This is part 2 in my 3 part series on my 100 day personal development plan.
The purpose of this post is to address the objections that – rightfully – are raised about the challenge.
In fact, I actually crowdsourced objections from people I shared tentative plans with. Let’s take a look at the most common:
- HOW AM I GOING TO QUANTIFY?
For goals that are not quantity based, I’m relying on contrast and vision.
I compare who / where I was at the beginning, and how far I am from the ideal. It’s a bit more of an art than a science – but it should be enough to get me over the line.
- WHAT ARE SIDE-QUESTS?
Side-quests are things outside of my usual life. I cannot do them to directly knock off an objective, but an indirect effect is fine. They exist to add variety to the challenge.
- HOW WILL I BALANCE IT ALL?
My little cheat-code with this entire challenge is the amount of overlap. Every objective influences more than one other objective.
The struggle will be balancing it on a daily basis – which just requires me to take effective actions (luckily that’s already an objective).
- WHY NOT HIGHER OR LOWER TARGETS FOR MY GOALS?
The common thread between feedback was people suggesting that I should raise or lower certain objectives. The funny thing was, they were all in conflict. Some people suggested I halve one goal, while another person suggested I double the same goal.
The target level for each goal I based off two criteria:
1) EFFORT: The target level had to need an above average effort from me to do. I wanted to push my limits but not burn myself out.
2) IMPACT: Each target level should create significant change based on impact. The level had to be enough that it would cause the most impact with the least effort. Efficiency and effectiveness in one.
- WHY AREN’T MORE OF THE GOALS SPECIFIC?
Some goals were hard to quantify – and I kind of rushed in getting it out.
For example, Value is quite vague. I could have listed certain skills I wanted, knowledge to gain, etc.
However, I didn’t want to box myself in too much – and this leaves plenty of room for me to manoeuvre during the challenge.
- THERE IS WAY MORE THAN 20 GOALS, WHY?
The most astute observation was that there are way more than 20 goals. In fact, there’s 40+ when you add up all the subgoals.
This is because these are 20 areas that I want to improve. The sub-goals were the actions I believed would provide the most value. I felt I could manage the burden and didn’t need to cut it down further.
It is worth noting that I left 60+ other ideas on the cutting room floor.
From myself, WHY SO MUCH?
This was never raised in a direct manner – but it underlined most feedback.
It’s a valid question. At the moment, I’m loving the book “80/20 Your Life” by Richard Koch. I’m sure that 20% of these objectives would have gotten me 80% of the results I wanted.
But the fact is – I wanted this to be difficult. I wanted a huge challenge that would call out the best in me. I know that I get excited by having so much to do. I’ve tried to focus on a single goal before and it didn’t work out (my rapid failing “North Star” Plan). In my experience, nothing has produced better results than these large-scale challenges.
This challenge is ambitious – but I can only see upside from it.
I’ll leave this post off with a quote from Google Founder, Larry Page:
“Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely,” he says. “That’s the thing that people don’t get.”.
Larry Page.
Zachariah Lewis 