Regular readers may have noticed my post topics have been jumping around a bit lately. This is partly because I have more than one blog, but also too many other writing projects. It also doesn’t help having a full time job and an ongoing search for a new full time job.

I’m taking a break from blogging, but not a break from article writing. An article a day is my current writing priority. When I return to blogging, I will be posting much more frequently. Once a week isn’t often enough to get a decent number of visitors. I’ll have over 50 articles ready to go and be posting every 3 days or less when I return. That will allow articles to be more closely related and that’s especially important with some of the more difficult topics.

If you’d like to know more, you can read the full details here.

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

If you aim too high and don’t quite make it, you may still reach your goal. If you aim at exactly what you want to achieve and don’t quite make it, you fail. Of course, we should always aim too high. But, most of us don’t. Why?

When we set a tough target and miss, we feel like we’ve experienced a failure. This is the case even when we know we were aiming beyond our goal and achieved what we wanted. We perceive two goals, one higher than the other, and it’s the low goal we achieve. What failures we must be.

Recognize the Value of Failures

The first step to avoiding this dilemma is evaluating the importance of our failures. We fail at many things every day that don’t affect us in the least. For example, most people who don’t drive for a living don’t care if they are failures as drivers. Every car accident is someone failing as a driver. It’s impossible to get into a car accident without someone breaking at least one traffic law. People cause accidents with their bad driving, total their car, injure or kill others because of their failure and are back behind the wheel the next day. Their failure as drivers doesn’t affect them because driving is not important to them.

We let failures affect us when we see them as failures to achieve important goals. Once, I gave myself a goal of writing an article every day with a high goal of writing 10 aricles in one day. I made this a one month trial. I achieved the daily goal and failed the high goal. My most productive day resulted in five articles. I had a nice collection of posts ready to go and should have been happy about that. Instead, I let my failure to write 10 articles in one day get me down and wrote no articles the following month.

An article a day is not a bad rate. That should have been a success. But, the 10 article goal was seen as important and spoiled the win. The trick is to see the higher goal as a nice-to-have goal but not an important one. I write at least one article a day right now and still have the 10 article a day goal. Because I know it’s not important to me, it doesn’t bother me that I’ve never written 10 articles in a day. With practice and time, someday I will and maybe it will become a regular habit. But articles are not my only writing. I write for work. I have some books in the works. And since I write several different types of articles, as well as short fiction, changing projects will always slow me down.

Aiming Too High Works

Even though I saw my 10 article a day goal failure as a personal failure, that attempt made me a faster and more disciplined writer. The perceived failure was a minor setback.

The lesson here is that, even if you can’t stop yourself from feeling like a failure for not achieving the higher target, it is worth aiming for it anyway. The attempt develops your skills far more than aiming for the easier goal.

What goals can you set yourself today to achieve more of what you want from life?

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

For someone who has studied nothing about psychology, there’s no mystery about how it works. They have no interest in the question. As far as they know, if someone has emotional problems they go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, receive therapy or medication and get better. A sunny idealized view, but one that is occasionally true.

The reality is that sometimes therapy and medication have no effect or even make the patient’s problems worse. But, this article isn’t about how psychology fails. The question is, why does it often succeed?

Modern mental health treatment at a hospital is most often a combination of therapy and drugs. Psychologists specialize in therapy. Psychiatrists specialize in medications. The question of the day is, “What makes therapy effective?” To answer that question, we first need to know the general principals of therapy.

How is Therapy Structured?

There are dozens of flavors of psychotherapy. They have a variety of focuses depending on the original thinker who invented them. They may focus on the self, society, sex, emotions, the past, life goals, the list goes on. No matter which therapy is used, there are several steps which must be followed.

1. The presenting complaint. What does the patient say has gone wrong? It can take some time to understand a patient’s problem because they will often present a related problem that is easier to talk about. For example, they may say they have an internet addiction and further questioning reveals that it is a porn addiction. Or they are feeling depressed because their career isn’t going well and they’re always broke, but as the interview progresses it becomes clear they have an anxiety problem because they’ve started selling illegal drugs to cover their expenses.

