Setting Goals

Sometimes, when I set goals, I already know how I'm going to accomplish them.  All that's left is getting my head in the game and doing it.  Restoring my body is an example.  I already know everything there is to know about building muscle; I just have to do the work and accomplish it.

Other times, I set goals, and I have no idea how I will accomplish them.  Those are the important ones.  

"Take the ring to Amon Amarth, Frodo."
"How?"
"FIND A WAY!"

Saying I don't know how a goal will be accomplished doesn't mean it won't get done.  It means I don't know how it will get done...yet.

With that in mind, here are my goals for the next twenty years of my life:

I want to add three hundred or four hundred students to the enrollment at Millsaps.  It took twenty years to lose them; we should be able to get them back in twenty.  I owe this to my father, my grandfather, my uncles, my aunts, my cousins, my sister, my brother, my nephew, my wife, my step-child, my father-in-law, To Lance, Brent, Catherine, TW, Jack, Rowan, George, John, Mark, Andrew, Susan, Tommy, Bavender, Joe-Lee, Bill, Lucy, Floy, Suzanne, and especially to Robert Wingate.  

If I'm alive, this will happen!

And probably if I'm not.

My other goal, a more difficult one, I want to make Mississippi, and especially Jackson, a place where young people want to live.  Where they find the most and best opportunities for them.  I'm tired of seeing our best move away forever.  I feel like this might be difficult, but not impossible.  Hell, Rudy Giuliani restored New York, and he's apparently insane.  Surely it can happen here.

My last goal, and this one is just for me; I want to write something people will read long after I'm dead.  I want something that people can hold in their hand and say, "this is what Boyd did with his life."  

I'm planting my flag here.  These things will happen, or I will die trying to make them happen.  I have friends and fellow travelers who will help me along the way.  On these things, I feel like my heart is pure and my aim is true.  That should help.