The Goal

I'm a very rare person - I got a life changing idea from management training!
A wonderful trainer called Chris Croft told us about a study done in the 1950s where a whole class at an American University (Harvard I think) was interviewed every 10 years for 30 years.
Only a small fraction of them had a clear set of life goals in 1950. By the time the study was complete, that small fraction had over 50% of the total wealth of the whole cohort. Of that fraction, an even smaller number had written down their goals and periodically got them out and studied them. That tiny fraction had over 80% of the 50%.
Allowing for the fact that 79.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot, that's a lot of wealth! Wealth of course does not equate with happiness but as Gertrude Stein said, "I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich"!
I can think of two rational explanations for why people who write their goals down end up rich:

1. Anyone anal enough to do it will have the traits needed to succeed.
2. Every day we make hundreds of decisions, most very minor. Every now and again, we make a bigger one and occasionally we make large ones. If we have no goal, we will end up with a drunkards walk where we go this way and that at random but keep on circling the same lamp-post. If we have a goal however, we will occasionally make decisions that push us in that direction. We still take a random walk, but now it gradually and almost effortlessly moves us towards the goal.

I like the second explanation.

So what was life changing about that then?

I was so impressed that I talked it through with Lindsay. We are fairly adventurous and enjoy spending long enough in other countries to get some real understanding of them. Lindsay spent 9 months on her own in New Zealand just before we got married and we took our whole family to the USA for 5 years in the 80s. We also both enjoyed sailing on the broads.
We decided that once the kids had flown the nest and before we got too old, we wanted to spend some years travelling. Doing this on land would be very expensive and it's easy to just see hotels and shops so we decided to go Sailing.
We looked at several options but the best combination of manageability (we would be well into our fifties) cost and warm weather seemed to be the Mediterranean.
So that was the goal - once the kids were flown, we would spend some years sailing round the Mediterranean.

And we wrote it down and looked at it next year and the year after that.

It's worked - we set sail in 3 months time.