Daily Ramblings – 2020 Goals – Here We Go!

Tags

Accomplishment, Achievement, Attack!, Consistency, Goal Setting, New Year, Push Yourself, You Got This

Drum roll, please…

As promised, here are my goals for 2020.

My 2020 Goals:

• Reduce Weight to 200 lbs by year’s end (weigh-in weekly)
• 365 gym visits
• Finish Rough Draft of my first Novel
• Complete 12 Online Courses this year
• Complete Computer Science Path on Codecademy this year
• Save 1200.00 by year’s end
• Finish Yearly Religious Discourse
• Run 12 book discussions
• Read 60 books this year
• Take a personal vacation once per quarter exploring a new town each time
• Visit the library 52 times this year
• Follow 200 new blogs this year
• Attain 800 followers by year’s end
• Track goals

It will be a great year! I can’t wait to knock this stuff out. Consistency is key. Just doing a little each day can produce huge results.

What are you goals for 2020? I suggest you set a few and make them public like I do. It adds a little more pressure, and it is great how people cheer you on throughout the year once they find out what you’re trying to do.

Send me your list if you’d like or send me a link to your annual goals you post on your blog.

I wish everyone a terrific 2020, filled with love, accomplishment, good health, and success. Let’s Go!!!

Until next time…

Dave

 

 

Daily Ramblings – Motivation Monday – End of Year Recap

Tags

2020, Achievements, Failures, family, Friends, Goals, New Year, Planning, Strategy

Here I am for one day to document my goals for 2019 and how it all panned out throughout the year. When I return finally on the 2nd of January 2020, I’ll post my 2020 goals. I wanted to get this out to you before New Year’s Eve as promised. So here we go!

Physical

1. Develop a life-long workout routine for home and gym
2. Reduce Weight to 200 lbs
3. Get to your Dental Appointments
4. Get Annual Physical
5. Chiropractor monthly to keep back and joints in order
6. Eye exam

Learning

1. Complete 12 courses online this year

Financial

1. Save 1200.00 by year’s end

Spiritual

1. Complete Book discussions
2. Participate on panel at Regional
3. Participate at HI retreat if invited
4. Kick off the Art of Spiritual Dreaming
5. Complete Light and Sound Discourse
6. Send in 12 Initiate reports
7. Spiritual exercises 20 minutes per day
8. Read Shariyat (My Bible) daily

Reading

1. Complete 48 books by year’s end

Writing

1. Finish Recruiting Book this year
2. Learn outlining for nonfiction books
3. Learn outlining for novel creating steps

Blogging

1. Build followers to 1000 by year’s end

Social

1. Stay in touch with family and friends

So everything that is in red is where I fell short of my yearly goals. Here’s what I learned.

Reduce Weight to 200 lbs – Missed

Losing weight is all about calorie deficit. You won’t lose weight if you do not decrease your intake. This is hard, no doubt about it, but I’ll be adding this again to my yearly goals for 2020. I’ve purchased a food tracker and will continue to strive to build a nutritious diet that is sustainable for the long-term. If any of you have followed my blog for this year, you know I gave the KETO diet a try. It didn’t work. I lost weight, but could not sustain the diet for the long term. Back to the drawing board.

Save 1200.00 by year’s end

Again, another tough one. You would think it was easy, but when you’re on a retirement income, it is not. I have morphed my budget in the last few months that should help me with this goal. This will also go back on my list for 2020. I plan on saving more than this, but this is the goal, since I couldn’t hit it this year.

Build followers to 1000 by year’s end

Another tough one. I thought I would make it, but have just recently breached the 650 mark for followers. This will be a goal of mine again, but this year will be more realistic. I’ll shoot for 800 by year’s end 2020. I’ve got some plans to change out some of my content for the upcoming year, sticking with the topics people enjoyed and leaving aside those topic areas where no one seemed to be too interested or where I wasn’t getting the traffic I wanted.

What I’m going to keep.

