100 Day Plan

***This is an interesting article about having a vision and setting goals, then working your plan to achieve them.

There are 100 days left in the year. How are your 2017 goals coming along?
For most people (me among them), there are things you wanted to accomplish that you haven't even started yet. Fortunately, 100 days is a great time period for achieving goals. It's a sufficient block to achieve progress, but short enough to leave no room for procrastination, which leads to a greater likelihood of success.
I know this from experience, having used 100-day plans several times to achieve big professional and personal goals. Among them:

1. Getting in shape to run a marathon, after basically being a non-runner
2. More than quadrupling the average monthly readership of this column, from about 250,000 people to well over one million
3. Studying for and successfully passing the state bar exam, while simultaneously running a media startup

1. Draft a goal.

You need a goal, obviously, and steps 1 and 2 of this process are about choosing the right one. To be more specific, you need on objective that is worthwhile, quantifiable, and at least arguably achievable.

• Worthwhile: We'll discuss this more below in No. 2, but there's nothing worse than working hard for something that doesn't merit your time and energy.
• Quantifiable: No wishy-washy goals allowed. To use the example of wanting to train to run a marathon in 100 days, it's not enough to say, "I want to get in better physical shape." Instead, you need something you can measure--26.2 miles. Otherwise, how will you truly know if you've succeeded?
• Arguably achievable: If your goal isn't a bit of a stretch, you probably don't need a 100-day mapping plan to begin with. But at the same time, you don't want to set yourself up for something you'll never have a chance of reaching.

 More at the link.

***Busy day today! I worked on my fall decorations last night, and got up really early this morning to finish up and start cooking. My family is coming for dinner today. Always look forward to having company over for a meal. :-) Chicken & noodles today!

***Ted Cruz is right. Obamacare is not the only awful bill that needs to be repealed. 

 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Congress should take advantage of the chance to use tax reform to repeal Dodd-Frank, which he argued has helped large banks expand while hurting small community banks and credit unions.

Cruz hopes tax reform is signed into law by “the end of this year or early next year.”

“When enacting tax reform, we should also use it as an opportunity to repeal Dodd-Frank. Dodd-Frank is one of the most damaging pieces of legislation in modern times. Dodd-Frank has wreaked havoc. Dodd-Frank was sold to the American people to stop ‘too big to fail.’ How has that worked out? The big banks are bigger and the smaller banks, the community financial institutions, have been devastated,” Cruz said last week during a Tax Foundation event on tax reform at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center.

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***From WealthyGorilla.com:


A gentleman was walking through an elephant camp, and he spotted that the elephants weren’t being kept in cages or held by the use of chains. All that was holding them back from escaping the camp, was a small piece of rope tied to one of their legs.
As the man gazed upon the elephants, he was completely confused as to why the elephants didn’t just use their strength to break the rope and escape the camp. They could easily have done so, but instead they didn’t try to at all.
Curious and wanting to know the answer, he asked a trainer nearby why the elephants were just standing there and never tried to escape.
The trainer replied;

“when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.”

The only reason that the elephants weren’t breaking free and escaping from the camp was because over time they adopted the belief that it just wasn’t possible.

Moral of the story: No matter how much the world tries to hold you back, always continue with the belief that what you want to achieve is possible. Believing you can become successful is the most important step in actually achieving it.


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***“Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else.” – Les Brown