Seven of Everything

Recently, at work, this video went around and I thought it was very interesting. They found three secrets of what motivate people and they were not what you might expect. They are: 1) Autonomy 2) Mastery 3) Purpose. Autonomy is the desire to be self directed. Mastery is the urge to get better at stuff. Purpose is the need to know where you are going. This author wrote a book called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. These are the results of very interesting studies: It may not appear to fit in with the seven structure initially but I would argue that it does fit in with a partial structure. Specifically 1, 2 and 3 for self and 5, 6 and 7 when leading others. This may not be clear to you even after watching this so feel free to ignore that.

I learned one of the great lessons of my life during track practice in high school. I decided to try pole vaulting one year but I learned rather quickly that it was not very easy. Our coach was an experienced pole vaulter who had a personal trainer. One day during practice, I asked her to give me suggestions on how to improve. She showed me how to hold the pole correctly and then watched my attempt to jump over the bar. I stood at one end of the track, held the pole with a firm grip, ran down the track, posted the pole in the box and jumped. As the pole raised me up, I lifted my feet over my head attempting to clear the bar. But I hit it, knocking it over and then tried to land without falling on the bar. I talked to the coach afterwards to see what mistakes I had made and where I needed to improve. She quizzed me to see what I did wrong; I didn’t know. Then she asked me where my eyes were while I was running. I recalled that I looked at the box, the bar and her. She told me that my...

For some time now I have been trying to determine what the needed criteria of a good goal would consist of. Last night the topic of my institute class was about goal setting so I was able to think more about this and formulate my thought process. Similar to the repentance process I kept hearing a list of criteria but there always seemed to be something missing or there was inconsistency or overlap between ideas. I am going to start by describing how the SMART goal is not good enough in my view and what should replace it. The SMART goal: S pecific M easurable A ttainable R ealistic T imely The terms specific and measurable seem to be very close. Specific seems to imply details; this is important for a goal. Measurable is also an important aspect of a goal. Similarly the terms attainable and realistic are very close. Both of them seem vague and I would put them under specific. What may be attainable to one person may not be attainable for another person and therefor not realist...