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Episode 38: Goblin Games – Dragons are S.M.A.R.T.
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Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our thirty-eighth episode, Hobbes Q. enlightens us on the importance of S.M.A.R.T. goals as a motivational and achievement tool, while explaining how Nicol Bolas almost certainly used those kinds of goals to help his long-term planning. But they're not just for interplanar dragon terrorists; you can also make your goals more efficient with S.M.A.R.T., and Hobbes explains how.
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or [email protected].
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle).
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to Mental Health Awareness and War of the Spark
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore Podcast. Today, this is HobSkew. I can be found on Twitter, at HobSkew, and I'm recording an episode for the end of Mental Health Awareness Month.
00:00:27
Speaker
Every May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I was thinking of a topic that I think would be important to that, while also looking a little bit at the lore of War of the Spark. As many of you might know from Twitter and following me, I am a mental health professional, I work as a psychologist, and I have talked a little bit on my feed about the importance of goals and setting goals.
Nicol Bolas's Strategic Planning and Goals
00:00:48
Speaker
Today, I'd like to kind of give a framework for goal setting called smart goals, as well as discussing the importance of having both long-term and short-term goals. And I thought, who better than to look at this through than through Nicol Bolas?
00:01:03
Speaker
As many of you know, I have considered myself an apologist for Nicol Bolas, and while I do recognize that this is kind of tongue-in-cheek in him being a very strong villain, he actually is somebody who planned a lot better during War of the Spark to accomplish his goals than our heroes did.
00:01:21
Speaker
He actually has been taking the concept of long-term goals, things that we have want to solve down the road or work on down the road, not necessarily today. He had this plan in place for many, many years to become basically an old walker status, to return to being a god and having god-like powers.
00:01:41
Speaker
Now, he knew that he was not going to accomplish this overnight, which is why he actually had to set about planning for his ultimate attack on Ravnica and casting of the Elder spell in order to harvest sparks. This actually required him to set up and achieve numerous short-term goals along the way to getting to this ultimate goal. These short-term goals are really these concrete goals that we each kind of have
00:02:10
Speaker
Now, the importance of having short-term goals is that they keep us on track. They keep us getting to where we eventually want to be. In this case, Nicol Bolas wants to return to old Walker status. He wants to have that power. In order to do that, he knows that he can't just jump to Ravnica.
00:02:27
Speaker
try to call a bunch of planeswalkers there, kill them, get their sparks, and be fine. He needs to set things in motion or in place to pull them there, and then to, once they're there, keep them
SMART Goals Framework Explained with Nicol Bolas
00:02:39
Speaker
there. And he's not aiming for our Gatewatch heroes, or just four or five. He's actually has a much grander scheme. So this
00:02:48
Speaker
many many steps and what we know is that basically by the time we get to War of the Spark, Nicol Bolas has been present on Amonkhet, he's been present on Ixalan, he has sent his envoy
00:03:02
Speaker
Tezzeret to Kaladesh in order to retrieve a planar pogrel. Each of these are steps that he had to take along the way in order to accomplish his ultimate goal. Now, Nicol Bolas knows that in order to achieve kind of his ultimate goal, he's going to have to basically break it down into manageable steps. A lot of us, when we get overwhelmed with setting goals, it is because we're picking things that are much too large to be a single thing. And what I mean by that is that we pick things that make it where
00:03:32
Speaker
we can become very overwhelmed and not make much progress towards our goals. So if I make just this goal that I want to be returned to my old walker status and all I can think of while I'm sitting in my meditation realm is I wish I was an old walker. I wish I had my powers. I need to start working on that. I know I can do it, but I don't really have any steps in mind or particular direction to go. That's what it becomes. It becomes overwhelming and I sit there pondering and not making any progress.
00:04:01
Speaker
Well, Nicol Bolas is not like a lot of us. He is somebody that's a doer. He started by making this decision. He broke his big long-term goal down into manageable chunks, knowing that he just had to kind of work along the way to a scheme.
