It's the Most Goal-Wonderful Time of the Year

The Thanksgiving Holiday usually signifies the official start of the holiday season. For me, it also traditionally signifies the countdown for next year's goals.

6 weeks for goal planning? I'm slow about how I choose them - working them, reworking them, trying to find a third way with them.

So slow, in fact, that I never got my 2011 goals on paper.

This is something that has not happened in 5 years or more. Why? Not because I couldn't come up with any goals, but rather I have lost heart in writing them. In other words, I did not create goals because I did not believe that I could reach them.

Perhaps this is the core of my despondency today - my lack of hope stemming from my lack of belief that I can achieve anything other than just getting by.

But is that legitimate? Is it legitimate to say that I will not aspire to anything because there is simply no way for me to achieve it? If that is my logic, then I have hobbled myself out of the gate before the race has begun. Just because goals and aspirations are not where my life is right now does not mean they are impossible, it just means I'll have to work all the harder to achieve them.

Part of that, I think, is simply due to being co-opted by the system in which I work, where there is little direct relationship between the amount of effort put in and any rewards that come out. All the effort in the world can be sunk in; the result is only more work and little notice, the dull hope of a small increase in pay and bonus.

But again, that is the fault of where I work, not what I do. I have worked plenty of other locations where those rules did apply, and the effort was noticed and rewarded.

But if I believe it's possible (not that it's a universal law, but it is highly predictable), that still means one has to have actual goals to shoot for - not ideas, not thoughts, not concepts, but actual goals. And they need to be goals that are actually larger than I think is possible, as I found in an excellent T.S. Eliot quote this morning: "Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

"Make no small plans" said Daniel Burnham, "for they have no magic to stir men's blood...Make big plans, aim high in hope, and work." Here's to an early 2012 that will give direction and purpose.