Scripted and Purposeful (BeFirst Course 124)

Right off the bat. I'm Dr. David King, husband, flower. All right, welcome back. We just talked about how accidental creative accomplishment does not happen. Well, it happens, but very, very rarely. So we shouldn't rely on accidents, happy little accidents like Bob Ross. We shouldn't rely on those accidents to allow us a sense of things will happen for us, right? Everything's going to fall into place. Now, with the right efforts and the right viewpoint and choices, many times things will fall into place for us, but not necessarily if we're looking to improve and become a better version of ourself. So let's talk now about purposeful goal accomplishment-centered targets. How do we get to the goal-driven and accomplishment-centered targets? This is just another exercise in the active creative process, just as dreams without goals are only wishes, and goals, if they're not written down, are garbage. So goals without individual steps are just hopes. Did you catch that? Goals without individual steps are just hopes. So if I have a goal, like I have a goal to save a million dollars by the time I retire, without steps to get there that are delineated and time-specific with effort behind those steps, it's just a wish and a hope and a dream. We can't truly accomplish anything until we accomplish those things, those incremental steps that add up to the overall goal. Those things that add up to the goal, right? It's the steps. It's the choices, the small choices, the steps that lead to the goal, which is where the accomplishment happens. Like you've probably heard many, many times, the basketball game or the football game or whatever game you're playing is really won or lost in the practice, in the practice sessions. That's when things are won or lost. We've talked about how we'd respond in certain situations. We've talked about what we would do given the presentation of a certain unique situation. Have we rehearsed that? Have we thought about the options we've got ahead of us? It's really how we react in these moments which defines our success, okay? So for basketball players, the game is won or lost in the rehearse, in the practice beforehand, right? As a trumpet player, when I was preparing for my freshman recital, really the determination of how well that was going to go was entirely on my shoulders and determined in the rehearsal sessions, in the practice room, hours and hours, down in the basement of the UP building at Central Missouri State University, enclosed in a wall of cinder blocks or a room of cinder blocks, you know, playing my trumpet until my lips wouldn't work anymore. That was when the recital was won or lost. That really determined the success of the outcome. I can't have a thousand dollars saved in the bank until I first have a hundred or ten dollars or a single dollar. We have to bring our goals down to the granular level. Granular meaning each grain, like a grain of sand, a grain of sand. Magnify each step so we can truly identify the necessary ladder rungs that it will take to climb up there. If we are always and only focused on the overall goal, we will miss out on the opportunities to make small repeated and meaningful investments into that goal. Saving pennies adds up when it is consistent and intentional. Did you catch that? If we're focused only on the big goal, if I only ever think I need a million dollars in the bank account when I retire, but I do nothing about it, I don't think about steps and requirements and actions I need to take, what good is having a goal if I'm only focused on the goal and not how I get there? For several years during high school, I worked as a brickmason, Brad Trinnell, whom I greatly admired and still do. This man set a solid foundational example for me of leadership and values and focus and hard work. During those hours working side by side with Brad, I was taught many things. One such gem that sticks with me and I still carry every day is how to move a very large concrete top to a pillar weighing several hundred pounds onto the top of a pillar without a winch or a pulley or a hoist. Two guys lifting this giant concrete point of the top of a brick pillar onto the top of this without a winch or a pulley or a hoist. We would first determine the location the concrete top would need to be and orient it in a fashion that allows easy access and less of a need to adjust it once it's in the right position. Then cautiously and carefully we would arrange the different scaffolding setups so that the quarter ton piece of concrete was able to be walked up the left side of the scaffolding, then to the right, then back up to the left, and then using a pry bar and appropriately directed force along with a healthy measure of pre-planning and preparation, we would lift the piece of block up to the place where it needs to be. One deliberate movement at a time. In this situation, there would be no way for us to just accidentally appear there, right? This huge hundreds of pounds of concrete, it's not just going to appear there, right? We had to take action. It's impossible for it to get there by itself. The only way to accomplish this goal is with pre-planning, caution, exertion, adjustment of our leverage, etc., etc., etc. More and more, more caution, more exertion, more adjustment, more leverage, etc. Every step, every single effort was intentional. And look at this. It was planned and purposeful and focused on the outcome. Focused on the outcome, which is to place that block where it needs to be, okay? One other such illustration is for some of you who've seen my YouTube channel, you know that my wife and I have a small flower farm. And one of the critical things to having a flower farm, if you intend on keeping any number of flowers alive after they're harvested, is to have some sort of a cooler. Now, for some people with a small garden or a farm, small farm, which we have a small farm, you can use a walk-in fridge that you can buy