Week 2 blog: Goals

 Things I learned: This week we went and learned a lot about finding long term goals, and charting a course to get there. It was interesting to read about Randy Pausch, who set out many different longshot goals in a wide variety of areas, and then ended up completing a large portion of them. I believe that he was able to accomplish a large portion of these, because he was willing to put in the work and effort to make it happen. The opportunities to achieve these goals didn't present themselves to him, rather he presented himself to the people who could make it happen. He went on and did a wide variety of things that even some of the most brilliant people won't do, because it took more than just pure intelligence to do them. It requires a certain determination and will power to accomplish them. He earnestly sought out the people who would help him along the way, as well as earnestly sought to be the guy that was most qualified to do it. For example, the Imagineering opportunity came out to him because he reached out to the person in charge of the virtual reality at the project, and the guy tried to make it work to get him on, because he saw that he was a guy who would be able to make a difference on their project. Dreaming is essential, but is only half of the battle. Any professional sports star was just an ordinary person growing up with the dreams of making it big, but it didn't just happen for them, they went out of their way to train and become better in order for the dream to come true. A childhood dream of mine has always been to become successful outside of my realm of influence. I've always wanted to make some sort of impact on the world. I have always been afraid of going to a job in which I become a nameless face doing some job anyone else can do. I always wanted to become someone who changes some small part of the world. I believe I can accomplish this, because I believe that I have a drive that will allow me to outwork anyone else.

Things I still need to learn: When you have a large dream that seems insurmountable, where could you possible take a first step? How do you know what an appropriate first step? What if there are many paths to the same goal, how do you decide which way to get there?