A Few Books And Some Musings About Them

I’ve ben thinking mostly about two of my goals: the one about going above and beyond for people I love and the one about finding (or returning to) my spiritual roots. I’ve been reading a lot as of late (per my goal) and I wanted to share some of the things I’ve been reading with you all and what it’s told me about me.

THE BIBLE

First of all, I’ve been reading parts of the book of 1 Peter in the Bible, specifically the parts about doing what it is God made you good at:

1 Peter Chapter 4

10 God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. 11 Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies.

Every time I get a new job I think, “This could be a really great way to help people! I’m excited!”, and every time it ends up falling flat. Maybe it’s because I’m doing it for the wrong reasons? Should I be trying to figure out how to do all this through God, and if so does it mean I should be doing it through a church? If not, how do I do God’s work outside of a church group?

Thinking about this has greatly influenced my choice of majors: Psychology and Social Work. That gives me opportunities to go almost anywhere armed with the knowledge of how people work and how to help them. Is it enough?

TO OWN A DRAGON - Donald Miller

This is the first book I ever read that I felt the author knew exactly who I was, how I felt and what it all meant. I actually purchased this book many many years ago on the recommendation of a friend, and never actually read it. Now I wish I had, because I think hearing these things earlier would have changed the way I view myself. More on this later, I feel this book needs to be at least an entire post’s worth of discussion.

THE FIVE LOVE LANGUAGES - Gary Chapmen

I’ve been trying to remember how to let the people I love know that I love them, so I pulled out the book that first thought me how love works. This book is actually written for marriages, but I think the concepts can be applied to any relationship. Again, a lot more on this book to follow as I work my way through it.

Finalized (probably?) Goals

Apologies for the delay between posts gang, it’s been a long week. Not having the time to (as I planned) go through each of my goals one-by-one, I’d like to present you with my finished list:

1. Bring my planned expenses down to $600/mo before Aug 1st so I can leave work comfortable and pursue school full time.
2. Make a least one night a week completely devoted to school work; this means no TV and no friends that are not around for the express purpose of helping with said schoolwork. This must be in place by the time school starts.
3. At least once a week do something above the “call of duty” for a friend in my life and at least once every two weeks for someone I’ve never met. (These are to be acts of service or kindness that I do not benefit directly from and are not just common courtesy. i.e. Holding doors open does not count!)
4. At least one book I’m reading at any given time must be adding to my spiritual knowledge.
5. Find a chair I can comfortably relax in by the end of summer so I will have a place to sit when the weather turns.

There they are. At first I thought this would be a lot to do, but the more I think about them, the more I think I have an actual shot. I feel confident in myself for the first time in a long time.

Random thoughts about my goals (and whatever else I happen to be thinking or doing) to follow in subsequent posts. I have never been very good at letting people know what I’m thinking and feeling. I’ve always felt better writing it down, and that writing was never shared. You, dear readers, will be subjected the thoughts I couldn’t get out of my mouth in real life. In short: The Leftovers.

Rebuilding My First Goal

So, having had a few days to look over my goals and give them some thought, it occurs to me that not all of them are actually setup to be obtainable. For instance, “Find a way to quit my job that I hate and put all my attention into school” is a nice thought, but has no clean definition on when I’ve actually met it. Do I cross it off when I quit my job? When I start school? When I finish my degree?

Looking down me list of five, I found all kinds of these kind of problems with them. So, I actually bothered to do a little research. It turns out there is a goal-making tool that the entire rest of the world knew about that has somehow slipped past me (which is, granted, not super surprising), SMART goals.

S- Specific

M- Measurable

A- Attainable

R- Realistic

T- Timely

Looking at my goals, none of them really hit that criteria at all! Therefore, I suspect my next few posts will be about adjusting my goals to make them not only more specific but more challenging as well. I’ll start today with the first of my goals, which I feel is going to be a two-fer: Find a way to quit my job that I hate and put all my attention into school.

First of all, like I said, it’s really two separate goals, one referring to my job and one to school. I’ll tackle the work part first.

Specific:

“Find a way to quit my job that I hate” First of all, if my goal is to find a way to quit, I must be pretty stupid. Quitting is as easy as dropping a piece of paper on a desk. Or, in some cases, as easy as simply not showing up. In thinking this, I decided the entire wording would have to be changed, so I started with, “Quit my job.”

