Friday Video: Do Schools Kill Creativity?
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A presentation I’ve come back to many times over the past year – a brilliant call by Sir Ken Robinson to rethink our education system and how it is currently set up to kill, rather than nurture creativity. Enjoy!
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February 4, 2010 2 Comments
London, Not Central Asia the Real Terrorist Threat
From Foreign Policy’s Reality Check,
Last month, an official told the Daily Telegraph that their country “has the greatest concentration of active al Qaeda supporters [in the West],” posing a threat to Britain and “the rest of the world.” The same article cited a fresh and ominous finding from the director of MI5. He estimated his service was aware of some 2,000 “radicalized Muslims” who might be involved in terrorist plots. That figure, of course, doesn’t include the population of plotters who have escaped MI5 scrutiny, like Abdulmutallab. As if to underline the threat, on Jan. 12, the British government banned two of the country’s most notorious Islamist organizations, Islam4UK and Al Muhajiroun, under a 2000 anti-terrorism law.
This goes back to my previous argument on why “preventing Al-Qaeda safe havens in Afghanistan” is a myopic strategy considering the nature of the opponent. Al-Qaeda is a GLOBAL terrorist organization with members scattered all over the world. I question the notion that keeping them out of one country or two (Yemen) will significantly hamper their operations.
We rarely hear our leaders discussing ways to bolster our relations with Muslims living in Western nations, yet this may be a far greater use of our time and money if we consider the above statements. I suspect the reason it doesn’t get as much chatter on the airwaves is because it goes against the existing paradigms we have concerning warfare. Simply put, few people in the American National Security apparatus feel confident operating in this “soft power” territory.
In “The Accidental Guerrilla” David Kilcullen asks the questions that come when reevaluating about these paradigms,
How, for example, do we wage war on nonstate actors who hide in states with which we are at peace, even within our own society? How do we work with allies whose territory provides safe haven for non-state opponents? How do we defeat enemies who exploit the tools of globalization and open societies, without destroying the very things we seek to protect?
Christian Caryl of the Foreign Policy article shows the real-life issues that arise as we attempt to answer these questions,
In the 1990s, policymakers desperate to address the concerns of the nation’s Muslims decided to foster the creation of Islamic umbrella groups. They also unwittingly fostered radical ones. For instance, Abdulmutallab invited extremists to speak to his college student group — but doesn’t seem to have done anything in London in contravention of British law. And he is not the only vivid illustration of how the institutions of democracy can dangerously blend with the institutions of jihadism.
Forays into the fight against radicalization in Western countries is a muddy affair at best, but its something that we’d better start figuring out soon. After all, I doubt the people of London would take to kindly to a strategy that involved firing missiles on their city from unmanned drones.
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February 4, 2010 3 Comments
Friday Video: Jeff Rubin on the End of Cheap Oil
Economist Jeff Rubin discusses the future of oil (peak oil) in an entertaining way that doesn’t take a PhD to understand. If you are a regular reader of Schaefer’s Blog this is a must-watch, even if you just watch the first 10 minutes. Basically, Rubin lays out a convincing argument why triple digit oil, translating to $6-$7 per gallon at the pump is all, but inevitable and will probably come sooner than we think. HT to Paul Kedrosky for this find.
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January 28, 2010 3 Comments
Lessons in Unsustainable Futures: GM and the DoD
In a recent Washington Independent article, Spencer Ackerman asked the all-important, but seldom asked question, “Why Should Defense Spending Be Sacrosanct?”
It’s not popular to ask this question, especially if you’re a congressman because in doing so you’re bound to be labeled as not supportive of the troops. However, the present course of the DOD is completely unsustainable. And in our current economic state ($12 trillion in debt and counting) I, like Ackerman and others, find it odd that there has been no serious talk of freezing the gargantuan DoD budget. In 2008, the US military spent more than the next 46 highest spending countries in the world combined (see here).

The spending problems come from personnel costs on one side — full retirement benefits for members who serve 20 years of active duty (most retire in their 40’s and now live well into their 80’s and beyond, a.k.a. 40 years of retirement pay), rising healthcare costs, salaries, housing pay, etc. Equipment costs on the other — planes, bullets, tanks, UAV’s and an aging fleet of …well, almost every weapon system you can think of. Just to send one combat troop to Afghanistan costs the taxpayer $1 million a year.
