Like many of you, when I first started skiing I couldn’t get enough.

My brother and I watched every Ski Utah TV show episode, went to every ski show, every Labor Day sale, subscribed to our favorite magazines, and were up in the mountains at the first sign of snow trying to get a couple turns in.

But in the folds of one of those magazines was a poster.

It had the usual awesome photo, but it also had something along the bottom that set the stage for my goals and behavior as a skier for the two and a half decades since then.

What was this magic something?

A calendar of the upcoming ski season.

The idea was simple:

• The goal it suggested was to ski 30 days that season
• Whenever I went to the mountain, I’d circle (or cross off) that day on the calendar

That was it.

Did I make it that season? Almost. I hit 25 days which, in hindsight, was pretty awesome for a high school kid who worked 3-4 days a week at the local grocery store.

Even to this day, that combination of a goal and always-visible tracking made the number 30 deeply stuck in my head. It’s a number I aspire to and track even though that was the only year I found such a poster.

I love posters, I always have. But that poster added a little bit of motivation – of aspiration – to the mix.

It gave me something to work toward and, more importantly, to achieve.

And that made all the difference.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.