2. The underlying problem. There is always a reason for psychological problems. Porn addiction can be caused by a poor social life which provides few possibilities for a healthy sexual relationship. Always being broke comes from living beyond ones means.

In some cases, the cause is chemical and medication may be the only answer. For therapy to move ahead, this underlying problem must be found.

3. The psychotherapist’s theory. The therapist can readily see how the patient’s problem fits into the treatment theory they’ve studied. Now they must teach the theory to the patient, or at least enough of the theory so the patient can resolve their problem.

The efficacy of the therapist’s chosen theory for a particular problem can vary greatly. For example, a theorist who focuses on sexual causes based on that part of Freud’s work will have trouble helping with an economic problem. But, they don’t need to look far for an answer. Freud also introduced the concepts of the id, ego and superego. The therapist can turn to these in the search for an answer.

Some psychological theories are rather narrow. For this reason, many therapists study several theories. Others refer patients that don’t fit their treatment to another therapist. Given that the therapist uses a theory that’s a good fit for solving the patient’s problem, treatment moves on to the next phase.

4. Resolving the problem. Now that the problem has been identified and put into the context of a psychological theory, the theory can be used to work out a solution. The depth of the patient’s belief in the theory and desire to solve the problem has a lot to do with the success of the therapy. An entirely internal issue can take years to resolve. A behavioral issue can be cured more quickly given a patient who is willing to change their behavior.

This has told you nothing about how to do psychotherapy. A therapist has at least a bachelor’s degree in psychology and one or more years of training in the theory they use. But that’s not the topic of this article. The question is, “Given that psychological theories are something someone has made up, why do they work to solve psychological problems?”

Psychotherapeutic Fantasies?

Yes and no. If we didn’t have the ability to think, we would simply follow the path of animals. Eat, survive, and reproduce. Thoughts and feelings are apparently irrelevant. But we create a psychological world for ourselves. We get a lot of help from our friends (and relatives and enemies and outside influences). Our psychological world is an imaginary world. It is created by our culture, our society, our religion, our relationships, and any other input that has an influence on our understanding of the world.

Sometimes the psychological world we create for ourselves is maladaptive. We develop a belief sytem that either makes us feel bad in itself or that causes us to behave in ways that make us unhappy. Imagination is more important than knowledge because it’s our illusions that cause all of our psychological problems.

For example, consider the person who believes that the pursuit of pleasure will lead to happiness. In reality, happiness comes from choosing to be happy. The pursuit of pleasure only leads to a need for more of the same pleasures. The pursuit of happiness also fails because a person is not happy if they are pursuing happiness. When you are pursuing something, you don’t have it. It’s a misunderstanding of the distinction between being and becoming.

What psychotherapeutic theories do is create a way of imagining our psychological world that will allow us to solve a problem. This is similar to how a religion will help a person by giving them a concept within which they need to overcome their vices (which solves many financial problems) and have hope for a better life after death (which makes it easier to bear a difficult current life).

Why does psychology work? Because it gives the patient a worldview that allows them to work out solutions to problems they could not solve using the concepts they had learned through life experience.

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

Hermann Hesse wrote books about people who lived more than one life in a single lifetime. The last one was published in 1943. Since then, few writers have made transitioning to a new life part of their novels. The requirement that the protagonist of a novel needs to resolve some deep personal conflict is usually handled with a new job similar to their old one, patching a failing relationship or finding a new lover.

Nonfiction books on careers do a little better job dealing with this. Most of what they write requires that your first career pays well enough that you have savings that can be used to get a degree that launches a new career. That is a transition between lives, but it’s rich people’s lives. It’s not what the average working person experiences.

Working Class Lives

The average person doesn’t come from money and their parents don’t know much about careers other than those they’ve had themselves. Even if they get a student loan to pursue a university or college degree, they are as likely to chase a useless diploma as a profitable one. If degrees are available, there must be careers to match, right? Not at all. Most of the arts will get you nowhere. Competition is heavy for the few jobs related to each field. In some humanities, the only work is teaching the same subject to other hopefuls.

