Most of us had at least one “Paint by Number Kit” when we were kids. All you had to do was take out the canvas with a shape—it could be the shape of a dog, a horse, or a vase filled with flowers–softly drawn on it.
The drawing had light blue lines indicating areas to paint, with each area containing a number corresponding with a numbered paint. The number-coded paints were also included, as well as the brush you were supposed to use.
Then you simply proceeded to open the first paint container and paint every area marked with that number. Next, you moved on to the second paint container, and so on and so forth, until your masterpiece was completed. Soon, even if you had no drawing or painting ability whatsoever, you had a beautiful work of art which you could proudly frame and display.
We can use that same approach today, as adults, to accomplish our goals. It is widely touted that goals have to be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. However, even after we have written our SMART goals, we still don’t know how we’re going to achieve those goals.
But what if we had a roadmap telling us exactly what to do in order to achieve our goals, much like the “Paint by Number Kit” told us exactly which color went where? Finding a pre-established roadmap you can easily follow is possible for a lot of, if not most, goals.
Below you’ll find three examples of applying the paint by number approach to accomplishing your goals.
Kit for Training for a Marathon
Suppose you’ve decided that one of your goals is to run a marathon. You look up the marathon you’re interested in running, write down the date, and decide that your goal is to complete the marathon in under four hours.
In addition, you’ve been running 3 miles, four times a week, for a couple of months, and there’s sufficient time to train left before the marathon. You can write down your SMART goal as follows:
“I will run the (stick the name of the marathon here) marathon in four months—on the 15th of August—in under four hours.”
Now that you know exactly what you want to accomplish, you need to know your “how”, which means that you need to develop a plan. Can you find a plan that has proven successful in helping other beginner runners finish a marathon in less than four hours, with four months of training? There’s a book called “The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer”
The promise of the book is that you’ll be able to run a marathon in sixteen weeks. It contains sixteen chapters, one for every week of training (plus an additional chapter telling you what to do after the marathon so that you recover properly).
The book tells you on what days to run, and for how long you should run each day. It also offers advice on the mental aspects of preparing for a marathon, as well as advice on nutrition, stretching, what to wear, the shoes you should use, and so on.
That is, “The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer” tells you exactly what you need to do each day, for sixteen weeks, so that you can run a marathon at the end of those sixteen weeks. It takes all of the guess work out of deciding how many days a week you should train, by how much you should increase your runs each week, and so on. In other words, it turns preparing for a marathon into a paint by number kit.
Kit for Weight Loss
I’ve never used the Jenny Craig diet, but if you visit their web site you’ll notice that their weight loss program consists of getting meals and snacks delivered to your home. By getting the food that you’re going to be eating prepackaged, you’re guaranteed a controlled amount of calories and appropriate portion sizes.
If one of your goals is to lose weight, it’s very difficult to accomplish this goal simply by writing down that you’re going to lose ten pounds in fifteen weeks by eating more nutritiously (which is a SMART goal). However, by following the Jenny Craig diet, instead of having to plan your meals—deciding how much protein and carbohydrates to eat for each meal, counting calories, making decisions on portion sizes, and so on–you just get up, pull the prepackaged meal out of the freezer, heat it, and eat it.
Of course, you do need to learn proper nutrition and portion control, because you’re not going to order Jenny Craig meals for the rest of your life, but the program gets you quickly, and easily, started on the road toward weight loss.
I’m not endorsing Jenny Craig—as I said above, I’ve never used their program; this is an example to help you find ways to create a roadmap to accomplish your goals, just like a paint by number kit guides you in creating a painting.
Kit for Writing a Novel
There are books out there that give you step-by-step instructions on how to write a novel; one of them is the “You Can Write A Novel Kit”
Although some may think that this method of writing a novel is too logical and mechanical to allow for creative expression, it’s just the opposite: having a clear process to follow helps to give shape to the characters, dialogue, and story lines that you have floating around in your head.
Conclusion
Once you decide what you want, and you’ve set it down on paper as a SMART goal, you need to devise a plan on how you’re going to achieve that goal. For most goals, you’ll be able to find a plan or a method created by someone who’s been there and done that, which lays out the specific steps you need to take in order to succeed.
Talk to people who have achieved the goals you want to achieve and ask them how they did it. Also, look for how-to programs or books which break down the process you need to follow into clear, simple steps. By following the paint by number approach to goal setting, you’ll soon be able to frame your list of achievements and hang it up on the wall.
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(Photo of the Paint by Numbers Kit is courtesy of Sugar Pond.)
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