Category: Personal Development

It has been over a month since I gave up the steady paycheck of the day job and pursued GBGames as a full-time business. Between moving, settling into my new home and office, and watching the World Cup, I’ve decided not to hit the ground running. Basically, I was taking a small break. I decided that I was fine with using up some of my savings to take a vacation from work and to get my head clear. After all, working for years at a day job, you are bound to pick up bad habits, right? B-)

As a game developer, though, there’s only so much time I can stay away, and I’ve been looking forward to starting work. The problem was that each day I would find myself feeling a bit anxious whenever I sat at my computer.

What makes me a bit anxious, however, isn’t just the knowledge that I’ll need to start working in earnest on my business. Yes, getting income and soon is very important and will be urgent sooner rather than later. If I don’t start earning money soon, my burn rate will eat through my savings more quickly than I’d like. But I knew that fact before, and I’m not worried about it yet.

What makes me feel anxious is that I didn’t know what to do. Not that I didn’t know what I COULD do. I had lots of projects and items on lists. I know what I wanted to do. The question is: what SPECIFICALLY should I do? What do I dedicate my time and effort to, and what do I put off until later? What should I do today, this week, this month, this year?

A good question to ask

I got a lot of insight into how to answer those questions by asking another one: “What would a successful day look like?” On its own, a day can mean nothing, but together with lots of other days, it could mean the difference between a life well-spent or a life wasted. So how do you know what a successful day looks like?

The answer is simple: if it was spent getting you to a successful week!

Of course, that begs another question: how do you know what a successful week is? The answer to this one is also simple. If that week was spent getting you to a successful month, then it was a good week!

And you can recurse all the way through successful quarters, years, decades, and life. Once you know what a successful year looks like, it’s easier to break it down into what successful quarters look like, and then it is easier to see what successful months look like, and so on. The long view sharpens the short view.

In My 16 Answers, question #16 asks “What does busy look like?” and part of my answer is as follows:

But, if I can identify goals I want to accomplish, and if I make sure to do those activities that will help me accomplish those goals, then I can know whether I’m being busy or wasting time.

Science fiction author Robert Heinlein is credited with the following statement:

In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.

When you work a day job, someone else gives you your goals. The company has already determined what products and services to offer, and you get to help create them. Easy.

When you are an indie, you’re the one who has to determine what products and services to offer. And it isn’t as simple as saying “I know how to program in Java, so I’ll create Java games.” It’s also not as simple as “Lots of people are playing farm simulations on Facebook. I’ll make a farm simulation for Facebook.” Besides doing an assessment of your own skills, you need to determine what the market wants. And in the end, if you expect to be fulfilled in any way, you have to know that what you’re doing is in line with your own purpose or mission.

Let’s say you want to educate children with games. Without knowing your goals or purpose, you could be sitting at your computer and randomly deciding between reading child psychology blogs, checking email, studying a game development article, chatting online, blogging, or programming. And from day to day, you wouldn’t have a sustained focus, so by the end of five years, you might not have even one game finished.

Now let’s say that your goals include creating five educational games over the course of the next five years. You know you need to create roughly one game per year to accomplish this goal. Before you create your first game, you want to do market research. Perhaps today would be the day to do some market research to find out what educational games are already offered to potential customers. Tomorrow you’ll play and analyze a few of those games. The next day, you’ll research the competition. At the end of the week, you’ll have a lot of information about your market. And perhaps that week was part of an overall month dedicated to determining what your first project should be.

In order to know what a successful day or any other time period is, you need to know what your goals are. Once you’ve set goals, it becomes much easier to know what you should focus your attention on at any given moment. Otherwise, you’re spending your time performing daily trivia. What’s worse, you won’t even know you’re wasting your time since you feel busy.

Do you find yourself busy without purpose? Have you found goal-setting helps give you a sense of direction in your daily activities?

(Photo: Useless Fountain by Milestoned | CC-BY-2.0)

Every year, especially around New Year’s Eve, people notice something about their lives that they don’t like. Maybe someone doesn’t like seeing the extra inches around his waist. Perhaps someone else doesn’t like the size of her savings account. Whether it has to do with health, wealth, or quality of life, these people identify something they don’t like and decide to do something about it.

They set goals such as:

• I’m going to lose 25 lbs by summer.
• I want to have half a million dollars before I retire.
• I want to live in a bigger apartment.

When people set goals, they have good intentions. They may even write down their goals. For a weight loss goal, perhaps that goal is placed on the fridge as a reminder. Perhaps that first week might be filled with exercise at the gym, and the goal setter might be filled with energy and motivation.

Too often, though, what happens for many people is that they soon forget the goals they set. The person who wants to lose weight might find that he has a hard time waking up one morning, and so he skips going to the gym that day. And he might go to the gym the next day. But soon enough, another tough morning comes. And then another. And he might find the habit of going to the gym daily gets scaled back to only a few days a week. Eventually, without realizing it, he won’t be going to the gym at all, and he’ll be back to living his life the way he did before he set the goal.