Almost everyone close to the organization knows we’re plowing ahead like a drunk driver headed for the cliff, but no one seems up to the task of fixing it. Worse yet, much of the leadership seems bent on simply increasing spending rather than fixing a broken system.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is making a noble effort, but the military-industrial complex is a three-headed monster, devouring every plan formed against it through strategic lobbying, creative bookkeeping and a view of the world based more on fantasy than reality.
Ackerman cites an October assessment from the CSBA’s Todd Harrison who compares the DoD to GM, explaining (emphasis mine),
Another similarity between the two is that both organizations are in a period of disruptive change in the competitive environment. In GM’s case, its market share rapidly eroded as gas prices climbed higher, the economy slowed, and consumers turned to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. GM found itself building a fleet of SUVs and trucks that consumers did not want and could not afford. Similarly, DoD now finds itself saddled with a number of weapon programs whose capabilities are ill-suited for the types of conflict the military currently faces and whose costs have risen beyond what the Department can afford. Many of the new weapons being funded today are optimized for middle-of-the- spectrum conflicts—that is, conventional, military-on-military conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm in 1991. But adversaries are well aware of the United States’ overwhelming advantage in the middle and are instead moving to either end of the spectrum: irregular warfare on one end and high-end, asymmetric warfare on the other. The challenge for DoD, as it was for GM, is that the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.
The last sentence is key, “…the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.” Much of it has to do with the huge, inflexible, bureaucratic organizational structure of the DoD as compared the nimble, decentralized, open-source structure embodied by al-Qaeda and affiliate organizations. One bans twitter, facebook and gmail while the other uses the internet train to organize its cells all over the world.
Changing the DOD’s organizational structure is one thing, putting a freeze on the defense budget is another and one that may be a bit more realistic. However, none of this is bound to change anytime soon if we insist on keeping our country in a state of perpetual war.
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. – James Madison, Political Observations, 1795
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January 27, 2010 No Comments
“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and America’s National Eating Disorder
A couple weeks ago I finally got around to reading, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan after having it recommended to me by several people. I will never look at food the same way again.
I know people make flippant remarks like that all the time, coming out of “Super Size Me” exclaiming with enraged gusto, “I’ll never eat another Big Mac!” In fact, I’m almost hesitant to make a comment like the aforementioned lest it cheapen a shift in my thinking that is actually quite real and startling even to myself. I’m being honest when I say that Pollan shook my worldview and forced me to confront an industrial food system of which I had been willfully ignorant, partaking in its cheap delicacies without understanding the repercussions. I mean, its just food right? Maybe not.
“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world — and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them. There are things in it that will ruin their appetites. But in the the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.
There was a ton of information packed away in the pages of this book, but I want to highlight two main points, discussed in the opening chapters of the book that really caused me to pause:
We are a nation of corn-eaters
“But I rarely eat corn!” you say. Do you eat any of the following:
- steak (corn is what feeds the steer)
- chicken, pork, turkey, lamb (all corn-fed)
- catfish, tilapia, salmon (all increasingly trained to eat corn)
- eggs, milk, cheese yogurt (once came from dairy cows raised on grass, now Holsteins tethered to machines, eating corn)
- soda and many juices (high-fructose corn syrup)
- beer (alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn)
- any processed food with starch, glucose syrup, maltodextrin, crystalline fructose, absorbic acid, lecithin, dextrose, lactic acid and lystine, maltose, MSG, caramel color, xanthan gum (all corn)
- Cheez Whiz, frozen yogurt, canned fruit, ketchup, frozen waffles, syrups, mayonnaise, mustard, hot dogs, salad dressing
As Pollan explains, “…the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five throusand different items of SKUs…in the supermarket…represent genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.”
So, you and I eat a lot of corn without even realizing it, but why? Because its cheap. And why is it cheap? Because the U.S. government heavily subsidizes the corn industry. As Pollan explains,
America’s farm policy was forged during the Depression not, as many people seem to think, to encourage farmers to produce more food for a hungry nation, but to rescue farmers from the disastrous effects of growing too much food – far more than Americans could afford to buy.
This system changed, however with the 1973 farm bill which replaced,
…the New Deal system of supporting prices through loans, government grain purchases, and land idling with a new system of direct payment to farmers…Instead of keeping corn out of a falling market, as the old loan programs and federal granary had done, the new subsidies encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any proice, since the government would make up the difference.
