Posted by Amir Lehrer on December 31, 2008
Everyone loves to make New Year’s resolutions. It’s a new year and time for a fresh star so we load ourselves up with all sorts of goals or resolutions. Lose weight, exercise, quit smoking, get a raise, start a business, start a blog, read more, and the list can go on and on.
I find that there are so many things that I want to accomplish or start doing and my list is a mile long. If you have too many things to think and worry about or to try and change, you will not accomplish any of them. That is why I am introducing and following my new goal accomplishing system for 2009 and encouraging you to do the same.
The 2009 New Year’s Resolution Goal System
The system is very easy and makes you wonder why you never tried something like it before. Here are the steps for the 2009 New Year’s resolution goal system:
Make a list of all of your goals.
1. Make a list of all of your goals for this year from major feats that you would like to accomplish all the way down to little changes you would like to make (like reading for 30 minutes instead of watching one of the TV shows in your routine). Try to come up with at least 12, one for each month.
Organize your goals.
2. Organizer all your goals in order of importance. The most important at the top and the least important (or the “it would be nice if I did it”) goal at the bottom.
Start working on your first goal.
3. On January 1, start working on your number one, most important goal. Work hard at it as if it is the only goal you need to accomplish this year. Each day in January do something that will bring you closer to your goal.
Evaluate your progress.
4. At the end of the month, evaluate how well you’ve done. Did you accomplish your goal? Did you get close? If not, what can you do to help yourself achieve your goal over the next 30 days? If successful, skip to number 6.
Evaluate your goal.
5. If you didn’t succeed, try and figure out why you didn’t. Was it too hard and should take longer than 30 days? If so, keep working on it for as long as it takes. Just make sure you evaluate your progress at least once a month and don’t give up.
Sometime you may find that the goal isn’t even right for you and that there are more important goals to focus on. If that’s the case, over the next 30 days, try the next goal on your list. It’s ok to decide that one or two of your goals were not right but if you find this happening with too many goals, try and figure out why and how you can make better goals that you can achieve.
Move on to your next goal.
6. Once you’ve accomplished one goal (or are comfortable enough with your progress), move onto your next goal. Work for the next 30 days to accomplish your next goal while maintaining your progress of your first goal (unless there is nothing to maintain since the goal was a one time thing).
Evaluate once again.
7. Go back to step 4 and repeat the steps over and over each month.
Keep doing this until next New Year and see how many goals you can accomplish. Next year try adding more goals and shorten the trial period. You can always assign different amounts of time to goals of different difficulty. Challenge yourself each year to see how many goals you can accomplish.
Over time, you will get better at disciplining yourself and maintaining your progress. Last year, without even noticing, I started using this system. If you look back to my first blog post, I wrote about starting my New Year’s resolution of blogging about “luck” on December 4th. On December 31st, I wrote about starting my next goal of creating personal financial statements every month, which I have also accomplished. Throughout this past year, I have started and accomplished many personal goals such as moving to a bigger place to live in a new city, quitting my job and starting my own company, spending more quality time with my family and many more. Looking back, it took about a month or so for each of them.
You will never accomplish all of your goals overnight but if you take baby steps and do them one at a time, you can be successful. Just remember, it takes 6 years to become an overnight success, so start working toward 2015.
Good Luck and Happy New Year!
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Posted by Amir Lehrer on January 8, 2008
Everyone knows the famous advice “if life throws you lemons, make lemonade”, meaning take whatever bad life throws your way and turn it into something good and sweet. This advice is something that a lucky person would live by. The lucky person would always look for the good in any situation. Professor Wiseman discovered in his experiments on luck that lucky people and unlucky people look at life and specific incidents very differently. In a car crash, an unlucky person would say “oh %#%$, I can’t believe this happened to me, I have the worst luck”. The lucky person would say “I can’t believe how lucky I am to be alive after that crash, it’s a good thing no one was badly hurt”. This same thinking is used over and over again with lucky and unlucky people.
Optimistic thinking can lead to luckortunity in infinite situations. A lucky person will go to new places because he says “you never know what you are going to see or who you will meet. The unlucky person says “why should I go there? It is always the same people”. The lucky person looks for good things in his day and focuses on the good and new. The unlucky person just keeps thinking “S.S.D.D.” (same crap, different day).
When it comes to going to a party, an unlucky person will go, wanting to meet the love of his life while the lucky person will go to have a good time. The chances of meeting the love of your life at a single party are quite slim but the chances of having a good time are pretty good. If you go to have a good time you are open to meeting the love of your life, a new friend, a business partner and so many other people. When you go for a specific purpose such as finding the love of your life, you close yourself off from everything else and put on your blinders and therefore miss out on any luckortunity that is waiting for you.
