Category Archives: The Big Picture

The big picture which gives us the context for goals, and indeed, life itself.

Navigating my blog

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Thanks for stopping by my blog. After an intensive six months of blogging, I’m taking a break to spend more time with my family and work on my next book. But wait! Don’t go. There’s plenty of interesting material on this site to keep you entertained and informed so make yourself a coffee, settle back in your chair, and keep browsing.

To make things easy, I’ve compiled a roadmap to help you find the posts most relevant for you.

My two favourite posts (and they’re very different) were An Innocent’s Introduction to Horror and The Circle of Life (which was also my very first post).

I have excerpts from Wings introducing the two main characters, Walt and Scott.

If you’re interested in how I go about writing a novel, checkout 700 words a day, Structured or Unstructured, Evolution of a Cover, or Editors: Who needs them?

Want to know more about setting and achieving goals? See Which Goals to Chase, Fear of Failure, The Daily Habit, The Importance of Being Precise, The Benefits of Lists or Post-goal Letdown.

There are also posts about the use of social media, some great interviews with other authors and even a few jokes!

Thanks again for visiting. I hope the extensive links above will help to give you an insight into writing, assist you to be more productive or simply give you a chuckle. If you’d like to give me feedback about this blog or Wings, or there’s any other questions you’d like to ask, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. My details are on the contact page.

Is there such a thing as Post-Goal Letdown?

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Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I place some importance on goal setting. (For example, see The Daily Habit, 700 Words a Day and Which Goals to Chase). However, it would be a mistake to think that I believe achieving goals is the only important thing in life.

In my experience, whenever I have put too much emphasis on any individual goal, I’ll inevitably feel a sense of post-goal let-down once I have achieved it. I don’t know if this is because chasing it has consumed so much of my time and energy that its absence leaves a gaping hole in my life when it is no longer there to pursue, or if it is simply because I can tend to build things up in my mind to be bigger than they are, or maybe because there is always something else to be done even after the loftiest of goals have been achieved. The sense of letdown may come hours, days or weeks after achieving the sought after goal, but it will surely occur.

In my mind, I think that expecting the achievement of some major goal to bring about deep satisfaction is similar to thinking that money will buy happiness. However, I’ve always found that a pay-rise, new car or new furniture has a lack of impact on my overall sense of happiness or well-being.

The bottom line? My view is that the journey is more important than the destination. If goals are the be-all and the end-all, you can miss much of the fun and interest along the way, and when you do complete a task, you’ll find it was never quite as satisfying as you envisaged it might be. But if you focus on enjoying the journey, and make sure you have a range of interests and activities in train at all times, then a life of satisfaction and achievement beckons.

The Daily Habit

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One of the problems with doing things that are good for us is that it can often be hard to summon the energy or willpower to start.

Take exercise for example. When the alarm goes off at six o’clock in the morning, the last thing you may feel like is getting up and lacing on the joggers. Smacking the alarm clock, rolling over and attempting to grab another hour of sleep may be your natural reaction.

Similarly for those who write, sitting in front of the keyboard and a blank screen can be quite a daunting prospect. At times like this, checking email, Facebook, twitter or the news may seem like a much more attractive proposition.

However, giving in to immediate temptation (whether it be sleep or email) will not help you get to where you want to go.

Someone once told me that you never feel worse after exercising. I have always found this to be true*. Similarly, there are few first drafts so bad they cannot be revised and edited into something presentable at a later date. However you can do nothing with a blank sheet of paper.

If you are shooting for a long-term goal, do keep making the right decisions to support that goal on a day by day basis, because these decisions will be habit forming. I have read that it can take a month of daily repetition for something to become a habit. The first month may be hard (particularly the second and third weeks), but if you push through it gets easier after that point. When you are struggling through these hard weeks, think about how far ahead you’ll be after three months of regular exercise or daily writing** compared to daily procrastination. After a few months, the difference between nothing and a daily something could be five or ten kilos off your weight or twenty thousand words down on paper, to say nothing of your improved sense of well-being.

The final thing I should say is that I often fall short in my attempts to maintain my daily habits so if you’ve got any tips which help you maintain your enthusiasm, I’d be interested in hearing them.

* If you were to get run over by a car whilst completing your morning jog, you probably would feel worse, so do make sure you look both ways before crossing the street.

** Insert your own benefits here, depending on what your goal and desired regular routine is.

Which goals to chase?

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Life is busy and our time is limited. How do you work out which goals to go after and which to ignore?

I try to make these major decisions in a holistic way by looking at my entire life and lifestyle so that I can prioritise between my many competing demands.

Unless you’re a professional tennis player, it’s not as simple as just choosing one goal and following it blindly. Most of us need to make our goals work in the context of a balanced life. For that reason, we need to think about goals as they relate to:

- Our family, relationships and personal life;

- Our career and study;

- Our friends;

- Our community interests; and

- Our personal pursuits such as hobbies or exercise or sport;

Every extra bit of effort we put into one of those dimensions can take focus away from another. Of course, we can often satisfy two dimensions at once. If we enjoy playing sport with our friends, that will satisfy the friendship dimension and our personal pursuit dimension.

One technique I have used is to list down each of those five dimensions in a spreadsheet, one on each row. In the first column I write down my current level of satisfaction with each dimension; in the second, I write down where I’d like it to be in the future (eg what I’d like to achieve or contribute in 1 year or 3 years time).

By considering all of the dimensions on the same sheet of paper, it means I am less likely to set unrealistic goals in any single dimension. If I want to chase one goal particularly hard, I will at least do so knowingly and can consciously choose to sacrifice one of the other dimensions.

I have found that using this technique to get the big picture right helps me plan my day to day and week to week activities, the achievement of which gradually contributes to the achievement of long term goals.

Reference: I have adapted this technique using some of the principles of “Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind,” which is explained in Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Follow the link for more information on the 7 Habits.

The Circle of Life

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My youngest son, a four month old baby, was christened a few weeks ago.

The church bulletin reported his baptism on Sunday. Also printed in the same bulletin was a section calling for prayers for the deceased. There was one name in that section – the name of Ethan’s Great Grandmother. Her name was there because this is the anniversary of her death and Ethan’s faithful Great Grandfather (also known as GGPop, short for “Great Grand Pop”) requested the inclusion of her name so she could be remembered and prayed for.

I found a certain poignancy in the fact that the bulletin announcing Ethan’s christening also commemorated GGNan’s death.

Ethan has never met GGNan. She died two decades before he was born. But Ethan is a part of her legacy.

Life goes on, and we plant and sow our seeds every day during the relatively short time we spend on this amazing planet. What legacy will we leave?