Start by looking back

Looking forward is great, yes. There’s nothing wrong with envisioning where you want your business to be in six months, one year, five years, ten years. But looking forward and visualizing the success you want to achieve is only half the equation, according to Piers Steel, author of The Procrastination Equation. Positive visualization of the future works best when you compare it to where you have been and where you are now. Doing so allows you to see the gap between your current position and the place you’d like to go, says Steel. Seeing the gap is a powerful motivator for getting you into action to start closing it.

Ways to look back:

• Write a year-end evaluation of yourself or your business as a whole.
• Look at the books: what was your worst month and best month in terms of numbers? Why?
• Make a quick list (5 to 10 items) of the best moments in your business in the last year. Then make another list of the worst moments. Look for patterns.
• Ask your employees for their take on the last year: best and worst moments, areas of strength and weakness in the business.

Taking a good look back should give you two definite kinds of goals: goals to improve or strengthen areas of weakness (you’ll draw these goals from seeing failures of the past year) and goals to build on your successes.

Focus, focus, focus

You can’t do everything, at least not all at the same time. In order to actually reach the goals you set for your business in 2012, you need to choose one to three areas and focus on them with intensity.

Why limit yourself? Because the time, energy and money you have are finite resources. You can spread them thinly in order to cover a lot of areas, and as a result make very little progress in any one area. That’s a common approach to goals, and it gets discouraging when you can’t see any notable improvement.

Think of the need for focus in terms of a peanut butter sandwich. If you’ve only got one big spoonful of peanut butter, how many sandwiches can you make? Well, you can spread it really thin, and make five disappointing sandwiches. Or you can heap it all on a single slice of bread and make one spectacular sandwich.

Lavish your attention on a single area (or two), and achieve great progress.

Refine your goals

Once you’ve chosen a few areas to work on, you need to turn your broad goals of “improve in XYZ areas” into good goals.

Good goals need to meet certain basic criteria:

• They should be specific. “Raise revenue” becomes “Increase sales by 10 percent.”
• They should be measurable. “Encourage innovation” becomes “Develop five new product ideas.”
• They should be realistic. “Raise our customer service level to make Zappos look like a bunch of deadbeats” becomes “Train our employees in excellent customer service.”
• They should be action-oriented. “Get a better marketing plan” becomes “Test three new marketing strategies.”

Build a basic plan for each goal

Basic is the key word. You don’t need a 10-page booklet for each goal. In fact, the fewer words you can use to communicate your plan, the better. We tend to get lost in our own words and plans and lose sight of the simple actions we need to take.

So make a plan for each goal, but keep it short, keep it simple and then start taking action. Your plan should provide this basic information for each goal:

• The desired outcome (the specific, measurable, realistic, action-oriented goal)
• The actions needed to reach that goal
• The person(s) responsible for each action
• The deadline for each action
• The means of accountability (checking in, meeting, sending completed work to the next person, etc.)

All the rest you can figure out as you go, tweaking the plan as needed. That’s okay. Good goals are also flexible.

Once you make the plan, get it to the appropriate people and get moving forward.

“In the short term, we regret what we do, but in the long term, we regret what we don’t get done,” says Steel. “Inaction causes us the greater suffering.”

Don’t suffer from inaction in this New Year. Make your 2012 a year of setting and reaching better business goals.

Annie Mueller writes about all aspects of productivity in life and at work. Her work can be seen at numerous on line publications. She blogs at AnnieMueller.com. Find her on twitter: @anniemueller.

From recruiting and training to offboarding, seasonal employees can put your human resources (HR) processes to the test. Not only do you have to find and hire the right people, you have a very short time to train them and get them connected to your organization. Here, I’ve outlined a few ways to go above and beyond your normal onboarding process to get seasonal employees geared up and ready to go.

Employee Integration: The Heart of Onboarding

During the standard onboarding process, every employee should be integrated into the company on several levels – from connecting with company values and understanding job duties to knowing who to turn to for what. According to Forbes columnist and onboarding expert Emily Bennington, this process is equally critical for seasonal employees – particularly those who interface with customers.

