“Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.” – Napoleon Hill
There are a lot of ideas and philosophies on goal setting and how to achieving goals. Different experts will recommend slightly different things, but for the most part it is all the same with a few basic principles.
The first part of the goal equation I want to talk about is writing your goals down and having specific defined goals. There have been numerous studies that show that less than 5% of the population actually writes their goals down. Then there is a slightly larger group less than 15%, who have goals defined but don’t write them down. So this leaves the majority of people, more than 80% of the population, who don’t even define goals! And guess what…the 3% that do write down their goals make 10 times that of the majority who don’t define and write down goals.
Next is the importance of seeing your goals on a daily basis. This will help “program” your brain both consciously and subconsciously, and makes the goals real. This will help you remain focused and motivated and you might start to question certain activities you do and how you spend your time, if it is not helping you achieve your goals. Also this process should make you take responsibility for your goals. Therefore goals need to be realistic and have a deadline.
There is a ton of information on achieving your goals and goal setting, I just wanted to touch on a couple key points, but the purpose of this post is I want to show a cool way to help you see your goals daily.
If you are like me and spend a lot of time at the computer, then posting goals on your computer makes perfect sense. So I wanted to show a cool way to do this. Below is an example of what my desktop looks like as I am preparing for a Half-Iron man, which is a major focus in my life right now and is coming up soon. Obviously sports and health is just one aspect in my life, and I set goals for all the different important areas in my life…but I figured this would be a fun example to show.
Example of goals set as desktop background
So here are the steps to place your goals on your desktop
Step 1: Download the FREE BgInfo program here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897557.aspx
Basically this program was designed to show system information on your desktop, which I’m guessing for most people, is not that important. But we can use it’s functionality to have some fun with it.
Step 2: Run the BGInfo.exe which will open a screen that looks like this:
Default BGInfo Screen
So here you can delete all of the default custom information and instead type your goals, here is an example:
BGInfo Screen with Goals
Their built in text-editor has some basic features that lets you adjust font-color, font-family, font-size and font-style. Also you can insert images, but I wouldn’t recommend that.
Step 3: You can adjust a couple options so that the text (goals) displays where you want them to. If you click the “Position” button, you can click the radio button of where you want the text entered to be displayed.
Also the “Background” button will let you specify a background image to use, or if BGInfo should just copy your current desktop background image.
For my example, I used PIXLR to create a cool desktop picture that relates to my goals I want to see daily.
Have fun with this and get creative, I would love to see some examples of what you decide to use this for.
I think The Incredible Machine would be challenging and fun to build.