In business, an unlucky person will fail and give up because he “just can’t do it” but a lucky person will say “ok, that didn’t work” and he will continue working to see what will work. An optimistic attitude can take you a long way. It can raise your spirits and give you the extra push whenever you need it. Being a pessimist will discourage you from trying new things and crush you if anything doesn’t work out because, after all, you didn’t expect it to in the first place. That can also lead to you not trying as hard and failing on purpose just to prove that you were right. The lucky person just keeps going because he always sees the glass half full and the light at the end of the tunnel.
Previous Posts in this Series: 10 Ways to Increase your Luck.
- Increase Your Luck by Taking a Different Route to Work
- Don’t listen to your Mother, Speak to Strangers!
- StumbleUpon the Greatest Luckortunity, the Cure for Boredom
- Blog to the Future
- Luck is Risky Business
- Get High on Conventions
- SHUT UP AND LISTEN!
- Get Lucky by Working Hard
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Posted by Amir Lehrer on December 8, 2007
If you’ve ever walked down the halls of a college dorm or almost any college building, you will notice posters and posters hanging on every inch of the walls and sometimes even ceilings and floors. There are so many activities being planned, books for sale and lost and found announcements. Sometimes the walls are so crowded that you can barely see some of the posters that are hidden under all the rest. Most people become immune to all the advertising and just ignore it all but for some reason back in 2001 I used to read all of those ads. It might have been because I was bored or looking for something to do but I paid attention to most of the ads plastered through my hallways.
There was one poster back in September 2001 that for some reason stuck out and put me on a path to meet my wife over a year later. It was a very simple sign that said “Wrestling Tryouts, No Experience Necessary” with the time and place written at the bottom. I never wrestled before that point or even had any interest in the sport but something made me give it a second look. The time worked for me and the location couldn’t be better. The wrestling room was almost directly under my dorm room. I figured I would show up and the worst case would be that I leave and never go back.
I believe it was a Tuesday evening that I walked into the wrestling room and saw a group of about 10 guys sitting around on the mat. I joined them and was immediately accepted as one of the team. They weren’t the best team and were always looking for new people, especially since they didn’t even have every weight class. Right away the captain announced that we are a team and we work together and if anyone needed anything all we had to do is ask. He then offered us all, his folder with all of his notes and past exams from every course that he has taken to make our lives easier. Many of the professors taught the same thing over and over each semester and even used the same exams. The coach then offered to help any of us out with our scheduling and speak to teachers if need be. I took him up on his offer and I’m not sure how it worked but somehow I got into a class that was over capacity on the condition that I just take my exams with another section. Since I was between the 2 classes, I never had to show up for class because I wasn’t on either attendance sheet. I’ll have you know that I did very well in that class and was able to show up to all of my wrestling practices.
During my time on the wrestling team, I learned to love the sport and practiced really hard to get better at it. I worked out and practiced an average of 11 hours a week and went from 23% body fat to a bit under 10%, letting me drop from the 197 lbs. weight class down to the 174 weight class. There was a point that I got down to 165 lbs. but decided that 174 was the best class for me.
Being on the team took me to many other campuses and a few other cities where I had the chance to see new places and meet new people. My new build made me feel great about myself and gave me an immense amount of confidence. This confidence made it much easier to meet and speak to new people and kept me in good spirits all the time. Over a year later I was still on the team and in better shape than I had ever been in my life. It was at that point that I met my wife. I believe it was my confidence to be able to just speak to people that broke the ice between my wife and me.
LUCKORTUNITY
There are 3 main points to being lucky that I covered in the above story:
1. Keep your eyes open
2. try everything and jump on new opportunities
3. work really hard
1. Just like the people in Professor Weisman’s experiment, I saw something right in front of me that many people would miss completely. If someone was looking for something specific on the wall of posters or thought that he didn’t need anything so why should he look, then he would have missed the poster altogether. I was looking for anything and nothing in particular and that is why this opportunity jumped out of me. The main point is to broaden your focus so you can see the forest and not get stuck staring at a bunch of trees.
2. Even if the opportunity jumps out at you, most people would ignore it completely. To get lucky, you need to take every opportunity to do something new and learn something different. You never know where it is going to take you and you don’t usually have anything to lose if you do take the opportunity. For me, if I wouldn’t have gone to that first wrestling tryout, I would have spent my time watching one more TV show that I would end up seeing at another time one way or the other.
3. Nothing comes easy and the harder you work on something, the better the results. Once I started on the team, I worked really hard to be the best wrestler that I could be. I worked out as much as possible and practiced at every opportunity. That led to my new level of confidence which led to me ultimately meeting the woman that I later married.
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