I had great success in the areas of book reading, classes taken and completed, and book writing. I also knocked it out of the park on my exercise, my spiritual areas, and my social areas. I haven’t finalized what my goal list will look like yet. I’ll be thinking about those things tomorrow and New Year’s Day.

I know a lot of people have given up on setting New Year’s resolutions, because they seem to fail or lose interest after a few months. I would urge you to set them anyway. Just don’t set too many. Shoot for one or two areas you’d like to improve this year and stick with them. Who cares if you miss the mark, the key is the process of trying to meet them. It really makes life very interesting. You will also make some progress. Relish that! That’s where you can become even more motivated. When you begin to see progress in an area you want to improve, you’ll be that much more driven to keep pushing!!

One thing I discovered is that my goals were not specific enough in some areas. I will reword them this year, so they are measurable. Tracking goals is really important. To properly track them, they have to be specific metrics. You’ll see this in my upcoming goal’s list.

Well, that’s it for today! I hope all of you are having a wonderful holiday season. I did. My brother and sister came out for the holidays and it was terrific! We had a great time as a family.

Happy New Year, readers! I hope all of you have a wonderful time at the parties you are going to or hosting. I also wish each of you great happiness, adventure, love, and an outstanding 2020! Remember: You can’t lose if you don’t quit!!!

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Ted Talk Tuesday!

Tags

Benefits, Dan Dennett, Evolution, Internal Wiring, New Year, Ted Talk

 

For the first Ted Talk Tuesday of the New Year, here is a short talk provided by Dan Dennett. He explains that cute, sexy, sweet, and funny are all wired in to our brains because of evolutionary processes. It is a short and funny video.

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Spiritual Saturday

Tags

Assessment, Balance, Goal Setting, New Year, Planning, Review, Well-roundedness

Over the next few days I’m going to be reviewing 2018. I’m also going to be formulating what I want to do with my 2019. If you’ve never done this kind of exercise, I’d highly recommend it. The first challenge I ran across when I began my annual habit of re-reading good books I’ve found, was what areas to focus on?

Here are the areas I use to formulate a New Year:

Physical

• Diet Goals
• Weight-loss goals
• Exercise Goals
• Nutrition Goals

Mental

• What do I want to learn?
• How many books do I want to read?
• What podcasts do I want to watch/stop watching?
• What courses do I want to take?

Spiritual

• What spiritual practices do I want to continue?
• What do I want to do to contribute to my fellow man?
• What kindness can I spread to the world?
• What types of spiritual questions do I want to pursue an answer to?
• What spiritual books and courses do I want to take?

Social

• Where can I go to meet new people (physically)?
• Where can I go to meet new people (virtually)?
• What activities can I do to engage with people?
• How can I improve or maintain current relationships?
• How can I gain more followers to my blog?

These are just some thoughts you may be able to think about for your own review and goal setting. I like to work through exercises like this because they help me to capture what really worked previously, what didn’t work, and what I can do to keep moving forward in my life. I think the most important aspect of this exercise, along with others, that bring some semblance of order and meaning to my life.

We all want to wake up energized and anxious to get to work. As a retiree, this has become a really important thing for me. I want my retired life to be profitable, meaningful, contributing, and fulfilling. These things represent different things to different people. I would challenge you to really assess what you value. What you want to achieve. What you want to do with yourself in the next year.

As promised, I’ll be posting my finalized plan for 2019 on the 31^st of December. This was a good year. Next year will be better because I’ve built a solid foundation of writing, exercise, spiritual pursuits, and social activities. This year will be better because I am better. I have learned a great deal over the last year and look forward to begin applying all I have learned/re-learned.

I hope all of you have a terrific New Year’s Day! Take some time over the next few days and really think about all of your experiences in the last year. What did you learn? What do you want to apply to your future?

I’m excited to begin the new year and begin executing all of the things I am contemplating. I hope you have some time to figure out what you want and institute a plan that will bring all of your goals to fruition.

Until next time…

Dave