The average person settles for a series of min wage service or labour jobs. If a job is especially crappy, they might get as much as double min wage, but never a real living. Since each job requires a few different skills, their lives are slightly different depending on the work. Each new job, although not a career, is still a new life. A new work life, not a new personal life.

Those who make good money often think of work as part of their personal life. Those who work low paying jobs, see no such relationship. Most low paying jobs can be learned in two weeks or less. One crappy job is as good as another. Barely making the rent driving or barely making the rent working as a security guard have an equivalent effect on their personal lives.

Working class workers must choose cheap entertainments. They can educate themselves with books, but without a degree they aren’t going anywhere. There are exceptions, of course.

When a working class person counts lives, they are counting the different kinds of jobs they’ve had.

Middle Class Lives

Now we’re talking better money. From double min wage to about one hundred thousand a year. To a working class person, the middle class are rich. There’s enough money that life outside work is more than just scrapping by from paycheck to paycheck. They can afford good vacations and expensive hobbies. They can afford to switch careers and have the money to pay for the necessary information to insure that whatever degree they pursue will lead to another profitable career.

When a working class person counts lives, they are counting the different careers they’ve had.

Rich Lives

Someone making more than one hundred thousand a year may not even have a job. There are some jobs that pay that well, but once one’s income is that high, they can afford to start their own businesses. A successful business can be a lot of work, but once it’s up and running managers can be hired and the investor(s) can sit back and watch the money roll in. If the jobs in the business have the added advantage of not requiring a degree in anything, wages can be low because there will be lots of candidates. That’s why there are a lot of min wage jobs.

Without the need to be at a job, a wealthy person can set up any kind of lifestyle they’d like. When a rich person counts lives, they are counting the different lifestyles they’ve chosen.

So What’s the Point of All This?

The point is that, no matter what your income level, you are not stuck in your current life forever. Don’t let it get you down too much if your job sucks. You can always get another and should be looking for the next opportunity.

I have a three year limit on any job that’s not good pay. I don’t want to be constantly applying for jobs, so I may as well stick with the same job for a few years if there are no better opportunities. On the side, I’m working on turning my long term writing hobby into something more. My attempts at learning to be a prolific writer are revealed in some of the articles on my
Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

Quitting a bad habit can be tough if you don’t have a good game plan. Because it’s a habit, you will have situations and times in the day when you feel it’s time to indulge.

Getting Ready to Quit

One way to prepare for giving up an established habit is to make a pre-emptive strike against those stimuli. Change the situations that prompt the habit. Change the time of day when you will indulge. Be careful with this or you could actually increase the habit. You are attacking the habit before you quit.

I’ll use snacking as an example. You want to go down a waist size. You can keep snacks out of your groceries by eating before you go, but there’s a vending machine at work that is too available. You can go to work with no small bills but it’s still easy to get change or borrow a couple of bucks from someone.

A Minor Setback

You buy one snack.

Worst case.
You decide you’ve failed your mission and must start over. You buy a second snack since you’ve blown it anyways.

Best case.
You decide you haven’t failed your mission. One slip doesn’t mean you need to start over. The number of days since you used the vending machine can stay the same since you just had a slip. You might even use a three strikes rules saying, I’ve only fallen into my old habit if I slip three times. As long as the slips are far apart, you can forget old slips.

A different worst case.
You decide you haven’t failed you mission and modify the rules. One snack a week will be okay. When you get used to that, a second slip changes the rule to twice a week is okay. Before long, you haven’t cut out anything.

Replace the Habit

One of the best moves toward overcoming a habit it replacing it with a different habit. Take up smoking. Then, when you want a snack, go for a smoke instead. Sorry. I’m being funny. A good habit to replace snacking is some exercise routines. A walk or a few pushups are something to do instead of having a snack.

Attitude Means a Lot

If you think of your replacement habit as something you don’t like, you will fail. When you have a bad day, your old habit will look like something to pull you out of it. The replacement will look like it makes things worse.

