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“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.”

- M.C Escher

If you’d like to work on goal setting and still haven’t created your new years resolutions, here’s the method I use to create mine.  I’ve also included some tools, articles, videos, and a podcast to help inspire you.

1. Review what you learned in 2008. Sit down and brainstorm a list of your the most meaningful moments, events, memories, accomplishments, and mistakes of 2008. Try to extract lessons from those things that you can use. You can read an excerpt from my list here.

2. Conduct a “personal brand” audit to see how you’ve grown in the past year. You can copy and use the brand equity checklist located here.

3. Honestly identify chronic problems you have. Most often, we limit our own growth with chronic bad habits. What are those 2 or 3 habits you have that impede your personal growth?  If you can’t answer that question, think about the 2 or 3 things you wish you could do better.  What’s preventing you from doing them?  Then, use the 5 whys method to determine the root of the problem, and try Leo Babauta’s one habit at-a-time modification method.

4. Ask yourself 3 simple questions: What are your passions? What are your values? What is your purpose?  If you take the time to sit down, clear your mind, and truly answer these questions, you’ll shift your focus to lining up your life with them.

5. Dig deeper to understand how to improve yourself this year using your answers from #4 above. Some recommended ways to do this: Envision U’s 45-day leadership challenge, Mark Stevens’ success self-analysis, Franklin Covey’s prioritization systems, and Tim Ferriss’ Low Information Diet series of articles.

6. Establish your prism – the lens through which you see things. As we learned in the Mark Stevens interview, successful leaders have a prism they use to provide context to the world around them. Right now, I like to use a combination of inspirational quotes, metaphors, and Newton’s laws as my prism.

7. Get motivated! Let these inspirational video and audio clips lift you up when you’re in a bad mood, or just not in the right frame of mind to work on setting goals: Tim Ferriss on thinking big and challenging conventional thinking (video, especially the last 1/3 of it). A former New York Yankee batboy on persistence (podcast, a fantastic story about how he got the job). Michael Jordan on failure (YouTube video).

8. Set no more than 3 achievable, memorable goals that you can do one at a time (linearly, so you aren’t trying to accomplish more than one at a time). Then, track your progress. Make sure you accomplish one of these goals in January to capitalize on the power of momentum!

Good luck!

UPDATE: Having trouble achieving those things you set out to do at the beginning of the year?  Check out these 5 tips from Zen Habits.

“Common men go nowhere.  You have to be uncommon.”

- Herb Brooks, from the movie Miracle

When I began creating my new years resolutions and working on personal goal setting for 2009, I took some time to reflect on the past year.  2008 was an amazing, challenging year.  The biggest event – by far  – was the birth of our daughter.  Beyond that, but the year was filled with ups and downs, trial and error, and some truly amazing experiences.

Here are some of the things I learned in the past year…

• When your baby sees you and smiles, it makes your world stop. Literally. Having a child with my wonderful wife is an amazing experience and crazy adventure…and I know we’re only just beginning it!
• If you open your mind to the potential of others, they will amaze you. Some leaders try to push their own “fire” into other people.  I believe that it’s already there, and as a leader, you have to pull it out.  In 2008, three people on my team at Quicken Loans launched important, new websites.  The best part? None of these folks had launched a website before, or had been leading web projects for more than a year.  Man, am I proud of them!
• What you focus on you find. In the past year, we survived a literal hurricane in the mortgage industry. How? We were passionate, persistent, and focused on the goal at hand.  Several times, in several different ways throughout the year, my team and I achieved goals that seemed impossible.  We did this by staying dedicated to each other, and ruthlessly focused on our goals.
• Persistence wins in the long term. I’ve been working on a specific Internet marketing project for the past 7 months – a lifetime in Internet time.  Only now are we seeing consistent results.  This was after several people had told me no, and that the project couldn’t be done. I really believe that “informed persistence” (I.e. deconstructing an issue and knowing everything possible about it, while also ruthlessly following up on progress) was the key to the project’s recent success.
• Companies can change greatly when they are acquired. Sometimes, even the best relationships can’t overcome the effects of a merger or acquisition.
• Deals can be created out of nothing, as long as they solve a need. I created several new deals this year that didn’t exist previously by simply solving a defined need with a solid, mutually-beneficial idea.
• Relationships are the rock upon which everything, I mean everything, is built. You know the old saying “nothing happens until something gets sold”?  Well, nothing gets sold until there’s a relationship.  I simply wouldn’t have been able to succeed in the past year if it weren’t for all the wonderful people in my life.
• With the Internet, you are only 1 person removed from some amazing people. Through this blog, I’ve met some amazingly smart and talented people over the past year – people I likely would have never met otherwise.  Thank you for reading and participating in this with me!