The history of American farm policy is vital in understanding our country’s food culture. While the free market advocate in me has always abhorred the idea of agricultural subsidies, the discussion presented by Pollan shows the various factors which make the debate more than just a black and white issue. However, regardless of the economic implications of paying our farmers to produce mountains of cheap corn, the fact is we end up subsidizing the most unhealthy calories in the supermarket.
Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.
For one of the fattest nations on earth, this isn’t welcome news.
We also eat a lot of oil
For some, the idea that we end up indirectly eating gallons of oil each year may be an even bigger leap than acknowledging the prominence of corn in our diets, but the unsettling truth is that we’ve built our modern-industrial food system on a foundation of cheap oil. From the chemical fertilizers that cause many of the crops to grow quicker and bigger, to the pesticides that keep insects away, to the gasoline used by tractors to harvest the crops and trucks to transport them thousands of miles across the country and finally to the packaging used to keep the food from spoiling — each link in the chain requires us to further rely on non-renewable resource.
How much oil is used? 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn, 1/3 gallon per bushel. “Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food…”
These costs are largely hidden to the consumer, but they remain nonetheless. What makes this scary is what will happen when a barrel of oil goes back to costing $150 or more and doesn’t mercifully come back down as it did a couple years ago. For a food system that relies on large amounts of oil to produce and transport its products, this spells huge increases in the price of food. Unless we choose to opt out, which of course is what a large section of the book is devoted to teaching the reader how to do.
Pollan goes much deeper into the food system than just corn and oil. He looks at the repercussions of feeding animals food they weren’t naturally made to eat, the treatment and quality of life of those animals, the somewhat disappointing realities of the big organic movement and why Whole Foods isn’t necessarily the answer, the vegetarian debate, the history of the modern food industry and even the challenges and unexpected pleasures of hunting and foraging for food in the modern world.
It would be hard to do this book justice without going on for another few thousand words. So I won’t. Instead, read this book and really chew it over (no pun intended…ok, maybe it was). You, like me, may end up surprised at how much your answer changes regarding the question of, “what’s for dinner?”
“We’ve become a culture of technicians. We’re all into the how of it and nobody’s stepping back and saying ‘But Why?’.” – Joel Salatin, Farmer (my new hero)
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January 25, 2010 7 Comments
Welcome Our New Son Judah James Schaefer!
Judah James Schaefer was born early Saturday morning. He is 7lbs 1oz, 19 1/4 in. long, has what we initially thought was blond hair, but now is looking more like a very light brown, and has quite long feet and hands (I see a future Van Cliburn or Michael Phelps…not sure which). As far as labors go, it went very well and quite quickly. Marelize was a trooper as usual and Judah was born 5 hours after arriving at the hospital.
Everyone is excited to have Judah here finally. Marelize, since she doesn’t have to carry a basketball in her stomach anymore. Malone, so she can have a “real-life” baby to take care of, sing to and eventually (an educated guess) boss around. And finally, I am excited because I now have a son for whom I can buy all sorts of wonderful things like hatchets (both the cutting tool and the book by Gary Paulson), guns, fireworks, etc. I can also make my best attempt at teaching him the Art of Manliness. He is a great joy and we’re so happy to have him in the Schaefer tribe.
Here are a few pictures from the last two days:
On the green they watched their sons
Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
As my father once watched me
~Edmund Blunden
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January 24, 2010 2 Comments
Friday Video: The Limits of Power – Andrew Bacevich
Retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, a West Point Graduate who went on to earn a PhD from Princeton and later taught as a professor at West Point and Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty at Boston University, is the author of one of the best books I’ve read in several years, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. A conservative historian, Bacevich expresses his “dismay at the direction of the U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.” Mainly, the excessive use of military force as an instrument to remake the world in the way we see fit.
The interview is a bit dated (Aug 2008) so forgive the election year discussions…and the obnoxious commercial break in the middle of the interview, but the main thrust of his message remains important, maybe even more so on the eve of 30,000 additional troops making their way to Afghanistan, the “Graveyard of Empires.”
I welcome your comments on what may prove to be some more controversial talking points. Enjoy the interview and sound off below!
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January 14, 2010 No Comments
Roald Dahl on Writing Fiction
As a young boy, few authors captured my imagine, horror and delight like Roald Dahl, creator of such scrumdiddlyumptious stories as, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach and Danny the Champion of the World.