Okay, off to a fair start. Of course, there are a lot of question associated with quitting a job, the most important being: Where will I get money?

Finding a part-time job can’t be too difficult, but that doesn’t change the fact that I need around $1000 a month to run my life, minimum.

$1000 is a number I reached after a bit of bill addition, which made me wonder if I wasn’t spending just a bit too much money on myself, or at the very least not spending my money in the most thrifty way possible. I could probably find places in my budget to cut and trim so I wasn’t quite so dependent on money. Sure, student loans will help a bit, but I don’t want to live off of them, nor do I ant to use them irresponsibly or unethically.

So my goal became:

Bring my monthly expenses down so I will be free to leave my job.

Measurable:

I need a number to shoot for, so I know when I’ve brought my expenses down far enough to quit. When I had my part-time job I made around $300 every two weeks, so given that I will probably be working less with school in session, I decided a goal to shoot for was $500. $500 a month to live on… which brought me to my next point:

Attainable:

Is $500 a month a completely insane amount of money? That’s not to say that sometime I won’t take a little extra and have some fun, but it is to say that I need my basic living expenses (home, food, phone) under $500. Luckily for me, I have a pretty sweet rent deal right now, and it doesn’t appear that will change soon. The first obvious thing to go, for me, was cable. If I’m going to devote more time to other things anyhow, I might as well lose the cable bill. For those that don’t know me, let me put this decision in perspective: I want a mass amount of media. And, no, it isn’t only because I’m lazy, it’s because I love the way a movie or TV show can make you feel. I can go into this later, I just wanted to be sure you understood this wasn’t something I walked into lightly.

I’ll have to keep the internet, I’ll need it for school and to write this blog, but internet can be found pretty cheaply, as long as I’m willing to live with a slower speed. The nice thing about keeping the internet is that I’ll still be able to find most TV shows I want to see through Hulu and Netflix. That helped ease my mind a bit.

The next place to cut was credit cards. Right now, I’m sitting at about $1,500 in credit card debt. This kind of eats into my fourth goal, so I want go into it now, but I could certainly save some money if I didn’t have those bills every month.

The more I look for cuts, the more I realize $500 just isn’t going to cut it, so I decided to shoot for something just a little higher at $600. It may mean I’ll have to work a little longer, but I think I’ll feel more comfortable. This makes my goal, so far:

Bring my expenses down to $600 a month so I can leave my job.

Realistic:

I suppose this means I need to make sure this is a goal I will actually be willing to work at. Doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be hard because, if goals were easy, we wouldn’t really need them. I don’t think I need to change the wording of my goal at this point, but it did help me reflect on whether is was something I wanted. (It is).

Timely:

This one seems obvious, but I missed it anyhow. Of course there should be a time frame on it or I can just put it off and put it off and put it off. Like with anything, deadlines can help motivate to an end. I thought it made a lot if sense for this goal to be reached by the time school started, so my goal becomes:

Bring my expenses down to $600 a month by Aug 1st so I can comfortably leave my job before full-time school starts.

Goals:

1. Bring my expenses down to $600 a month by Aug 1st so I can comfortably leave my job before school starts.
2. Put all my attention into school.
3. Start showing the people I love that I care by giving more of myself to them.
4. Figure out who and what this God person may or may not be.
5. Purchase a chair I can actually relax in.

If I wrote a blog every time I made some new life choice, I probably wouldn’t have time to actually carry out the choices I made. That said, I’ve never blogged about ANY life choice I’ve made, so the decision to go back to school seemed as good a thing as any to share with the world.

To give you a little background on what makes this choice actually interesting, this will be the 4th school I’ve tried to give myself a ‘new start’ at. Something always came up. Depression, a job, a stroke, and a thousand other things that kept me from doing what I needed.

So, I’m gonna keep you all updated (by ‘you all’ I mean the four of you that will ever bother reading this) and ask you keep me accountable.

So far, after an afternoon for brainstorming, I have the following goals:

1. Find a way to quit my job that I hate and put all my attention into school.
2. Start sowing people I love that I care by giving more of myself to them.
3. Figure out who and what this God person may or may not be.
4. Erase all of my non-school related debt.
5. Purchase a chair I can actually relax in.

I reserve the right to adjust these goals as I change and as they become clearer. Come with me on this adventure?