Category Archives: Goals

Goals, Stories

Can you feel the heat? Persist and Ignore.

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English: Basketball player LeBron James during...

Summer is here, with record setting temperatures this past week. Hot! The Miami Heat were also red hot this past week, scorching a very game OKC Thunder on Miami’s way to their second ever franchise NBA championship and the first one ever for superstar Lebron James.  I love sports, and although I’m not as diehard a NBA fan as I used to be, I do still like watching games and following the finals. One thing for certain is that people either LOVE Lebron James or they HATE HATE HATE him. I haven’t seen a basketball player polarize the fan base so dramatically in a long time. A lot of it had to do with the way he handled his departure from Cleveland to join the Heat. Despite taking a pay cut to get to Miami, many  thought he was arrogant in the way he handled himself. When the Heat made it to the finals last year and lost, tons of fans were very happy. Most rooted for the Mavs just because they wanted Lebron to lose, and when they finally did all fingers pointed at Lebron. He took so much criticism on just about anything you could think about criticizing. This year, many wanted the outcome to be the same. I think some people would have enjoyed watching the Heat make it to the finals every year and lose every year until Lebron retired. But it didn’t happen. Lebron not only elevated his game to help his team win the championship, he shut up an ARMY of haters. Well, at least some of them. And at least for a little while.

Valuable life lessons can be taken from sports all of the time. You win some, you lose some. There will always be critics, naysayers, trolls and haters if you are doing anything of value and anything worth doing. Always. Bet on it. They’ll be there laughing at you when you stumble or fall, only to quietly slink away waiting until you fall again. No critic was ever idolized. No statues were ever built for them.

Get up, stand up, persist, and do what you were put on this planet to do. You aren’t going to always win. Hell, if you’re like me, you are probably going to lose a lot more times than you win. That doesn’t necessarily make you a loser, but it does make you more resilient. And hopefully a little bit better.

Goals, Me

Happy 2012!

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Happy New Year! 2011 is over and I hope it was good to you. Let’s aim to make 2012 even better.

2011 was a good year. It was probably my best year in terms of learning. School gave me the opportunity to touch on subjects I wouldn’t have found on my own, as well as come across people whom I may not have been exposed to otherwise. These people were not only intelligent but helped bring new perspectives that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. School also allowed me the time to do my own reading. And I did a lot of it. I read over 50 books the past year. Although many people say that a rigorous MBA program doesn’t allow you to have a life outside of it, my experience has been the opposite. I found myself having adequate time to do the things I enjoy doing such as reading, working out, rock climbing, and jiu jitsu. These activities all contributed to my learning, balance, and well-being and were vital to my overall happiness.

There were a few disappointments in 2011, which included a large number of injuries. I threw out my back, tore cartilage in my ribs, messed up my right foot, aggravated my neck, etc. etc. in what seemed like a never-ending ocean of injury after injury. This made me very, very frustrated. I am hoping the lessons I have learned in 2011 will allow me to take the necessary precautions this year to avoid injuries while still doing the activities I love. I was also annoyed with my lack of output, which has always been my Achilles heel. I tend to consume a lot of input, hence the amount of books I read, but lacked creating any output of my own. This blog being an obvious example of that. I don’t have any excuses for this. I managed to do most of the things I wanted to do, and yet if I’m honest with myself I know I did those things so I could avoid doing what matters, such as figuring out how I will feed myself in the coming years. This annoys me to no end. There are certain activities I know I should do, but just conveniently never get around to doing them. My guess is probably because I find most of them uncomfortable. This is something I will address in 2012.

It will be a big year, with big changes coming up. I’ll graduate, turn 30, and leave Toronto, to name a few things. I’ll continue doing the activities I love, but will definitely have an emphasis on output. Have a great 2012!

Friends and Family, Goals, Life

Psssttttttt…is this thing on??

