Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Around the World

I recently had lunch with a friend just before she was about to take off on an around-the-world journey. I was envious. We had talked previously about goals, something she knew I believed was important. But, more importantly, goals were something her Dad believed in. She put it simply, "It may seem cheezy, but this 'goal' thing works." I found it interesting that she had to include the "cheezy" disclaimer to me, a reader and listener of those same books, as if to say, "you know, I'm not some crazy, self-helf zealot."

That encounter made me realize two things:

First, having goals and putting them out there for the world to hear (I'm thinking of Gary Vaynerchuk's claim that he WILL buy the NY Jets) is a something that I believe can work for anyone and that more of us should embrace (I'm telling myself to be more vocal as I write). None of us should ever feel they need to defend our desires to strive for difficult goals with a line like, "I know it sounds cheezy, but..."

Second, we parents need to model goal-setting for our kids to really make it stick. This is important because modeling is how kids learn. They "do what we do, not what we say" (unless of course we do what we say). As I've noted in this blog many times, goal-setting for kids is a path to learning to save.

So put your goals out there for all to see. Have your kids to the same.

See where that takes you.

Around the world, maybe?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

John - I think you are spot on about goal setting. Another way to think about this (keeping with the theme of travel) is that if you don't know where you are going you may eventually find your way but if you know exactly where you want to end up you will find the shortest path to get there.

Thanks for the great post.

Best,

Brad
http://www.MulaMoo.com