“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” Zig Ziglar

The most difficult roadblock to our achieving our goals is realizing what they are. On his web site, Tom Ziglar quotes a poem written by a friend and poet, Cliff Feightner, about those of us who simply don’t know what we want and are wandering aimlessly through life, never really achieving anything.

“Even though they are moving around
They make a disparaging sound.
You see them in motion,
Though they don’t have a notion,
For success they are not even bound.”

We sit down with pencil and our nice new planner, all ready to write our “mind map” and …. we got nothing. We don’t learn buy BUYING books, we learn by READING books. Nice planner. Paid for it. I own it now. Hurry up nice planner! Make me a plan!  (silence) (skip to bottom line)

Used by permission Vector Toons

In our youth maybe we had an idea: we wanted to grow up to be a fireman, or a policeman, or a doctor, or a nurse, or President of the United States. Ten years later we go to college, and most likely once there we will change degree objective two or three times before we settle on a goal for our life career.

I wasn’t asked what I wanted to do, the High School and University apparently collaborated on my aptitude and I was assigned to honors physics. ” ‘ear vee haf un poe-tay-toe”: equal potential surfaces just was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I changed degree objectives three times, spending away three semesters of my scholarship. I started in honors physics, then pre-medicine, then finally Electrical Engineering.  I was young. “Equal potential” like “weightless strings” and “frictionless inclined planes” is an oversimplification that mostly does not exist in real life.

But we have to live in real life.

Turns out I went through a four year engineering curriculum in two and a half years, due largely to Purdue’s awesome foresight in allowing some of us to work at our own accelerated pace instead of holding us back sitting in Ye Olde Lecture Roomes. We could pull our next lesson from a file cabinet, do it, see the teaching assistant, take the quiz, take the test, move up to the next course. That allowed me to cover several courses in the time most students would do one course.

Zombie Walk in Edmonton. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

The normal life routine of just aimlessly ambling along programs us in advance to fail – we do what we are told, never planning for ourselves or even thinking about what we want to be at the end of our life: in the chess game of life we should be thinking three moves ahead but we are only reacting to whatever the other player just did. We just want to “be happy” but we don’t know what “happy” looks like.

When we sit down with our nice new planner and try to pick a goal, we struggle, or come up with some lame thing to write down because we have to write something down. We are not committed to work toward it because, well, we don’t actually feel it, it’s not really our goal, it’s just something we wrote. Buying an exercise machine does not make us physically fit – most people just get a place to hang clothes. If we’re going to get physically fit we have to use the exercise machine as a regular part of what we do.

We think like zombies, just ambling around, numb, moaning “Braaaaains! It’s not my fault! It’s the President’s fault! It’s the Congress’ fault. The man always gonna hold me back!”.

So I said all that to say this: we need to plan. To fail to plan is to plan to fail. If we do not grasp and work toward how we want our last years to be, then we will reach our retirement years and they will not provide the life we want. Unmanaged systems tend to chaos. Without our effort, to plan, our life will not be what we want.

The good news is that we can plan, and we can have whatever we decide will be a  happy retirement for us.

To understand what we really want in life, we can close our eyes and ask our self,  “If I woke up tomorrow morning and everything was a perfect world, what would that look like?” Amazingly, we can picture “perfect” even though we cannot pick a goal. Now, write that down – whatever “perfect” is – as your life goal: describe what makes your world “perfect” as your life goal.

All that remains now is to break it down in steps, assign dates to achieve each of those steps one by one over time.

Money is another area where we all need goals but most people just randomly amble about simply allowing whatever happens to happen. Chaos ensues, and their retirement is filled with poverty and sadness instead of having their financial matters out of the way and being able to give time to being happy. But we don’t need to be poor: we don’t *have* to reach the end of our life and have nothing.

Just as goal setting is easy when you see how to do it, also financial planning is a simple matter of basic steps everyone can do. If you would like to retire strong financially then register for our Financial Peace class which starts March 9. The link is http://fpu.com/1113078. If you can’t afford their “membership kit” then message me.

This free public FPU workshop has been underwritten by a generous grant from the 3Rivers Federal Credit Union Foundation. 3Rivers is Here for you: here for good. If you’re ready to start a lifelong banking relationship with a local organization you can trust, then 3Rivers is for you. https://www.3riversfcu.org/.