I’ll use exercise as the example again. You may have been taught to hate exercise in school. Even if you only had one tough gym teacher, you can remember exercising until you were in pain. You decide that, “Exercising is stupid unless there’s a reason.” Getting in better shape or avoiding the snack machines are reasons. But you still have the attitude that exercise is not one of the good things in life. How can you change that? When can you make the change?

Now Is the Only Time

You can live in the moment. When I was a boy, my father had a watch with a saying on it, Now Is The Only Time. If you focus only on the present, any moment can be a good one. Comparing the present moment to the past and future is a setup for unhappiness.

When you have a good memory of peak moments from your past, you can always see how those times were better than the present. When you have great plans for the future, you can always see how tomorrow will be better than today. If you believe in a future heaven, this world can seem like a hell (or maybe just purgatory). You’re better off enjoying the present moment.

Now Is the Only Being

If you think in terms of being instead of time, you can still bring yourself down. How happy does what you’re doing now make you feel compared to going out with friends? Judging the emotional value of an activity relative to other activities is a losing venture in the emotional well-being game. If you’re determined to make yourself unhappy, even something you enjoy doing can be turned negative by thinking of something you enjoy more.

One way around this is with comparisons to activities that make you less happy. It could be worse. At least you’re not digging ditches. This is still a focus on negativity and doesn’t work any better. There is hope though.

Drop the comparisons. Live in the moment absolutely. Each activity brings both pleasure and pain to some degree. You might be hungry while watching a movie, but you focus on the story and forget about it. You may be tired while working, but getting the job done right has your focus. Ask yourself what good you are getting from anything you do. Are you gaining knowledge, strength, or building character? Is it good practice? Do you find it enjoyable on some level? Use all the positives.

Habit? What Habit?

How does this relate to the habit you want to give up? You look forward to the habit because you remember how it brings you some degree of perceived happiness. But habits don’t bring lasting happiness or you would be happy right now because of the habit. All it does is give you a happy break. If it brought you long term happiness, you wouldn’t want to give it up.

We’re back to replacing the habit again. Look for a replacement that does lead to long term happiness. Walk to the snack machine and tell the snacks (in your head), “You aren’t as good as you appear and only make me fatter. I can get better food than you for less money.” Use the money you save on snacks to take a loved one out to a decent restaurant. If you’re quitting smoking, a brisk walk is a better break. Again, you can write a script to tell yourself how the short term happiness of the dead habit is being replaced by the long term happiness of self improvement.

Some of the more addictive habits, like smoking, may require help, but any habit can be beaten.

 

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

If life seems to be stuck in a negative rut for you, maybe it’s time to consider what kind of world you’re living in. Is it moving you closer to realizing your goals or further away? Is it helping in some ways but distracting you in others? Sometimes friends will hold you back unintentionally. Everybody doesn’t want the same things. You can reverse direction.

Start by Finding the Negativities

If you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t fix it. Make a list of the ways you spend your time. Include how much time you spend on each activity. Rate each as either positive, negative or neutral. You aren’t going to cut out a neutral activity, like eating, for example. You will want to do your best to get rid of the negatives. Four hours of TV every night is a negative, in case you didn’t know. An hour of TV every day is a break. Four is a waste of time. You’re zoning out when you could be accomplishing something.

A group that likes to party can be great if your life seems to be all work. But you can get caught in a cycle of working all day and relaxing all night to compensate for a boring job. Having fun doesn’t often lead to a new career. You need to take action to break away from that boring job.

Breaking Away from Negativity

Merely deciding to quit negative activities doesn’t work. You end up with free time and nothing to fill it. Soon, the activities you dropped are back and nothing has changed.

To eliminate negative activities, find positives to replace them. Is there something you can study or practice for the sake of your career? Have you always meant to learn to swim or dance and never had time to take classes? Is there an old hobby you used to enjoy that got replaced by the negative you’re now trying to eliminate?

What if You Can’t Find a Replacement?

Sometimes nothing will come to mind. Ask your friends about their hobbies and social groups. A new adventure could be just the ticket. If you can’t find a good lead among your friends, a stroll through the yellow pages or the downtown may be the answer. Just meeting new people can snap you out of a rut. Any change has the potential to put you on a positive track.

