From the desk of Doctor B. D. Septive,
the most self-helpiest of all self-help gurus.
You must think of where you are and where you want to go before you can answer this question. If you are in a college classroom and you want to be in the chair of Sony’s CEO, your goal is ridiculous. It’s preposterous to even entertain the notion you could have that job. Even if you just want to sit in his chair for a minute, it’s a longshot. However if your goal is to sit in a chair and watch a Sony, I say go for it. If your goal is not achievable it will lead to nothing but frustration, anger, and standing in front of a car dealership in a gorilla costume.
You can’t expect to walk down the street of your pitifully insignificant life and plop yourself into a position of such power and responsibility as Chief Executive Officer of a successful multi-national corporation. That is unless you’re the current CEO’s offspring. In that case you don’t really need to do anything except get expelled from military school and flunk out of Yale. When daddy gets tired of all the headaches that come with the job, he will hand it over to you and watch from a distance as you systematically wreck every piece of the company, a little bit at a time. He knows you pretty well and that’s why he will sell all his stock just before he announces your new position.
But since the great majority of you are not the offspring of a CEO you’ll have to do a lot of work and be pretty damn good at it to advance to such a position. So unless you have eight or nine Pulitzer Prizes and have found a way to make gold from orange juice, stop with the unrealistic expectations, already.
You understand yourself better than anyone else, even if you don’t want to. You know how cranky you get when you set a goal you can’t reach. You scream and throw popcorn at passersby or you climb into the pen with all the puppies until the mall cops throw you in the holding cell. But that is truly a blessing in disguise because it is a perfect place to think, to reflect on how to set and achieve goals that are attainable to you and the voices that won’t leave you alone.
3 comments:
Not everyone dreams of being a CEO. I wanted to be a double-nought spy or can-opener salesman. But there, too, it's all about pedigree. Luckily, I'm tall, blond, good-looking, rich, and out of touch with reality.
This story sounds oddly familiar...Oh that's right, although this tale is full of humor, sarcasm, and wit it is so often very true. So the lesson to be learned is...Only strive for the unobtainable if your over-bred pedigree is worth millions. Otherwise, start stretching! You don't want to pull a hamstring while bouncing around in that gorilla suit :)
Goals, yeah, I battle with them every day with my students. I find the kids have more realistic goals than the adults! Hmmm. Maybe being naive and/or innocent is the key.
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