or get from a restaurant, or you can use a series of what do you call them? Refrigerators, right? We all have refrigerators. And these work fine for keeping flowers alive. But we wanted to go big or go home. No, but we wanted to make our own walk-in cooler out of a shipping container. Originally, my idea was to get like one of the 10-foot shipping containers, you know, the kind that you see on the back of a semi. So it's pretty big. I mean, the inside is, you know, it's maybe seven feet tall and about, I don't know, is it eight feet wide or something? So we had a big rig deliver us a full-size shipping container. And it's corrugated steel. It's incredibly heavy. And my goal was to get this into the barn. So here's what I did. Here's the barn, right? And you can see I set up these, and this wasn't my idea. I was, I got a lot of input and watched a lot of YouTube videos. I set up these, these are essentially posts for a fence. And then I had the truck set these blocks, or set the giant shipping container, there it is, on the posts, right? So you can see there they are on the posts. Pretty cool, right? This is, I don't know, it's about 5,000 pounds, and it is exceptionally heavy. It is so stinking heavy. Now we have a small tractor. It's a very small tractor with a front end scoop, a shovel. And what I did is I slowly pushed that in, you know, a few inches at a time because it was so heavy with the tractor. And then I get a pry bar and push and move so it was steering in the right direction. But look at this. See this? This is supposed to come across here, but obviously it's, it was a little too high. I had measured it. I thought it would fit, but guess what I forgot to include? The thickness of those posts. So I had to pop those nails out and lift it up in order for it to work. Anyway, so I eventually got it to this position, but then I wanted to close this space over here. So how am I going to do that? Now in retrospect, I think I should have left it centered because this little space over here, we now have a family of groundhogs living there that I can't get to to help encourage to leave, right? But how in the world am I going to move this? Now this is interesting. This kind of popped into my head and I'm sure it wasn't my idea alone. I'm sure I saw this on a YouTube video or someone else told me how to do this. But if you see here, I've got a floor jack, a three-ton floor jack. So this is 5,000 pounds, three times is 6,000 pounds. So this should be enough to lift it. And what I would do is I would lift the shipping container and you can see right there, I have a small piece of a small log, right? And I would put it under one side. So envision this. I am lifting the whole thing up, just this side, put a log under it, and then I release the pressure. And so what happens? It's interesting because what happens, let's see if I can mark this up. There's usually a markup option here. There we go. So this block, right? Boy, that's really small. Sorry. This log, as the weight would come down, would actually push the whole entire piece that way. And it would just lean over just a little bit. So each increment, I probably got two or three inches out of it. And then I wedge this underneath it again, I'd lift it up and I'd push it over sequentially, one little step at a time, right? It was pretty, pretty cool. I really, I mean, it was an incredible amount of work, but it was pretty cool that it actually worked. So here is it in place, right? Where I wanted it against the wall, again, I probably would have moved it in retrospect to a different place. We could have left it outside. And then the next step, of course, was to build the insulation on the inside. So here's a bunch of foam panels. You can see a bunch more foam. This little guy in the middle is actually holding the top up. I've got it all glued with construction adhesive and trying not to get high in the process. The hole in the back is for the air conditioning unit. So there's one layer of insulation held with adhesive, and then the silver stuff, which is supposed to keep the heat and the coolant a little bit better. We went all the way around with that. There's the construction adhesive, and you can see, ta-da, now it's done. Now the bottom is just plywood. On the bottom of the metal, I didn't put any insulation there because it's sitting against the dirt. Anyway, that was the adventure. And here it is with our AC unit and the cool bot, that little blue guy there to the right, which over-programs the AC unit and makes it work. So to go back to what I was talking about before, these intentional small movements allow us control to get to where we want to be. But we have to have the end goal in mind and have planned for it. So it's intentional, it's planned for, it's purposeful, and then we're focused on that outcome. But we can't just be focused on the outcome, right? We have to be focused on the steps, the increments, the ladder rungs that it takes to get to that outcome. Okay, so that is our discussion about having a scripted, listed, purposeful, and goal or accomplishment-centered targets or goals to get to. If we don't have the goals and the steps to get there, it's like having a road trip planned with no map. Maybe you know a destination, I want to go to Disney World, but I don't have a map or a GPS to get me there, and I don't have gas to drive, and I need new tires on the car, and I need an oil change, all this stuff. So we've got to have purposeful, scripted, intentional, written down, goal, accomplishment-centered targets. Otherwise, we'll just kind of wait for that bag of money to fall on our heads and wait for us to suddenly become that perfect version of us we've been trying to become. Okay, thanks again. In the next lecture, we're going to talk about how values can drive and give us more purpose, but they also can keep us in the way that we should go so that we don't get off track. So thanks again for tuning in. I'll see you in the next lecture.