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Goals Define Choices

by JimRaffel on March 12, 2010

Everything you do in life takes you closer to your goals, or further from them.

Without clearly defined goals you have no standard by which to judge your choices. Yesterday I shared four of the key choices I have made in my life over the past year. Each of those choices has brought me closer to my goals. There is a great deal of published material on goals. Some of it talks about specific goals with specific time lines. Other material leans towards what is working for me, broad sweeping goals.

Goal number 1: Strengthen my understanding of the relationship I have with God. Yes, I believe in God. No, I’m not a huge fan of organized religion. I can tell you almost every real, authentic and sustainably successful person I know puts some form of spirituality at the top of their list.

Goal number 2: Be the most awesome husband and father I can be. Husband is listed before father in the previous sentence on purpose. A healthy traditional family starts with a healthy relationship between the spouses. Cheryl and I devote a great deal of time and effort in our lives to the sustainable achievement of this goal.

Goal number 3: Have a rocking business that supports my family, while giving back to the community that provides that support. There are actually several communities in my case. The graphic communications industry, the Milwaukee community and this great country of opportunity that we live in, just to name a few. Working to achieve financial success, without some plan to make the world a better place along the way, seems like an empty plan to me.

Goal number 4: Share my life long journey to achieve goals 1, 2, and 3 via this blog. It just does not get any better than this. The growth I have seen in myself and chronicled via this blog is here for you all to benefit from. I sincerely hope you are able to take something away from each and every post that enriches your life.

With these goals in mind go back and look at the choices I made. Can you see how those four choices make more sense when framed by these goals? Do you prefer broad sweeping goals like I do, or do you favor the very specific and time based goals I spoke of earlier? Let’s use the comments to get a conversation going.

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Trust as Currency

by JimRaffel on March 10, 2010

Today I experienced first hand what if feels like to hold the currency that is the trust of another human being. Early in the day I learned that a new customer has chosen to go with my proposal based upon the recommendation of “Fred,” a customer I wrote about in my Regaining Trust post. Later in the day, one of my largest customers made a significant long-term financial commitment because he trusts that we will get the work done as we have in the past.

Last June I read Jeffery Gitomer’s Little Teal Book of Trust and began to realize that I had more than a few messes in my life which needed cleaning up. I had let down a customer who had become a friend over the years. After a month of hard work and introspection, I repaired the relationship enough to write the aforementioned post about regaining trust. This was about the same time I began developing my real, authentic and sustainable methodology for making decisions.

Slowly but surely over the past nine months I have continued following Gitomer’s advice and I have transferred the success I wrote about to all aspects of my life. As I regain the trust of those important to me, I am learning to trust others in ways I never have before. That leads me to Chris Brogan.

Chris Brogan writes extensively on the topics of social media and community. While reading his new book Social Media 101 I came across Chapter 48: Who Is Secretly Pitching You? Chris’s version of this post in his new book adds the context that the chapter had generated the idea for his first book Trust Agents.

How do you value trust in a personal or business relationship? Do you think of it as a currency like Chris Brogan does? Share your thoughts in the comments and I promise to respond with mine.

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Blogging is How I Live Real, Authentic and Sustainable

March 3, 2010

It’s real because writing is the doing part of thinking. It’s authentic because my writing comes from the heart about what’s going on in my life right now. My life is sustainable because my thoughts turn into words which in turn become actions. Earlier this week I had the privilege to speak at MKELive’s Ignite [...]

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Fit Milwaukee is Real, Authentic and Sustainable

January 24, 2010

I have these three friends Anne Munkwitz (@bananza), Tracey Gessner (@tmgessner) and Brennan Stehling (@BrennanMKE). Together they started Fit Milwaukee. Yesterday two teams of four people (who did not even know each other one year ago) ran a marathon relay together. Some people ran and some of us just watched and cheered them on. All [...]

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Q: Work More or Less? A:Yes

January 18, 2010

I suspect the title of this post leaves you thinking “huh, he wants me to work more and less, how does that work?” Well, let me explain how this works. My friend Joe, who has only known me for a few months, somehow managed to crawl inside my brain and figure out what makes me [...]

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Color & The State of Printing Industry 2010

January 1, 2010

Color & The State of the Printing Industry 2010 also appears on the  ColorMetrix Color Conversation blog. It never ceases to amaze me how integral color knowledge is to the graphic arts industry at large, yet how few people in the industry really understand the topic. The problem is that color, like the game of [...]

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Real, Authentic and Sustainable

October 14, 2009

Incidents over the last nineteen months have lead me to a new philosophy of life that spreads across my family, spiritual, and business existence. This philosophy is so obvious I sometimes forget to look at situations utilizing this new and powerful tool I have at my disposal. Ask yourself if what you are doing right [...]

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