00:04:17
Speaker
So, by the time we have seen him on War of the Spark, he's been very busy. We know this. He's been in the shadow for many, many years on many different planes. He's been learning how to cast a spell that he believes will let him harvest these sparks, which is the Elder spell. He's used the Immortal Sun from Ixalan, a device that traps planeswalkers so that they cannot leave.
00:04:40
Speaker
He's basically used the ability to call planeswalkers. Now he manipulated others into doing this for him by having a beacon that would call them all basically the interplaner beacon and he manipulates people into bringing them there, but then once the planeswalkers get there, they're trapped. Now our heroes in the background, they know that something's going on.
00:05:02
Speaker
on Kaladesh, they're meeting with Chandra, they all have this plan to basically meet, but they haven't really, they don't have anything cohesive because they don't know what they're doing. They don't have a cohesive plan because they don't know the full extent of what Bolas is doing. And that is where he kind of has this advantage. He in some ways has set himself up because he's using smart goals. So let's talk about what smart goals are.
00:05:25
Speaker
SMART is an acronym that we use in, I mean, it's used in the business world, it's used in psychology, it's kind of used in a lot of fields where people need to be able to set goals. And we use acronyms because they're concrete, so they're very easy to remember. Each letter in SMART stands for a step that you need to be taking when doing your goal.
00:05:45
Speaker
So, broadly, SMART goals are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable or achievable, relevant, and timely. The T stands for timely. You may hear this in different ways. At times, the R can stand for realistic. I'm going to really be going with SMART with the R standing for relevant, and that's because it adds a different quality that isn't necessarily
00:06:13
Speaker
the same thing. The A usually encompasses realistic goals, so I want to add R for relevant. So what does that mean? Well, we need to be specific in our goals. We need to not make them vague. If I say that I want to lose weight, I want to take over the multiverse, those are vague goals. I don't exactly know what they mean. If I say I want to lose weight, how much weight,
00:06:40
Speaker
Well, how am I going to know that I accomplished the goal? It doesn't tell me very much. Same thing with taking over the multiverse. Does that mean that you are going to be in charge of every single plane everywhere? Do you mean just that you are going to be powerful and return to your old walker status? What does it mean to be in control?
00:06:58
Speaker
That's kind of vague. Specific really is narrowing it down, making it concrete, and making it so that other people can know what you're talking about and what you're planning on doing. Now how we often do that is kind of by doing things that are the rest of smart.
00:07:15
Speaker
So for instance, the M stands simply for measurable. This is how are you gonna know that you've accomplished your goal. So how do you measure it? So if I'm giving again my weight loss example, how many pounds do I want to lose? Over what time frame do I want to lose it? I think for weight, oftentimes the amount of weight is the way that we make it most measurable because it's something that we can agree on.
00:07:43
Speaker
Once again, goals are something to be set. They're not going to go perfectly, and we can talk about what happens when they don't. They're just something to aspire to. So for Nickel Bowls to make something measurable, it would be, I want to get the, you know, Immortal Beacon off of this plane and giving it kind of a time frame. He wants one Immortal Beacon activated on Ravnica. He doesn't want multiple of them.
00:08:08
Speaker
It's understanding kind of what the plan is in a way that whoever you are working with will understand how that goal has been met, how has it been achieved.
00:08:19
Speaker
The A stands simply for a goal being either achievable or attainable. And these are both kind of asking the question of, is this goal realistic? So if I tell you that I want to be a millionaire by next week and I am nowhere close to that in my life or I have no easy way of getting it, I probably
00:08:43
Speaker
cannot achieve or attain that in the time frame that I've given you. So this is a similar idea too for
00:08:53
Speaker
I think our gate watch in some ways making a plan to take over or killed Nicol Bolas to take him out. Is it attainable or achievable? And this is where we have to talk about results oriented thinking because I
Achieving and Understanding Relevant Goals
00:09:06
Speaker
don't know outside of basically divine intervention how good their plan actually was. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the fact that
00:09:13
Speaker
They don't really have a smart goal. They don't really their goal is basically to end Nicol Bolas. I mean, and that's what they're doing. And from a standpoint of how they're going to do it, they got some vague ideas. They don't actually know if they're going to work, but they also don't really have backup plans. And I think part of that comes from the fact that they.