Like any efforts at self improvement, you must act now. Planning to make a change someday gets you nowhere. Work out what you need to do and do it now.

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

Do you feel like you’re doing all the right things and getting all the wrong results? If you’re the only one who knows what you’re going for, there’s a good reason you aren’t seeing good results.

Your Job

If you have a job as a graphic artist, for example, and help out with technical documentation on your own time, don’t expect to be offered a technical writer position. Promotions are offered in line with your current job. You need to be explicit about what you want. Let the managers who work with technical writers know that you want to switch roles. Get their advice and take assignments from them. Study what they tell you to study to get ready for any required tests and to prepare for the change.

Keep track of everything you do to prepare for the role you want and you will be ready if the company happens to be one that blocks role changes. The same studies, practice and certifications that would have gotten you what you wanted in your current company can help you get into the role in a different company.

Your Entrepreneurial Sideline

I’ll continue with the graphic artist example. Let’s say you want to go into freelance graphic design and leave your day job. If the only thing you do is apply for graphic design work on freelance job boards, you won’t get anywhere. Work you do for others usually can’t be used as an example of your work (you’ve sold the rights) and you sure can’t use examples from your day job. You’re not asking for what you want. You’re settling for what you can get.

A better approach is to create examples of your work that you can use to show off what you can do. If you want to use the internet, you can put your examples on the same website where you advertise your services. In the real world, you can have the examples available for when clients drop by.

Your Relationships

If you keep making new friendships in the same places you’ve always gone to find friends to drink with, don’t expect to find people interested in business. And the reverse too, if you want friends you can unwind with. You’re setting yourself up to fail. Go to the places where people with similar needs would go. If you want to become an entrepreneur, go to business association meetings. If you want to quit drinking, go to A. A. If you want to become a carpenter, go to trade school. You’ve got to get the ball rolling yourself. Nobody else is going to come along and make your dreams happen.

Now is the Only Time

Make a new commitment to your intentions. Learn. Do. Be. Practicing the life and career you want produces new learning opportunities and improves your abilities at your craft. Immersion in your work keeps it always on your mind and it will come up in conversations. Meeting with others is an opportunity to increase your community and collaborators. Sometimes you will be surprised at who can help you.

Don’t make plans for the future. Make plans for today. Start now.

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

You As Victim

You make yourself a victim when you see yourself as acted upon by other people. When you believe your life is out of your control, you become passive and things happen to you. You feel sorry for yourself because you can’t do anything about the events that decide your fate. You find yourself looking for pity from others because of the bad situation you have no control over.

As a victim, your success depends on what other people think. You become a people pleaser because you think it is your only hope of success. Your goals go nowhere as you help others fulfill theirs.

Why Would You Want to Be a Victim?

As a victim, you have little responsibility because you aren’t the active agent. You don’t need to take charge and do anything. You can coast through life.

You also get sympathy from others. They worry about you because of the tough time you keep having.

Being a victim makes it seem like you must be in the right. The others who are giving you a hard time are bad people. If you’re in the right, why change?

You As Victor

To get out of victim mode, you must become the active agent of your life. Do you think you can’t follow your dreams because you have a full time job? What kind of place are you working? Most jobs are only 40 hours a week. You have more spare time than work time. Use that spare time to educate yourself, practice and earn money pursuing your own chosen life goals.

More good things will happen to you when you are actively pursuing your goals. The people you meet along the way to your dreams are on a similar journey. Positive relationships will develop and help you grow.

Helping yourself is more effective than relying on others. There’s an old saying, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”

Your New Mindset

Part of no longer being a victim is losing your thoughts about how others have taken advantage of you. You have spent too much time thinking about how other people have affected your life. Look at your own decisions. Forget the part where others have interfered with your plans. You are going to take charge and keep moving your plans forward whether others are on board or not. You don’t need outside validation.

An important part of this forgetting is forgetting the people who have made you a victim. You must forgive them so that you can stop thinking about them. After all, feeling negative towards other people makes you feel negative toward yourself. By being the active agent, you will feel positive about others and yourself.

