I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about goal setting. I remember back in CAPP class, we had to go through these garbage goal setting exercises that made me cringe. What a waste of time. If anything, that experience deterred me from wanting to set goals. To be honest, since then the only goals I’ve set are in sport. I guess because sport consumed most of my life.

It never crossed my mind to think about lifelong personal goals until recently. What do I want to do? How am I going to do that? These questions scare the shit out of me. This is when I started to think big. I’ve come up with some lofty goals that I won’t share now… They are ‘need to know.’

What I will say is how I am going to get there. Creatively working my ass off and investing my time and resources on things I care about and can control.

I’ve developed an interest in building communities around a brand. Social media is an amazing tool in this process. About six months ago, I made the decision to master social media. What the hell does that mean? I’m not sure either. Nonetheless, I got on my grind reading everything I could all day until my eyes wouldn’t stay open. See you later school. I had a burning motivation to learn and felt like it was only a matter of time.

How long does it take? For anyone familiar with Malcolm Gladwell. Aside from being Canadian and having amazing hair, he talks about the 10,000-Hour Rule in his book: Outliers. Long story short, it takes 10, 000 hours of work / practice to master something. That is 40 hours a week for five years. Holy shit.

I’ve got a long way to go before I master social media branding and community building, but the cool thing is that I can control that. With the amount of information on the interweb, you can learn just about anything for free, provided that you want to.

As cliché as it sounds, it’s about hard work and hustle. I already know that no one will outwork me in community building because they can’t.  I have a shitload to learn from so many different people. I’ve been given some amazing opportunities. Tons of smart people surely know more than me at this point, but I will close the gap through intelligently directed effort because that is what I can control.

Kill it on things you can control. Don’t waste your energy worrying about shit you can’t, it’s not worth your effort, not even worth your thoughts.

Do you see value in  setting personal / career goals? Do you review them regularly?

Branding, Renaissance Man, self-educatioion, self-improvement, Social Media

, , , , , ,

March 22, 2012

1 Comment