My 2015 Strategy Part 1: Dreams and Aspirations

Tuesday's post was all about creating  a strategy based on tying in your goals with your mission.

Part of that -- a big part actually -- is becoming a hero in my own life by pushing my abilities and potentials to their limits, to master and transform myself. For me, each of these big goals either serves to unleash my own capabilities and my capacity to support others, or it directly provides resources for other people.

The Strategy

Refer back to Tuesday's post for some pointers on how to set your strategy up to support your mission.

I wanted to focus on things that would help me make some big impacts soon, rather than the things that are cool but less critical to my core mission and sense of fulfillment. So for the time being, I wrote off the Tibet stuff and the flying, just to give myself some focus (not because they are somehow harder to achieve. They're not).

I also noted that I have already started several businesses, so I need to spend some time clarifying what would give me fulfillment around that.

Since the mission is providing resources and support for people, the blog was pretty high on the list, since it has been the most direct way for me to do that:

• Write 2 blog posts a week, every week, for 2015, focusing on strategies to help people expand their capabilities in support of their goals and mission in life.

Since I derive a ton of fulfillment from actually spending time with friends, AND that directly supports my mission, I realized I needed to find ways to spend quality time with those friends.

• Reach out to 3 people a day.
• Establish a regular phone call routine to have actual conversations with people that matter to me and whom I especially want to support.
• Get off Facebook. DONE (The time I spent on Facebook brought almost zero value to my life, and only gave me the illusion of being in touch with my friends. Since leaving, I haven't noticed. I might go back on my own terms, but for now, I'm happy).

Since playing intelligent games improves my capabilities, my confidence, and my chances to spend quality time with friends, I wanted to give that some priority in 2015.

• Organize regular gaming nights and find friends to play RPGs, card games, and strategy games with on a regular basis. Become the host. <--This will also help me take a lead in providing useful support to my friends.
• Invest in good games: Chess, smart RPGs, simulators, etc.

Martial arts has been instrumental in supporting my health, fitness, and confidence, so it's something I want to focus on for 2015.

• Join a martial arts gym and attend 2-3 classes a week. DONE. I joined a Kali gym in Boulder to learn how to use a knife and defend against one, and a Krav Maga gym in Denver to further my study of that style.
• Take part in more improvisational styles of fight training, rather than the rigid techniques I'm used to. I will do this through my Kali gym, which also hosts a BJJ and Muay Thai school.

I'm already working on my novel, so I'll just keep doing that:

• Write or research my novel for 30 minutes a day, to have a first draft finished by the end of March, 2015. I'm considering upping it to 1 hour, but 30 minutes works, so I'm reluctant to change it.

Same goes for reading:

• Continue reading habit. I'm thinking about tracking and setting reading goals, but I already spend a ton of time reading and read fairly fast, so it's not a big deal for me.

I was actually really surprised at how accessible most of my goals were. I had been operating with a story that I didn't have any time or money to apply to actually doing things of consequence, but when I broke down what I wanted to do, I found that I could take steps right away.

Money, Career, and Fitness

Since the whole point was that "time and money aren't issues," I didn't think about money, my available time, or my available energy, in the initial exercise. Everything here pertains just to my dreams, my mission, and my sense of fulfillment.

However, making those things happen DOES require getting the logistics in order. It's important that the logistics are supporting the right things, as I pointed out in the last blog post.

Make sure your actions are done to support something that matters to you, so that your motivation is taken care off.

Next week, I'll share my plans for getting my logistics in order to support these dreams and missions, plus provide the ACTIONABLE GOALS version of today's post.

If you haven't already, read Tuesday's post on the system for setting a strategy for 2015, and then spend some time brainstorming what you'd actually like to accomplish.

Then, distill those things into specific goals, perhaps constrained by what can be accomplished in a year (you can always adjust if you're going too fast).

K.C. ***

Photo credit: Rachel Kramer on Flickr