I’ve been working on my 2009 goals lately. I am big on the goal-setting. Last year I picked up a copy of Jinny Ditzler’s Your Best Year Yet!: Ten Questions for Making the Next Twelve Months Your Most Successful Ever on Chris Brogan’s recommendation. It’s super-helpful in terms of thinking about how to make and set plans for the year in a way that isn’t cheesey or overly “personal development”-y. It does use the phrase “limiting paradigm”, which turned me off at first, but then became particularly relevant.

Part of the book made me realize: Being in a competitive educational environment without any kind of attention to how my brain was working emotionally led me to make the connection that

success =  spotlight = target= bad

At the time, this was factually untrue, and I even had models for how untrue it was. How I made this connection I’m still working out. At any rate, I routinely aimed for the quiet and more personally comfortable success of 2nd place–an accomplishment, but not a target; clearly an achiever, but not in the spotlight. While that may have worked in high school (even though it really didn’t), it’s useless now, except to hold me back from doing things I want to do. My family & friends will love me whether I succeed or fail, so I might as well succeed.

Enough of that. 2009 is going to be much more fun than 2008 ever was. Let’s start early with stuff I love!

(Inspired by Meg Fowler’s Friday Love List)

I love:

1. Peppermint bark
2. Della the Weimaraner snuggling in bed next to me
3. Twitter
4. Fresh flowers next to the bed
5. Ripping articles out of magazines
6. Having goals
7. Ben’s sweatshirts
8. Pasta
9. White Christmas lights
10. Scrooged
11. Working outside in the sun to make a garden
12. Satsumas
13. Towels fresh from the dryer
14. USC kicking some UCLA butt all over the football field
15. Hulu
16. My friends
17. My family
18. Always & 4eva as they say back home, Ben

What do you love? Will you still love it in 2009?