Over 270 children from throughout New Zealand marked the opening of the Challenge Wanaka Triathlon Festival with the Puzzling World Junior Challenge Wanaka.
The children, aged between six and 15, swam, biked and ran through Lake Wanaka and around Pembroke with not only personal pride at stake but also a spot as a balloon kid, running down the finish chute behind the winners of Challenge Wanaka next Saturday.
“Wow, those kids were tough today,” said Challenge Wanaka director, Victoria Murray-Orr. “I can’t believe we woke to snow on the hills this morning but that wasn’t going to stop these guys – it was awesome to see so many youngsters having so much fun.”
The Challenge Wanaka Triathlon Festival continues tomorrow (Monday) with the Radio Wanaka 5km Charity Fun Run followed by Swim the Course on Wednesday morning. Some of the world’s top short course athletes will race in Tri NZ’s Contact Cup on Friday night before the flag ship iron distance triathlon, Challenge Wanaka on Saturday 21st, along with the Lake Wanaka Half. For further information, visit www.challengewanaka.com.
The results from the event are as follows:
Boys – 6-7 years 1st Sam Idiens (7) – Christchurch 2nd Ian Pugh (6) - Tauranga 3rd Caleb Dixon (7) – Cromwell
Eleven days to go and team Findlay family are ready to go! Phillippa, Scott and their daughter Kenzie will be competing as a team in the half Challenge on the big day!
Kenzie pictured above in the pink hat and goggles will be tackling the swim leg, Scott on the bike and Phils handling the run. We wish them lots of luck and heaps of fun on the big day!
I recently got back from a month's vacation — the longest I've ever taken, and a shocking indulgence for an American. (Earlier this summer, I was still fretting about how to pull off two weeks unplugged.) The distance, though, helped me hone in on what's actually important to my professional career — and which make-work activities merely provide the illusion of progress. Inspired by HBR blogger Peter Bregman's idea of creating a "to ignore" list , here are the activities I'm going to stop cold turkey in 2012 — and perhaps you should, too.
Responding Like a Trained Monkey. Every productivity expert in the world will tell you to check email at periodic intervals — say, every 90 minutes — rather than clicking "refresh" like a Pavlovian mutt. Of course, almost no one listens, because studies have shown email's "variable interval reinforcement schedule" is basically a slot machine for your brain. But spending a month away — and only checking email weekly — showed me how little really requires immediate response. In fact, nothing. A 90 minute wait won't kill anyone, and will allow you to accomplish something substantive during your workday.
Mindless Traditions. I recently invited a friend to a prime networking event. "Can I play it by ear?" she asked. "This is my last weekend to get holiday cards out and I haven't mailed a single one. It is causing stress!" In the moment, not fulfilling an "obligation" (like sending holiday cards) can make you feel guilty. But if you're in search of professional advancement, is a holiday card (buried among the deluge) going to make a difference? If you want to connect, do something unusual — get in touch at a different time of year, or give your contacts a personal call, or even better, meet up face-to-face. You have to ask if your business traditions are generating the results you want.
Reading Annoying Things. I have nearly a dozen newspaper and magazine subscriptions, the result of alluring specials ($10 for an entire year!) and the compulsion not to miss out on crucial information. But after detoxing for a month, I was able to reflect on which publications actually refreshed me — and which felt like a duty. The New Yorker , even though it's not a business publication, broadens my perspective and is a genuine pleasure to read. The pretentious tech publication with crazy layouts and too-small print? Not so much. I'm weeding out and paring down to literary essentials. What subscriptions can you get rid of?
Work That's Not Worth It. Early in my career, I was thrilled to win a five-year, quarter-million dollar contract. That is, until the reality set in that it was a government contract, filled with ridiculous reporting mechanisms, low reimbursement rates and administrative complexities that sucked the joy and profit out of the work. When budget cuts rolled around and my contract got whacked, it turned out to be a blessing. These days, I'm eschewing any engagement, public or private, that looks like more trouble than it's worth.
Making Things More Complicated Than They Should Be. A while back, a colleague approached me with an idea. She wanted me to be a part of a professional development event she was organizing in her city, featuring several speakers and consultants. She recommended biweekly check-in calls for the next eight months, leading up to the event. "Have you organized an event like this before?" I asked. "Can you actually get the participants? Why don't you test the demand first?" When none materialized, I realized I'd saved myself nearly half a week's work — in futile conference calls — by insisting the event had to be "real" before we invested in it. As Eric Ries points out in his new book The Lean Startup , developing the best code or building the best product in the world is meaningless if your customers don't end up wanting it. Instead, test early and often to ensure you're not wasting your time. What ideas should you test before you've gone too far?
