Happy New Year! Time to revisit your goals.

[Joey English]

You may be thinking that “Happy New Year” is a strange title for this column since we’re in the middle of April. Well it’s not. That’s because I’m talking about the Hebrew New Year. It just started, and we’re currently in the first month, the month of Abib.

The month of Abib is rife with Biblical awesomeness. Yahweh plagued Egypt and brought the children of Israel out of slavery; He parted the red sea and the death and resurrection of our Messiah all took place during this month. Hope and the promise of great things to come has always been at the center of Abib.

Something I love about celebrating the Hebrew New Year is it gives me another opportunity to set goals. Interestingly enough, Abib falls at the beginning of the second quarter. If you’re like most people, this is when you’re either in the thick of working towards the goals you set in January, or you have already let some slip.

If the latter circumstance is true, it’s OK. Goals are meant to give you a destination as well as a point of reference. Once you have a point of reference, you can adjust your course in life as needed in order to reach your destination.

Abib is a fantastic time to revisit the goals you may have set in January and adjust as needed. If you didn’t set any goals, it’s a great time to start.

Before you begin brainstorming about goals, let me challenge you with this poem by Jessie B. Rittenhouse.

“I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, However I begged at evening when I counted my scanty store; For Life is just an employer, He gives you what you ask, But once you have set the wages, why, you must bear the task.

I worked for a menial’s hire, Only to learn, dismayed, That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have paid.”

When you’re identifying and writing down your goals, you’re negotiating with life on what your wage will be. Make sure you dream big during this process because life will give you what you ask of it.

Now that doesn’t mean all your goals should be huge. On the contrary, you need some small and some intermittent ones, but you definitely need the huge ones. These big goals will help encourage and inspire you on your path to success.

And you need to keep them where you can see them. Take my buddy Mike Hicks for instance. Mike is an awesome guy and a super-successful investor. He got that way by setting good goals, writing them down and looking at them regularly.

The other day I was having lunch with Mike at his office and I noticed he had a poster board hanging by his desk with pictures and inspirational quotes glued to it.

I asked him what the poster was about, and he replied it was a vision board. The pictures, he said, were images of what the end of his goals look like. Seeing them helps him envision what his success will look like. These pictures and quotes encourage and inspire him to keep moving forward. Seeing them daily, not only keeps the goals in the forefront of his mind, but it also proves to him that his goals are attainable.

In essences, this practice gives him hope

Hope is at the forefront of all the stories we read about in scripture during the month of Abib. Remember how Yahweh gave the children of Israel a column of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to look at and to lead them in the right direction? In the same way during this month of Abib, use a vision board to give you hope and lead you to the good things to come as you work towards your goals.