And the same goes for any goal. Perhaps the person who wants to save $500,000 gets excited about saving a bit of money each time she gets paid, but it’s possible that there are plenty of bills that need paying and the morning coffee isn’t too much money and someone’s birthday is coming up. She might find that saving money is just too hard, and eventually she falls out of the habit.

A year later, these people might look back and realize that they haven’t made any progress on their goals. And for some people, they might have a lot of goals that they are failing to achieve at once. Insert guilt and frustration here. I’ve been there, and odds are, you’ve been there, too.

So what can you do? I recently realized a few ways to make goal achievement easier:

1. Focus on only a few goals, not a billion!
2. Make those goals vivid!
3. Keep your attention on those goals!

Focus on only a few goals!

This one was tough for me to internalize. I have a billion interests. I have a day job. I have an indie video game development business. I write for this blog. I play soccer. I have friends and family I want to spend time with. I am the Charter Executive for the Association of Software Professionals Games Special Interest Group. I want to weight about 15 lbs less than I do. I want a nicer apartment. I have a ton of papers I want to shred, a set of online business courses to finish taking, books to read, a ukelele to build and learn how to play, a printer to setup…Yeah, I’m busy! B-)

I used to keep all of these projects on a list, which is good in that they won’t fall through the cracks or become forgotten, but I always felt like I wasn’t making progress. One day I’d write a blog post, but I wouldn’t have time to work on my game development projects. I’d go to the gym and run for an hour, but then I’d be too tired to read that business book I’ve been meaning to finish. I’d do some actions related to one project, such as taking the online business course, but then feel like other things weren’t getting done, so I’d switch my focus to something else.

Eventually, I realized that my approach wasn’t working. My attention was spread too thin, rendering me ineffective at everything. I felt frustrated, and life just wasn’t fun. I felt like I needed to constantly be “on”. Watching TV, playing video games, reading for leisure, spending time with friends: they all felt like ways I was procrastinating doing all of the work that I knew had to get done. As the psychologist William James once said, “Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” And I had a lot of those!

If I was going to accomplish anything meaningful, I needed to focus on it until it was done. After all, if it was the most important thing for me to do, why spend time on anything else? Isn’t that just procrastination?

At the start of the new year, I identified a few major goals that I wanted to accomplish this year. Not 50. Not 100. I came up with four goals, and I have since reduced them to three. At any given moment, I know that if I should be doing anything, it is in service to to accomplishing those three goals.

Why so few? Because I need focus if I want to see these goals accomplished. Focusing on a billion goals is the same as having no focus at all.

Make those goals vivid!

There are good ways to define goals, but there are also bad ways to do so. If you search online for tips about setting goals, you’ll inevitably come across the acronym SMART, and you’ll also come across articles suggesting that it is outdated. Whatever you decide to do, write your goal so that it gives you energy to think about it. Boring goals won’t motivate you.

“I want to lose weight” is a lame goal. It has no energy behind it. There’s no vision. It’s just a weak prayer. A better version: “I want to lose 15 lbs in three months.” It’s better partly because of the details, but it could be improved. How about this one?

“I am achieving a healthy, optimal weight that makes me look sexy and feels vibrant. I easily reach a weight of XYZ lbs.”

Achieving! Healthy! Optimal! Sexy! Vibrant! Easily! These words make the goal FEEL awesome! Just think about the way that goal is written in the last example. It’s a lot harder to forget than “I want to lose weight”, isn’t it?

You want your goals to fire up your imagination, and you want to imagine what success looks and feels like. It might sound silly, but this activity is key. I allow myself to enjoy the good feelings that come from immersing myself in these goals as if they are already achieved. This isn’t just fantasy or navel-gazing. Imagining that your success is already accomplished actually helps you accomplish those goals! If you can convincingly feel that your accomplished goal is real, your subconscious can go to work making it happen.

Of course, if you do the work to create a goal that inspires you, it would be a shame to forget about it.

Keep your attention on those goals!

I’ve had a problem declaring goals and not following up on them. For example, when it came to making time for regular game development each week, I have historically been pretty bad at it. Tracking it through the Thousander Club, I could see just how bad it was, and at the start of each year, I would say, “This is it! This is the line in the sand! I did badly before, but I will change my ways completely!” The next thing I know, it’s December, and I realize that I am nowhere near 1,000 hours of game development.

If your goals are important to you, you need to dedicate the time to thinking about them. It’s too easy to forget about your goals when you’re drowning under obligations and interests pulling you in multiple directions.

Some people suggest writing down your goals every day. I don’t like the idea of throwing away hundreds of index cards throughout the year, so I wrote them down once, but every morning I make an effort to think about those three goals. I read the statements, and because they are vivid and striking, it is easy to imagine them being real. I’m healthy and look great. I’m living in a comfortable, secure home. My business is successful and profitable.

Every morning, I make the time to quietly think about my three main goals for the year, and it is time well spent. These are goals I really care about, and I don’t want to forget them just because urgent tasks distracted me. And the more I think about them, the easier it is to remember them. It’s a nice feedback loop. And as I make progress on these goals, they just get further reinforced.

