YouGottaWannaBaby!- Resetting Your 4th Quarter Goals

I know you're supposed to set your goals in January, but I like to mix things up.  We've got three months left or 1/4 of the year left, so let's refocus now and have a great final four months of the season. So this is our 3/4 check-in/refocus.

This Borrowed Genius comes from that coach who made his players put four fingers into the air to show that it was the fourth quarter. For me, that was our legendary head coach, Nick Mourouzis, who was the winningest football coach in DePauw University history. He was so intense and so positive. My personal favorite saying of his was, "We're like Otis Elevator, baby! We're going straight to the top!" But what he what he was most famous for saying was YouGottaWannaBaby!- all in one word- usually when we were really tired but needed to push to the end. (Here's a snapshot of Coach Nick, passing in front of a young freshman wide-receiver / future talent agent, on ESPN2's broadcast of the 101st Monon Bell game between DePauw and Wabash, at the beginning of the 4th quarter.)

There's just something about putting your hand up, saying, "This is the fourth quarter. This is it. Whatever happened before wasn't everything, it was just leading up to this. This time, right now, is when we close strong and show what we're made of."

What were your goals for 2024?  Even if things haven't been great, what can you accomplish in the final three months that you didn't necessarily do well in the first nine? What wrongs can you make right? How can you finish strong?

I'll go first.

I've been bad at doing this newsletter.  I don't even want to see how many articles I've written this year, but it's way off of the 18 I wanted to have written by this point.  I have excuses like everyone else.  We remodeled our old house and then moved into a new one, moved our oldest kid (the aforementioned math nerd) to college, etc. There's always an excuse. But I can work to finish strong no matter how I started, so I'm committing to writing eight more articles by the end of the year.  This one counts in that total, so just seven more after that!  (If there's anything you'd like me to write about, please let me know.)

Your turn.

What reset goals do you want to hit in the last 1/4 of the year?

And let's not forget that we can celebrate the things you've done well. I set a goal of working out every day, biking 2,500 miles, and running 1,000 miles for the year. I'm a little bit ahead of schedule for running (801 miles so far, so a couple of weeks ahead of schedule) and I'm already at 2,452 miles biked (almost there!).  

What goals are you hitting so far this year and want to celebrate? Where do you need to lean into "YouGottaWannaBaby!" and push through here at the end?

From 2002-2007, I wrote a weekly comic strip that appeared in about 40 small publications in the US, Canada, and Israel. If this is a newsletter, we might as well have a comic each week, too!

Brian Lord is the President of Premiere Speakers Bureau and the host of the Beyond Speaking Podcast. A 29-year speaking and entertainment industry veteran who started his first agency in his dorm room, Brian has done everything from running a non-profit and writing a comic strip to coaching youth softball and competing for TeamUSA in the Duathlon Age Group World Championships in Romania in 2022. He and his wife Krista enjoy raising their four kids outside of Nashville.