I found Mr. Dahl to be somewhat of an odd, mischievous old man. In my imagination he was tall with knobby knees and bad teeth which he used to offer both large, gracious smiles and terrifying growls as the mood struck him. He had a wicked sense of humor that made me giggle nervously as I hid under my covers with a flashlight, reading his stories into the wee hours with a box of Oreos as both companion and fuel.
Recently, I have begun going back through some of his short stories. In doing so I have found myself devouring his writing, just like old times, and more curious than ever about what made this man tick.
He, like myself, was a military pilot. He flew fighters for the RAF in WWII and was shot down over enemy lines in the Libyan desert, sustaining injuries that eventually led to his reassignment as an attache. It was this dramatic story, which he told to famous author, C.S. Forester, a short time later while stationed in Washington D.C. Forester was writing for The Saturday Evening Post at the time and had stopped by Dahl’s office (much to Dahl’s surprise) to see if he could get the pilot to recount his tale so he could write a nice article about it. Dahl offered instead to write it all down and send it to Forester who could revise as needed and make it his own. A few weeks later Dahl received the following correspondence from Forester:
Dear RD, You were meant to give me notes, not a finished story. I’m bowled over. Your piece is marvellous. It is the word of a gifted writer. I didn’t touch a word of it. I sent it at once under your name to my agent, Harold Matson, asking him to offer it to the Saturday Evening Post with my personal recommendation. You will be happy to hear that the Post accepted it immediately and have paid one thousand dollars. Mr. Matson’s commission is ten percent. I enclose his check for nine hundred dollars. It’s all yours. As you will see from Mr. Matson’s letter, which I also enclose, the Post is asking if you will write more stories for them. I do hope you will. Did you know you were a writer? With my very best wishes and congratulations, C.S. Forester.
His career took off from there.
In The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More Dahl looks back at his writing career and lists a few requirements for anyone hoping to become a fiction writer:
1. You should have a lively imagination
2. You should be able to write well. By that I mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader’s mind. Not everybody has this ability. It is a gift, and you either have it or you don’t.
3. You must have stamina. In other words, you must be able to stick to what you are doing and never give up, for hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and month after month.
4. You must be a perfectionist. That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can.
5. You must have strong self-discipline. You are working alone. No one is employing you. No one is around to fire you if you don’t turn up for work, or to tick you off is you start slacking.
6. It helps a lot if you have a keen sense of humor. This is not essential when writing for grown-ups, but for children, it’s vital.
7. You must have a degree of humility. The writer who thinks that his work is marvelous is heading for trouble.
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January 11, 2010 2 Comments
David Foster Wallace on the Freedom vs. Security Discussion America Isn’t Having
“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” – Benjamin Franklin
The late author David Foster Wallace, well-known for works such as Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster, is someone whom I have always heard spoken of in high regard, but have yet to read myself. In a 2007 issue of “The Atlantic,” he posed a question that I believe is even more relevant today than it was at the time of writing. The premise being, how much freedom are we willing to give up for the sake of security?
**Much thanks to Gordon Brander for posting a link to this via Twitter and alerting me to such a gem.**
Since 9/11 the United States has gone to gargantuan lengths to make America “safe again” – forming an entire new department (Homeland Security) with the sole purpose of protecting us from those who wish to do us and our country harm, expending nearly a trillion dollars and thousands of lives prosecuting 9 years of war on foreign soil, transforming a trip through the airport from a leisurely, even fun little jaunt into an infuriating backwash of security checks and buffoonery, forming a color code for how threatened you should feel on any given day, building fences, tightening border security, creating watch lists, monitoring phone conversations/websites/e-mail traffic, assassinating enemies by missiles shot from unmanned machines reigning down death from the skies…I’ll stop for the sake of time and sanity.
Turning our attention to the latest terrorist plot involving the young Nigerian Jihadist who set his crotch on fire (72 disappointed virgins) 30,000 feet above American soil as his Northwest Airlines flight made its way to Detroit, the renewed focus on increased security seems much like “the song that never ends.” Acting as a prophet, Wallace exposed some questions for discussion two years ago that bear repeating on this day as we decide how much more we are willing to give up in the name of security — take a look:
Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?
In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?
Here it is put another way by counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla,
“The threat is that a zero-risk approach to terrorism, one that seeks to drive the chances of another 9/11 attack down to zero, might cause Western countries to take well-intentioned precautionary measures that would be so divisive internationally, and so repressive domestically, that we would end up destroying our way of life in order to save it, compromising freedoms and values to guard against a relatively remote risk.”
