Goals in Bite-Sized Pieces

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

I've been having a hard time choosing a New Year's Resolution. There are a lot of things I want to accomplish this year: I want to have the children's story I'm working on rewritten, completely illustrated and ready to send back out to publishers by the end of the year; there's another story I want to finish writing so I can start working on the illustrations; I want to continue to learn Adobe Flash; I want to learn to write script from scratch in Second Life; I want to rework my Web site to make it more interactive; and I want to improve my chess playing skills so I can win when I play my father-in-law next Christmas. There's a lot of things I want to do by the time 2010 rolls around. I realize, however, that none of the things I've listed here are a resolution. These are all goals.

I do this every year. Instead of coming up with a resolution I come up with a list of goals. There's nothing wrong with that I suppose, but anyone who knows me and has watched me attack a goal knows that when I decide I'm going to do something I dive in head first, learn everything I can about it and spend a lot of time working towards that goal. That sounds like a good thing, but I eventually end up working too much and sleeping too little. It's good to be focused, but sometimes I turn it into too much of a good thing.

With this in mind, I've decided to do something different this year. This year I'm going to actually come up with a resolution that can help me acheive my list of goals. My resolution this year is to acheive things in bite-sized pieces. By working towards my goals in small steps, I can find time each day to play, leave enough time to sleep and enjoy the journey.

If you're actually reading this, I encourage you to watch the video at the top of this post. It is the last lecture of Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who died in 2008 from cancer. I'm reading his book, "The Last Lecture" which was written after this lecture was filmed. I'm not reading it the way I usually do, which is cover to cover in one sitting...like watching a movie. I'm reading it in my New Year's Resolution style; a chapter at a time every few days. Bite-sized pieces.