Want to bring your learning to the next level? It may be time to set a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.
It’s easy to come up with small, overly-realistic goals. But, these lack the passion that draws people out of their comfort zones to take on serious risk. True learning occurs when you do things that are unfamiliar and face the possibility of failure. A Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal should be something that inspires you and scares you at the same time.
What does a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal look like? Consider these examples:
- The Think Big Manifesto shares the story of an activist who spread the word by creating an extremely popular YouTube video and a hedge-fund manager who gave up the business world to become an organic cattle farmer.
- Homeschooling mom Julie Bogart encouraged her kids to come up with their own Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals. Her 11-year-old daughter wanted to hold a Jane Austen-style ball as a prom alternative. With the goal in mind, her daughter took vintage dance lessons, held classes teaching the dances to her peers, and learned to sew in order to create costumes for the event.
- Now an assistant editor at Harper’s Magazine, Chris Beha dealt with setbacks in his young adulthood by setting a goal to read the entire set of Harvard Classics in just a year. His readings gave him new insight and his experiences were recently published as The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else.
- Google’s company mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Although Google is a for-profit organization, their Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal has produced some amazing resources for self-learners, including virtual access to academic articles, scans of books, and a handful of no-cost software programs.
- Temp worker Julie Powell decided to learn the art of French cooking by completing every single recipe in Julia Child’s famed book in just one year (quite the undertaking if you’ve seen the recipes). Not only did she become an excellent cook, her endeavor landed her a major book deal and she now combines her love of cooking with her lifelong dream of becoming an author.
All of these people and organizations had set backs along the way. But, by focusing on their Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals, they were able to accomplish some rather amazing things and learn more than they ever could by keeping their thinking “in the box.” [click to continue…]
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