After many years of trying to set personal goals in various ways and then failing to stick to them, I’m finally having some success. I can’t claim all the credit for this. To get from someone who has never been able to be consistent at anything, to someone who appears to be making the [...]
After many years of trying to set personal goals in various ways and then failing to stick to them, I’m finally having some success. I can’t claim all the credit for this. To get from someone who has never been able to be consistent at anything, to someone who appears to be making the right lifestyle choices for the first time, I needed help. So I followed somebody else’s process.
The Magic Lamp: Goal Setting for People Who Hate Setting Goals
Keith Ellis hasn’t written much, mostly just the book I’m recommending and a cyber thriller which I haven’t read, but what he wrote on goal setting I think is brilliant. It’s only got 19 reviews on Amazon, mostly positive, but it’s ranked around the 17,800 mark in terms of Amazon sales which is quite a healthy ranking.
What it’s got going for it is accessibility, simplicity and what you could call memorability. In other words it’s the kind of book you can read easily, follow easily and remember easily. For a self help book it’s much more likely to work for you than a more complex or over engineered manual.
The book describes a simple 4 step process to setting goals. The first step, listing and prioritising the goals, was a real help to me. I’m the kind of person who fails in goal setting simply because I want to do too much; not because I’m unmotivated but because I’m too motivated in an unfocussed way. Following Keith’s thinking on how to change this really made me realise the relative importance of my various intents. The second step is to JFDI, to actually get on with it, which helped me break my inertia. The third step is about managing and monitoring your progress and the final step is to just keep going, a section in which Keith Ellis helps you to predict and prevent all the many things that can derail you from your goals.
The book does have it’s weak points, certainly in the marketing spin in the book. It does not contain a secret and there’s nothing about this book specific to people who hate setting goals, other than the fact that it’s probably the simplest approach you can read. You’d have to want to set goals before buying it anyway.
Right now this is the only goal setting book I recommend. I’ve read alot of snake oil on this topic and this isn’t that. Many of my friends and family have bought this book on my recommendation and there is a well thumbed copy of it right beside my bed.
Tags: books, featured, health, psychology, review, self improvement
December 10th, 2009 at 1:10 am
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