Strategic life goals are those fuzzy goals that are hard to quantify, like “better humanity” and “create a legacy.” They’re your purpose in life. Everyone’s goals are different, and they may change overtime. Some folks even choose not to have broad overarching goals, and that’s fine. Me however, I need them. I need autonomy and I need to occupy myself on things I believe somehow matter. Goals create a road map for your life.
Strategic goals should not be confused with tactical goals. Tactical goals are things like “climb a mountain” whereas a strategic goal might be “experience nature to the fullest.” The tactic and act of climbing a mountain helps you achieve your broader strategic goal of experiencing nature to the fullest.
Everyones life goals will be different because we all have different world views, but here are some examples of broad strategic goals to get you thinking.
Feed the world’s hungry
Become exceedingly wealthy
Affect peoples lives with art
Entertain people
Help people
Rule the world
Be happy
You can probably think of much better examples than me, but you get the point.
Take the time to write down your life’s strategic goals, and reflect often on how you are achieving them. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind and to-do lists and forget what you’re really trying to achieve.
In my attempt to measure my progress towards my strategic life goals, I’ve created a dashboard that attempts to mimic the behavior of unlocking achievements and leveling up in a video game. It’s certainly a work in progress, but you’re welcome to check it out on my Strategic Life Goals page.
What are your goals? How do you measure your success in achieving them?
The only child of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace was born in London in 1815. She wrote an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers using Charles Babbage‘s mechanical computer, the analytical engine. This makes her the world’s first computer programmer. The programming language Ada is named after her.
Adele Goldberg wrote several books on Smalltalk-80. In the 70’s Adele worked on the Xerox Alto, the first computers to have a GUI and use a desktop metaphor.
Steve Jobs requested to see a demo of the Xerox Alto and Adele refused to show him. Her superiors at Xerox ordered her to show Jobs a demo, and naturally Apple copied all of their best ideas.
Mary was the founding CTO of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. She invented the laptop’s sunlight-readable display technology and co-invented its ultra-low power management system.
She left OLPC in 2008 to found her for profit company Pixel Qi which focuses on display technologies.
Jeri is a self taught chip designer and hacker extraordinaire. Remember Christmas 2004 when all the shopping malls had those joysticks that plugged directly into your TV loaded with tons of Commodore 64 games? You can thank Jeri for that. The C64 Direct-to-TV is her creation.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (nicknamed “Amazing Grace”) served in the United States Navy for over 40 years and was awarded the highest non-combat award possible when she retired. With a masters in mathematics and physics from Yale university, Grace developed the first compiler, and conceptualized machine-independent programming languages, ala COBOL. Grace is sometimes called “the mother of COBOL.”
You’ve probably heard the old story of how a moth got caught in one of those old massive computers, causing it to crash. Grace remembers that story, she was there! She’s the one that popularized the phrase “debugging.”
Grace Hopper
Grace Hooper is also responsible for one of my most frequently used quotes, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”
And if you’re still not impressed, the US Navy named the destroyer ship USS Hopper (DDG-70) after her.
The majority of Grace’s retirement was spent speaking and lecturing about technology at computer events, where she always wore her full military dress.
Grace is kind of my hero.
So, what have we learned about the woman programmer’s dress code? Unlike the men’s dress code, beards are not in fashion, and long hair is optional. Fine Victorian era gowns are in, as are military uniforms. But, with the exception of a rare few, it seems that neither male nor female programmers give a rat’s ass about fashion.
On November 1st I shaved my face clean for a friendly bet amongst my friends on who could grow their mustache the longest before their significant other gave them ultimatum to shave it. As it turns out, our little bet coincided exactly the same day Movember started. What is Movember? Movember is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues – specifically prostate and testicular cancer. This of course is brilliant, and I couldn’t help but join the cause.
You can help fight against prostate and testicular cancer by becoming a sponsor of my mustache. “Ridiculous” you say? Ok, sponsoring a mustache is a little silly, but this Movember, the money raised in the U.S. will be split between the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation to fund research to find better treatments and a cure for prostate cancer, and there’s nothing silly about that.
DONATE HERE The link so nice, some times you have to click it twice [to make it work].
I’m writing a book for the popular “For Dummies” brand by Wiley, Twitter Application Development for Dummies, #TADD for short.
While doing research for the book I compiled a brief timeline of Twitter’s company history. I was about to remove it from my notes when I realized it was kind of interesting, and I might like to refer to it later. So, I’m throwing it up on the blog for you to enjoy. 🙂
