This week is centered around life advice from Aki’s dad, my almost father in law.
1) Outline ambitious goals and then find solutions to them
The easiest way to guide and organize your life is to write out some ambitious goals and think of what you need to achieve them. As with passions, the easiest goals are the simplest ones – you want to double your salary, for instance, or double your productivity. People who think in terms of paths usually just find reasons why they can’t do something. What you want to think is where you want to go and what you need to get there. The road may be long but breaking it down into short, achievable goals is how you get there.
2) Don’t be casual in your goals
Choose your goals and commit to something, that’s what life is. It doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be right freaking now, but the worst thing you could do to yourself is just la-la-la pick a career out of a hat. But like most things in life, it’s better to choose early than to let life choose for you. Because you could wake up tomorrow 40 and in a job that you hate but can’t escape.
3) The road beyond excellence: taking risks
Everyone knows the road to excellence – hard work, dedication, good habits, etc. But once you get there, there’s nobody to hold your hand and tell you the right way to go. You have to make up your own path and sometimes that means taking risks. Education is important because it teaches you how to think, but it isn’t indoctrination. It shouldn’t kill intuition, it should just kill bad intuition. Just realize that at a certain point, there’s a transition from student to leader, and that means beyond college, you should be building the blocks to things like creativity and inspiration.
Goals from the week:
1) Fell a bit short of 200 quiz questions but close enough
2) Fell short on the pullups (no bar in LA) but got the pushups and situps
3) Finished Wicked. Did not like.
Verdict: Not too shabby, but too many holes in the record. Have to blog more often.