Goal Setting
Goal Setting SEVERAL SELF-MADE MILLIONAIRES, all of whom started with nothing and worked their way up, were having dinner at the home of one of their group. The conversation went back and forth about the various reasons for success and why it was that the people around this table had achieved so much when the average person achieves so little. Finally, the most successful of thegroup spoke up and asked, “What is success?” When they turned to him for his answer, he said, “Success is goals, and all else is commentary.” Turning Points Throughout your life, you will have a series of turning points. These are moments, insights, or experiences that can take a few seconds or a few months. But after one of these turning points, your life is never the same again. Sometimes you recognize one of these turning points when it takes place. In most cases, you only recognize that it was a turning point in retrospect. As you look back on your life, you often remember small things that happened to which you paid little attention, but the consequences of these events changed you in some way and had an influence on the person you are today. One of the major turning points in my life, and in the lives of most successful people, was my discovery of goals. If you want to be successful, you have to have goals. The Key to Riches It is not uncommon today for people to complain and even demonstrate in the streets about “the 1 percent versus the 99 percent” in our society in terms of income. But they’ve got it wrong. In reality, it should be “the 3 percent versus the 97 percent.” Only about 3 percent of people have clear, specific, written goals and plans that they work on each day. The other 97 percent have hopes, dreams, wishes, and fantasies, but not goals. And the great tragedy is that they don’t know the difference. Earn and Acquire Ten Times as Much As a result of reading many studies into those people with and without goals, I have found that the top 3 percent earn and acquire, over time, on average, ten times as much as the bottom 97 percent put together. Why is this? There are many reasons. A mantra of wealthy people is “Don’t lose money.” In terms of success, we could say that the corollary is “Don’t lose time.” The fact is that when you have clear, specific goals and clear plans to achieve those goals and you work on them every day, you save an enormous amount of time. You accomplish more in a few months or years than many people accomplish in a lifetime. By setting goals, you program your mental GPS, which then functions like a guided missile to move you directly toward the target you have aimed at, taking feedback from your target and making “course corrections” until you achieve your goal. As Thomas Carlyle wrote, “The person without goals makes no progress on even the smoothest road. The person with clear goals makes rapid progress on even the roughest road.” You have heard the saying “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Develop the Big Three Perhaps the very best way for you to develop the “big three” of superior thinking—clarity, focus, and concentration—is for you to develop clear goals for every part of your life. Fully 95 percent of success is developing clarity in the first place. You must become completely clear about who you are—your strengths, your weaknesses, your special talents and abilities—and what you want to do with your life. Then you must focus single-mindedly on one thing at a time,without diversion or distraction. According to both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the ability to focus on one thing at a time is more responsible for success in our fast-moving, turbulent times than any other mental ability. Finally, once you have decided who you are and what you want and have decided upon your point of focus, you must develop the discipline to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing at a time and stay with it until it is 100 percent complete. Goals enable you to develop the qualities of clarity, focus, and concentration much faster than anything else you could do or decide for your life. Goals are the best antidote to “fuzzy thinking,” which is probably more responsible for frustration and failure than any other factor. Minimize Distractions Because of rapid change and constant electronic interruptions—e-mail, texts, telephone calls, and social media—more and more people are developing a form of attention deficit disorder that makes it almost impossible for them to think clearly or to stay “on task.” They check their smartphones every time, are slaves to social media, and are continually chasing the “shiny objects” of immediate stimulus. Those who do not have goals are doomed forever to work for those who do. In life, you can either work to achieve your own goals or work to achieve the goals of someone else. Of course, the best of all is when you help your company to achieve its goals by achieving your own goals. The Impact of Change Perhaps the most important factor affecting your life today is the speed of change. In all of human history, we have never experienced the rate of change that we are enduring today—except for next month and next year and for the rest of our lives. Three main factors are accelerating the rate of change and causing us to feel out of control. Our very best plans are often invalidated, sometimes overnight, by a change in one of these three critical areas. 1) INFORMATION EXPLOSION The first factor driving change is the information and knowledge explosion. Information and new ideas are expanding, growing, increasing faster and faster. One new piece of knowledge, one new idea or insight, can upset or overturn an entire industry, causing failure and bankruptcy. More smart