When you fly a plane, and you are headed to a destination, there are many forces that are working against that plane, and they constantly push it off course. Gravity, the rotation of the earth, wind, weather patterns, all of it could make that plane go off course. The entire time, the pilots are working to keep the craft on course, so they can land at the destination.
If the pilots acted the way I acted for over 30 years of my life, they would just say, well, we were supposed to go to Tampa, but here we are in New Orleans, enjoy your stay – we will be happy to try again some other time.
Whenever life pushed me around, I just went with the flow. I thought it was cool. I thought it made me easygoing. I’ve spoken before about getting 3 rejection letters and saying, “Okay, I guess I wasn’t cut out to be a songwriter.” When I did this, I let life decide my course for me – and I spent most of my life doing this. The jobs I got were the jobs my dad found for me. The women I dated when I was younger were there by chance, and I put no effort into dating, we just stumbled upon each other at a time when we were both looking for a mate, shrugged our shoulders and started dating. I only did what was easy, and I think the majority of this was because I didn’t have any clear-cut solid goals that I was going after.
If my plane to Tampa ended up in New Orleans, I would have shrugged my shoulders and said, “Okay, I’ll probably have fun here too.”
The point of all of this is that I didn’t need to do any course correction because I had no real destination. I was okay with wherever I landed.
Now, my goals are solid, I know what I want, I know where I want to get to. And that might change as time goes on, but for now, I am moving toward a solid concept of what I want my life to be. I’m living with the conviction of certainty – which means my destination is more like going to the moon. You see, you can miss Tampa and end up in New Orleans, and that’s not a big deal. But you don’t want to miss the moon.
My goals are now like the moon. And because I have a destination, it become a simple thing to revise my mindset, my actions, my skills, my reflections – I can ask myself often, “Am I still headed to this destination, or do I need to correct my course?”
If the answer is that I need to course correct, I’d better do it soon, before I get even more off course, before it gets harder and harder, and ignore the voice that says, “It’ll be okay if you miss the destination. We’ll be okay.”
Let’s say that you were a website designer, and you wanted to make some money. You can be assured that if you send out 20 proposals, you’re going to pick up at least one client. And let’s say that you decided that you wanted to make a certain amount of money per month, and that amount meant that you had to pick up 4 clients a month. You can do that math and say that means you have to send out 80 proposals a month. So twenty proposals a month, weekdays only, we will say that’s 4 each day you have to send out – to achieve your goal.
Remember that, this would be YOUR goal, nobody is forcing you to this number, or the amount that you decided you wanted to make.
Now let’s say just one more thing about this. You reflect after the week is over, and you ask yourself, “How many proposals did I send out?” And your answer is “Well, on Monday I wrote one, but the grass was growing so I had to get out there and mow it, and…the rest of the week I got pretty busy…” The real answer here is one. You sent out one proposal. That means that every twenty weeks you will get a client. So less than three clients a year.
It’s time for a course correction. Look at the results, look what you’ve done, and most of the time it is easy to see how you can course correct, just by doing what you planned in the first place. So you can reflect, “How can I make sure that I make those 4 proposals every single day, so that I’m where I say I want to be?
Keep your eyes on your goal, and when you reflect, think about your actions in light of your goals – how can you course correct your actions to get the results you want?
Take each of your goals, and look at your own activity in relation to the goals, and see where you can tweak the course a little bit so that you don’t end up in New Orleans, or even worse, so that you don’t miss the moon.
