Set Your Goals

My dad always asked/made us set goals as his minions/children so that we could grow/excel in life and learn...something.  Clearly I missed the lesson. You see, I was never too hot on the idea of goals.  The thing is unless you're really motivated you're going to either a) forget them or b) remember them (and realize they're out of reach hence killing any motivation).

On my mission in Russia goals were shoved down our throat, which turned me off the prospect even more.  For some reason, we were instructed to have a weekly goal of 5 new investigators each week.  I'm not quite sure why this was the standard since I didn't reach 5 new investigators for my whole mission.* Goals may work in other places, but in Russia no matter how ambitious or hard-working you were, goals had this way of saying "Hey, I appreciate the effort, I really do, but when you tally your numbers at the end of the week I'm going to crush your spirit by reminding you that the lofty goals you set are in a different stratosphere from your actual numbers." So as you can imagine, I've grown quite bitter towards goals.  A good friend of mine's philosophy is if you don't set goals, you have nothing to be disappointed about.  Sound advice.

* I'm not sure why I'm writing about my mission 1 1/2 years after the fact...I think it has something to do with me being asked how many baptisms I had today.  I must say I prefer my answer to the kid who answered '1' but later divulged that the person had asked to have their records removed from the church.  Zero is better than one in that case.

ANYWAYS, the point of this post was to highlight some of my goals from the past year that I failed to meet.  It didn't help that the only place I had them written down was in an obscure folder on my computer.  So without further adieu...my shortcomings of 2010:

• Read 20 books - The only goal I actually achieved.  I just read Into The Wild - I don't know if you can do something more hurtful to your parents, but I quite admired his daring living his life the way he did.

• Pay off $1000 of car debt - I'm in debt $7000 to my dad for my car, unfortunately the Census and working at the fly lab didn't contribute enough to make a dent in that.

• Straight A's - Ummm....no.  No C's since freshman year though! The problem with me and grades in college is I'm not planning on grad school (at least for a while) and I have to take a bunch of classes I do not care about for my major where I just do the minimum amount of work possible and wait for the semester to end (Exhibit A: Native American Literature last semester).

• Attend the temple 2x/month - Once I didn't achieve this the first month, there was little motivation to do so for the remaining 11.

• Read scriptures every day - I can't say I recommend exclusively studying the Old Testament.  Not the most exciting set of scripture.

So it wasn't my most productive year, but I did remember to do what my fourth-grade teacher taught me - D.E.A.R. - Drop Everything And Read!

And I did make a blog, so the year was not lost. And I'll still probably set goals for 2011.