Agile Personal Development

As I mentioned in a previous post, the SuperViva website looked like a great way to help brainstorm your life list. As part of my agile personal development process, I took it for a spin to find out whether you really can judge a book by its cover.

Setting up my account was pretty easy, within 30 seconds I was ready to start adding goals! I started off with looking at the most popular goals to get some ideas. I ended up with about 25 of them right away. Then I went to the ‘Idea Directory’, where goals are categorized by Travel and Places, Activities, Self Improvement, Money and Work, Entertainment, Community & People, Sports and Fitness, Times of the Year, Random Thoughts, and Adult (hmmm….). One thing I like is that when selecting a goal, you can categorize it as ‘Done’. It is nice to be able to start off with something already checked off your list.

I realized quickly that if you want to look at all the goals on the site, you will be there a long time. I set a limit of only reading goals that at least 3 other people had in common. A short time later, I decided I needed an even faster method. I went with the ‘Most Popular Interests’ section on the right side, and narrowed things down a lot quicker. I tried not to censor myself, if a goal stuck me as something related to my interests, I selected it. Once I went through that section (took about 2 hours), I had 108 goals, plus 18 items I have already completed.

One of the interesting things when you go through this exercise is seeing all the goals that you don’t want to do. For me, this list included ‘learn how to throw shotput’, ‘get waxed’, and my personal favorite - ‘have mirrors on all my walls’. The most insane one I saw is ’spend less time on the internet’. What?!? Are you kidding me? Why would you do that?

Some others make me wish for those lazy summer days while in college, like ‘wake up by 10AM every day for a month’. I probably couldn’t sleep past 9AM anymore if I tried. Another great one is ‘have a bath in warm porridge’. I’m not sure where to begin with this one - I mean, really, who would ever take a bath in cold porridge?

Some of the goals made me think differently about what a goal should be. One in particular was to take a photograph of you completing each item on your life list. Another interesting type of goal is completing another list (like visit all the national parks, or all 50 states, or watch all of the AFI’s top 100 movies, etc). There were some that were ongoing goals, with a specific frequency. For example, watch a sunrise every year, or spend an entire day outside once a month. This idea blew my mind, since when I started, I thought of goals as a one time thing. Do it, and check it off the list. But not all goals really meet that criteria. Based on this revelation, I added a goal to attend a concert at least once a year.

One of the disadvantages of selecting goals from the list is that your personal goals may be worded a little differently than what is there. You have to make the tough decision of whether you want to make your own goal that is similar to one that already exists, or give in to peer pressure and accept what someone else already created.

After I had my goals set up, I went back through and edited them. There were some duplicate goals (with slightly different wording) that I removed, and some that I changed the wording to be specific to me. This was an easy process. You can even add notes to your goals, set a due date, a priority, etc. I’ll evaluate the implementation part later, for now I’m sticking with developing the goals.

I also removed some of the goals that seemed a little more ‘how’ than ‘what’. For example, one goal was to ‘make new friends’, another was ‘get more friends by talking to strangers at a party’. The first one is a better fit for life goals, since you aren’t tied to *how* to make new friends, just that you make them. After pruning back and doing some minor editing, I was down to 90 goals. There are still some that need to be cleaned up, but I think I’ll try some of the other life goal brainstorming methods before I come back to it.

My current SuperViva Life List is here.

I’ll give my final evaluation of using the SuperViva method for life list development in a follow-on post.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Goal-Setting Methods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.