So make the time! It can take mere minutes each morning to visualize your goals. Set up reminders. If you don’t need reminders to accomplish your goals, that’s great. If you are like me, get into the habit of setting aside time to think about your goals daily.

Does this visualization really work?

To give an example of how amazing it is to focus on a vivid vision, one time I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to own a Lamborghini. I never really cared about cars before, and this was purely for fun. These cars cost as much as a house, so it would feel pretty wealthy to own one. They turn heads. I could wear shades as I drove down the street. I could show up at parties, and the valet would be excited to get the opportunity to park my car. I didn’t really want such an impractical car, but as far as pretending I was rich enough to own one, why not? It was just for fun.

But you know what I started seeing a lot more of? Corvettes. I saw them everywhere. Sometimes I would see four or five before I’ve traveled a mile! People around me talked about Corvettes. I learned that there were some for sale near my home. I went to a bed and breakfast in the middle of the countryside in Wisconsin, and even there I saw a yellow Corvette outside of the restaurant I went to eat at! It turned out that there was even a Corvette car show in town. It was surreal.

I’m not saying that I manifested Corvettes by thinking about cool cars, although some people will talk about the Law of Attraction at work here. I personally think that I was merely noticing these cars more since I had trained my subconscious to look for awesome cars. They were probably always there, but I hadn’t cared about them enough to notice before.

Regardless of what you believe, making it a habit to vividly imagine your goals will help you recognize opportunities to make those visions a reality. Now, the three points I described above aren’t enough to get you to achieve your goals, but if you’ve ever experienced the frustration of realizing that goals you set a year prior were completely forgotten, they should help you keep your goals at the forefront of your mind, show you how realistic they are, and make it easier to achieve them.

Have you had difficulty coming up with ambitious dreams? Do you find yourself constantly ignoring possibilities, thinking that you couldn’t do or be enough?

Last week, in an effort to give back to my old high school, I joined a number of other alumni in giving presentations to the freshmen and sophomore men. The organizer’s two main goals for these presentations:

1. To reach out to those students who are on the fence about the possibility of going to college.
2. To encourage those students who are planning on going to college to try to go to the best college they can.

I took the big picture idea to be: dream big.

My presentation focused on my own uncertainty during my time in high school. I didn’t know what to expect after high school ended. To make it worse, my fear of the unknowns of college and my future kept me from creating a plan. In the end, things worked out better than I ever expected. I finished by asking the students to embrace possibility, ignore mediocrity, and dream big.

What I didn’t realize until after I had given the presentation four or five times that day is that there seemed to be a pattern with my ability to embrace change which probably made all the difference in my life.

Anytime there was some challenge or opportunity, I would think, “I can do it.”

I was in student council. I was Homecoming King. I took drawing, painting, and accounting classes rather than take a free period. I was editor of the school paper. I was in the honors program, received great grades, and was a member of the National Honor Society. I organized an all-day event to replace a discontinued annual event instead of leaving a gap. After high school, I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science along with two minors: mathematics and microelectronics. I started my own indie video game business. I tried out for the Chicago Fire soccer team.

I didn’t list those accomplishments to toot my own horn. My point was that in each case, the idea that I could actually DO it was natural to me.

That isn’t to say that actually DOING these things were easy. As editor of the school paper, I only published four issues out of the entire year, and I managed to get the paper in trouble with the school administration (it’s better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission?). Going for two minors along with my major took me five years instead of four. Forming GBGames, LLC took me months longer than it should have.

But because I thought I COULD do it, I eventually found a way. It would have been easy to ignore the fact that the Chicago Fire was holding open tryouts. I hadn’t played soccer in 10 years. The odds of me suddenly becoming a professional soccer player were very slim indeed. Why bother?

I’ll tell you why. The barrier to entry was laughable. I pretty much had to sign my name on an application form and send in a small fee. Bam. I was one of the 156 people who tried out, and I got to play soccer with some of the best and brightest amateur soccer players from around the world. I had no illusions that I was going to get called back for the 2nd or 3rd days of the tryouts, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that with my attempt, I had a blast, and now I have this great story to tell people. How many people do you know that can say they tried out for a professional soccer team?

But I never would have even bothered looking up the application process if I didn’t think that I could do it.

So if I could that presentation again, I’d sum up everything with “Believe you can do it.”

If you internalize that thought and apply it to every opportunity you care about, you can’t help but be more ambitious. Why settle for a dead-end job when you could go to college? Why settle for a community college when you could find scholarships, grants, and loans to send you to the best college you can find? Why settle for any relationship you can get when you can find a fulfilling one? Why settle for mediocrity when, with a little thought and effort, you could attain awesomeness?

What is your pattern for approaching possibilities, challenges, and opportunities? Do you surrender immediately to the idea that you can’t, or do you generally feel confident that you can?

(Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanlight/62314517/ | CC BY 2.0)