Eliminating these five activities is likely to save me hundreds of hours next year — time I can spend expanding my business and doing things that matter. What are you going to stop doing? And how are you going to leverage all that extra time?
2:55 PM Thursday December 15, 2011 by Dorie Clark | Harvard Business Review
We thought a nice way to start the year would be to talk about goals, we found this article that said all we wanted to say! Happy New Year!
“Without goals, and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.” -Fitzhugh Dodson
Did you know that less than 3 percent of Americans have written goals, and of those who do less than 1 percent review and rewrite their goals on a regular basis?
This means that as soon as you start setting goals and reviewing them regularly you’ll be ahead of 99% of the population in terms of the potential to become successful.
If you want to accomplish something in life, financial independence for example, and you don’t establish clear and specific goals it’s more like day dreaming than goal setting.
KEEPING APART GOALS AND DAY DREAMING
Ask yourself the following four questions to discern if your goals qualify as goals or if they can be considered as day dreaming. In the examples below I use becoming rich as a goal, but these questions can be applied no matter what kind of goal you want to achieve.
Is this goal specific? Becoming rich is a dream, and to turn this dream into a goal you need to put numbers on it. Instead of having the goal to become rich, which really isn’t a goal, your goal can be specified as building a net worth of $1 million.
Is this goal actionable? Hoping to become rich by winning the lottery is a dream. A goal needs to be something that you can take action on, preferably right now. Becoming wealthy through starting a business is actionable.
Does this goal have a time limit? ”I am going to be worth $1 million one day”, or ”Some day I will go to France”, or ”Some day I will change career”, all of those are goals, but they can be improved. When you set a deadline, that’s when the magic really begins to happen. ”I am going to be worth $1 million in seven years”, or ”I will go to France within three years”, now those are better examples of correct goal setting.
Is this goal realistic? Building a $1 million net worth in seven years is totally reasonable, but setting the goal of building $1 million net worth in three months is just not realistic. It is possible, but not realistic. While it’s important to not set the bar too high, it’s just as important not to set the bar too low. If you feel scared by your goal but still feel that you can accomplish it, that’s when you know you have set the bar at an appropriate level..
BREAKING DOWN GOALS
When setting goals people often start with the big goals, goals that may be spanning several years into the future. To translate your big goal into a managable plan you need to break the goal down though. Let’s say your goal is to be worth $1 million within 7 years. Then what?
Breaking down your goal into smaller sub goals or objectives makes goal setting more managable, and this is an important strategy in how to set goals the right way. For example, if you want to write a book within a year the goal to ”write a book in one year” can feel massive. It’s easier to break that goal down into monthly and weekly goals, so your monthly goal might be to finish chapter one, while your daily goal might be to write one page per day. All of a sudden it feels a lot more managable.
KEEPING A DAILY TASK LIST
A secret to successful goal setting is to have a clear picture of what needs to be done each and every day to move one step closer towards achieving your goal. A recurring habit among very successful people is that they know exactly what needs to be done when they get up in the morning, i.e. they plan their days ahead of time so they can get to work on the most important tasks immediately in the morning.
GOAL SETTING ARTICLES
This article goes more into how you can successfully create a daily task list. If you want to be the captain of your soul and the master of your future read this article.
Staying focused is one of the biggest challenges related to goal setting, and if you can’t focus on doing it won’t matter how many hours you spend on planning. Here’s five easy steps that you can take to stay focused.
Writing down your goals is a great start, but to really take it to the next level and increase your chances of accomplishing your goals you should regularly review them.
A life of the late Steve Jobs catches the great man's many contradictions with unerring skill.
Technology begets the future and, thanks to Steve Jobs, it sketched the next phase in the evolution of lame-brained Homo sapiens. The headquarters of Apple in Silicon Valley are located in a galactic street called Infinite Loop and Jobs felt at home in such an abstract location. His preferred non-colour was white and the transparent buildings he helped design had spiral staircases of glass shaped like coils of DNA. He was, he believed, "enlightened", a luminary to be ranked with Gandhi or Einstein.
Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography
by Walter Isaacson
As Walter Isaacson says in this incisive biography, Jobs behaved like a Nietzschean superman, using his will – transmitted through an unblinking stare – as a remote-control device that compelled others to do his bidding. As a child, he made his parents sell their house and buy another one that was beyond their means so he could qualify to enrol in a better school. As an adult, he drove his silver Mercedes at the speed of thought and parked it straddling spaces reserved for disabled drivers: the normal rules were for ordinary mortals. When first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he refused surgery and thought he could zap the malignancy by applying mental force, backed up – since this was ditzy, faddish California – by a regime of "organic herbs, juice fasts and frequent bowel cleansings".
At his best, Jobs mimicked the serene demeanour of a Buddhist priest, just as the white or silver gadgets he sold exemplified a style that Isaacson calls "techno-Zen". He negotiated multimillion dollar deals while walking barefoot through the countryside and bought himself a mansion in which he had to sit cross-legged on the floor because he disapproved of possessions and had theoretical objections to furniture.
But at his worst, as a colleague said, he resembled Rasputin. He screamed that underlings were "bleep, bleep bleep" before abruptly firing them, and his vindictive temper worked like a guided missile. During a dispute with Google, he declared that he intended "to go to thermonuclear war on this".
Jobs attended Apple's first Halloween party dressed as Jesus Christ, while his most devout admirers cast him in the role of God the Father, the creator of new worlds. Product launches were staged as re-enactments of Genesis, unveiling inventions that looked, as Jobs said about the 1988 Macintosh, like visitors "from another planet. A good planet. A planet with better designers".
Customers believed in his wares with a cultish fervour. The iPhone was soon nicknamed "the Jesus phone" and when Jobs turned up at his local Apple store as it went on sale he was greeted, according to Isaacson, as Moses might have been "if he had walked in to buy the Bible". The iPad's arrival provoked a journalist to refurbish the metaphor by remarking: "The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it."
Yet the saviour stank, physically and sometimes morally. The young Jobs abhorred deodorants and seldom showered, confident that his vegan or fruitarian diet laundered him from within. Despite his preachy claim that paying for music downloads disseminated "good karma", he sometimes lied to colleagues and competitors and stole the credit for ideas that belonged to others. He was a man of the media age, inept at unmediated human relations – an adopted son who resented his abandonment by his birth parents but abandoned a daughter of his own born out of wedlock; a disengaged and narcissistic lover, who during his affair with Joan Baez insisted that she should have a particular Ralph Lauren dress, took her to the mall to see it and then after scooping up a few shirts for himself left her to buy the dress using her credit card (which she declined to do). Revealingly, he importuned Isaacson to write this biography because, he said, "I want my kids to know me". Did he think that a book was a proper substitute for parental attention and care?
Isaacson catches these contradictions with unerring skill and partly justifies them by placing Jobs at the awkward intersection between two generations with opposing creeds. Born in 1955, he belonged to the bratty clan of baby-boomers who rebelled against the suburban conformity of their parents. He dropped out of college and simultaneously dropped acid, visited Indian gurus and idolised Bob Dylan. But although he emerged from the counterculture, he became an emblem of corporate culture and even commissioned Issey Miyake to design a uniform for Apple employees.
He may have disdained material encumbrances, but his business relied on inciting consumerist desires in others. The revolution he dreamed of in the days of flower power turned out to be electronic, not political. The former hippie sold his iPods and iPhones to hipsters who have no interest in changing the world but simply want to enjoy it as they groove to their pocket library of iTunes and loll on digital clouds cyber-chatting with friends they have never actually met. Isaacson almost blasphemously calls into question the purpose of the gadgetry that is now compulsory if you want to be young, stylish and hyperlinked: iPad apps, he says, place the world at your fingertips, and in doing so allow you to "waste glorious amounts of time".
The biography is honest and therefore often harsh, but it confers on Jobs a kind of tragic desperation when, with the onset of cancer, he discovers that his infinitely looped and ingenious mind is housed in a fallible body. So cerebral that he disliked eating and preferred to starve himself, he was eventually eaten alive by his greedy tumour.
Isaacson laments Jobs's infantile tantrums, while recognising that this childishness – exemplified by his Pixar blockbuster Toy Story – turned his products from tools into delightfully frisky playthings. When you remove the cover from the iPad 2, as Isaacson puts it, the screen "pops to life like the face of a tickled baby". That beautiful phrase sums up Jobs's bequest: he did redesign the universe and he reminded us to be amazed by it.
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