Goal Setting Tools for Your Success

In Burma elephants are used for lugging trees about. (Modern business folk would call this "forestry operations".) Unlike modern mechanized equipment, it takes time to grow an elephant, as well as time to train it. This is not as easy as it seems, because infant elephants have a nasty habit of wandering away. (A little bit like leaving your handbrake off when parking your car at the top of the hill.) Burmese elephant trainers have a simple and elegant solution.

As soon as the baby elephant can walk (a few minutes after it is born), they secure it to a stake with a thin piece of rope -- barely more than a piece of string. The young elephant tries to free itself but it is too weak to break the string or dislodge the stake. It keeps trying. But eventually it will give up. And here is the really neat trick!

Once this elephant has given up trying to free itself -- it never tries again. Which means that a Burmese elephant trainer can secure an adult elephant with a piece of string - secure in the knowledge that it will not escape.

Whenever I see somebody who is employed (rather than somebody who is self-employed, or who owns a business) I think about that piece of string. As employees we are often massively abused. Consider for a moment how guilty we feel when we want to take Wednesday afternoon off. How often is that guilt balanced by the extra time we put in on a Saturday morning, or late Monday night? How often don't we sacrifice our freedom - the stuff that is really important to us (a sick son who wants his hand held, a daughter playing her first hockey match, a partner who is languishing through lack of attention) - because of the thin string that ties us to a specific job?

When last did you try and rethink your life, and tug hard on that piece of floss tethering you to the pebble sunk in your own lake of daily brown stuff? When last did you say "I want to be there!" instead of "I don't want to be here!"? When last did you look at your boss is if you were a job applicant, and not a supplicant?

It's not too bad if you are doing work that you love, for an income that meets your needs and allows you to have fun as well. But there's something very wrong when you're doing something you don't enjoy; you're doing it just for the money; and the money isn't particularly good. I am stunned at how hard people will work for a mere pittance -- feeling trapped by a thin piece of string. (And by somebody who looks like an oversized Burmese elephant trainer!)

We self-employed people fall into a similar trap, losing our vision and our dreams and settling for so much less than we are entitled to. There is no shortage of people assuring us that we are not adequate to surviving the rigours of the business world. Isn't it amazing how the more successful we are, the more our families and friends feel the need to share the probability of our failure with us -- urging us to "consolidate"?

It's not always fun running by yourself. And it gets darn lonely most of the time. But, honestly, there is no other way to stay really alive, is there?

We South Africans are bred to be compliant. We're taught to never question our teachers, and then to never question our bosses, and in turn to never question our government. Remember what happened last time we just let things slide? Isn't it time to start asking a whole bunch of penetrating questions - and the first and best one is: "What am I doing here?" Followed by: "Why am I putting up with this?" And finally: "What do I really and honestly want to have accomplished when I think about my life as I take my last breath before I leave this wormy body and become a butterfly?"

Now that I think about it, that last breath might be a tad frustrated if I still have a stuk string stuck around my ankle. Go get 'em tiger, this will be the last 4th week of January 2004 you will ever enjoy. Time to scare your boss, your banker, and your friends? Suig elke dag droog. [If I translate that into English the first word lights up email filtering systems across the known universe.]

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