Made any plans lately?

Why are you doing the important things you do? Why are you drawing up the plans you're making? There's got to be something that keeps you doing them, and when you get to know what that something is, you can surprise yourself with how many ways you can get more of that something into your life.

• Your crazy hours are running you down, leaving you open to every sniffle and cough that presents itself. When your friends and family are still sleeping, you're up, and vice-versa. You hardly get the time to have a meaningful conversation with any of them.  You want to feel healthier and more connected to the people important to you. You want to keep to a regular schedule, and you struggle to do so.
• You're tired of scrimping and saving and feeling poor, dammit, but when you look around everyone's in the same boat, and you're not the only one hurting, so you put on the boots and keep going. Things won't stay like this forever, and you end your 30-minute pity party to seize the day and kick its ass.
• It sticks in your throat like you've swallowed a whole pineapple -- or a grenade -- but you don't run, and you start that very important conversation that you've been meaning to have with your wife/boss/co-workers/employees/friends, etc. for weeks.
  

Thinking about how you think about things is called metacognition  -- And when you examine your way of thinking, you can uncover long held biases you, haha, never though about. You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney's website, lists down many of the ways we fool ourselves into thinking that we make unbiased decisions and hold balanced views.

When you actively become involved in "thinking about thinking," you become more adept at seeing things clearly, as they are, not as you think on the surface they are. You develop clarity. When you see things clearly, with little illusion or self-delusions, you can act unencumbered by false information, inflated expectations and sketchy data.

You see what you truly need to live the life you're happy with. You know what matters, and these things  that matter to you are both goals and spurs.

Welcome to December. Congratulations, you made another year!

It's around this time that networks start promoting their December "Coming Soon!" program schedules, traditionally going all out at year's-end by running special broadcasts with titles like "The Year In Review" , followed by "The Best and Worst of 20__" and "The Top Ten Lists of The Year."

It's not just the media doing this, though. It's a thing we all like to do around the tail-end of the year. We take this time to re-cap, looking back on everything that happened and everything we've done, and then making the time to visualize what we would do differently next year, planning for these things and hoping we would get to accomplish them within the next 365 days.

And it's almost next year, you know. Blink, and you'll be surprised how quickly it gets here. So before this year ends, how did it go for you? What stood out? Anything new you learned about yourself this year? What are your heartfelt goals for next year? Better have some pen and paper handy, then. You have some work to do.

And here are a few bits of advice to help you along with the planning process:

Do not make New Year's resolutions. They will only make you feel bad about yourself.

How do you chase a moving target?
You don't lose sight of it. Period. You do whatever it takes, scramble, hustle, hot-foot it, but you keep your eye on the prize. If you lose visual, don't panic. Be still. Keep your eyes peeled for movement. Anticipate the easiest, fastest, sneakiest ways the target will try to use to escape. Be ready to move.

How do you chase a moving goal?
Keep it in front of you as much as you can. Make a regular reminder for yourself with it if you want to make it a habit that will last -- by regular I mean daily and by reminder I mean actionable items. If it's a big goal, break it down into bite sized pieces and remind yourself to deal with those pieces everyday.

• Big goal broken down into small chunks over time = success
• Small goal broken up into smaller chunks over time = big success

The goal is something you want to happen. Maybe it has to happen for something you want more to become a reality. Or maybe you want it out off the way so you can move on to better things. Whatever your reasons, hitting the goal lets you do what you want to do after it.

The goal is a target. A target is something to aim for. Or to follow, like a game animal, but in a weird theoretical way where instead of following the tracks, you connect the dots that lead to completing the goal.

If you want success on your own terms, you have to define your terms.

"Defaulting" is what we call what happens when you don't make a move in your favor...the situation either stays the same, or it shifts to the most likely outcome to happen without your influence. You don't get to have a say anymore even if you are affected, because you didn't speak up when you had the opportunity. This goes for action too, not just words.

This is another facet to knowing exactly what you want. If you are clueless about what you truly desire in your life, if you don't know what you want, you'll take what you can get...again, you land in the default zone. You didn't know any better, or maybe couldn't have cared less at the time. You drifted, went with the flow or followed the status quo. You followed the rules. So, take a look at where you are now. Assess your life.

Are you satisfied with what you're doing with your time? Are you content in the life you have? Are you enjoying the security that you envisioned for yourself? Are those visions actually yours?

Success on someone else's terms are their kind of success, not yours. As a kid you may believe they are yours because those standards are what you grew up with, and measured yourself against. Since you grew up with these standards, they're normal to you. They become your default standards -- but sooner or later, living by default standards can get wearing. Teenage rebellion is only the tip of the iceberg, but it's a very honest example. As an adult, you can take the initiative to test things for yourself and find out what you can do, find out which standards you can truly claim as your own....and you can say it's because you're trying to find out who you are and what you stand for.

For example, which of the following means "success" to you?

Quick! A laser is a beam of coherent light, but what does the name itself stand for?
Answer: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (mouse-over)

Lasers can zap skin discolorations, whiten teeth and read the bar-codes on your groceries. They can cut through steel. Medical applications and industrial processes aside, lasers are awesome, and while waiting for light-sabers to become available, one has to understand that a laser's real power lies not just in the pretty lights it produces, but in the principle that makes it work: coherence. Lasers are coherent light. Flashlights can't cut through anything but shadows, after all.

So what does it mean for something to be coherent, to possess coherence? A lot of terms get tossed around in the resulting scramble: "possessing internal consistency, a : systematic or logical connection or consistency , b : integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values..."