00:09:35
Speaker
There is poor planning on their part. That's all I want to say at this point. But the point being that A is for attainable or achievable. It also is how are you going to do this goal? So if I tell you that I'm going to lose three pounds, the A part is going to add you to tell me, well, what are you going to do to get there?
00:09:56
Speaker
Is this simply a matter of changing your diet? Is this a matter of you need to exercise more? And if you exercise more, you're the person who eats less. What are you gonna do? Combine those two.
00:10:09
Speaker
The achievable or the attainable is how are you going to accomplish your goal? Another example I often use is money. If I'm trying to save or gain money, there's many different ways I can do that and it's going to be based on what my specific goal is. My specific goal is to have, you know, 10 bucks by the end of the week. That's a very different kind of steps that I'm going to have to take to get there than if I tell you I want to have $100 by the end of the week. The A tells us how.
00:10:40
Speaker
The R is relevant. Like I said, this really is why is this goal important to you? This is where you tell me why a goal is something that you want to achieve.
00:10:55
Speaker
The important thing here is it's gotta be important to the person making the goal, not to somebody that they're working with. If somebody's working with me, and I'm their therapist, and I tell them exactly what goal they should do, and I tell them exactly how to do it, they're gonna be a lot less likely to do it. Doesn't mean they won't. It doesn't mean that there's not a chance that they're not gonna accomplish it. It means that I'm relying on the fact that they're willing to do what I tell them to do.
00:11:21
Speaker
if I am not really sure why it is important to them or why we're doing this goal. So if somebody tells me they want to lose weight or if they want to meet more people, I want to know why that is. If they're telling me, well, because you told me to come up with a goal, odds are they're probably not going to make a lot of progress towards that. Bolus is very clear. We know why he's seeking each thing that he's seeking. His ultimate goal, his long term, is to return to this old walker status that the mending took away from him.
00:11:50
Speaker
he we know that he is somebody that is dealt kind of with insecurity in a lot of ways I really will say in my opinion part of what Nicol Bolas is is he is he knows he's powerful and when he is not that anymore he actually is almost operating out of fear part of what the mending did to him was make him vulnerable again like he was when we first see him as one of the twins born from the same egg and the smallest of the group
00:12:18
Speaker
So we have a reason why the overarching long-term goal is relevant to Bolas, but we also know why he's doing each step of it.
Time Frames in Goal-Setting
00:12:27
Speaker
We know he wants the Immortal Beacon because he wants to draw Planeswalkers there at a scale that he's not going to be able to do just by being an enemy. We know that he needs to learn a spell that will allow him to harvest these sparks and bring them into himself.
00:12:41
Speaker
We know that he needs an immortal son or he needs a way to be able to keep walkers from leaving once they get there. He's drawing them into a trap. They're planeswalkers. He can't just have them be able to escape. He's not going to be able to do a good enough job to catch enough off surprise to harvest the number of sparks that he would need to meet his ultimate goal.
00:13:00
Speaker
Bolas's relevance is kind of everywhere. We know each step of the way, each goal that he's coming up with, why he's ultimately doing it, but even why for this individual step it's important.
00:13:13
Speaker
The T simply refers to a time frame or giving this kind of a timeliness. This is to kind of stop us from doing what a lot of us, I think, do, which is saying that we're going to finish something someday or we're going to get to it eventually. We're going to go out there and, you know, yeah, when I got time, I'm going to get this done.
00:13:35
Speaker
As many of you know, that leads to a lot of periods of inactivity or not making progress, making progress in fits and starts. So we get a period of motivation and we work towards it or we just wake up one day feeling great. We make progress towards a goal we set.
