And the secret is? Discipline

So you’ve watched the secret and have focussed intently on manifesting a new car, house, lover or life but nothing has happened. It must be a crock right? All these fads that come and go with happy shining people saying “just believe and the universe will bring it to you!” seem to have the same message. That positive thinking creates positive results. So why does it not seem to work all the time? Why is it that when you think of negative things, sure as hell they come to pass, but positive things seem to evade you? Speaking from experience, when I have been focussed on the negative, they have come around just as sure as day follows night, so I speak from experience here. I am not blowing hot air here: all I say is from my own experience as well as reading numerous books, listening to audio books and watching movies on this subject When you focus on the negative the negative happens because you are inviting problems into your life by thinking about them and fearing them and in general, doing nothing to prepare for the event or to avoid the problem. Focussing on negative things fills you with fear which can prevent you from taking the necessary action, but I’ll talk about that in a future blog. Today I want to talk about why simply focussing on positive stuff does not immediately bring results.

© Photographer Marek Paju | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Stop. Wait a minute. That’s not how life works. Yeah, when you plant a seed, the eventual outcome will be a fruitful tree or plant that brings forth a multiple of the same seed or fruit that you planted (OK, ignoring GM and other weirdness here: I’m talking natural fruits!). But this does not happen overnight: your plant will take some time to grow and often will need nurturing, watering and fertiliser in order for you to reap the rewards you seek. Nature takes time to manifest the fruits of your labour, and this is the natural law of the harvest. “As you sow, so shall you reap”, but not today. So imagining and focussing on a goal is a prerequisite to achieving it: you have to at least plant the darn seed! But your goals, like seeds need attention and focus. You can’t just imagine yourself being able to play the piano and hey presto, tomorrow you can. It takes consistent focus and consistent action, preferable on a daily basis.

Mastering a subject takes consistent study and time. You can’t master something by crash studying it once: this is how students sometimes pass exams, but I can guarantee that what they crash study will be forgotten and lost to them within a few weeks. If you want to truly master a subject, you have to make it part of your life, even if it is only for half an hour a day. In fact, half an hour a day is a fine amount of time to spend on something that you want to master, whether it is playing the guitar or learning math. It is the daily reinforcement of your study that will lead you to master the subject. If you’re in a hurry you may want to increase the time, but I’ve left university a long time ago and when I study these days it’s for my own knowledge, not for an exam.

Moving towards a worthwhile goal takes consistent action. If you plant a seed then forget about it, there is a good chance that it will be overcome by weeds, or just die. You need to give it attention. This means of course that you should be thinking about it (just like the secret says) and doing something about it. You need to have enough faith to actually do something. If you think about what it is you really, really want, then do nothing, the question I must ask is, “Do you really, really want it?” I mean, if you really, really want something so badly that you are wanting the universe to manifest it, then surely you are willing to do something about it? The bible says faith without works is dead, and not to make this a religious argument, but if you do nothing about your goal, then it is not a goal, it’s a dream. Make it real by doing something and the universe will reciprocate. Sit on your butt and do nothing and again, the universe will reciprocate. Take daily action, create a plan and work the plan and you will move towards your goal.

If you will focus on your goal and do something towards the achievement of it on a daily basis, you will move towards it. When you set goals you should have a date in mind for the accomplishment of the goal, and take some sort of action at the time you set it towards achieving it. One of the best actions you can take is to create a plan for the achieving of the goal and this can be done at the time that you set the goal. When goals are huge and we have no idea of how to achieve them, they need to be broken down into smaller sub goals which can be broken down again until each little goal is achievable and we know how to achieve it. After you do this, you may want to look at the date by which you want your goal and modify it based on the effort that you will need to expend to achieve it! Then, each day do something in your plan to move it along. The really cool thing about a plan is that you can measure progress towards your goal: you know how far along you are and you know the outcome and the results of your plan. This can really be a motivating factor in your path to success.

Daily Fundamentals

Today's article may come across as a bit technical: this is not intentional, but is purely because technology and software development is my field of expertise and the source of my current life-style. The things I speak about can be applied to any aspect of life. You should always learn and practice the fundamentals. Every day. Get into mastery of a subject, rather than breeze through life on auto-pilot. While auto-pilot worked well for me when going through the split-up with my wife, it's not a good long-term strategy and I know if I carried on like an automaton, in a few years I'd be washed up and worthless in my career. When you follow a path in life, make sure you know more than just the path: learn the surrounding terrain, the weather patterns in the area you're walking in. Be the master of the path, not just another chump hired to lead a few college kids for the summer.

