Panes of Glass

I am re-embarking on something I used to do often and in college ceased to do because it just caused me too much frustration. No, I’m not catching the bus to work. I don’t even know where the Woodlands Express drops off. I’m reading Brian Tracy’s book Goals!. I have read three chapters so far and answered the questions at the end of one, so I’ve barely started into it. However, it has been tremendously helpful in helping me sort through all the stuff that was dug up during my trip to Dublin.

I’m a big fan of goal planning, and yet I have had a really hard time setting goals and not achieving them. This was often due to a change in priorities or realization that I had set the goal so as having something to accomplish. I finally decided that I would do better to not set such precise goals and instead set general goals. This worked well at first, probably because I was still setting action plans and timelines in the back of my head but not formally. I have always been okay with that, but to miss details in some plan–I have never been able to easily accept that.

Well, now I end up where I am today, constantly setting “goals” for myself that are completely immeasurable and overloading myself with too many projects. This book has already helped me zero in on what I really enjoy and knock off a lot of the intriguing-and-interesting-but-not-quite-right hobbies I’ve set for myself. For instance, I’ve been all about building my own website software for about four years. However, this started because I wanted a way to write and I wasn’t satisfied with the software that had been out at the time. I thought programming was cool and interesting, so I set the goal of writing my own application. However, I’m not passionate enough about that to ever accomplish so great a feat. I’d rather be writing. I finally realized my mistake when I thought back to when I switched my major from computer engineering to accouting/managment information systems. I found calculus and programming languages fascinating, but I realized I never really wanted to do that much with them for a living. I think I forgot about that.

That’s about as far as I am right now. I still need to work out goals for progressing my interests, etc. and action plans on how to get there. I’m interested to see what the book has to say. And I’m working on not getting too caught in the details to become frustrated when my goals are not accomplished exactly as I planned them. I think that years of maturing and growing in patience and contentment should help, but I know I have a tendency to become easily frustrated with my lack of performance. This should be an interesting pursuit.