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Wondering if anybody still reads this thing, outside of random Googlers. If you do, awesome, you guys/gals rule. It has been a busy year so far! A lot of things happening that are as exciting as they are scary. I haven’t updated here in a long time not because I didn’t want to and not because I didn’t have the time. In all honesty, I just don’t know what to say. Sometimes the best course of action is no action. Some of the consequences of my decisions won’t be known until a few years out, so I’d rather not comment on them. The things that are going well are doing exceptionally so. And the things that aren’t I’m not really that worried about.

School was one of those things that just kind of took a back burner in terms of priorities. I honestly don’t know if school was the right decision at this point. It has its pluses, it has its minuses, so who knows. What doesn’t? Ask me again in 5 years and I’d have a more solid answer for you. The only real regret I had with school was that I didn’t get to connect with my classmates as much as I would have liked. I lost touch with a bunch of them that I would have liked to see more. But thems the breaks. School was extremely fast paced, stressful for some, and money/finding a job and time was always a concern for many. As for me, my own priorities changed as well and going out constantly and being involved in extra curricular school activities started to wane on me. I much prefer things like solitude, taking on personal challenges, physicality, learning on my own and so that’s what I focused on and set my priorities to. It might have been a schizo move and I acknowledge that but I just have to keep it real to myself and so I apologize to my friends and the potential friendships that I didn’t make because of my actions. There really are fantastic people in my program.

I feel very creative, experimental, and stoic right now. It kind of feels like that feeling when you spend a long time on a really hard math problem and get the right answer. I’m just loving life right now and rolling with the punches. I remind myself that this is my one chance at life and so I am going to do it the way I am going to do it. This summer is going to be my best yet. This much I’m sure of.

Goals

Small Decisions, Small Victories

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One of the reasons that I do not subscribe to the New Years resolution mentality is that I know it rarely works.  I have mentioned before that if you have to wait until a new year to start on whatever journey you plan on embarking than the burning desire just isn’t there.  I have written before about how willpower alone just doesn’t cut it.  Willpower is finite. For the people who regularly go to a gym, what they see every year is a spike in treadmill usage and other cardio equipment for the first few weeks in January.  And then gradually those people start dropping like flies because “real life” gets in the way.

Lack of defining clear, actionable goals is a major contributor to this problem.  Nobody really knows what lose weight actually means.  Most probably mean lose fat.  Other people’s goals are just too epic, like trying to lose 150 lbs in 3 months or something.  Aside from the fact that weight is not a good indicator of fat loss, large goals are hard to achieve with a high failure rate.  Small goals and small decisions, however, are much easier to achieve.  Eat an elephant one bite at a time.  150lbs can be broken down to walking 10 minutes a day for a week.  That is a much easier goal to achieve.

Every small decision achieved is a small victory.  Celebrate the small victories with a fist pump so that they motivate you to continue.  Perhaps you can try to challenge yourself with a slightly harder goal.  That’s eating the elephant.  I’m not a fan of long term projections, goals, and planning, although for some reason or other they like teaching it in business schools.  The projections are almost always wayyyy off and suck but business people like looking at them.  Mind boggles.  Every inaccurate variable compounds over a longer period of time so if you are off a little at the beginning the longer the goal the more off you’ll be.  Don’t worry, unless you are writing a business plan to investors or something then you do not need to be this silly.  Start small and celebrate small.

I’ve reclaimed my inbox and gotten to inbox zero, something Merlin Mann talks about to take control of email overload. Fist pump!  Its nice having gmail say “No new mail!” .  On the flip side my goal of writing 500 words per day for 2 weeks straight failed immediately.  You ever say something and regret it as you were saying it?  Yea that was me with this one.  My best friends have kept me busy and I don’t spend nearly as much time with them as I’d like so I didn’t get to do as much writing as I wanted, among other things.  Also, there is no burning desire so the goal had the odds stacked against it from the beginning.  I have begun to write more, which was the initial jump start I was looking for, so I am satisfied about that.  Now its time to get back into the swing of things (I am currently recovering from the sore throat from hell)!  I should probably start small and work my way up.