On Thursday, I attended a short one day course at the Defense Technology Tower B where I was exposed to Tony Buzan’s 5 learning steps. Close friends of mine would know that I had been reading up on quite a bit of Tony Buzan’s books, namely the ones on mindmap, memory enhancement and one called “Use your brain”. Hence the material covered was not entirely new to me. However, I still managed to learn something new and get re-inspired by what the speaker said. The day served as a good revision and a renewed attempt to try to pick up Mindmapping in Tony Buzan style.

There was something that the speaker said which resonated with me. It was something I had heard before, once in exactly the same manner, and the other in a different focus. He spoke about a study done on Stanford students and how only 5% of them actually set goals in their short to long term time frame. As they progressed, the study continued and eventually what they found out was that these 5% earned 95% of the total wealth of all the students.

The other version I heard just had a slight difference to the numbers. Top 3% earning 97% of the total wealth. Numbers aside, it served as a prominent reminder of how important goal setting and goal getting is. While I had kept general goals of my life so far, I have not attempted dictating to the micro level the kind of sub-goals I would like to achieve the over all goals.

Hence while I still had interest in mind-mapping, along with the still fresh lessons, I started work on my goal setting. It wasn’t easy, and I took quite long to decide on what I wanted to do in the first quarter. I had defined short term as a time period of 1 year and it had contained 4 quarters. I tried to give each quarter a structure so I could modify and add components as and when the need arises. For example, I cannot predict the type of books that I am going to read beyond Quarter 1 as there will be new and more interesting content that captures my imagination. Also, I cannot predict on which engineering study I should do. Hence I catered slots for book reading and a mini project each quarter.

Then I progressed on for the medium term goals which I set as a time period of 3 years. After writing some of my medium term goals, I realized how much they would have affected the short term goals, hence I had to go back to do some tweaking as and when necessary. I am sure that when I arrive at my long term goals, I will have to adjust my medium and short term goals accordingly.

The quote “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” just strikes me as something very true. I could potentially waste my life away if I did not find time to plan and get together with myself. I need to allocate some alone time occasionally to recharge and re-plan my life. My work life is also in a mess because I did not sit down together with myself to plan what I wanted to do.

With the fresh new insights from the course, I will then set my mind to my goals and achieve them. In the process, I hope to become rich monetary, spiritually and in health.