Learning From Last Year

Jeffrey Gitomer - A business speaker and author whom I've read and enjoy - posted an article today about learning lessons from last year - not just that we boldly go forward into the New Year, but that we consider what has happened in the last year, rate them, and what lesson we learned from each of them.

It's a good idea - a great idea actually, coming from someone who is becoming more and more haunted by the fact that I continue to be stuck in the same place.

As I look back over my planners (I have them going back to 2003), what I realize is that most - or all - of the goals I continue to carry forward are the ones that I have had from year's past. In fact, with a few exceptions, if you looked at my earlier goals, you'd really wonder what year they came from.

Perhaps this one fact, more than any other, explains the feeling I've had of late that in a great many ways, my life is stuck on a treadmill, not really moving ahead but very slowly, almost imperceptibly, falling behind.

Great. So what am I going to do about it?

Two things. The first (which I can't do until I get back home from the audit) is to review 2011 in detail by what was intended, what was accomplished, and everything else that happened. It won't be a perfect review, but it will at least give me a sense of what did (or didn't happen).

The second thing I've actually started at work and will start for my personal life as well is a mistake log.

A mistake log? A simple worksheet with four columns: the date, what happened, the root cause of why it happened, and what I will do to correct it. It's a simplified version of a process that I use every day.

Is it working? I've already got three errors in it, three things that I actually always had issues with but have now recorded to remind myself not to do again.

Sometimes it's not that we lack the knowledge we need, it's that we fail to force ourselves to use it.