You will replace that wasted thinking time with more useful creative time planning your future. If you must examine your past, look at your successes, your careers and educational achievements. Your past choices say a lot about where you want to go, what you want to become. Move your focus from past to future.

As a self-starter, success depends on what you do and how you feel about your accomplishments. Make plans and follow them. Don’t expect everything to come together overnight. It won’t. Break your plan down into as many steps as possible and achieve them one at a time.

With your new outlook, when others get in the way you will choose new others. You are the active agent. When others are not dependable, they can be replaced. You are not their victim. They have failed to do their part. You will sometimes have to fire your boss, by changing jobs. They can’t be part of your plan, but there will be others that align with your plans. Never give up. Keep working on your dreams. Even if you temporarily can’t move forward, move sideways and keep practicing where you are now.

Work on your dreams for long enough and they will become reality.

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

Social anxiety is a fear of social situations where you may be evaluated by others. You don’t know what other people are thinking or how they may react to you. That element of mystery should make socializing interesting. If you have social anxiety, you experience fear instead of excitement.

The Cause

Part of the problem is going over bad memories of past social events. This builds up your social failures in your imagination. When you don’t deliberately choose your memories, you will recall more failures than successes. It’s human nature.

Another element of social anxiety is focusing on yourself instead of the situation. This increases performance anxiety and you don’t react well. You’re not paying good enough attention to the other person.

You fail because you fear failing.

The Cure

To reduce social anxiety, remember successful social situations. For example, you want to introduce yourself to someone who looks interesting at a large social gathering. The first thing you think of is the last person who got offended when you approached them. You go over it again and again in your mind. You decide approaching that stranger is not worth the risk.

Now imagine taking a different approach. You remember the introduction that went bad and put it out of your mind. How? Think of a time when you introduced yourself to someone new and it went well. Think over that encounter as many times as you need to and then go make a new friend.

And if it doesn’t go well? The other person has a social disorder. You’re fine because you’ll try talking to a different stranger right away. Some small talk is fine. You don’t need to make a new friend every time you talk to a stranger, just be friendly.

What if you’ve had a bad experience every time you’ve tried to make a new friend? You need to keep trying until you create a positive memory that you can use to make it easier in the future. The best place to start is in social situations where you have a higher chance of success. Large family gatherings and social groups where you all share the same interests are a great place to build positive memories of first encounters.

Public Speaking

Maybe your anxiety is limited to public speaking. That can be an especially tough social anxiety to get over. There are many books dealing with becoming good at public speaking. Most of them assume you’ve already conquered your fear. I’ll walk you through the steps I learned and used to overcome my own fear of public speaking.

  1. Prepare some material to present to a group at a later date.
  2. Learn your speech. Don’t memorize what you will say. Read it over until you have a good idea of all the points you want to make.
  3. Give the speech to an empty room without looking at your notes. You’ll miss some points. Review your notes and do it again. Repeat this step until you can give the speech and cover all of your main points.
  4. Give the speech to one or two supportive listeners. Repeat this step until you are comfortable. If your listeners get tired of the speech, find more volunteers. You may feel some anxiety. Think of it as excitement and it will be a lot easier to take. With practice, you will be able to interpret it as excitement all of the time.
  5. Expand your audience. Try to work your way up to larger and larger groups. Eventually, you will be able to give your speech to so many people that the size of the group no longer matters.

The key is practicing every step until you are no longer nervous. Once again, you are creating good memories to relieve social anxiety. And that’s what life’s all about, isn’t it? Good memories.

Extreme Social Anxiety

If your social anxiety is so bad that you can’t have a normal life, you should consider professional help. Search Google for “Help Line Your City” and click a health link with a local or toll free number. If they can’t help directly, they will refer you to someone who can.

To reduce the anxiety of calling for help, imagine that you’ve already done it and the person on the other end was cheerful and helpful. Those are the kind of people who work on help lines. Imagine having a good phone call as many times as you need to and then make the call.

Any form of anxiety can be reduced by taking small steps toward feeling comfortable with the feared object. As you notice nothing bad happening, you will become more confident and continue to grow out of your fear.