The problem with most of that national security apparatus is that it is full of technicians, but few philosophers. Everyone is figuring out how to fine-tune and employ the latest gadgets designed to scan, probe, listen, kill and protect, but no one is stepping back from the problem and asking whether we should spend as much time, blood and treasure doing the aforementioned in the first place. The very thought of such a question would be banished as unpatriotic by most. And yet, Wallace concludes,
In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?
I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, but I do know that security has its costs and the discussion of whether or not they are always and forevermore worth bearing needs to take place. Thus far, it has not.
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January 5, 2010 6 Comments
Balance: A Healthy Way to Make and Keep New Year’s Resolutions & Goals
As New Year’s approaches we all find ourselves examining our lives and seeking a fresh start with renewed purpose. I dug this post out of the Schaefer’s Blog archives because I believe it is one of the most practical and valuable I have ever written, and at the time of posting in 2007 only my wife, dad and a couple friends (after much cajoling) were reading my blog.
For two years I used the method below to make and keep my New Year’s resolutions, or goals as I call them. I achieved decent results, but last year on a whim I decided to go without any concrete goals whatsoever, just to see what would happen. Without goals my life was very streaky and somewhat chaotic (not in the fun indie movie kind of way). I had a good week where I got a lot done and everything seemed to be clicking relationally, financially, spiritually…then the next week I would find myself in a desert.
So, this year I’m going back to the following method of making New Year’s goals and I hope you will join me! Below is my post from 2007 in its original form, enjoy some vintage Schaefer’s Blog while you look forward to 2010.
_______________________
When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, most people I talk to roll their eyes and sigh, thinking of the futility of the whole exercise after years and years of failure. The spirit behind a New Year’s resolution is a noble one, an attempt to live a better life or do things differently. The problem is most of us just don’t approach it with much intentionality, instead making up an unattainable goal in the heat of battle, like losing 50lbs after stepping on the scale the day after Christmas. Last year about this time, my sage father-in-law showed me an incredibly simple, but effective way of making a list of goals, or resolutions, for the year and actually following through on them. This is the process:
Understand Balance – I am convinced that 99% of people’s disappointments and failures in life are simply due to imbalance in a certain area(s). Eating too much, exercising too little, not praying enough, too much time at the office, too much television, etc. The point is, there’s a happy medium in every area of our lives; a place of balance where we find our best life. All New Year’s goals should be made with the theme of balance in our minds.
Take Stock of Your Present State – Before you can decide what you want to strive for in the future you have to have a good understanding of where you are in the present. Take a pen and piece of paper and sketch out a diagram similar to the one below.
The point is to look at each area of your life, ie. family, work, spirit, body, finances, etc and take stock of where you are at this moment in time. Decide what areas are important to you and create spokes for each one. Next make tick marks on each spoke, labeling them 1-10; 1 meaning you’re failing miserably in that area and 10 meaning you are perfect, no changes necessary. Make a dot where you think you fall in each area, then connect the dots. You will probably notice immediately that the shape you’ve created has very little resemblance to a circle, which would represent perfect balance. Most likely you have some areas that you’re doing great at and others that you’re struggling. The point of this diagram is to show visually what needs to change in order to make a circle, or bring balance to your life. This diagram is the basis for creating your New Year’s goals.
Make Goals for Each Category – Now its time to actually come up with your goals. Remember, the desired end state of this whole process is a balanced life, so all individual goals should be made with this in mind. In other words, if you notice that you have a very high score for work, but a miserable one for family/marriage, make goals that will allow you more time at home and less at the office. In order to create good goals, use the SMART acronym: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timebound. For a better explanation on creating SMART goals reference my previous post on the subject. Again, make goals that will create a circle on your diagram, which will mean putting different levels of effort and focus on each area.
Exchange Your Goals With a Close Friend – Accountability is crucial in achieving any goal in life. Find a close friend and have them go through this exercise with you, then exchange your goals and bring them up on a consistent basis throughout the year. I emphasize close friend for two reasons. First, it is likely that some of your goals will contain personal information, like investing goals, or family issues, so its important to have someone you trust. Second, only a close friend will really get on your case if you falling short in a certain area. We all need a good friend to confront us every once and a while if we really intend to make lasting change in our lives. With accountability your chances of succeeding in achieving your goals and keeping your resolutions increase dramatically.
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December 28, 2009 1 Comment