“Your customers aren’t going to know who’s a seasonal helper, and who’s not. Every employee needs to feel connected,” Bennington says.

That’s why you cannot afford to rely on ad hoc or on-the-spot training to prepare people to represent your organization. You need a process that zeroes in on helping seasonal hires become part of the team quickly.

Because of the time constraints associated with onboarding seasonal workers, you’re going to need a concentrated game plan. The first step is to determine just how deeply integrated temporary employees need to be before they can contribute to your bottom line. How familiar with your products do they need to be to handle the register? How much do they need to know about your history or product line-up to offer good customer service? Take a look at your existing onboarding process, and then adjust and condense it so you can achieve your optimal level of integration.

5 Key Factors of a Strong Seasonal Workforce

When discussing onboarding strategies, some people may assume we’re only talking about training. But the fact is that the employee experience starts much earlier – in the recruiting stage. With this in mind, here are a few key strategies to help you throughout every phase of the process.

Tailor your recruiting strategies. First impressions have a lasting effect, and you’ll want to make the right one when sourcing candidates. Your recruiting efforts should be tailored to meet the specific needs of a seasonal workforce. Whether you are doing the hiring yourself or utilizing a third-party staffing firm, it’s important to make the details of the opportunity clear from the get-go. Make core responsibilities, approximate length of hire and typical schedules explicitly known. This will make it easier to focus on candidates with the right mindset and expectations required of seasonal help. I would also be wary of how you communicate potential for further employment, as you don’t want folks making assumptions.

Perform due diligence. To avoid costly mistakes resulting from labor or tax law violations, don’t skimp on due diligence in collecting legal papers and monitoring employees’ schedules.

“A lot of people short-circuit processes like verifying work eligibility or tracking hours correctly. It should go without saying, but you really need to be sure you’re following the law,” says John Rossheim, a senior contributing writer at Monster.com.

By streamlining your process of tracking and managing important forms and documents, you can better ensure compliance. You could even ditch the endless paper files altogether and move to a paperless solution – such as I-9 Comply.

Provide proper training. According to Bennington, every onboarding process should include conscious efforts to integrate new employees in three key areas – including technical skills, company culture and social interaction with other employees. When adapting this for seasonal onboarding, it’s important to understand how each area impacts your new hire:

• Technical Skills: To what depth of expertise do seasonal employees need to be trained to perform their jobs? And in what areas?
• Company Culture: How thoroughly do seasonal hires need to understand company policies and values?
• Social Integration: In what ways can you connect seasonal employees to your organization so they feel like they are part of the team?

Getting more specific, Rossheim suggests designing your seasonal workforce “to accomplish the task at hand, rather than haphazardly training everyone to do everything they may possibly have to do. Specialize rather than throwing everyone into the same bucket.” Both Bennington and Rossheim agree that online training courses offer a great solution for organizations. Although they both stressed the importance of interpersonal connection and mentoring as well.

Know your capacity upfront. Whether you have a general human resources management system, a fully functional talent management suite or a hodgepodge of spreadsheets and checklists – it’s important to know your capacity. Can your back-office system efficiently handle an increased volume in applicants and new hires? My advice: If you have any doubts, you should explore options for updating and enhancing your system. There are many tools and web-based software solutions available that can help you cost-effectively minimize bumps in the road when hiring and onboarding seasonal help. Applicant tracking systems in particular can greatly reduce the time spent on administrative tasks while recruiting new employees.

Make them part of the team. Seasonal employees can easily feel isolated if an onboarding program doesn’t successfully connect them to the organization. Target – one of the nation’s top three retailers – employs large numbers of seasonal help and has fine-tuned their onboarding strategy over the years. According to Eddie Baeb of Target Corportate Communications, each seasonal team member learns about Target’s mission, vision, values and culture, as well as the basics of on-the-job safety. Team members are then given an individually tailored learning plan for their role and paired up with a trainer to learn the ropes.

From day one, Baeb says, Target is focused on engaging seasonal employees and making them feel just as valued as anyone else.

In many cases, these hires become a regular part of the Target team – with nearly 40 percent (about 35,800) of seasonal team members joining as permanent employees last year after the holidays.

