. For example, I have an overall goal: train for 10,000 hours and make the PGA tour, and stay sane. There’s a 2011 goal: Be hitting a full set of irons on all cylinders and be playing from at least 200 yards out. Then I have a number of goals for the first quarter of this year, among those are to consistently shoot under par on the “par 3″ 50 yard courses I play and hit 90 percent of my lags to my success zone of three feet. And.. I have goals for while I’m in Florida for February: to start hitting solid contact on my wedges at least 95 percent of the time. then… (I’ve got a lot of goals) I have goals for next week, namely to shoot a 26 on the Par 3 Mason Course out at Columbia Edgewater next Friday (my personal record is a 27). Finally, my goal for the weekend is actually to not golf tomorrow and rest my body for a day, I have to set this as a goal because otherwise I’ll go out everyday and risk burning out on golf.
To add to all this, everyday I wake up and think about what I need to work on that day and then set a goal to push myself for the day. These are the most important goals because without daily challenges it becomes easy to put off training for another time, but if there is something you are determined to improve that day you are forced to work on it.
But, I don’t just have golf oriented goals because there is more to this than just the golf, unfortunately. In order to continue the story, I need to spread the word, so I have goals of number of followers for the blog and on facebook. Shawn Dailey, the Physical Therapist working with The Dan Plan, has helped me build a set of goals oriented around physical fitness too. And then there are personal goals, which are important to keep, too. I can’t let the project overwhelm me so much that I forget about my friends and family, because without them what’s the point of any of this, eh?
Goals goal goals. I never knew how important they could be until I took on a project that was perhaps a bit too large to swallow whole. I learned early on, though, that without them it’s easy to get lost at sea.
The challenge is simple enough. At some point this weekend or early in the week, pick a goal for yourself and stick to it. It can be silly or something that you’ve always wanted to do but never set aside time or thought too difficult. Regardless, set a goal and stick to it because that’s the important part. Examples vary according to what your interests are and how much you are willing to push yourself. It could be to run two miles once, hit the gym three times, finish that chapter of the book you are stuck on, watch less/more tv, bring a sack lunch to work everyday, go to the library for a new book instead of buying it, volunteer somewhere, push a pedestrian out of the way of a speeding dump truck, do your taxes, etc.
It’s not the idea, but the followthrough that makes a person great.
I would also love to hear from anyone out there, so if you have a goal you would like to share please do! Another tidbit I’ve noticed is that when you share your ideas/desires with others (even strangers) it makes them that much more tangible, and when you tell the entire world you’re going to do something you’re pretty much stuck doing it, for better or worse!