Scott H Young

What are your anti-goals for the next year? If a goal is a decision to achieve something in the future, an anti-goal would be a decision not to achieve something else. While you may not give a lot of thought to what your anti-goals are, they are something you need to have. A goal is meaningless unless you also determine what you are not going to work on as a consequence.

You can’t do everything. Becoming a millionaire, meeting the person of your dreams, and competing in the Olympics might be possible, but it’s unlikely you would be able to do them all at once. Setting a focus for the next year means that you need to define what you aren’t going to focus on.

Choosing an Anti-Focus

Picking what you aren’t going to do might sound limiting. If you decide to get in shape the next year, that doesn’t mean you should let your business crash or stagnate. But this isn’t want picking an anti-goal means. It simply means that you are selecting areas of your life that you aren’t going to devote attention and energy towards improving.

With myself I’ve decided to make this business my emphasis for the next year. I’ve decided that it is on the verge of being able to support me full-time, and several months of hard work can push it over that point. But it selecting this emphasis, this also means I won’t focus on my health, relationships and other skills.

Overloaded With Goals

I’ve found it easy to overload yourself with too many goals across too many areas at the same time. Trying to do everything at once defeats the entire purpose of goals. A goal serves like a magnifying glass, focusing you on one direction. But if you place several goals in different directions, you spread your attention too thin.

Reaching an Ignition Point

How long would it take to set a piece of paper on fire in midday sun? The paper could stay there for hundreds of years and never catch fire because the heat never reaches a critical threshold. But if you put a magnifying glass, the paper can start to singe in just a few minutes.

I like to see goals as working the same way. Spreading yourself over five areas doesn’t necessarily mean that improvement will be one-fifth as fast across all five areas as it would be if you just focused on one goal. There are times when a complete focus might only improve twice as much as spreading over five areas. But there are also times when a complete focus might improve a hundred times.

Investing your focus isn’t like investing your money. Although there are some similarities, you won’t find stocks that have a 6% return when you invest 50$ and a 200% return if you invest 300$.

I always strive to reach ignition points with my goal setting. That is, investing my focus and time in such a way that it create the biggest impact. A magnifying glass might warm paper in one second and set it on fire in the next. The difference in temperature might only be a few degrees, but the effect is dramatic.

Integrity in the Moment

The future is never certain. You might decide to focus on your health when an amazing business opportunity comes up. You might be focusing on your business and meet a person who you want to start a relationship with. Deciding whether to keep your original focus or switch takes integrity and decision-making.

A focus shouldn’t become a chain, binding you to a goal when other opportunities make it foolish. But at the same time, it needs to be strong enough to keep wandering.

What are your goals and focuses for 2008? More importantly, what have you decided to put on hold to invest the extra energy?

From the Web

Bottom-Up Personal Development - One of the best articles I’ve read in the last few weeks, this is another one by Brad of 30sleeps. Bottom-up personal development means working on building the right habits and skills that work towards any goal. This type of self-improvement has been a priority for myself over the past few years as I’ve worked to slowly engineer the habits and skills I want.

Litany Against Gurus - I hate guru-worship and everything it implies. No person is perfect or can be seen as the answer to every problem. Occasionally I’ll get overwhelmingly positive e-mails from readers who praise everything I write. I’ll also get hate mail from people who don’t feel I have the authority to write about productivity, motivation or some other topic. I think both of these responses come from the same broken notion that sharing ideas belongs in the hand of a few elite experts, rather than regular people.

From the Archives

Enthusiasm - An early article I wrote about the benefits of being in an enthusiastic mood and ways you can encourage more enthusiasm in yourself.

From the Shelf

Faust - I finished reading the first part of this classic German poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It deals with the struggle of the protagonist, Faust, in his battle with the demonic Mephistophilus over his soul. Faust sells his soul to the devil on the condition that the devil can have his soul if he experiences a moment of true happiness, which Faust believes, will never come. I was disappointed to discover the version I had only contained the first part, so I’ll need to wait to get my hands on second half to finish the story.