I've been a software developer for 16 years and every year I look back at what I did the year before and think "yuck" to myself. One part of me is quite excited that I can always be learning more and getting better at my chosen vocation. Another side of me feels that it is annoying that I am never a master at my profession.  I find myself getting tired of the constant churn in technology, especially in the Microsoft world. I know that things change and improvement must result in change, but often I look at the technology and see just another layer of crap on top of existing crap and wonder what it's all for. Frankly, I find myself tired of all this change and the constant need to be memorising somebody else's ideas to land the next contract. I believe the term that should be used for the way developers feel about all this new and exciting technology that is not so new or exciting, is "developer fatigue".

When you get pulled into the trap of seeing marketing as technology, you get tricked into burning all your energy learning the next greatest framework instead of practising fundamentals. What do I mean by daily fundamentals? I mean the kind of learning that is going to make you a great programmer rather than a great user of the next microsoft framework. Seriously, learning WPF and becoming an expert in the framework will be great short-term. You'll land contracts with great rates for the next 3-5 years. Maybe more if MS sticks to their ideas, but I doubt it. And after the boom, what do you have left? Five years of experience in a dead technology. So rather than deep diving into an abstract layer of technology, I advocate deep diving into the fundamentals of technology and understanding exactly how computers work, how graphics cards work, how shaders and shading languages work. Learn a new (programming) language every couple of years, and make sure you choose one to master that is commercially viable while you learn new languages, ideas and thought-patterns.

Learn how compilers work, computing theory, language theory, design patterns, algorithms, OpenGl (a really, really stable framework that's not going to just go away). Heck, I'm thinking of starting my own little framework using OpenGl as a layer of rendering widgets to cross-platform GUIs rather than relying on Microsoft and their stooges to provide me with WPF. I think c++ or java (nice and cross platform) with an underlying OpenGl library should do nicely, allowing the development of GUI applications that just work.

Divorce, Depression... REBOOT!

I recently went through a divorce. To say it was an unpleasant experience is putting it mildly. I languished in depression for quite a while with consequences for my health and wealth. I felt like the whole thing was an ugly and immoral process with the only people benefiting being the lawyers. In the beginning of March I started to turn around slowly, but by that time I was broke, my waist had ballooned to 41 inches and I had no work. Not a good place to start from. However, in retrospect, when you are going through hell, sometimes it's appropriate to be depressed. You're allowed to be sad when you lose your kids, your dreams of a life together with someone you've loved for 20 years.

The truth is that the dream didn't just evaporate over night: it deteriorated over quite a long time. As my ex and I aged we changed and our dreams got out of sync and we no longer saw eye to eye. It got to the point where I dreaded coming home after work and would work all the hours that God gives to avoid her. I'm sure she was relieved too. Things deteriorate and fall apart if you don't maintain them and the damage that has been done has been astronomical to me, to her and to our four beautiful daughters. In terms of this very important life goal, I have failed.

Relationships often underlie our goals, dreams and desires and need to be given the attention that they deserve. Going through this ordeal has got to be the worst possible way to learn this. I am going to pay a lot of attention to relationships, friendships, family and people from now on. If you want a family home with happy kids running around, full of laughter and joy, it's critical to ensure that your other half is happy. It's just as critical for you to be happy in the relationship so you have to make sure that you give your other half feedback. If you get to the point where you are being unfairly dominated and pushed around after talking, get a councillor or tell your partner that there are consequences for this behaviour. I think the only thing worse than divorce, in terms of a relationship, is staying with someone who makes you feel terrible.

So, after all this I have crawled out of hell, and am back on track for living a fun, happy life. I have been back at gym for 8 weeks and have lost an inch off my waist! However, I've also gained an inch and a half on each thigh from lots of squats, lunges and dead-lifts. I've actually gained weight from gym while losing fat, which I think is a good thing: I certainly feel a lot better about life. Note to self: when in a relationship, talk, listen and love. It is not enough simply to love someone: in order to keep in sync with each other, you need the channels of communication to be wide open.

Communication is key and learning and applying this is going to be a fun ride for me as I tend to prefer my own company. When you are in any kind of team, it's important to keep the goals and visions the same so that you can remain united. It's also important to communicate to make sure we're all on the same page and as happy as possible. So, life has been rebooted for me and my chip has been upgraded by an unpleasant experience. Time to move on...

What is converged vision?

Today I want to shed some light on the theme of my blog, and the direction I want to take my blog, software and life in: converged vision.