Offboarding Offers an Opportunity for Improvement

At the end of your busy season, you may have discovered a few star performers you’d like to bring onto your team permanently. That’s great! For the rest of your seasonal help, though, Bennington suggests “there’s definitely an opportunity to establish brand ambassadors.” In other words, the offboarding process provides you a chance to make a lasting positive impression, while gaining insight into the worker’s experience with your organization.

Standard offboarding practices include surveying workers on their experience. Did they feel they were equipped to succeed? Do they see any areas that need improvement? But Bennington suggests going beyond surveying, and having one-on-one exit interviews with select employees to get more candid responses. Not only are you showing interest in the employees’ thoughts and opinions, but you can also use this feedback to better your organization’s talent management processes down the road.

Kyle Lagunas is the HR Analyst at Software Advice. On the surface, it’s his job to contribute to the ongoing conversation on all things HR. Beyond that, he makes sure his audience is keeping up with important trends and hot topics in the industry. Focused on offering a fresh take on points of interest in his market, he’s not your typical HR guy.

If you establish performance goals during the annual performance evaluation process and have often wondered where to start, here is a little guidance. Many supervisors and employees see goal setting as the opportunity to list the training classes the employee will attend for the coming year. And, while learning goals are appropriate, the goal setting process can be much more meaningful. Here are four kinds of goals that you might consider when setting annual performance goals.

1. Essence of the Job Goals

These are the goals that clearly describe tasks that are required on the job. For example, an accountant might have a goal to prepare and submit monthly financial statements. A librarian might have a goal to catalogue and reshelf returned books within 12 hours. A mail clerk might have a goal that requires her to deliver all mail daily to all work sites. Essence of the job goals make the expectations for the job clearer than they are listed on the job description. These goals personalize the job to the position and to the individual employee.

2. Project Goals

Project goals are those activities that the employee will pursue with a beginning and an end and may be above and beyond the employee’s routine duties. Project goals can be related to improving systems, developing new products, creating new programs, or anything else that you can think of.

3. Professional Development Goals

Professional development goals specify what the employee will learn for the coming year. While attending a class to learn something new is noble, try to find new ways to help employees develop their skills while clearly linking the goal to the organization’s needs. For example, “cross training in a new work area at least one day per week” is a professional development goal. A better goal would be to cross train in the accounting department at least once per week and be able to reconcile bank statements by October 31.

Or, “attend a training class on PowerPoint and develop a new slide show to be used in new employee orientation” would be more challenging than just attending the class. Make sure the professional development goals not only develop the employee, but also help your organization.

4. Performance Improvement Goals

Performance improvement goals should be saved for those times when you want to emphasize clearly that an employee’s behavior must change. Performance improvement goals include things like, “arrive to work ready to serve customers at 8 a.m. every day” or “limit the number of customer complaints you receive to three per quarter.” Obviously, not all employees would need these kinds of goals. However, they can be helpful in documenting your performance expectations in a clear and measurable way.

Now, go out there and set some goals! Make your expectations clear and everyone wins!

It’s a jungle out there. Cash is dear, the lackluster economy is driving competitors to slash prices aggressively, and hungry competitors are surfacing from overseas. To stay competitive, organizations need to keep productivity high while on a budget. Doing this has never been more important, but it doesn’t have to be hard if the leader you’re staring at in the mirror knows how to motivate employees.

Leaders who adopt certain practices can drive productivity in many ways at virtually no cost. I place the practices into two categories: general practices that apply to all employees and employee-specific practices.

General Practices
The biggest general productivity-boosting practice comes from delivering a plan that takes employees from point A to point B. Point B needs to be some distance from point A, or you’ll get a yawn from employees rather than increased productivity. You’ll also need to make sure that every employee has specific roles and deadlines in the plan and that each is held accountable for meeting the due dates with quality. Employees’ juices really flow when they know they are accountable for delivering something important to a company’s success.

