My Finish List: The Reveal

I'm more than a little nervous about posting this. Putting something in writing is one thing.

Publishing it is entirely different.

I haven't shown my Finish List to anyone — not even my husband. Not that I've been hiding it. I just wasn't sure it was finished, and I didn't want to show it to him until it was.

See? I'm already finishing things! I finished my Finish List. 

So putting my list out there for everyone to see - OK, the three of you who will click on the link, including my husband and sister - is really daunting. That's an increase in awareness of 300% over the public's current level of awareness of my Finish List. That's huge! Enormous! Corporations and political candidates pay big money for that kind of return.

So here are the rules I set for myself for creating my Finish List:

1. Goals must be concrete and measurable. No "I'm going to lose weight" wishy-washiness. Example: "I'm going lose ten pounds."
2. Goals must have a deadline either explicitly or implicitly attached to them. Example: "I'm going to lose ten pounds by the end of May."
3. Goals, whenever possible, should be broken down into smaller sub-goals. This allows me to track progress and see if a correction needs to be made. Example: I'm going to lose two pounds by the end of February and ten pounds by the end of May."
4. Goals must have the word "finish" in them. Try it. It's harder to do than you think. Example: "I'm going to finish losing two pounds by the end of February and ten pounds by the end of May." 
5. Set goals that affect multiple aspects of life. Personal and professional, spiritual and physical, individual and family. Example: See actual list below.

So here is my 2012 Finish List. I thought about breaking it up and only posting one goal per post. But I decided that was cheesy and kind of being a tease. However, I am not going to publish the details today — schedule, specific names of books, explanation of how these items were chosen, etc. I will come back to that later. But for now ...

Marybeth's 2012 Finish List

1. Finish 12 books I’ve already purchased and/or already started. At least six must be non-fiction.
2. Finish setting up my personal blog and post at least once by the end of February.
3. Finish 50 hours of work on Joshua's embroidered Christmas stocking.
4. Finish an outline and writing the first 150 pages of my novel.
5. Finish my first sprint triathlon in June.
6. Finish hand-writing the book of Proverbs in a Moleskine notebook.
7. Finish writing 40 blog posts on my company's blog: Lab Reports.

Props must be given to Jon Acuff of the Dave Ramsey organization for coming up with the whole Finish List idea.

He — like me — is a self-proclaimed great starter, but a very poor finisher.

He — like me — realizes that no one can change the world (or even themselves) by starting something. Only by finishing it.

He — unlike me — is getting paid to do his Finish List and blog about it. So ... that's about where the similarities end.

For more about Finish lists, click here to be taken to Jon's blog. One more similarity, though.

He — like me — collects Starbucks latte mugs from cities he visits around the country and the world. I actually bought him his mug from Cancun, Mexico. Two years ago we were attending the same conference and realized we were both in search of one, so when I found one, I grabbed two. (That's completely irrelevant, of course. I'm just name-dropping at this point.)

So...what would you put on a Finish List for 2012?