00:13:55
Speaker
The timeliness is really just to give a timeframe to the goal so that we can simply understand when do you want to do this by. This also is nice if you're working with somebody on your goals that they have an idea. So they're not going to be hounding you if you've given them permission to check in with you. If you say that it's going to take you a month to do, they're not asking you every day or once a week. You guys have come to an agreement that you want a month to complete something.
00:14:21
Speaker
So you want to think about your time frame and once again, your time frame needs to be realistic. If I say I want to lose 25 pounds in a week, that's probably not the safest or healthiest goal and it takes it out of that range of achievable or attainable outside of extreme measures that are not healthy.
00:14:42
Speaker
We don't really know the time frame on Bullis. I mean, that would be the one thing that we don't get across the stories. We know that he's building towards this. We know he's been building towards it for very long periods of time. But we obviously don't have Bullis sitting down with a therapist, working on these goals on a whiteboard together and giving him a time frame or she a time frame.
00:15:04
Speaker
Now, Bolas would probably dig that, not to talking to a therapist, but maybe planning ahead and just talking to somebody in his life, since we know that he just is a dragon who wants to sit and read books. But we don't have that information. We do have the fact that we are dropped into the story at a point where Bolas'
00:15:22
Speaker
Short-term goals are now coming to fruition. He's finally making
Comparing Bolas and Gatewatch Planning
00:15:27
Speaker
the progress towards his long-term goal. Now one of the things that I think is important to keep in mind here is even if we have the best laid plans, we can come up with all the steps that we need to do. We can make a goal smart.
00:15:39
Speaker
we can even have, like Bolas did, really making the progress to our ultimate goal, it doesn't guarantee success. I think that's an important thing to realize. I actually am a big proponent, as many people know, of the Yoda phrase, do or do not, there is no try, which is this idea that you don't try to accomplish your goals. You do what you're gonna do or you don't do what you're gonna do. Now, you may make some progress,
00:16:09
Speaker
but it's not a matter of that you tried because if you say you try a lot of times that's suggesting that you basically
00:16:19
Speaker
made some sort of an effort, or you got right there, it just doesn't tell us. The end result is you either did or didn't do it. Now, that's important because if we know that you did or didn't do it, we can then work on problem solving. If it didn't work out at the end of this, if all of Boles' plans fail as they did, theoretically he could be doing the next step of what I teach people, which is simply problem solving. Problem solving around what went wrong and what went right.
00:16:48
Speaker
now we're dealing with a fantasy world we know that we have almost in some ways divine intervention we have Ugin stepping in at the end he's we get a little bit of kind of exposition where he explains to Bolus that he knew that Bolus was gonna do this and he but at the end of the day I don't like it because it's like Ugin
00:17:14
Speaker
Sounds like he's trying to be very very smart, but his plans sound like this plans Basically rely on other people doing things in an exact specific order and I do not believe that he could have predicted that I don't so I this the reason this is difficult for me is people a lot of times are
00:17:37
Speaker
Results oriented, they are not process oriented and setting smart goals is a process. The end result may or may not be what we want it to be and we work from there. We need to focus on what the process would be. So now Bolas could sit in the meditation realm and he's got
00:17:55
Speaker
who knows how long, we know he's technically not immortal at this point, having had his own spark harvested. He is still an elder dragon, he still has a timeframe to live. He could sit there and problem solve or bound what went wrong. He wasn't able to account for Liliana's duplicity. He wasn't able to account for whichever pieces we want to get into here.
00:18:26
Speaker
So that's kind of where we would lead next.
00:18:30
Speaker
The end of goal setting is to then identify what problems need to be fixed or not fixed. I do want to contrast how Bolas approached this and what Bolas did to how the Gatewatch approached things. They went and sought out a sword that they knew had slayed an Elder Dragon previously, and that is the Black Blade, which was reforged.
00:18:56
Speaker
We don't actually know. They don't even know at the point of when they do this if this is going to work or if it's going to kill a Planeswalker. They don't really go into this having a ton of planning. Their plan is to meet on Ravnica as a group and they're going to kill Bolas.