Goals often fail to materialise for a number of reasons, among these reasons are:

• Failure to follow through 
• Failure to take action 
• Having so many goals we don't know what direction to go in 
• Having goals that don't turn us on or have no compelling outcome 
• Having goals that are unrealistic 
• Having goals that are too easy to achieve and don't stretch us: we may achieve them, but they don't benefit us as much as they could. 

Now I have an idea which I'm sure is not new or unique about why our goals sometimes fail to become realities: we set goals that are divergent. That is, we set goals that do not support each other which divide our focus and have us running around like chickens without heads. For example, setting a goal to earn £50 000 a year and then setting a goal to buy a new Ferrari in the next year. You may find that the cost of maintaining your new car is half your targeted income. 

When it comes time to set out goals we have to get real and do some research especially when it comes to the cost of our "thing goals". If I want my company to earn £100 000 a year but set a goal to buy a £750 000 house next year, I may well achieve the first goal, but am likely to fail in the second as it is going to be based on my income which I've targeted at £100 000. The bank in very unlikely to give me a mortgage of 7.5 times my annual income. So, how do I resolve these in-congruent goals? I still want a mansion, but am not earning enough!
Simple really: your goals have to be convergent. You have to have a converged vision of your outcomes that are supported by all your goals. All your goals should work in concert to achieve the vision you have. Goals that do not work towards this vision should be discarded, reworded order erred till your vision changes. I'm not a particularly religious guy any-more but I used to be quite a serious Mormon. They have a way of expressing the single-mindedness required of church members: you must press forward steadfastly with an eye single to the glory of god.

Well, I'm not saying you should become a Mormon or have your eye focused purely the glory of god, but what I am saying is that your goals should be designed to be convergent on your vision. Note that I say designed, not randomly brain-stormed. I know many times when you set goals they are a list of things you want to have, do, go to, see or be and they are normally stated almost randomly as you think of them. In fact, a lot of goal-setting books, audio books, seminars and courses will help you think of the things that you want to achieve, have, or do by encouraging you to list a bunch of things that come to your mind, then select the top three from the list and think of ways to achieve them. I think this approach is a mistake as it often results in divergent goals that do not support the vision of the life you want to live and the person you want to be.

I believe that when you have identified the things you want to do, own or be, you should choose the ones that all focus on your vision of who and what you want to be. These goals, and the pursuit of them will shape your life for the next few years, so make sure they a the goals that will support your vision of a life well lived and your general happiness. Design your goals to support each other and your desired outcome. That way you will press forward with an eye single to your desired outcome (or vision), rather than have a bunch of divergent goals that eat your energy and are possibly counter-productive, or at least so in-congruent as to guarantee your failure.

So, looking back at our examples, if I want to earn at least £100 000 and live in £750 000 mansion in the country, I have to have a few very specific goals:

• Save £300 000 in the next 5 years 
• Earn £100 000 per year 
• Buy my house in 5 years 

 Or

•  Earn £200 000 a year and buy my house next year!

Now to figure out how to make that kind of money; but that's a subject for another post.

Goals and risks

I've spent quit a bit of my career as a risk management software developer in the realms of enterprise risk management. You've probably heard a lot about risk management in the news as the financial crisis of the last 5 years was caused mainly by bad risk management and a lack of risk management. In enterprise risk management a lot of time is spent identifying risks and setting up controls on the risks to prevent events and to mitigate the damage of events. Additionally companies spend some time trying to analyse the impact of these risks and the likelihood: time not well spent (in my opinion) unless you have access to the mountains of actuarial data that insurance companies have.

What has this got to do with goals? Well goals are things you want to do, have, be, achieve, see, experience and so on, while risks are things you don't want to have, experience, suffer. Risks are simply anti-goals :) Anti-goals are useful because they tell us what we don't want. How many times have you told yourself "I never want to be like that...", "I never want to go through that...", "I never want to do that...". At the heart of what I call personal risk, is the desire to avoid some outcome. At the heart of risk management is the desire to avoid some event. Risk management would identify controls that can be put in place to avoid or mitigate risks.

When I identify personal risks, I also identify the positive outcome I would rather have. For a few years of my life while my marriage was breaking apart I focused on bad things and bad outcomes and they tended to become real. For about 3 years, a lot of horrible things just happened in my life. I believe that what you focus on becomes real: "As a man thinketh in his heart", so is he (Proverbs 23: 7). This has been my experience, so lately when I think "I don't want to be overweight" (just an example :)) I change my thought to what I want instead: "I want to be healthy, fit and good-looking". That way I can identify steps I can take to achieve the goal rather than just focus on what I don't want. Focusing on what you don't want is like walking backwards with your origin in sight and not being able to see your destination: you never know where you are going in life and probably end up right back where you started, at the place you wanted to avoid.

