The Wandering Generality vs. The Meaningful Specific

As often happens when buying a book or two on Amazon.com, you get to the checkout and see that you've spent $19. Crap. If you spend $25 you get free shipping. So you go back to the search engine and try to find something somewhat cheap to put you over the $25 mark but still good enough to warrant buying. I was having a tough time figuring out what to buy sice nothing immediately came to mind, but then I thought 'hey let's give Zig Ziglar a crack'.

Zig is a motivational speaker I've heard about for some time. Many of the instructors from real estate investing courses as well as authors of other books rave about how this guy gets you moving. I wanted something general from him, so I passed on his CDs on selling and instead got his one on goal setting. I already have plenty of material on goal setting, but I really need something to motivate me to actually do it, and possibly listen on a semi regular basis to keep me in line.

The guy has a fun southern accent and seems like a warm old man you'd like to know. He's got a bunch of quaint expressions and metaphors that work for him. One of the opening things he said on the CD was "You cannot make it as a wandering generality. You must become a meaningful specific." That sorta struck me, I liked the words he used that I wasn't even sure were nouns. Can a person be a 'specific'? The sentiment makes sense though. People bob here and there, go from place to place, job to job, wandering and general. A goal person doesn't have this vagueness of purpose and lack of direction. It reminds me of a quote from Fight Club (the book, not the movie) where Tyler is motivating his followers: "All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction." We have all this wandering time and energy that could fill a room, but it's almost useless unless you shoot it a direction.

I have my gun, and it's focused. I just need to pull the trigger.