Performance are quantitative and SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Examples include: Saving $2,000 by March 2010, increasing department revenue by 30% by end of quarter, or qualifying for Boston Marathon by 2011.

Learning are qualitative mini-goals supporting a performance goal. Examples include: Find iPhone application to manage spending, Read industry report and understand popular new products for next quarter, Find and work with running coach to improve running technique.

Performance goals are rarely fully in your control. The best we can do is increase our probability of success. For example, increasing sales 20% requires you to find new clients. What happens if the economy crashes or you lose an important client? The beauty of learning goals is that they are fully within our control. Learning 3 new sales strategies is something you can control and increases your probability of accomplishing your performance goal.

One of my performance goals is to find a job at an industry-leading San-Francisco based company. My learning goals are:

• Share my job story with others: Track goal progress and hold myself accountable.
• Informational interview at 3 of my target companies: Develop connection with target company and learn culture.
• Learn new technical skill or take class: Improve marketability and network with others in industry.

You increase your chance of success by asking what resources you can commit, who can support you, and why you would like to accomplish it.  Questions I ask are:

• How much of my time and money can I contribute? I only have so much time and money.
• Who can help me accomplish this goal? How can I help them?
• How long will it take to accomplish?
• Why do I want this goal? Is it an external driver (Sales Award, Annual bonus, impressing others) or an internal driver (Gain experience, Improve writing skills)?

I want to accomplish my goal to boost my income, gain experience, and develop my technical skills. I plan on spending around $150/month and 35 hours a week. I would like a position by February 28th, 2010, if not I plan to re-evaluate my progress. My job success team, industry contacts, and friends are supporting me. I help my success team find leads and provide support, my industry contacts gain access to my network, and friends have my support in other areas of their lives.

Now is the perfect time to begin setting your goals for 2010. I want you to create a performance and learning goal using the guidelines I have set above. Let me know what you come up with.

“Perhaps no job search in American history has been so mythologized as that begun by sixteen-year-old John D. Rockefeller in the sweltering Cleveland of August 1855. Although he was a rural boy, his family hadn’t been full-time farmers, and this must have made it easier for him to escape from his small-town, agricultural past and enter the new market economy. Though times were tough, the boy set out with no modest ambition as he pored over the city directory, identifying those establishments with high credit ratings. Already endowed with instinctive respect for big business, he knew exactly what he wanted. “I went to the railroads, to the banks, to the wholesale merchants,” he later said. “I did not go to any small establishments. I did not guess what it would be, but I was after something big.”25 Most of the businesses he visited lay in a bustling area known as the Flats, where the Cuyahoga River twisted through a clanging, roaring landscape of lumber mills, iron foundries, warehouses, and shipyards before emptying into Lake Erie, which was crowded with side-wheel steamboats and schooners. His quest had a touch of callow grandiosity. At each firm, he asked to speak to the top man—who was usually unavailable—then got straight to the point with an assistant: “I understand bookkeeping, and I’d like to get work. ”26

Despite incessant disappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o’clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day—six days a week for six consecutive weeks—until late in the afternoon. The streets were so hot and hard that he grew footsore from pacing them. His perseverance surely owed something to his desire to end his reliance upon his fickle father. At one point, Bill (John’s father) suggested that if John didn’t find work he might have to return to the country; the thought of such dependence upon his father made “a cold chill” run down his spine, Rockefeller later said. 27 Because he approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self-pity, he could stare down all discouragement. “I was working every day at my business—the business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this every day.”28 He was a confirmed exponent of positive thinking.

With almost thirty thousand inhabitants, Cleveland was a boomtown that would have thrilled any young man avid for business experience. It had drawn many transplants from New England who had brought along the Puritan mores and Yankee trading culture of their old hometowns. While the streets were largely unpaved and the town lacked a sewage system, Cleveland was expanding rapidly, with immigrants pouring in from Germany and England as well as the eastern seaboard. The plenty of the Midwest passed through this commercial crossroads of the Western Reserve: coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, iron ore from around Lake Superior, salt from Michigan, grain and corn from the plains states. As a port on Lake Erie and the Ohio Canal, Cleveland was a natural hub for transportation networks. When the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad arrived in 1851, it created excellent opportunities for transport by both water and rail, and nobody would more brilliantly exploit these options than John D. Rockefeller.

