Mapping The Pursuit of Awesome - Part 3: Plotting a Course

Imagine you're setting off on a road trip. Your plan is to get from your house to your nice little beach home several hundred miles down the coast. You know where you're going, but haven't really given much thought as to how you'll get there.  You're pretty sure that you pass an old church building somewhere not far from your home, but after that you're relying purely on the spirit of adventure and the knowledge that as long as you know the destination, it doesn't really matter how you get there.

The most likely result is that one of two things will happen:

Either you'll pass the church and then spend half an age driving around aimlessly until you eventually come upon your beach home much later than you would have liked.

Or, you'll drive and drive for miles and miles until you finally realise that you never even saw the church, have only the vaguest idea where you are and absolutely no idea at all of how to get to your beach home.

Pursuing our most valued goals can be much like our imaginary road trip. If we know where we want to go yet don't really think about how we'll get there, we'll either never achieve our goals at all or take far longer to achieve them than is really necessary.

Now you may argue, much like our road-trippers, that as long as you achieve said goals in the end, how you do so or how long it takes you shouldn't really matter. You'd have a point, and if that's your chosen method for your own Pursuit of Awesome, I wish you well.

That said, I'd much rather have a clear set of directions for my journey so that I may reach my destination (completing all my goals) faster and with much greater focus.

Creating your directions
How you go about creating your directions is  up to you. I can't stress enough how much the Pursuit of Awesome is an entirely personal matter; go with what works for you and will best help you to achieve your goals.

If you're not exactly sure what does work for you, here's a suggested plan for mapping your Pursuit of Awesome.

Assess where you are
There's an old cliché which tells us that we can't know where we're going until we know where we've been. I like to think of that somewhat differently:

It's harder to get where we're going if we don't know where we are

We've already looked at assessing where you are to help you get to where you want to go, but here's a quick recap.

• What do you hope to change about your current situation by pursuing your goals?
• What do you have that can help you with this?
• What do you (or don't you) have that might stop you?
• What can you do about the things that are stopping you?

Set milestones

One of my goals for 2012 has been to write 300,000 words over the course of the year.

To help me achieve this goal, I had to create milestones. 

• 100,000 words written by the end of April
• 200,000 words written by the end of August
• 300,000 words written by the end of December

To make it even easier on myself, I set further milestones en route for the bigger ones above

• 25,000 words written by the end of each month
• 6,250 words written by the end of each week

Setting these milestones helps me to pursue my goals in several ways:

• It makes the whole goal seem less daunting.
  It's easier to focus on writing 6,250 words than 300,000
• It boosts my confident and keeps me motivated
  If I can reach the 100,000 mark, it inspires me to work towards the next 100,00.
• It helps me to stay on course
  This is the most important one of all. If I don't look out for my milestones and drive towards them in my Pursuit of Awesome, how will I know whether or not I'm heading in the right direction towards the destination marked 300,000 words?

I used similar milestones to help me run a marathon, start my own business and pursue other goals. 

You may be happy to just set a couple of big milestones along your journey, but the further you can break it down and the more smaller milestones you can set on your path, the easier you'll find it to stay on course.

Keep your eyes on the road
In much the same way that it's harder to reach our goals if we don't drive towards our milestones, it's difficult to even reach those milestones if we don't look out for them.

Keep track of your progress by writing down what you're doing to work towards your goals, give yourself deadlines to reach individual milestones (in the above example, 25,000 words is a milestone, one month is a deadline) and constantly evaluate where you are to make sure your pursuit is going in the right direction.

Once that's done, you'll almost be ready for take off.