wafflesatnoon.com

Waffles At Noon is not just about disbelief, skepticism, political moderation, and satire. All of that is done to help wake people up… to let go of beliefs that hold them down. Though there are articles such as my Jäger drinking log, which is purely for entertainment, my overall goal is to help people in some way.

So with that in mind, here’s an article I wrote for a website I ran about four years ago. I had a lot of positive feedback on it, so I hope you find it just as useful.

A lot of self help books, tapes, and websites exist out there with the promise of helping you achieve your goals. I have to laugh when I realize most of these “successful” self-help gurus simply made their money peddling their drivel to the lemmings of the world. Most of those end up in the bargain bin because the people who do read them realize that those promises aren’t fulfilled in those books. The worst are the websites that go on and on and ON forever about this big “secret” that they can sell you, and once you have this secret, you’ll pretty much be Superman. I can tell you what their secret is: Sell crappy self-help books, and promise that their contents contain the secrets to everything you could want in life. Cha-Ching!!

Take a look at Jim Carrey’s take on your over-the-top paid programming guru:

Anyway…Achieving your goals is more than positive thinking, and more than those lofty-but-generic goals like “I’ll improve myself every day.” You need a specific plan, and a specific goal in mind. I often ask people what they want - and their goals are vague. Just saying, “I want to make $10,000 a month” is not enough. In fact, that’s more of a RESULT of something than an actual goal, because $10,000 isn’t going to just appear in your bank account every month. You have to EARN it somehow. So let’s say you decided to start your own website, and with that you want to make $10,000 a month. So your real goal is to make $10,000 a month with this magazine, right? So what I’d like you to do is take out a piece of paper. At the top of the paper, write down your goal. Write down the one thing that would make your life better right now. It doesn’t have to be financial. It can be a better relationship with your kids, or it could be cleaning up the mess in your home. What’s the one thing that your life needs the most now? Something that is within your control to change…

So at the top of your paper, write down this goal. Don’t write down a result – such as making $10,000 a month – but write down the one thing that will make this goal happen.

Now let me ask you this… what is the one step just before that goal that will make it happen? If it’s your magazine, maybe getting a mailing list to send it to. If it’s a better relationship with your kids, maybe the final step toward your goal is working less overtime, or if your house is a mess, maybe the final step is cleaning out your garage after everything else is done. What we’re doing here is thinking backward from the ultimate goal - to the step that is required just before that goal.

After we’ve written down our next-to-last step, we need to think backwards one more step. In our magazine example, maybe the step before the mailing list is finding someone to print and mail the magazine. For our relationship example, maybe step we’ll take before working less overtime is to have a talk with your kids and set up a time to do something together. If it’s your messy house, maybe the step before tackling the garage is to have the carpets cleaned.

We’re going to keep working backwards, step by step, until we end up to where we are right now. Our last step in reverse order is to make the list you’re making now, so you’ve just completed step one on your list. Remember, our list reads from bottom to top, so the top of your list should have your ultimate goal and the bottom of your list should have step one, which is making this list on it. Number the steps from bottom to top. Now since we have just completed step 1, we’re going to move on to step 2. From now on, until Step 2 is completed, I don’t want you to worry or even THINK about your ultimate goal. All that matters is getting Step 2 completed. So our list becomes NOT a list of steps, but a list of small goals that become progressively more important. What you’re going to do is get obsessed with step 2. Focus your free time and energy on this step until you make it happen. Don’t look back to step 1 or ahead to step 3. Don’t let yourself become distracted, and DON’T look at the list and become overwhelmed if you have a lot of steps. We’re taking one step at a time, putting all of our energy into each step, and once that’s completed - we’re moving on to the next step. Each step is a goal in itself, so never worry about anything except what’s on the agenda right now. Not only will this help you focus, but you won’t feel overwhelmed, and you won’t be focused on a goal that seems to far away to achieve.

Now unlike some of those phony positive-thinker gurus out there, I’m about to say something negative. You’ll probably fail along the way, and that’s OK. A failure along the way is NOT the end of the world. In fact, it could actually help you do a better job when you do finally reach your goal. Say you’re halfway up your list when something doesn’t turn out as you expect. Say you have 10 steps on your paper, and you’re working on step 5 and something happens and step 5 is not achieved, even though you did steps 1 through 4 successfully. You’ll need to take a look at step 5 and figure out why it was a failure, and what you can do to make it work.

The path to success is never a straight line. It’s often more like a maze, with lots of curves and dead ends. When you hit a dead end, you can just give up… or back track and try another path. You will eventually work your way around the problem and move on. That’s how every successful business in this country rose to prominence.

When I was a kid, I used to love to do those mazes you get in puzzle books. Well when I hit a dead end, I didn’t just give up and put the book away, I went back and tried a different path. A book of mazes is an analogy to a set of goals in life. You keep trying until you finish, because you KNOW there is a path to success. That’s exactly how your steps are going to work. A curve or dead end is not a bad thing, and it might just make your goal that much better.

Just keep your attention focused solely on the step at hand, complete that step, and move on to the next one. Before you know it - you will have reached your ultimate goal, and when you do, I’d love to hear about it.