So personal risks, or anti-goals should be identified, but then overridden with more positive statements about what you want. In fact, emotionally it may be well to keep both your goal and anti-goal in mind as this will help you to strive for your goal while avoiding the risk. Keeping both in mind will help you leverage off your emotions to get what you desire while avoiding what you don't. It's much like asking yourself "how will I feel if I achieve this goal?" and "how will I feel if this risk takes place?" Let those feelings drive you to create a goal that motivates you to succeed.

Goals stated in this way should create a compelling force that will drive you to achieve them, and give you a fantastic reason to celebrate when you do.

When life gets in the way

I suspect it happens to everyone: we mean to do something but just never get around to it because we are too busy working, taking care of kids, or if you're like me, sick in bed with flu: yuck. The bottom line is that the important things we really want become secondary to the stuff we have to do on a day to day basis. It becomes really difficult to focus on our goals because we're too busy living. Actually, when this happens to me, I'm too busy surviving and my happiness levels plummet.

I am admittedly, a prime example of this as I've not posted an article or two that I've meant to write and have wanted to since I got a short term contract at Balfour Beatty that paid my bills for a couple of months, then got this flu the day after my contract ended. First I was too busy, then I was too sick. In the words of Eric Cartman: "laaaaame". Seriously, most of the reasons we fail to achieve our goals and stated ambitions are lame! I could've written these posts on my iPad on the train. Easily.

In fact, I'm in a nice relaxing bath doing just that right now! I guess at the heart of it there are some simple reasons why we let life get in the way:

1. Laziness allows us to claim to be too busy/sick etc.. 
2. We are overwhelmed by the stuff we have to get done.
3. We don't focus on our goals enough. 

I believe that resolving the third problem will greatly help us resolve the others. I find a daily review of my goals and asking "what can I do today to work towards this" helps me to be creative and think of things that I can do, even if sick in bed or commuting to work. In fact, I think when you get creative, many opportunities arise that normally would just not occur to you.

One way of remaining focused is to list all those small and annoying tasks that must get done and prioritising them so we can do a few each day. This way we remain aware of these outstanding tasks and exercise the art of fulfilling promises to ourselves by getting this stuff out of our way. When I leave little things undone I find myself feeling on edge: my sub-conscience is constantly reminding me that I've forgotten something. So consciously listing stuff in a little to-do list and deciding when to do them instead of doing them ad-hoc let's my subconscious relax and allows me to focus on what's important.

So I promise now not to let life get in the way, to always review my goals and to keep the mountain of stuff small by always keeping the stuff written in a to-do list and committing to get a few done each day.

Quick Achievements to boost confidence

Sometimes our goal-setting muscles are so out of use we lose faith in our own ability to achieve them. If you've pursued a goal such as "learn to play the guitar", "get a science degree in maths" or "Learn to program a new (but very boring) computer language" you may find that two hours of slog a day for 6 months to a couple of years mad achieving the goal really tough.

Often we fall by the wayside when pursuing these types of goals when the effort of pursuing the goal becomes clear and the perceived reward of achieving the goal diminishes in the far distance. One thing I like to do to remind myself of the effectiveness of setting goals, is to look at a couple of things that I really don't want to do but should; things that are quick and easy like a phone-call to HMRC or a utilities company; and set a goal to do it on the same day. Then during the day, just do it. It's a nice easy way of flexing my goal-setting muscles and getting a quick win. A reminder that I can achieve things easily.

Some goals take a long time to achieve, like learning to play a new instrument. I find it is far more effective to look at these long term goals and break them down into sub-goals. Achieving sub-goals should be rewarded: we should celebrate out achievements to remind ourselves that we are on the right path and will, in time, achieve our main goal.

When you first start learning something new, you often don't know what you don't know, so setting sub-goals may be difficult when you set out to achieve something new. This should not be a deterrent: rather once you know more about the subject, you are better positioned to break down the main goal into smaller goals that you can achieve on a daily or weekly basis (depending on how often you need to celebrate :) )then go for those sub goals.

Be flexible: I have found that setting goals like "spend 2 hours learning to program the android, 2 hours playing my bass, 2 hours studying core java, 2 hours at gym and 2 hours learning WPF" leaves no time in my day for social life, emergencies, contingencies or children. Sometimes I need to make choices about which goals are more important (though this can change with time and circumstance) and focus on them. Learning to program the android is not a life-long endeavour and can be set as a goal, worked on and completed. During this time I'm spending less time playing my bass. Being an uber-bassist is a life-time goal so I can do less every day as long as I do some every day, and all is good.