Another employee productivity booster is being generous with praise for employees who go the extra mile, improve their performance, meet stretch deadlines or exceed expectations. It’s important to make sure the praise is deserved, because gratuitous comments are not motivating to the recipient and demotivating to everyone else. The impact that recognizing employees has on productivity never ceases to amaze me — but it’s easy to understand because so many leaders are stingy with praise. When employees finally have a boss who recognizes their achievements, they are flattered, energized and grateful that their boss can tell a slacker from a producer.

The productivity dividends from being a role model leader can also be huge. So many employees have worked in Dilbertesque environments that when they have a boss who earns their respect, they are motivated to be part of her team and to demonstrate that they are valuable members of the team. As a role model, a leader wants to telegraph ideal employee behaviors, such as being timely, organized, collaborative, considerate, honest, quality-oriented, empathetic, a good communicator, a learner, having a good attitude and taking initiative.

The productivity dividends from being a role model leader can also be huge. So many employees have worked in Dilbertesque environments that when they have a boss who earns their respect, they are motivated to be part of her team and to demonstrate that they are valuable members of the team. As a role model, a leader wants to telegraph ideal employee behaviors, such as being timely, organized, collaborative, considerate, honest, quality-oriented, empathetic, a good communicator, a learner, having a good attitude and taking initiative.

1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs defines the order in which employees are generally motivated to satisfy their needs. Physiological, or food and shelter, is the need satisfied first; safety is second; social needs third; self-esteem fourth; and self-actualization, or being all that one can be, is fifth. When leaders know which employees are trying to satisfy which need and focus on appealing to it, increased productivity is a natural outcome. Keep in mind that appealing to a need that is already satisfied will do nothing for productivity and that a satisfied need can become unsatisfied and in need of being satisfied again. For example, when the recession hit, millions of employees who were trying to satisfy their third-, fourth- or fifth-level needs reverted to making sure that physiological and safety needs were being met. Leaders who didn’t notice the change found themselves managing unmotivated employees who were desperate for their bosses to give them some assurances that their jobs were safe rather than hosting company get-togethers that might appeal to the social need, or offering challenging projects to satisfy a need for self-esteem.
    
2. The late David McClelland, a Harvard psychology professor for three decades, identified three major groupings of motivational types: achievement-motivated, power-motivated and affiliation-motivated. I have found that knowing an employee’s type is indispensable to driving productivity. An achievement-motivated employee will be supercharged when given an opportunity to make a significant difference or advance his or her skills. A power-motivated employee will be energized by money, winning, a big office or anything that communicates power. An affiliation-motivated employee is electrified by working with agreeable colleagues. Too many times I have watched executives scratching their heads when a big bonus scheme failed to deliver boosts in productivity. Little did they know that the perceived 800-pound gorilla of motivation is a 99-pound weakling when it comes to influencing achievement- and affiliation-motivated employees.Which is more important to employee motivation, satisfying a need on Maslow’s Hierarchy or appealing to motivational types? Maximizing motivation requires you to appeal to both. Keep in mind that if someone is struggling to meet her physiological or safety needs, helping to satisfy these needs may be the only thing she finds motivational.
    
3. Is an employee introverted or extroverted? In general, employees who are extroverted will be most productive when they are out pressing the flesh or working on tasks that require engagement with people. Employees who are introverted will be most productive when they are working on projects that require contemplation and working alone. Send an introvert to forge relationships at a networking event, and productivity will be low. Place an extrovert on a committee to analyze the implications of reams of statistics, and productivity will be similarly low.I am often asked how to identify need levels, motivational types and whether someone is introverted. My solution isn’t infallible, but it’s pretty accurate, reliable — and quicker and cheaper than a battery of tests. This solution is caring enough about your employees to observe their behaviors and responses. Incidentally, when you heighten your attention to employee behaviors, the employees will notice that you care, and that will give you another free productivity boost.

One last thing: If your competitors have higher productivity because of higher wages or bigger investments in technology, you can gain the upper productivity hand when you focus your attention on motivating employees. Management is a people’s game, and there is nothing that will yield higher productivity dividends. I have found that a motivated employee can easily be twice as productive as a marginally motivated employee.

