Determining Your Primary Goals
August 8th, 2007This is the first post on The Decision Strategist. As a discussion of decision making strategies and techniques, The Decision Strategist is my attempt to delve further into our decisions and look at what kinds of decision making errors we tend to make and how to avoid them. In this post I discuss my current goals because goals are implicit in our decisions, and having an explicit list of goals can be helpful.
Writing out my goals has been useful in helping me to plot a future course. It informs a lot of day to day decision making as well as the long term decisions I face. The benefit of having gone through a goal writing exercise is that you can use them when facing future decisions to keep you or your business aligned with your values. This is useful in the short term for reminding yourself not to have that snickers bar if you are trying to lose weight, but even better for long term planning. For example, when looking at whether to buy or rent a house, financial factors may matter less than other factors (such as your family). My ultimate decision depends on these factors, all of which relate to my goals and values.
Here are a few guides to the goal setting process that I’ve really liked:
- Everything at stevepavlina.com
- This article at Startup Nation
Near Long Term Goals
- Launch a decision-based startup
- Live in a foreign culture
- Get out of debt and become financially stable
- Develop strong connections with important people in my life
- Maintain a healthy lifestyle
These goals are all related to my general desire to have a fulfilling and interesting life with a career involving programming and technology.
Launching a decision-based startup
This blog is actually a first step in launching a decision-based startup. Here I can talk about decision making techniques I want to implement in the startup, and hopefully discussion will help me understand better what goes in to making different kinds of decisions.
Live in a foreign culture
I’ve always wanted to live somewhere other than the United States; somewhere less than first world. Latin and South America seem really great to me. In trying to plan what I am going to do with my life, one consideration is something like joining the Peace Corps.
Get out of debt
No one likes debt. I have roughly $18,000 in debt from a combination of school loans and the six months after school that I was unemployed. I was lucky enough to begin working at BBER almost two years ago, and I am finally getting to a point where I will be out of debt. I’m hoping to have all my credit card debt paid off by October.
Develop connections with people in my life
When considering life goals, it is important to go beyond career and family. I tend to isolate and retreat rather than push through and work things out with people I care about. This leads to people gradually dropping from view once we don’t share an activity or live together. I want to change that about myself and learn to be better at keeping connected to important people.
Maintain a healthy lifestyle
I generally have a healthy lifestyle. Though I’m not as active now as I once was, I’ve managed to ween myself from soda, limit my chai consumption to once a week, and I’m eating fairly healthily. There are always ways to get better at this though, and I would include doing more gardening as one of those things.
Those goals are long term in the sense that it may be some years until they come to fruition, but I want to get started on them now, so here are some of my short term goals to bring me closer to my long term goals.
Short Term Goals
- Learn to program in python
- Get involved in an open source project
- Develop startup prototype
- Search for ways to reduce costs and save more money
- Re-involve myself in a sport, dance, or martial art
- Spend quality time with my girlfriend
- Take steps to a healthier diet
These are all goals that I want to at least start before the end of 2007, though some of them I’ve already started. They serve as the first stepping stones to achieve my long term goals.
I will refer back to these original goals as I discuss different decision making processes in future posts, and of course post updates to the goals as time goes on.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you find some useful ideas here.
-zot
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