My previous blogs have focused on a proven system of daily, task-driven organization that my father attempted to teach me in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. My retirement last month was a chance to regret how much more I could have accomplished over the course of my life had I just listened to him. In the 1960’s, however, we did not listen to our parents.
My father’s daily system is easy and reliable, comfortable as a newspaper in a comfortable reading chair. Yet it is also incomplete.
Any time management expert will tell you that daily planning is not enough. There must be a focus on longer term goals. There must be a time to decide what you really want to achieve over the next five or ten years. Most important goals have stages and steps to integrate into your daily planning, but until you figure out what you want, you won’t know the stages or steps to put into motion each day.
My father, of course, knew this as well as he knew the necessity of daily planning. In the family garage, along with the daily planning sheets, I found boxes of business cards he passed out to help his patients (and, he vainly hoped, his nine children) focus on longer term goals. The cards began with capital letters stating, “MY GOAL IS.” Then there was a blank in which you summarized your dream in just a few words. Here is what the cards looked like. [My Father’s Business Card] There were lots of these cards because, of course, us kids never used them. They’d been gathering dust for 50 years when I found them in my parents’ garage in Ohio. I took a box home with me, and have since reproduced them for myself, my family and friends.
We all know what a big goal looks like: Getting married. Getting a new job. Changing careers. Completing a degree. Buying a house. We all have these goals in our mind, but how often do we take the simple step of writing them down and leaving the reminder in a place where we can’t help seeing it? My father encouraged writing out the goal simply, in a few words, then leaving it everywhere so you could not stop thinking about it.
I doubt my father invented this idea. I recently read of something similar in David Goggins’ “Can’t Hurt Me,” where he tells of putting his goals on yellow stickies that he affixes to his bathroom mirrors, so they always stare at him in the morning.
My father’s “My Goal Is” business cards did not just give you a place to write your goals. They were also packed with wisdom to help you achieve them. The sources of this wisdom: Napolean Hill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Earl Nightingale, and Jesus.
The first quote on the card:
“What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
The quote is usually attributed to Napolean Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, and the most successful success guru of the early 20th Century. If you read his seminal work, you will quickly realize that most of today’s “life coaches,” success gurus, and most motivational podcasts, are all basically recycling Napolean Hill’s fundamental ideas, which he synthesized from decades of interviewing successful entrepreneurs. My father put Napolean Hill’s principle into action when my parents decided they needed a new house. As our family grew, we were cramped in a tiny home in Garfield Heights, Ohio. Five of the nine of us kids were living in the attic. We could see the problem, and my father set the goal: “A New House.” He then came up with the first task for his goal, which was doubtlessly transferred into daily steps of high importance that he would periodically announce to us: buy a lot, hire an architect, find a builder, commence construction, etc. When he bought the lot, he took us there so we could imagine a house where there were only trees. When the architect was hired, he asked us what we would like in the house. We all said, “An indoor swimming pool.” It seemed like an impossible pipe dream. Although he did the work, we had spoken the goal, then talked and dreamed about it until it became a reality for us, and ultimately for him and my mother. The house fell into disrepair in my parents’ final years. It has now been sold, and the pool of our dreams, which was preposterously hard to maintain through a Cleveland winter, has been filled in by the new owners. Yet the pool remains the product of our childhood dream and my father’s exercise in goal setting. It will always be the place where I taught myself the butterfly in a vain attempt to be relevant on my high school swim team.
The second quote is “We become what we think about all day long.” This quote is most often attributed to Dale Carnegie who credited Ralph Waldo Emerson. My father was a devotee of the success literature of his day, and listened avidly to tapes by Dale Carnegie, and even took “How to Win Friends and Influence People” course to become a better speaker. He often spoke to Rotary Clubs and other groups about his surgeries. My father did not really need the course. He was always a commanding speaker, and he brooked no interruptions—especially from us. He got even better after delivering lectures to us on Dale Carnegie’s methods at dinner. Carnegie’s methods have stood the test of time: even today you can sign up for the courses my father took in the 1960’s. Although I don’t doubt the truth of Carnegie’s statement today, I didn’t get much benefit from this idea as a teenager. I felt like I was the last person who had any control over what I was thinking. Worse, my thoughts always seemed to depress me. I rejected this idea simply because it came from my father. I figured Dale Carnegie’s ideas were going to end me up in one of Pete Seeger’s ticky-tacky little boxes, which was the last thing we youngsters wanted in the 1960’s. I began to look for substances that would keep me from thinking about anything all day long. It was a long journey that almost finished me.
The third quote is the only one for which my father provided a source. It was a translation of part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Mathew 7:7-11.
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it shall be opened. Or what man is there among you, who if his son ask him for a loaf, will hand him a stone; or if he asks for a fish, will hand him a serpent? Therefore, if you, evil as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!
My father’s citation on his business card went to verse 7:12, which, significantly I now think, contains the Golden Rule: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
I ignored Jesus’s words in this passage, thinking my parents’ belief in them was childish and oblivious. When I was eight, I had prayed in vain for the Cleveland Indians to win the pennant. When this exercise failed (the Indians failed to win the pennant during my childhood) I concluded that prayer did not work. I could ask Jesus to let me run a four-minute mile, or get an A in Physics, but it seemed that I alone was in control of such things, and they were determined only by how much I trained or studied.
Of course, it was my understanding of scripture that was naïve, for a lot is implied in the requirement of “seeking” and “knocking.” As explained by a Biblical scholar,
[T]his empowerment presupposes that we are ready to be as committed to God’s purposes as Elijah and like-minded servants of God were. Such a call to believing prayer supposes a heart of piety submitted to God’s will; it would not apply to a man praying to obtain another man’s wife or to a woman praying for a nicer car as a status symbol of conspicuous consumption. Although Jesus states the promise graphically, he implicitly addressed his only men and women of God who will seek the things God would have them to seek for the Kingdom and their basic needs.
Craig S. Keener, Matthew (Downers Grove: IVP Academic 1997), 160. As stated in the Lord’s Prayer, earlier in the same Sermon on the Mount, we should pray only for God’s Kingdom to come, and that His will be done. There are a few men in history, Elijah was apparently one of them, that have believed strongly enough that God did extraordinary things at their request, as when He brought life back into a child at Elijah’s request. (1 Kings 17: 20-22.)
Sixty-eight-year-old me had learned a few things since rejecting my father’s teaching. I had learned that if I was grateful and valued the gifts that had been given to me, I would receive all that I truly needed—and a few things that I just wanted. It is enough to pray only for my daily bread, and that my sins be forgiven.
Sixty-eight-year-old me decided to give my father’s old business cards a try. I wrote down three goals on the cards and left them on my various desks and in other places where I would see them often. I’m 70 now. I won’t tell you what these three long-term goals were, but I will tell you that I have achieved them all in the last two years.
If you would like to try to this method for yourself, you have my permission to print out the pdf version of my father’s cards for your personal use. Let me know if it works for you.
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