When you appeal to the desires of employees to contribute to the achievement of company goals, recognize employees for a job well done, behave as a role model and appeal to individual employee motivations, you demonstrate your knowledge that management is a people’s game. Furthermore, you show that you know a leader’s No. 1 job is motivating her employees every day — because that is the key to increasing productivity and staying competitive.

Source: WomenEntrepreneur.com

Schoof and SunRun’s process of re-assessing goals at six months and one year is a great example, but you should be actively tracking progress on an even more regular basis as a manager. It’s a great idea to be flexible with regard to goals, but don’t change them too often unless you really are certain that those alterations will help the goals of the larger business. Altering goals too frequently can mean that you’ve lost track of the big picture.

“One of the most effective ways that we’ve been able to track goals is literally to sit down with employees and have an honest discussion,’ Schoof adds. “Failing to follow up shows the employee that you might not care as much about their success as you did when they originally started.’

Source: Inc.com

Here are a few tips, according to George Bradt, the managing director of PrimeGenesis, a Connecticut-based executive onboarding and transition acceleration group he founded in 2002.

1.    “Assign clear, specific, realistic, and useful goals.’ The more specific the goals are, the easier they are to measure. Telling an employee to “just do your best’ doesn’t clearly state anything.

2.    “Be a positive performance role model.’ One of the most effective ways to get employees to embrace your goal-setting program is for you, the manager, to set and achieve challenging goals for yourself as well. Your positive expectations often set the stage for better performance and create a positive association between you, the performer, and his or her success.

3.    “Be supportive and express confidence in your workers’ ability to achieve goals.’Allowing your new employee to take personal responsibility for developing strategies and an action plan to reach goals means that the manager understands the employee’s value. As a boss, be sure to provide specific feedback and develop a positive impression of yourself in new employee’s eyes, providing them timely and detailed feedback about reaching the goals.

“In terms of defining goals, we set six-month and year-long goals for every employee and for our organization as a whole,’ says Pat Schoof, vice president of human resources for SunRun, a San Francisco-based home solar energy provider that had a big staff increase in one year.  The staff grew from 30 to 88 employees in 2010, with more scheduled to start before 2010. “Those can obviously change as business progresses during the course of the year, but particularly when you’re bringing on a new hire, it’s something we take very seriously.’

So how do you set those short- and long-term goals and then actually follow through on them? It starts before the hire is even made, but day one is the best opportunity you’ll have as the employer to define both short- and long-term goals, be it professional (projects) or personal (familiarity with the company culture and structure).
“It’s a great idea to give them a project early on so they really feel like they’re contributing,” Thomas says. “It doesn’t have to be the most in-depth work, but it will be good to get their feet wet and they won’t feel like they’re simply getting oriented. From there, start thinking about the bigger project at hand, which should have been something you addressed with the candidate before you even made the hire.”

Source: Inc.com

What should we do? That is the first question the manager must answer. What is the mission of the organization I am managing? What is the strategy for accomplishing that mission? What are my goals for the future, consistent with strategy and mission? What are the overall goals for my team, and for each member of the team?

This may sound obvious. But it is remarkable how many managers never get to this basic question. They take their mission, strategy and goals as given – something that has been set by others. Perhaps it’s their boss, or their boss’s boss, or perhaps it’s just built into the situation or organization in which they work. These managers will spend their entire work life reacting – reacting to orders from above, reacting to pressures and problems from below, or simply reacting to the insistent demands of a busy workplace.

If all you do is react, you will fail as a manager. You may be good at solving problems that arise. You may be skilled at responding to the needs and requests of those you work for, or the people on your team. You may work long hours, be loved and respected by your employees, and be the very model of organizational efficiency. But you will not be an effective manager.

One of the most popular management books ever written is Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” – a book that describes seven practices that will lead to success in either your personal or your professional life. Habit number one is simply this: be proactive. The very essence of being human, Mr. Covey writes, is self-awareness – the ability to think about, and ultimately make independent decisions about, your life. Your actions are not simply determined by “nature” – your genetic make-up, or by “nurture” – your upbringing, or by the environment in which you live and work. Rather they should reflect your ability to choose your own course. Effective people focus on being proactive, not reactive, and looking for the things they can do, rather than dwelling on those they can’t.