Possessing coherence in communication for example, is having orderly, logical sub-ideas radiating from a central idea. If you've ever had to go through outlining an essay in English class, it's like that. Try thinking of yourself as a spider -- an intelligence in the center of a web created of interlocking and related ideas. Even as the real spiders can spin webs of simply remarkable beauty where each connection made just so, coherence can make the connections between ideas beautiful in their clarity.

It's the difference between a labyrinth and a spider web. You don't get lost visually when looking at a spider web. When this happens, wherever you end up, you can just latch on one idea that radiates from the center and use it to get back to the heart of the entire web.

Coherence gets to the point. Coherence radiates from the core.

Remember how sharp and hyper-real the world looks like when you're anticipating something?

• Getting up very early on Christmas morning.
• Haunting the mailbox (or the side-table beside the front door) for your acceptance letter from college.
• The last few minutes before you're called in for the final interview.
• 5 minutes before you meet the person you've been corresponding with through Skype and e-mail for the past 6 months.
• The moment the door opens to your first exhibit, and the first guests arrive.
  

You're antsy. You can't be still. You're screamingly awake --internally, at least-- and your thoughts are going a hundred miles an hour. What's going to happen next? What do you do if you get what you want? What do you do if you don't? What do you do? It feels like you're going to vibrate out of your skin, you're so dizzy.

What about these situations?

• You're behind on your credit cards. Way behind, and every time the phone rings you train yourself to ignore it. The creditors won't get anything anyway, it would only be a waste of time. Then there's a knock on the door.
  
• It's the week before finals, and it seems the whole student population is at the library. All the tables are filled, and the snafu with the books you reserved can't be fixed, the books just aren't there anymore. Sorry.
  
• The numbers have been steadily dropping in the past month, and more customers are opting out of your latest marketing strategy's sign-up plan.
• Too much month, not enough money. You have a gap of four days before your next paycheck comes in, and it might as well be two weeks.

A while back we posted the following entries:

• Free Classes Online! (Or, Rethinking Education) - "Hard times do ease up, however, and while you can't predict the future, you still decide your own fate. You do what you can to keep going, and if that means going for more education, you still have options."
  
• Taking Action (Rethinking Education 2) -  "There's no time better than the present to train yourself to being flexible and open to change. This is something you have to teach yourself, and no course or college can give it to you."

While these articles touched on the various choices available today for people looking to continue their education, today's discussion touches on a different aspect of the issue:

• One, what does it mean "to be educated"?
• And two, what will it mean to educate yourself?

What does it mean, to be "educated"?
This is a very old question, and one which has been hotly debated by the great minds of history, but for today,  What Must An Educated Person Know? (The Personal MBA) is an excellent staring point. Usually when people talk about "getting an education", they're talking about college, when in fact college is an institution that facilitates education but isn't a guarantee of it (face it, we've met people with very nice degrees who can't handle PowerPoint, or exhibit common street-sense). In the article, things like majors, extra-curriculars and internships aren't even even touched on. According to Joshua Kaufman, being educated is all about skills acquisition and practice.

Let's start with something simple: There is something you want. You really really really want this something.  This something may be an object, an event or a condition. For example: it may be a better job, a promotion, or better health.

Now: what are you doing to get it, or make it happen?

The gap between "wanting" and "having" is filled with taking action. You know about pipe dreams and castles in the air, but if you don't act, you resign yourself to wanting from afar. If pining away is your thing, no one's stopping you. But if pining is not your thing, then you're the biggest factor in the way of getting what you want.

You want this, what do you do get it? A lot of that. The trick -- which isn't a short-cut or a trick at all -- is to break down the lot of THAT into smaller to-do's, then little just-did's. That's how success sneaks in -- it disguises itself as hard work. Another component to success is clarity: you have to be clear about what you really want, because if you're vague about your desires, 1) how will you know if you've already got what you want? and 2) how sure are you that it's what you really want? (Maybe it's a substitute for something else?)


You want. So?

You know the 80/20 rule. You even know the formal designation for it: the Pareto principle. 80 percent of the best results, or most meaningful changes, come from 20 percent of your actions, and so on and so forth.

80/20. Eighty-twenty. 80/20. Eighty-twenty.80/20. 80/20. 80/20. 80/20. 80/20.  Bored now?

You see 80/20, you get it instantly -- then you move on. Just flipping the deal to 20/80 made you stop, didn't it? So by now you know that there hasn't been any new discovery to the Pareto principle, only a restatement of the issue. In this case, restating a problem also re-frames it.

When you put the focus on the 20 percent, you put the weight on the actionable parts, not on their most probable outcomes. Yes, you also lay the groundwork towards getting "the most beneficial results," etc. etc, but putting the onus on the acting gets things in motion. You look at what you're going to do, the changes you're going to make, and the things you'll have to release to get the results you want. You don't get the results without the action. 20/80 shifts the focus to just that.

Status quo :

"Status quo" is a different animal from "comfort zone", although it's very easy to take one for the other. You both get used to them, and they can help make you feel safe and stable. Just as you know the boundaries of your comfort zones, you know what keeps the status quo, and in both case your general approach is usually this:  Don't rock the boat. Just keep quo-ing.

You may have also hear this one quote about the definition of insanity : doing the same thing each time and expecting a different result.  Repetition with the intent to change just isn't possible; You give the same-old, same-old, you get the same-old, same-old, period.

But if the status quo just isn't doing it for you anymore and you're desperate for a change, how do you get though without rocking the damn boat?

You don't.