Dumb Medicine

This is my first post involving personal development. Don’t be too harsh on me please.

So goals are pretty important aren’t they? I tend to think so at least. They help us make sense of what we’re trying to do with this life. I unfortunately have not been very good at keeping with my goals lately. I consider it a personal failure.

The most recent example is actually this website. It has been a medicine blog for about 2 years now, and before personal development, my plan was to write a fictional story about a pharmacist who is having a normal day, then is thrown into the worlds of spies and action. My plan was to produce an article every 3 days.

I had already written 7 or so articles when I started and had set them up to automatically come up. The problem is I never kept with it after I set up the articles. I left the story on autopilot, and eventually became disinterested in the story all together.

My challenge to you

You’ve come to a personal development website to develop yourself. I’m here to provide you with the information you’re seeking to develop yourself. Therefore, I feel a bit accountable for your successes or failures, so I’m going to assume the role of a coach.

My challenge to you is to set one goal. It can be almost anything, but I want you to set a goal. If I were you, I’d set some goal that you consider a self improvement. I’m not even going to try to tell you what your goal should be, that’s personal. For some, growing a mustache could be their goal. If they consider it a self improvement that is. For others, the challenge could be to shave their mustache away everyday. This should be entirely personalized to you, and should be a self improvement.

What kind of goals are you talking about?

I could say that one goal I have is to get out of bed everyday, but it’s a crappy idea. For me it has never been an issue. I believe I’ve never spent an entire day in bed. My point with this is I would never consider getting out of bed a goal. Getting out of bed is a habit of mine and is also a habit most other people. Now, I recognize there are people who have struggled with getting out of bed every day of their life. If you’re one of those people, then getting out of bed could be a goal for you.

I know that was an exhaustive metaphor, but my point is your goal should be something that is not a habit of yours. It should be something that improves some aspect of your life that you are not already doing. There are an infinite number of possibilities, but general themes for self improvement are as follows:

• Improves your health
• Improves your mind
• Improves your spirit
• Improves your relationships

Why set goals?

Like I said, I think goals are generally a good thing. Goals give us direction for our actions, and allow us to achieve things we would otherwise not do. I’ve found from my own experience that if I don’t develop some plan for my day, I will actually do nothing. I might read random articles or look at work without actually doing it, but at the end of the day I couldn’t tell you what I did.

Goals however make you accountable to yourself. They give you a skeleton for your day, and generally help you remember you have things to do.

Enforcing your goal

I find that if I don’t write down what I’m meant to do I forget. I’m not sure if it’s because I have a poor short-term memory, or a by product of being a guy. It’s probably a mixture, but that’s still no excuse for the number of things I forget. So lately, I’ve been writing down a list of what I’ve meant for myself to do. This may be a strategy that helps you. Please let me know if it does.

Write down your goal, and put it somewhere that you will see several times throughout the day. You shouldn’t hide it, and you shouldn’t be embarrassed by it. If you are, then use code words!

My challenge

I wouldn’t be a very good personal developer if I didn’t hold myself accountable to a goal either. So even if no one else reads this blog but my wife, my goal is to write at least 1 article every 2 days. This one has taken me about 30 minutes of dedicated time, and I think it is a pretty decent start. Let me know what you think.

If you end up following my blog, please keep me on track. I’ll get emails if you guys comment, and I think social reinforcement would be helpful. Oh yeah, thanks for reading my first post!

DM