In my first post "The Year of Writing Dangerously" a made a reference to the term 'Game Changer.' I figured it would a good time to supply a definition for the term. First, some background. I'm planner guy. I have used various planner systems since I became an IT professional. Big ones. Small Ones. Electronic ones. Full year books or monthly booklets. Web apps or desktop programs. All of which do one thing. That is to manage your time.
I was between planners about 5 years ago and my daughter gave me a Passion Planner. It was a bound book which contained weekly pages for the entire year. What was different about it was it didn't just talk about goals and tasks. It made you figure out what outcomes you wanted to happen within the next 3 months, year, 3 years and your whole life.
It was the classic 'big rock' strategy of time management where you specify the most important outcomes. It provides a framework for achieving those Game Changers as well as everything else.
Game Changes are NOT resolutions. Every January resolutions are made to effect some kind of change, but in almost all cases fail to manifest any change in a life. Gyms are crowded in January by well meaning people looking to make a change. By February they are ghost towns. Resolutions fail mainly because they are not written down and integrated into your daily routine.
Game Changers are NOT Goals, even if they are SMART Goals. Goals are the next level above resolutions because at least they are written down. Goals were my go to method for achieving success for many years. Goals are good. They remind you of your stated priorities. However, goals only work if you break them down into tasks and add those tasks to your weekly/daily schedule.
One of my favorite authors, Scott Adams stated in his book How To Fail at Everything and Still Win Big that goals don't work. The reason they don't work is that every day you haven't achieved the goal you are in a failure state. Have a goal to lose 20 pounds of weight? Every day you haven't lost the 20 pounds you have failed. The failure rate for goals is higher than the rejection rate for insurance salesman or used car dealers.
For those reasons I prefer the concept of Game Changers for life planning each year. I am happy to report I was able to complete 12 of the 16 Game Changers I specified last year. Though technically it's only a 75% success rate, the unfinished Game Changers were rolled into the following year. There was no sense of frustration or failure. This is why I like Game Changers.
I leave you with a quote from Benjamin Franklin.
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