The effective manager is the same. Any workplace is filled with constraints. You may have an overbearing boss, you may have an extremely limited budget, you may not have enough people to do the job you’ve been asked to do, you may be part of a culture that is hugely resistant to change. There’s an understandable tendency for people to fall into a familiar pattern, and just do things as they’ve always been done, or do what others ask them to do. Your job as an effective manager is to do better than that. You must understand all the constraints, and know which can be changed and which cannot. And then you must decide on a positive course forward.

That leads to Mr. Covey’s habit number two: Begin with the end in mind. It’s not enough to simply choose a course; you must have a clear sense of where that course will lead you. You need to decide both what you are going to do and where it is going to take you. In short, you must have a strategy.

As a manager, it is your responsibility to decide on goals for yourself and your group. But it’s not something you should do in isolation. You must make sure the goals you set for your team align with those of the broader organization. And you must make sure that your team understands, accepts and commits to those goals. The more you can involve your employees in setting goals for themselves and the group, the more committed to those goals they are likely to be.

Most managers recommend that you write down the goals for your team and each of your direct reports, and then revisit those goals on a regular basis – perhaps every six months, or once a year. When writing goals, it’s helpful to keep the following tips in mind:

– Goals must align with the organization’s mission and strategy.

– They must be clear and easy to understand.

– They must be accepted and recognized as important by everyone who will have to implement them.

– Progress towards goals must be measurable.

– Goals must be framed in time, with clear beginning and ending points.

– They should be supported by rewards.

– They should be challenging, but achievable.

The last point is particularly important. Goals should give your team something to reach for. But they should not be unreachable, and their attainment or lack of attainment should not be dependent on a host of circumstances beyond the person’s control.

One of the aspects of my role as a manager that I genuinely relish is on-boarding new employees. I enjoy those first few weeks, when I have an opportunity to influence someone’s career. Because face it: The way a new employee is treated when they arrive colors their attitude and aptitude for the rest of their time in your organization. Treat them well, pair them with a great mentor, and provide the tools, technology, and training they need, and they are well-equipped for success. Screw it up, and they might never recover.

That’s why I was happy to see Dick Grote talk about on-boarding in a recent post at the Harvard Business Review. I’m already a believer, and you should be too.

Of course, large companies usually have some sort of institutionalized onboarding process for new hires. Smaller, less bureaucratic companies might not want something as formal, but they should still put together an on-boarding checklist to make sure they have all of their bases covered. It’s not rocket science; look around your organization and pull together the information and resources that will position people for success.

Don’t forget to:

• Set up a new PC and be sure it’s configured with email and other internal tools he or she will need.
• Print a box of business cards and have them available the day the employee arrives.
• Ensure the workspace looks inviting — a nameplate is tangible proof that you recognize you’ve hired an individual (even if that individual is about to work in a cubicle).
• Create an organizational chart in a program like Visio and explain it in detail to the new hire.
• Assign a peer mentor to your new hire to answer questions and deal with issues as they arise in the first few weeks.

What else is part of your on-boarding process? Weigh in with what’s important in your company in the comments.

Quotations

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he had imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” –Henry David Thoreau – Walden, or Life in the Woods

“To me, there is only one form of human depravity – the man without a purpose.” –Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged

“It’s never too late to be who you might have been.” –George Elliot

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in ones favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: ‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.’” –W.H. Murray, of the Scottish Himalayan Expedition

“The entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and actualizer… He can visualize something, and when he visualizes it he sees exactly how to make it happen.” –Robert L. Schwartz

“Give yourself an even greater challenge than the one you are trying to master and you will develop the powers necessary to overcome the original difficulty.” –William J. Bennett – The Book of Virtues

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.” –Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“‘Cheshire Puss,’ she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it’s pleased so far,’ thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

`I don’t much care where–’ said Alice.

`Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

`–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation.

`Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.’” –Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.” –Benjamin Mays

“By recording your dreams and goals on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be. Put your future in good hands — your own.” –Mark Victor Hansen