cookie sale

This year started like any other. I was finishing high school, participating in activities like show choir and band, and I started my final Girl Scout cookie selling season. But when the pandemic led to a total shutdown, that all came to a full stop. My Girl Scout council had to end the cookie sale early and, as a result, allowed all troops to return their unsold cookies. A lot was returned, so I decided to step up and try to help by selling what I could. I began by raising my goal-only a little, because it was more difficult to sell during a pandemic. When it started returning to a kind of normal, I raised my goal more and more, and in the end, I sold a total of 44,200 boxes of cookies, breaking the national single-season record and setting the national career record for cookie sales at 180,000 boxes!

This was far more than my original goal to get my record to 150,000 boxes. I was selling many hours every day for months to reach this achievement. Over the summer, I learned a lot more about goal setting and achieving goals that require a longer period of time. I am interested in learning more about the many factors that lead to any kind of success; this is a large part of what motivated me to write a book for my Girl Scout Gold Award project.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be exploring the topic of motivation and achievement more in depth through this blog, and I’m curious how my observations compare to what other people have learned about what it takes to achieve large goals, whether it’s earning a degree, writing a book, starting a business, or selling Girl Scout cookies.