Even if you don’t feel you have social anxiety, how comfortable are you in social situations? When is the last time you made a new friend? When is the last time you talked to a stranger? What can you do to become more socially outgoing today?

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

I’m going against my usual article style and talking about my own goals in this one. I think some concrete examples are called for.

Ten years ago, I received an old 386 PC as compensation for some bookkeeping I had done for a small business. At the time, I was using an Atari 2200 computer, so this was an interesting change. The Atari had a GUI but the 386 did not. It came with all of it’s original manuals. I read them all and tried everything. It amazed me how much more I could do with this black and white text-only machine. I saw a lot of potential there and had an idea.

1. I will study the basics of all areas of computers.
2. I will study programming and become a programmer.

These became my new goals, ahead of my writing aspirations. I was working in a french fry plant at the time. A month later, I bought a PC running Windows and moved to a bigger city. A year later, I was a tester in a multinational software company. Eight years later, I quit my software testing job. It was making me depressed. What went wrong?

Steve Pavlina would say it was because it was a job (10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job). He makes a lot of good points in that article, yet all of those problems didn’t matter while I was successfully completing the first of those two goals.

1. I will study the basics of all areas of computers.

That was a big goal. I had no idea just how big until I had read a few textbooks. There was no time limit in my plan. When I had learned the basics of all areas of computers, I continued to study. I overdid this goal. I knew more about some areas than people with degrees in the field. There were several projects I proposed, someone with a computer science degree said it couldn’t be done, and then I would do it.

2. I will study programming and become a programmer.

Pride kept me from moving on to the next goal. I wanted to keep getting better at everything to do with computers. Programming was part of my general studies but I failed to move on to the next step. Once I accepted the first goal as my job, most of the problems Steve Pavlina mentions became real. It was only a matter of time before I would leave the software testing job.

Now I needed to modify my life goals by removing computers from my life plan. I’ve added the other major goals here.

1. I will study the basics of all areas of computers.
2. I will study programming and become a programmer.
3. I will build up an investment portfolio so I don’t need a job.
4. When I don’t need a job any more, I will write novels.
5. I will write nonfiction books.
6. I will write about how to achieve success and happiness.

This certainly shows my real interests. I’ve been writing for over 25 years. I’ve been studying psychology for over 35 years and have a degree in it.

But the new goal set also needs a path. The list above is just three variations of writing. Where are the steps?

I spent the next two years writing like it was my only mission in life. I produced a lot of work but where was it going? Looking at your past is a great way to find your strengths. Fifteen years ago, I wrote a manuscript about our search for meaning and showed how all of the different humanities disciplines were talking about the same thing. It was too academic. I needed real world experience to make it useful.

I set new goals for myself. They were a bit different at first, but here’s how they stand now.

1. Learn to write at least 1000 words every day.
2. Start a free WordPress blog and learn how to blog.
3. Start my own psychology website and increase my article writing.
4. Keeping writing nonfiction books and sell them as ebooks.
5. Keep writing novels and sell them to publishers.
6. Re-evaluate my goals.

How would I keep these large multi-step goals from taking over and becoming my only goal? I didn’t want a repeat of the general computer studies. I set time limits.

I will keep working on each goal for at least a month and no more than a year before moving on to the next goal.

I was already writing over 1000 words a day on any day I chose to write. I had started a free WordPress blog in September of 2009. With my new plan in mind, I began taking my writing blog seriously in November. I experimented with it. I would post more often, less often, go off topic, publish a fiction article, I even brought psychology into some writing posts.

With the one year mark fast approaching, I prepared for the next step. I would start my own psychology website. You’re reading it now. It’s just another free website, but there’s nothing wrong with that. By October of 2011, my goal will become publishing my first nonfiction ebook.

What does all this have to do with you? I’m hoping you won’t make the mistake I made with the first list of goals. The milestones within my first goal kept growing until they became the only thing I was focused on. The simple introduction of a time limit on my major goals was all it took to break that limitation.

I hope this article has been some help. I didn’t mean to reveal so much about my own goals, but the deed is done.

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.