Hi Dien!

Your story about what Thomas used to do...

> Thomas used to buy these "Magic"
> card decks at the store, and take out the
> highly desired cards, and sell those
> individually to other kids. He found he
> could make a profit by doing that! (Not a
> big profit, but big enough to keep a school
> kid interested.)

... reminded me of a little venture I had going when I was at school.

I ran a hire business.

Remember those small hand-held LCD games from back in the 80s?

Anyway. I had one that no-one else had and I used to hire it out for the day - they got to play with it while at school. And I even had special "take home for the weekend" rates.

On another note...

GOALS...

I'm in the middle of creating something for one of my business interests. And while it's a bit from being finished, I figured it could be adapted directly to setting and achieving goals.

But first, let me say, I am NOT an expert/guru/whatever about setting goals and how to achieve them. It simply seems to me, that what I'm working on is adaptable.

So what it is?

A Flow Chart.

A lot of companies use Flow Charts for problem solving. If the machine stops you refer to the chart for a series of Yes/No questions and answers until you've identified the problem.

The one I'm creating is a full on operational flow chart - covering every single aspect about the operation of the business. In essence, it's a Step-by-Step Complete How-To Operations Manual in flow chart form and covers (will cover by the time I'm done) every little details and you'll be able to see how everything is linked together.

Anyway. It appears to me that something like this could be a great way to set and achieve your goals. Your Goal being the finish line.

So what you'd do is create a flow chart from now (START) all the way through to END (the achievment of your goal) making sure to "cover all your downsides" along the way.

Large goals could easily be broken down with this method.

Dien mentioned washing windows before so lets use that as an example...

In simple terms, for a successful window washing business you need 1: a way to encourage people to call you. 2: A way to quote. 3: A way to wash the windows. 4 A way to handle the money.

Each thing is separate but part of the whole. Four little systems that all link together.

So you could create a Window Washing Flow Chart which starts at "Look for houses that suggest the owners can afford to get their windows washed" then "Look for Pride of Ownership within the suburb" as that suggests those people will be your best chances of using your service. This is followed by the simple question of "Have you identified houses that match those two criteria?" Yes sees you move on while a No takes you back to the start.

Once identified your flow chart would move onto the next step... getting them to call you. So you might have "Do you have marketing materials?"

Yes sees you move onward to "Select marketing materials to use" while No goes to "Create marketing materials"

And so on and so forth.

Each part of the flow chart FORCES you to cover your downside, or at least know how it will be covered, before moving on.

The one I'm creating is quite extensive and indepth. It's purpose is to allow anyone to walk into the business and be able to run it simply by following the flow chart.

And that aspect rasises another interesting thing...

Make your Goal Flow Chart indepth enough and couldn't be a product which others could also use to achieve he same goal as you?

Body For Life (or whatever it's called) was mentioned elsewhere.

How about a Get Fit Flow Chart.

Start -> buy book -> select food menu -> is the food selected available at your supermarket? Yes (moves on) No goes to -> select different menu making sure food is available at your local market.

In this small example, the downside was unavailable food. You covered that with instructions on what to do in that event. You could, of course, add a choice of "Locate food items using your Yellow Pages or the Internet" and progress with the chart from there.

Once done, all you'd have to do is follow your chart and you couldn't help but achieve your get Fit goal.

Large things are a sum of their smaller parts. All the smaller parts put into a Flow Chart and linked would show you HOW to achieve the larger goal.

At least, that's what popped into my head.

What do you think?

Michael Ross.