For all the thriving waterfront commerce, the job prospects were momentarily bleak. “No one wanted a boy, and very few showed any overwhelming anxiety to talk with me on the subject,” said Rockefeller.29 When he exhausted his list, he simply started over from the top and visited several firms two or three times. Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.

Then, on the morning of September 26, 1855, he walked into the offices of Hewitt and Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers on Merwin Street. He was interviewed by Henry B. Tuttle, the junior partner, who needed help with the books and asked him to return after lunch. Ecstatic, Rockefeller walked with restraint from the office, but when he got downstairs and rounded the corner, he skipped down the street with pure joy. Even as an elderly man, he saw the moment as endowed with high drama: “All my future seemed to hinge on that day; and I often tremble when I ask myself the question: ‘What if I had not got the job?’ ”30 In a “fever of anxiety,” Rockefeller waited until the noon-day meal was over, then returned to the office, where he was interviewed by senior partner Isaac L. Hewitt. Owner of a good deal of Cleveland real estate and a founder of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, Hewitt must have seemed a mighty capitalist indeed. After scrutinizing the boy’s penmanship, he declared, “We’ll give you a chance.”31 They were evidently in urgent need of an assistant bookkeeper, since they told Rockefeller to hang up his coat and go straight to work, without any mention of wages. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for an adolescent to serve an unpaid apprenticeship, and it was three months before John received his first humble, retroactive pay. For the rest of his life, he would honor September 26 as “Job Day” and celebrate it with more genuine brio than his birthday.”

Inspired by this story I have put together a list of companies that I would like to work for. My qualifications are relatively simple, since at this stage in my career I am still a generalist.

1. ) Headquartered or has an office in the San Francisco Bay Area

2.) A company leading their industry or pioneering a new strategy

3.) I must be passionate about their mission. When I believe in a company I will “work” from 7am-9pm to ensure the company succeeds and becomes #1.

I harbor no illusions about the difficulty of gaining employment or working for free at these companies. I am not an Ivy league graduate, I am not a Rothschild, and I have not grown up in the affluent areas of the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite the lack of traditional measurements, I have excelled in my internships, managed an array of projects, and have won the support of people I have met in person. At the risk of revealing too much, I will keep my identity private as long as I feel it is pertinent. The companies I have arrayed include:

1. BillShrink
2. OpenTable
3. Eventbrite
4. SolarCity
5. Better Place
6. CaliSolar
7. Center for Automotive Research
8. Belkin
9. Draper Fisher Jurvetson
10. Tesla Motors
11. Coulomb Technologies
12. Sequoia Capital
13. Luxim
14. Oorja Protonics
15. KPCB
16. Sigma Partners Menlo Park
17. NEA
18. Palo Alto Research Center
19. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
20. JP Morgan Chase
21. Parthenon Group
22. Organic
23. IDEO
24. Frog Design
25. Charles Schwab
26. Levi Strauss
27. Gap
28. Williams-Sonoma
29. Banana Republic
30. Apple
31. Franklin Templeton Group
32. CNET
33. Bon Appetit
34. Macromedia
35. Facebook
36. Mozilla Corporation
37. Nanosolar
38. VantagePoint Venture Partners
39. YouTube
40. Clif Bar Company
41. Pandora
42. M Squared Consulting
43. Panthenon Ventures
44. Intel Capital
45. Plug and Play Tech Center
46. NetFlix
47. Specialized
48. LinkedIn
49. Zero Motorcycles
50. AeroVironment
51. Electric Power Research Institute
52. Oracle

Quite a list I know. As long as 51 companies say NO and 1 company says YES, I will be affirmed in my hunt.

-D