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New Year’s Resolutions: 2005

I like it when I can get a jump on things, and this year I am going to go ahead and do that by getting a running start on my New Year’s resolutions. I think that by starting to work on these babies right at the start of September I’ll have a few of them accomplished, which should give me enough momentum to power my way through the rest of them when January rolls around. Also, I know that my Mom will get a kick out of hearing that I am already done with half of my resolutions for 2005 right as 2005 starts.
So, here they are… please try to keep me accountable to them if you can remember to do so. Thanks!

1. Good Schedule
Having a good schedule is one of the most important things in my life. This is the biggest positive impact that my Southwestern experience had on me. The Good Schedule is foundational. It leads to requiring less day by day, minute by minute discipline after the schedule is formed, and if well planned a good schedule will set you up for successfully reaching goals that you set when you decide your schedule.
This schedule will consist of the following items.
–Sleeping at consistent times = a good sleep schedule.
–Praying regularly, but not out of habit or ritual. This should be tricky.
–Working out.
–Reading daily… several times a day. Inspirational reading in the morning, homework reading throughout the day and in the evening.
–Studying daily, but not on my day off.
–Writing daily
–Blogging 15 times a month.
–Cooking and Cleaning daily.
–Fellowship!
–One day off every week.

2. Goal Setting
Goal setting is probably the second biggest impact that Southwestern and listening to Bill Hybel’s Couragous Leadership during my SW experience
has had on me. I don’t want Southwestern to take all the credit for this though, because I had started to get the picture long before I had even left for the program.

About this time last year I was persistantly explaining the idea of investing to Joy in the hopes of selling her on the idea of starting a Scottrade account and investing some of her hard earned money. It paid off, and when it did I set a rather audacious goal for both of us. She invested $4,050 and I had just over two grand. I wanted to have the $4,272 that I started college with by the time I graduated, which amounted to almost a clean double of what I had last September. So, I told Joy that I had a plan for doubling our money in one year. I asked if she wanted to be on board for that plan with her money and with her prayers. She was hesitant at first, but after successful first few months she was completely sold. We were ahead of our goals before December in a mediocre economy!

To wrap this story up… It is now the end of August. Joy’s $4050 is looking more like $8,563.39. My mere two grand is now $4,611.76, and now my mom is setting up an account with Scottrade with $4,500 for me to manage for her. This is why I am going to be working on setting goals for 2005. I know that I could not have done this well in the stock market if I had not set audacious goals for Joy and I, and if we had not been praying about meeting our goals.

This goal setting goal will consist of the following focus points.
Setting yearly goals (like this one.)
Setting Monthly goals at the begining of every month.
Setting Weekly goals before or immediately after my day off.
Setting Daily goals when I wake up in the morning.

3. Positive Attitude
Whoa, this is also something that Southwestern was relentlessly trying to drill into all who entered its summer of hell. Weird. I guess some of this brainwashing has worked on me after all.
Anyway, I desperately need to have a more positive attitude. In the last few days I’ve been spending a lot of time reading and I have been hit from some of the most disparate sources about the importance of a positive attitude. Then I realized that I am on again off again with my attitude. I need to be perpetually optimistic and positive! OK, that is a joke, but I would like to get to the point where I am able to whether most of the storms that life throws at me better than I do now.

4. Straight A’s
In the past I would have this as a New Year’s resolution after a first semester of rather crumby grades. This year I can’t do that because I was accepted into seminary on academic probation, because I didnt’ meet their grade requirements. So, I have to have two stellar semesters back to back to find my way out of probation. Craziness! Usually I wait until I’ve been in a school for a while to get into academic probation. Talk about starting early with things!

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