Nice to see your Starcraft II ranking, I’ve been playing a lot more than I should too, but I enjoy it too much ! I’m a low level diamond player trying to climb my way up.

I wanted to correct you on your French but I see it’s already been done Don’t listen to the rumors, we aren’t that rude, if you try to speak the language, people will help you !

Achieving goals are for most people tricky in the beginning. The reason is that you just dont developed a proper way to create reasonable and realistic goals.
The only way to get this is by doing it and afterwards analysing your previous attempts to create a better vision of what’s possible and what’s not. Its an itterative process. Each new goal is done with information from previous attempts. wether it was a succes or failure.

Its quite easy to understand that in the beginning there wont be much satisfaction from finished goals. This sucks. It demotivates you and blocks you to continue. You will fail for sure. But is this opinion correct?

I dont believe so.
Instead try to look at the attempt itself. By starting doing something you already made a huge step. Its a succes!!! You have something already to fill your mind with.
If you manage to see this, you will find out that everything will be so much more easier.
Starting with something gets easier, finishing something gets easier. And you will feel a lot better and other people will like you a lot more!!

In general its recommended to always try to look at the positive sides of things. This not only goes for goals, but also for people or whatever.
Forcing your brains to think positive is first essential tool you need.

My main problem is that I forget my non-main projects and neither talk about them nor do them!

From Karate Kid:
Walk on road, hmm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, get squish just like grape. Here, karate, same thing. Either you karate do ‘yes,’ or karate do ‘no.’ You karate do ‘guess so,’ just like grape. Understand?

You can find some good advice on establishing positive rituals in The Power of Full Engagement.

I wanted to make it in February. So I said, “WordPress is horrible for a blog, let me write my own engine.” So I wrote an engine in CGI::FastCGI. Then I decided that using a while loop for the dispatch was horrible, and went to POE::Component::FastCGI. That was about March. April and May I implemented the entire engine, but the CSS and HTML was a nightmare (i’m far from a designer of pretty things). By July I was basically saying, “I can’t write a blog because I make bad CSS and HTML that is unattractive”.

I talked to a friend of mine whose advise was basically, “You want to write a blog, write a blog. You’re writing a blogging engine.”

So now, I’m using wordpress and have actually published some articles. Eventually I think I’ll port a theme to my engine and use it, but building things infront of your end-goal that derail the actual goal is still a huge problem I have.

Like you JD, I’ve shed my financial bad habits and was hoping to be fulfilled from that. I somewhat am, but now I’m faced with even bigger challenges…challenges there are no easy to follow instructions for. There’s no “debt snowball” for what I want to do with my life.

Like Rob said above, perhaps you are struggling with the strategic question of where to take GRS in the future?

Sounds to me like you do–if this game is your vice or your hobby or whatever–great for you.

Enjoy

Putting numbers to things give us control over them.

But seriously though, you are so right. For so long I wanted my own business and blog and just talked about it but never actually did anything. Now I’m finding how much work it really is! But I still enjoy it!

My dad was a complainer and it drove me nuts. He was so unhappy about his life.

Whenever I feel the urge to complain I ask myself:
What can I do to get out of this situation?
It seems to work most of the time, especially if I start with a relatively easy task to start with. Then it gets the ball rolling.

I admit though that sometimes it takse a while to get out of rut. Best to try not to get in it in the first place.

JD, for your French: maybe you can have a small blogitem every day with some new French idiom? Or a chat in French? Je vous souhaite de bonne chance, et je pense que c’est mieux pour vous si on vous répond en Francais.

Silver League here too.. Trying to push forward with Protoss..

Did you really delete SC II? Good thing its a quick install

Et, bonne chance avec vos études! Je pense qu’il ne sera pas trop difficile. Apprendre une langue resemble à écrire un roman: pour progresser, il faut que vous écriviez, lisiez, et PARLIEZ.

Translation: And good luck with your studies! I don’t think it will be too difficult. Learning a language is similar to writing a novel: to get better, you must write, read, and SPEAK.

or at least I think that’s what I said. I skipped french last semester :/

Thanks!

Thanks for the great post!

One of my whole reasons for wanting to retire early is to have more time to devote to my video game playing passion. I promised myself as a kid that I would never stop playing video games, and nowadays work just gets in the way (that, and the ridiculous prices of today’s games).

