John Carrier

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw

Today, I’m going to do a little mashup of ideas from two of my current living heroes, Timothy Ferriss and Keith Ferrazzi.

Keith’s new thing is sharing your goals with your friends to garner their support (and deepen your relationship with them), and in that spirit, he recently blogged his goals for the new year.

Tim’s book, the 4-Hour Workweek, teaches you to throw out your reasonable goals in exchange for unreasonable ones. His logic? Since (a) radical goals can be waaaay more motivating than humdrum ones, and (b) there’s less competition for the far-out stuff (more people dream of owning a dream house than a dream castle), then (c) you are more likely to reach your crazywild goals than your run-of-the-mill ones, if you take your crazywild goals seriously and actually take the first steps toward achieving them.

The mashup: here’s my list of the Top 10 Insane Goals I want to accomplish this year. I came up with this list after much thought over the recent holidays using the methodology Tim calls “Dreamlining.” Out of 30 or so things I would do if I had $100 million in the bank and there was no way I could fail, these 10 (in no particular order) would be the most life-changing.

1. Take a family trip to Israel.
2. Run a 50-mile race.
3. Take the BOSS 28-day wilderness survival course.
4. Purchase a dining table that seats 12 people.
5. Take a volunteering trip through AJWS.
6. Through-hike one Triple Crown long-distance trail.
7. Take sushi-making lessons. In Japan.
8. “Winter” (as a verb) someplace warmer than Minnesota.
9. Take a family trip to Europe.
10. Start a “virtual” brewery: Develop a tasty beer recipe, contract-brew it at an established brewery, and distribute it solely through the Internet.

Accomplishing any one of these goals would change my life for the better. Accomplishing 2 or 3 of them would make it the best year of my life (after the birth of my children, marrying my wife, blah blah blah). I’m going for all 10. Now, where’s the coffee?

Has anyone out there done any of these things? What’s the best way to start? Please use the comments below for tips and trips, or better yet, to list YOUR most outrageous goals for 2008.

Tags: 4HWW, goals, unreasonable

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 10:29 pm and is filed under books, contrarian, goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.