00:19:13
Speaker
From what we've seen so far and we may get more as the story comes they they have like okay We just got to get Gideon in close. We have a sword. He's gonna use the sword We're good to go and when that falls apart they move into improvisation and the improvisation in some ways is simply aimed at keeping themselves alive now as they don't really have another plan and
00:19:37
Speaker
I think that becomes clear in the fact that it's only by trying to semi appeal to Liliana. They're trying to figure out what's going on. I mean, it's not to take away from their heroics. It just isn't from a smart goal standpoint. They didn't have good planning. They were not really problem solvers.
00:19:56
Speaker
went into this without having a lot of information that they needed to have. I just kind of want to talk about what the other planeswalkers may have for long-term goals. We don't see them as planners. We see them more as people that have kind of moved to reactions to what's happening around them. It's not to say that it's a bad thing that maybe that's the best they can do with what they have right then.
00:20:18
Speaker
I would be interested to see what planeswalkers have as longer term goals and if they're being smart about breaking it into the steps that they need to do so that they're not feeling overwhelmed or they are making the progress.
Exploring Other Planeswalkers' Goals
00:20:30
Speaker
Tamiya was probably the one that I think of that is the researcher. She probably has a longer range plan for what she's been doing. She's been learning. She's been gathering the information.
00:20:42
Speaker
I would have liked to have seen a lot more of her story I'm hoping that we're getting a lot more because with her being that kind of the I love the fact that she's a field researcher on a card that's somebody that might be having a little bit more planning other planes walkers we just haven't seen as much of that from well actually Liliana would be an example of somebody who has her plan her long-range goal was to kill all of the demons that she owed contracts to
00:21:06
Speaker
Once again, she doesn't have full information, which is how she ends up in Bolas' clutches. However, she kept taking the steps that she needed to do to get there to hunt down and use the Gatewatch in her assistance along the way. So we have two planeswalkers that I really can think of besides Bolas that have been working towards their long-term plans.
00:21:26
Speaker
Most of the other gate watch members, most of the other planeswalkers that we've seen in the stories really are just going day by day or plane by plane. Could be a product of the storytelling and what's been going on. I do think that it's a very interesting way to think of things from a standpoint of that process versus outcome kind of scenario.
00:21:45
Speaker
That's how I'm reaching the end of what I wanted to do for today. I just wanted to really introduce and discuss smart goals. There's something that's a key thing, I think, for any person that's just trying to achieve something in their life. We all have goals that we are working on or we end up getting stagnant. That's been my experience. And I think that smart goals is just a framework.
00:22:11
Speaker
It's a way to kind of start to think about what we want to do or to think about how we can make our goals more likely to be achieved. Once again, not going to give us 100%. We are more likely though. So to keep that in mind, quick recap. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
00:22:36
Speaker
or reaching the end of Mental Health Awareness Month, and I just want to kind of keep that at the forefront of people's minds. I would say that I'm one of these people that believe that that's something we should be doing every month, but... That's our show.
00:22:56
Speaker
You can find the podcast at Goblin Lore Pod on Twitter, or email any questions, comments, or concerns to goblinlorepodcastatgmail.com. If you'd like to support your friendly neighborhood gobsmugs, you can do so at patreon.com slash goblinlorepod.
Podcast Credits and Contact Information
00:23:13
Speaker
This episode of Goblin Lore was hosted and written by Hobbs Q, who you can find on Twitter, at Hobbs Q. Editing and production for this episode by Joe Redman, who you can find on Twitter, at Finthorn. That's F-Y-N-D, Horn. Our music is by Wintergatan, who you can find at vintergatan.com. That's wintergatan.com.
00:23:35
Speaker
Logo by Steven Raphael on Twitter at StevenRaffle. Goblin lore is presented by Hipsters of the Coast, which you can find at hipstersofthecoast.com. And remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.