The QLog

50/5 Challenge

I have encouraged friends, family, and clients (and some strangers) to consider crafting the following:

A. A Life List of 101 Goals that includes goals for 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, (and maybe 50) year time horizons.

B. A Purpose Statement to explain the reason one has for waking up everyday (a good starting point is to consider what you would like people to say about you...both now and 100 years after you have died).

However, a few people have told me that they have have a hard time with both of these activities. Here is an exercise that can help.

Today, you are given both "the good news" and "the bad news".

1. While having breakfast with your accountant, you discover that your net worth has suddenly increased, due to all your efforts, to $50 million dollars!

2. However, after lunch, during a routine doctor visit, you discover that you only have 5 years to live. These will be healthy years until the very last day; however, there is no cure or treatment.

This is the 50/5 Challenge. Map out how you would spend your time for the next five years. Go into detail. Do not just say "travel the world". Where would you go? Why? With who? What would you do there? What else?

If you have a problem with goal setting, this may help you gain some insight into what you really would like to try, see, experience, be, or have before you really do enter into your last five years of your life.   

100 Goals in 1000 Days

Yesterday, I started a new blog to track one hundred goals I plan to complete over the next 2.75 years. Please visit 100goalsin1000days.com to learn more about this new meme. Although this neoblog has a minimalist look currently, as it matures, the style will certainly change and I have plans to add both audio and video entries. 

My new 100 Goals in 1000 Days blog will NOT replace Qlog as it has a very different purpose. Instead, I will be maintaining both digital journals simultaneously.

What Have You Forgotten?

On March 19th, the world lost writer and visionary Sir Arthur C. Clarke. You can see the farewell video that he recorded for his 90th birthday where he outlines his world-changing "three wishes" for humanity I hope they all are granted in the near future.   

Although Clarke is best well known for his science fiction novels such as Childhood’s End (which has been in print for 50-plus years and has generated over $25 million in revenue) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (plus the 1969 movie of the same name that he co-created with director Stanley Kubrick), he also wrote a technical paper that outlined the feasibility of a true global communication system in 1945 via satellites in geosynchronous orbit, a brilliant insight, some years before Sputnik. Twenty years later, Clarke wrote an interesting essay entitled "How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time" about this idea as he did not patent the the concept (yet, he points out, the patent itself would have expired by the time it would become economically viable anyhow).

I decided to re-read his classic novel Rendezvous with Rama and while I was immersed within his fictional universe, I discovered a great question, a motto of one of the characters, Karl Mercer: What Have You Forgotten?

Consider your current goals, projects, and tasks. What is missing? What is hiding? What have you overlooked? Is there an assumption you need to re-think, a variable you need to re-calculate? In other words, what have you forgotten?

Happy Leap Day

Since 2008 has 366 days, I suggest using this "extra" day to review your annual goals, revise some of your action plans, and outline any necessary course corrections for the next 10 months. This will help insure that 2008 is great.

Fifty Year Plan

If you have completed your five year plan, I encourage to craft a 50-Year Plan! Expand your time horizon for half a century and plan out all you would like to be, do, have, learn, see, and experience.

What if you are already 80 years old? Then consider what legacies you would like to leave behind and how could you help\influence\impact your family, friends, community, or the world-at-large in fifty years from beyond the grave.

Of course, this plan is subject to change as the world changes; nevertheless, course corrections are easiest when you are already have your bearings and are heading in a single direction.

A rough outline can be completed within a few hours. A superior Fifty Year Plan will take several weeks to assemble as it will involve personal brainstorming, quite reflection, critical thinking, and strategic planning.

Five Year Plan

"We greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in one year.  But we greatly underestimate what we can accomplish in five years.”  - Peter Drucker

Successful people usually have a time horizon that spans several years. So, if you do not have a 5-year plan, I highly suggest you take an evening an map out the next few years, consider everything you would like to do, have, be, and experience. Some things are just not possible to complete within 365 days. Increase your goals list to span long-term targets that may take a few winters to accomplish.

Know-What

"There is one quality more important than "know-how" and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it.  This is "know-what" by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be." - Norbert Wiener (the founder of the interdisciplinary field of Cybernetics), The Human Use of Human Beings, 1954

Two Extremes and the Mean

When considering any major problem, it is useful to consider these three potential end-games.

1) What is the worst possible thing that could happen? Consider the bleakest consequence. What steps can be taken to decrease the possibility of this occurring?

2) What is the best case scenario? Stay objective when answering this; however, consider the optimum solution and the methods that would produce this successful result.

3) What is the most likely outcome? Why do you think this is the case? Analyze your assumptions.

Create a Legacy List

This is new exercise I developed for someone who was having a hard time thinking of long term goals. I am releasing it on the Log as a raw exercise as it is has not been field tested; yet, I think it is worthwhile. Take a few minutes and consider these questions:

1) You are 100 years old and on your deathbed. You have lived a full life and are satisfied with your personal and professional accomplishment. What legacy would you be leaving behind to your family, friends, community, and the world on the day you died? Be specific.

2) Now imagine it is 100 years after the day you died. What specific impact would you like to have on the world of your grand children's grandchildren?

Reflect on the Nobel Prize, one of the world's best Legacy project. It was inspired by the erroneous publication of Alfred Nobel's obituary (his brother had died, but French newspaper had the facts mixed-up) and the contents horrified him. Why? It began Le marchand de la mort est mort which means "The Merchant of Death is dead" and then condemned him for becoming a rich man by finding ways to kill more people efficiently than anyone before in history. He did not want the remembered by historians as the "Merchant of Death" so a few years later, he donated the vast majority of his estate when he died to establish the Nobel Prize fund. Today, most remember his name for rewarding the great minds of the world instead of as the inventor of dynamite.

Also, let me know your thoughts on the creation of a legacy list.

Three Magic Words are...

...Write It Down!

1) Do you want increase your productivity? Write It Down. Think on paper and consider your top concerns, assumptions, questions, goals, projects, and tasks.

2) Do you want to increase your creativity? Write It Down. Record your observations, conversations, ideas, insights, answers, solutions, crazy thoughts, and wild memes.

Simple advise? Yes. Easy? No! Think of all the times you had a million dollar idea for a great book, movie, business, or project but could not recall the details later.

I do suggest keeping a daily journal as a life enhancing habit. Why? It is an excellent way to insure that you capture your thoughts on a regular and semi-systematic basis.