As far as becoming a doer, I’ve resolved that as long as I’m stuck in Afghanistan I might as well write a little bit about it, which is why I decided to dedicate every Friday on my blog to sharing my experiences.

I think that’s incredibly unfair. Simplistic. And naive.

Anderson himself says that while he’s published over 100 books, he also has over 800 rejection letters. That strongly implies that success is not entirely within his control. Sometimes he’s lucky. More often than not, he’s not.

In this economy, sure it’s easy to find a job if you don’t mind working for minimum wage, doing boring repetitive tasks that make you question why you even bothered going to college. It’s much harder to find a job for which you are neither under- or overqualified for, even when you are realistic about the skills in demand and the expectations of the job.

The nationwide, generic unemployment rate, uncorrected for regional differences, blue collar jobs, white collar jobs, etc, etc, is roughly 10%. The underemployment rate, a way of measuring our potential productivity, is closer to 25%. As the cliched joke goes, there are a lot of people out there with Masters’ Degrees in English Literature, asking you if you want fries with that?

There are lots of reasons why this may be the case. Sometimes people can’t move for a better job due to negative equity or family obligations. There may be regulatory and bureaucratic constraints. Training may not be available. There may be a surplus such that only the most experienced get hired. The desired field may be saturated; not everyone can become the CEO of a fortune 500 company simply because there are only 500 such slots to begin with. Or there may just simply be no money available in that field (such as construction). These are all factors that are beyond the dream-job-applicant’s control.

I realize that this is just a single blog article emphasizing the power of positive thinking and taking baby steps, but I can only imagine how Anderson would have felt if he had confessed to 800 rejection letters only to be told that he wasn’t trying hard enough.

My friend just got a new job slash promotion, climbed the ladder and is now one rung short of his dream job. (Congratulations if you’re reading this!) The thing is, he spent four years paying his dues, putting up with crap, working graveyard shifts, going on interviews, volunteering for projects and doing everything he can to make himself the ideal candidate.

By any measure of the word, he’s a doer.

He will also be the first one to tell you that the only reason he was even considered for the position is because the incumbent decided to move on to greener pastures. He firmly believes that the secret to his success was being patient, saying focused on his goal, turning down other opportunities, and waiting for his chance.

By that definition, he’s also a talker. I can’t begin to tell you how many times we’ve tried to persuade him to do something else that fully utilizes his talent, and more importantly, did not rely on his boss kneeling over.

I did not mention his name earlier because by virtue of being a talker, he also inadvertently sabotaged an otherwise promising relationship. I don’t know if it keeps him up nights but it certainly would have kept me up nights; would I have been happier “doing something” and keeping a girlfriend, or being a talker, waiting for my chance but loosing the girl in the process?

Obviously there’s some overlap and it’s not a black and white issue.

In the interests of offering constructive criticism, I’d love to see a follow up article discussing when to accept that something’s beyond your control, in the context of seizing job opportunities.

Especially in today’s economy, at what point should someone stop “talking” and leave his secure job? And probably a little more relevantly, at what point should someone who’s receiving unemployment benefits, stop applying for his dream job and instead take a minimum wage position, and baby-step his way up the ladder?

I greatly enjoy your posts AND the posts of your staff writers. The Simple Dollar was the first pf blog I started reading and while Trent does a great job, it is getting a little stale. I know I can drop by GRS and see something fresh from a different perspective while there are only so many times I want to read about making my own laundry detergent or skipping a latte or two.

My husband and I both recently graduated with PhDs from UC Berkeley. We have often talked about the fact that we aren’t the most intelligent people we know -we were just both very diligent and we persevered. One of the most brilliant people I know failed to earn her PhD in my program because the work didn’t appeal to her.

Now I’m working in the “real world”, and I have much less drive than I did before. Thanks for the wake-up call. It’s time for me to set some new goals!

PS. re: Raghu Bilhana’s comment -I love your guest posts. They broaden the perspective of your blog and have introduced me to a lot of new ideas.

1 – scout your opponent early on, maybe with your 9th harvester if you’re paranoid. I use my 14th you should be able to see what’s coming and adjust your tactics accordingly.

2 – if you are hit with a rush and have few to no war units, use your probes to attack the invaders.

3 – always be building harvesters until you have something like 20-24 on your minerals.