Change of Perspective and a Personal Challenge

Change of Perspective and a Personal Challenge

I’ve read or listen to over a 100 books, CDs, DVD, and articles on Personal Development and Success, but it wasn’t until I read Bill Bartmann’s book “Billionaire: Secrets to Success” that I discovered a key missing component to achieving success and why I was failing more than succeeding.

Not everyone responds to things the same way or learns in the same way so even though I had access to all this great material I personally just couldn’t put it together. More times than not, I would set a goal and give up on it half way towards it.

What I was missing was the way I looked at my goals. In this day and age we have become accustomed to goals being nothing more than something to be cast aside.

How many times have you set a New Year’s Resolution only to let it go after the first month or worse yet, never even start it! Because of the carefree attitude we have grown accustomed to when it comes to New Year’s Resolutions we’ve taught our subconscious it is ok to quit when trying to achieve a goal.

What Bartmann brings to light is that we tend to keep promises more readily than we do goals; so the key is to make your goals promises to yourself or someone you care enough about that you’ll keep your promise.

Think this point over. How many times have you slipped or given up on your goals? Of all the times you have succeed and achieved your goals what was different about those goals? When I looked over my personal goal achievements I was shocked to realize that they were results of promises I made to myself, someone else, or a type of personal challenge.

To test this I made myself a challenge. My challenge was to make enough posts to Warrior Forum to achieve the 500 posts originally required to post challenges in the Challenge and Contest area. The new limit is 200, but I wanted to test this theory so I set my goal for 500 posts.

To achieve 500 posts you need to make 16 posts per day with four extra posts on the 30th day, if you are doing a month with 30 days. I also decided to make one of the posts a 400 plus word article, and limit the thank you post to 5 only. This meant that I had to make 1 article post, 10 quality posts, and allowed 5 posts that were thank you post (which I really tried not to do).

The first few days were the toughest, as I felt out the posts and the topic available to respond to. After the first 3 days it became easy, in fact most days I found myself posting 20 posts per day and then 25 posts; some days over 30!

My goal was 500 posts; I reached that mid-month but kept going, after all my goal/promise was for the month of December, 31 days. It’s now the 26th; I’m half way to 700 posts and still going strong.

My wife asked why I’m still going when I hit my 500 posts, it’s because the promise was for 31 days, and a minimum of 16 posts per day with one being an article. Then she asked me why? What was I getting out of it?

I’m getting self-satisfaction and proof that this is what works and why I succeed when I do. Plus I’m proving to myself that I can write a full page article each and every day with NO problem. The first article took a while to write, the next was written quicker, now I can write an article in about 15 minutes if not shorter.

If you are having problems setting and keeping goals try making them promises and breaking them down.

My overall goal/promise: 500 posts in 31 day with 31 of them being articles. That breaks down into a minimum of 15 posts per day, plus 1 400 word article, plus an additional 4 articles needing to be posted some time during the 31 day period.

To break this down even more you can write the article in the morning or in the evening and make some of the posts in the morning and the others at night. You can make the extra posts on the weekend.

Finally you have to set and keep when you are going to make your posts. For example if you are going to make posts everyday then keep it that way. Don’t make 30 post one day then 50 posts 3 days later, then 100 posts a week later. The entire purpose of this exercise / challenge is to develop discipline and good habits.

If you decide that you are going to post only on the weekends, or every other day, that is fine, just keep to what you decide at the beginning. I would not write more than 1 article per day because I wanted to develop the habit of writing every single day.

I submitted this challenge to the Challenge and Contest Area but haven’t heard anything as of yet.

Those of you that have seen my posts will now understand why so many in this month of December. You will also notice that 90% of them are all of substance and very few are just plain thank you.

Most of my posts were in the Mind Warrior section because there are a bunch of great people here that make it easy to reply to and interact with. Some I have come to enjoy reading and interacting with.

I know this has already helped me a great deal and when I finish with this challenge I’ll be able to post here and other places far easier than I have been able to in the past.

Hope this helps at least one person out there. I’d like to thank all of you for helping me make this possible with your great posts and counter post.

Merry Christmas and a Very Happy and Prosperous New Year.

James Darren Davis