When I've set goals that are demanding in time and require most of my day to be spent on doing something, I've failed miserably. Life just gets in the way. Try to avoid scheduling too much time in your week to a set of activities and be flexible in when you spend time doing things and what your goals are: i.e. Learn to play the bass part to Enter sandman rather than spend two hours practising every day. One of the major drawbacks to "spend this much time a day on something" type goals is that you never really celebrate them as they often do not engender a sense of achievement. While "learn to do this" or "finish that" type of goals can be celebrated as they come along with something having being done.

I guess the bottom-line of this post is: "Don't mistake time-management for goal setting." So get out there and set some achievement-style goals.

The value of goals

One of the luxuries I have at the moment is a lot of time to think about goals by virtue of being engaged in the development of my own goal management software. I've read many books, been to seminars and done several courses on goal setting, time management, personal power and so forth and what I've noticed is that most goal-setting courses focus on an aspect of goal management and have a system for setting and managing goals that is somewhat rigid.

That is, goals may be qualified in terms of how they relate to your vision, how one should focus ones time on the important rather than the trivial, how goals are related to who you want to be and so forth. As my life circumstances have changed from bad to good and back again, I've grown to believe that there are different reasons for setting goals at different times in our lives, and that the manner in which we approach goal-setting and management should be guided in a way that is sympathetic with where we are in our lives.

For example, when a person finds themselves at the peak of their career, all their personal goals achieved, but for some reason feels hollow, empty and wonders what it's all about; an approach that involves some analysis of what you want your life to mean, and what your vision for your life is would be appropriate.

When that same person is on the ropes, down and out and hanging to their sanity by a thread, an approach that allows them to foster some hope based on the goals that can be achieved would be appropriate. I'be been on the ropes before and goals gave me something to look forward to, to focus on and to drive me forward in such a way that I was able to get myself out of the problems that I was in. I've also been in a place where I had achieved many of my goals and was still not happy: the achievement of goals does not make you happy if you have the wrong goals. Setting goals can have great value to get our minds into a more positive frame of mind. When our needs are already met and we are moderately successful, goals should have meaning attached to them so that the achievement of the goals can be truly celebrated.

Books don't generally offer this type of flexibility of guidance: they tend to be algorithmic in their approach. Indeed, even most religions seem somewhat algorithmic: "keep this commandment and God will bless you with this blessing" as if God was some sort of genie who blesses on command. Perhaps books are not the best way to get the inspiration that you need depending on your circumstances. I hope to address this problem with my goal-setting software.

Thinking about goals

I've decided to learn how to program Android devices and then brush up on my WPF programming and finally to learn programming for the iOS (iPhone and iPad). The vehicle I'm going to use is the development of a goal-management application that will run on all these platforms: not a single code-base, but one for each platform with some common interfaces.

Apart from learning how to program for these platforms, I want to return to the methods of goal-setting and planning that I used when I was younger; methods that resulted in success. But I want to do more than just automate these methods or make them easier to access, I want to know more about what makes me tick: what makes goals work; what makes goals effective; and why sometimes when we are achieving all our goals, we still feel unsatisfied and unfulfilled.

There seem to be a lot of quick-fix solutions in terms of time-management and goal management systems with promises to change your life in 7 days. I have utmost respect for many of the authors of these systems and have seen results in my life from programs such as "Unleash the power within". However, I've also experienced that some things in life take time: learning to play a musical instrument with a degree of mastery; learning to paint; mastering just about any craft. These things take time and the "change your life in a week" solutions sell folks the idea that they really can master their destiny in a week. I think there is a big difference to taking charge of your life and time (which these systems can help with) and reaching goals that require consistent effort over long durations of time. Others might disagree, so I'll leave the blog open to comments as I develop my product.

The last few years have seen my life go down a path that I never foresaw, that some would describe as failure. I believe that too much focus on goals and achieving these goals lead me to a place where I had all the things I wanted, had reached all the goals I set for myself and was bored.

I've realised a couple of things:

1. my dreams that I had strived so hard to achieve were small dreams and I should have dreamed bigger.
2. achieving goals without having a solid reason for the goals will put you in a position where you don't celebrate your accomplishments as they have little meaning to you.

So I've been thinking about these questions:

• What is a goal?
• Why do we set goals?
• What makes goals important (caring about the outcome)?
• Why do we just give up on some goals?
• How are goals related to vision?
• How are goals related to how I define myself?
• How are goals related to relationships?

This blog is going to be quite central to my life for the next few weeks while I work on this project and as the application develops I'll be posting downloadable links to the software. This blog is part of the project.