A couple of weeks ago, I shared a video of Adam Baker giving a presentation at Tedx-Asheville. I was impressed by the presentation and wanted to reach out to Adam for some additional information. If you haven’t watched the video yet, I would encourage you to do so. You can find it here.
In case you are not familiar with Adam, he is the creator of the popular Man vs Debt blog and recently started a business called You vs Debt that helps people sell their crap, eliminate their debt, and live the life of their dreams. The mission of You vs Debt is the subject of Adam’s presentation.
Although Adam is crazy busy, he was good enough to take a few minutes to answer some of my questions via email. Adam’s responses to my questions helped to clarify for me exactly what Adam’s philosophy is and how it has impacted his life. I hope it does the same for you.
Earlier this year, I set several goals for myself that I want to accomplish before the year is out. Previously, I would routinely set goals and then hope to accomplish them. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But what I didn’t do is follow up periodically to see if I was making any progress. That changes this year.
Here is a list of the goals I have set for myself along with notes on the progress, if any, I made on the goal during December. The majority of the goals were detailed in my Making Plans for 2011 post from earlier this year. I’ve added a few goals to the list since then as well.
The year came to a close this month and I can’t really say that it ended on a high note. The general malaise I have been feeling continued throughout most of December and it turned out to be a rather unproductive month. Thankfully, along with the new year came a new commitment to turn things around and to become more productive. I’ll write more about that in my next post. In the meantime, here’s how I did on my goals during the month of December:
How are you feeling about 2011 ending and 2012 beginning? For most of us, 2011 was a really tough year. The economy is as weak as we have ever seen it (even worse than the great depression), unemployment is high and credit markets are tight. It’s a scary time to make changes. In times like this, people tend to hang on to what they have, even if what they have isn’t what they want.
And yet, despite the challenges we are facing, opportunities abound. Not only are there opportunities everywhere, but the tough economy actually provides us with advantages that we wouldn’t have during stronger economic times. Don’t believe me? Read the following thoughts from resident genius Seth Godin. It helped to pull me out of my funk and re-focus on what is really possible right now. I hope it does the same for you.
There are thousands and thousands of people out there living lives of quiet, screaming desperation who work long, hard hours, at jobs they hate, to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.
– Nigel Marsh
My friend Adam Baker is an amazing young guy.
Adam was in his early 20′s when he suddenly realized that the script he’d been given by society really wasn’t in his best interest. You know the script I’m talking about. We all receive the same basic one. It goes like this:
work hard in high school so you can get into a good college
borrow money so you can attend the good college so you can get a good job
get an apartment and borrow money to fill it with stuff
find a mate, get married, and then borrow more money for a house
have some kids, borrow more money and get a bigger house
Do all of this, and someday you can enter the promised land of retirement. Problem is, until you hit retirement, all of your money goes to pay your debt. And if you make it to retirement age, you’ll probably find out that there’s no money left to retire on. For most of us, we don’t figure out the deck is stacked against us until we get close to retirement age.
When Adam started his journey, he was in a position like a lot of us. He was in debt and he was working to pay the bills. But he asked himself one question, and the answer to that question changed his life. The question? What does freedom mean to me? He wasn’t looking for a dictionary definition. Instead, he wanted to know what his life would look like if he was truly free.
Last month, Adam was invited to share his story at the Tedx Conference in Asheville, NC. a video of that presentation is attached. In the video, Adam tells his story and issues a challenge to anyone who is still going to work every day to pay their bills. In an upcoming post, I will give you some of my thoughts about the presentation. I’ll also discuss how Adam’s message can be applied to my life. To be honest, I’m struggling with Adam’s message at the moment and I will be hashing it out in my mind over the next few days.
I found the following on the Leadership Freak blog. It’s a guest post written by Lolly Daskal and I think it does a good job of pointing out the differences between leadership and management. The point is, there is a difference.
What is the biggest difference between managers and leaders?
Both roles are important but they seek to do different things…
Leaders lead people. Managers manage people.
Leaders set destinations. Managers navigate the roads to get there.
Earlier this year, I set several goals for myself that I want to accomplish before the year is out. Previously, I would routinely set goals and then hope to accomplish them. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But what I didn’t do is follow up periodically to see if I was making any progress. That changes this year.
Here is a list of the goals I have set for myself along with notes on the progress, if any, I made on the goal during November. The majority of the goals were detailed in my Making Plans for 2011 post from earlier this year. I’ve added a few goals to the list since then as well.
My productivity fell off a cliff in November. I wish I had a good excuse, but I really don’t. I was still traveling a bit and I was a little under the weather on a couple of different occasions during the month, but there’s no one thing that prevented me from being productive.
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.
– Ferris Bueller
At the end of every year, I take off a few days to evaluate what I accomplished during the course of the year and plan for what I’d like to accomplish in the upcoming 12 months. This year-end planning session will take place next month. I’m already looking forward to it.
In addition to taking off a few days next month, I’m taking off this entire week. I’m not going to beat myself up for not writing this week. I’m also not going to get overly involved in any projects. What I am going to do is just sit and think.
It seems to me that a real weakness for a lot of people is their inability to sit quietly and consider their life. I’m not so much talking about meditation (although that can be valuable too). I’m talking about taking a long hard look at your life and deciding what should change and what should stay the same. I don’t want to do things a certain way in my life because I have always done things that way. Whatever I do, I want to do it consciously.
Everything is on the table. If I’m involved in something that no longer serves me, then I’ll work to change it. If something I’m doing seems to be working just fine, I’ll continue it. Nothing is off limits. Everything will be considered.
I have been extremely gratified to have people read the articles I post on this blog. The comments have been great and I hope that everyone who has stopped by has found something interesting and valuable. But the truth is, I don’t write this blog for others. I write it for myself.
I started writing this blog as a way to share my thoughts and ideas with other people. I guess I was egotistic enough to think that I had something to say that others could benefit from. But honestly, that motivation changed not too long after I began writing here. What I found was that if I wrote a blog post about something that I was struggling with, writing the post would help me get my thoughts clear in my head.
For instance, a while ago I was thinking back on a great opportunity I had that I let slip away. The memory of my mishandling of the situation made me feel pretty lousy. I was feeling bad about myself, but I wanted to analyze the situation and hopefully learn from it. That resulted in two blogs posts about what fear had cost me in my life (Post 1, Post 2). In hindsight, I hope that anyone who read those blog posts got something valuable out of them, but the real goal in writing them was to help me learn from a bad experience.
Earlier this year, I set several goals for myself that I want to accomplish before the year is out. Previously, I would routinely set goals and then hope to accomplish them. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But what I didn’t do is follow up periodically to see if I was making any progress. That changes this year.
Here is a list of the goals I have set for myself along with notes on the progress, if any, I made on the goal during October. The majority of the goals were detailed in my Making Plans for 2011 post from earlier this year. I’ve added a few goals to the list since then as well.
A couple of weeks ago, I shared a video of Adam Baker giving a presentation at Tedx-Asheville. I was impressed by the presentation and wanted to reach out to Adam for some additional information. If you haven’t watched the video yet, I would encourage you to do so. You can find it here.
