Remembering back to my days in the military a particular moment (among many) sticks in my mind. The man in charge told me I had a good understanding of what we liked to refer to as the big picture. While what we were doing in the present may have seemed ridiculous it had a purpose. In the big picture it made sense.
With that instance in mind I have been doing a lot of brainstorming lately, relating both to my business life and my non-business life. What do I want to do and where do I want to be. At the end of the year? 6 months from now? A year? 10 years?
It’s been amazingly productive.
I am not one to plan too far out, meaning you won’t see a blueprint for the next ten years of my life. But… I do have a pretty good idea of a few things I would like to accomplish, how I get there remains to be seen.
So today I set it in stone. In the back of one of my various moleskines, on a sturdy page, a part of the cover, I wrote up a check list. I choose to put it on this back page because it seems more official. While I can tear out an inner page and discard it, I can not tear out the cover without the notebook itself collapsing in ruin. To me this makes it official, I am now committed to accomplishing these goals one or more at a time.
It’s not necessarily about how you get there it is just taking the time to recognize that you would like to and committing to it. Make it official and set a goal. By not setting a strict plan I leave it open. I have no milestones by which to gauge failure, thus allowing me to do what is necessary to accomplish the goal. There is not stopping point, no end just failed paths to a goal. The nice thing is you can always create a new path and continue to move forward.
I will write more about the individual goals as they start to come to life.