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 the
group 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 people are developing more good and disruptive ideas today, in more different ways and on more different subjects, than at any other time in history.
2) THE EXPANSION OF TECHNOLOGY
The second factor driving change is technology—growing, expanding, and increasing at incredible speeds. Advances in technology can quickly transform entire industries. Think of companies like Nokia and BlackBerry that dominated their industries until the first iPhone was released in 2007.
Within five years, both of these companies were virtually gone. BlackBerry went from controlling 49 percent of the business cell phone market to 0.4 percent in that time, and Nokia stopped selling cellular phones and sold out to Microsoft. One new technological breakthrough on the other side of the world can put you out of business as well if you do not respond to it quickly and appropriately.
3) AGGRESSIVE COMPETITION
The third factor, perhaps more disruptive than anything else, is competition. Your competitors are fiercer, more aggressive, and more determined than ever before—except for next week and next year. The competition is focused on using each new potential piece of information and breakthrough in technology to change and shape customer tastes, develop new products and
services, and render obsolete whatever you are currently offering.
Your competition is continually scouring the world of new information and technology, seeking opportunities to serve your customers with what they want better, faster, and cheaper than you are today.
The equation is SOC = IE x TE x C (the speed of change is equal to information explosion times technology expansion times competition). And the only thing we know is that the rate of change is going to be faster and faster in the months and years ahead. Charles Darwin wrote, “Survival goes not to the strongest or smartest of the species, but to the one most adaptable to change.”
Goals Are Essential
This is why goals are so important. Goals enable you to control the direction of change, to assure that your life and work are self-determined rather than being dictated by outside events.
One of the great secrets of success is for you not to worry about things that you cannot do anything about—factors that you cannot change. You cannot change or slow down the rate of change. But you can adjust and adapt to change much better as long as you are clear about your ultimate goals.
Today, you can be either a master or a victim of change. You can be a creator of circumstances or you can be a creature of circumstances, overwhelmed and left behind by the onrushing and impersonal forces of change that you cannot affect.
Goals give power, purpose, and direction to your life. Goals bring out the very best that is in you, enabling you to realize your full potential.
Goal Setting Brings Out the Best
Goal setting requires long-term thinking, slow thinking, and informed thinking. A key success principle is for you to “think on paper.” The very act of writing down what you want dramatically increases your probability of achieving it. Remember, you can’t hit a target that you can’t see. You can’t hit a target unless you can clearly describe it on paper.
The quality of your thinking is greatly enhanced by the quality of the questions that you ask yourself, especially in the areas of goal setting and goal achieving. Here are some questions that you should ask and answer on a regular basis so that you can maintain high levels of clarity, focus, and concentration:
1) DETERMINE WHAT YOU REALLY WANT
What do you really, really, really want to do with your life?
It seems that when you ask this question, it is the third “really” that helps you to develop absolute clarity about where you want to be sometime in the future. When you ask “really” three times, you drill deeper into what you want more than anything else.
2) WHAT DO YOU REALLY VALUE?
What are your values? What are your basic organizing principles? What virtues and qualities are most important to you and most important in the people whom you like and admire?
Most problems in human life, most confusion, can be resolved by a return to values. Your values make up your core. They are the axle around which your life revolves. Your values determine your deepest emotions. They determine your beliefs, expectations, and attitude. “You don’t see what you believe; you see what you have already decided to believe.”
For one week, ask yourself this question repeatedly: “What is my most important value in life?”
Don’t be satisfied with your first answer. Your first answer will always be something simple, obvious, and admirable to other people. But keep asking the question. “What is my most important value in life?” You may be surprised at the answer you eventually come up with.
3) YOUR THREE MOST IMPORTANT GOALS
What are your three most important goals in life right now?
Write down your answer in thirty seconds or less. When you only have thirty seconds to write down your three most important goals in life, your answers will be as accurate as if you had thirty minutes or three hours. What are they?
4) NO FEAR OF FAILURE
Imagine that you have 2 Billion Shillings in the bank but you discover that you only have ten years left to live. What would you choose to do with the next ten years?
This question liberates you temporarily from the limiting concern over money and resources. Most people hold back on doing what they really want to do because they feel that they cannot afford it or that they do not have enough time, talents, or resources to achieve it.
But when you imagine that you have 2 Billion Shillings in the bank and you must choose to do something with the next ten years, you will often see clearly what is most important to you—your “heart’s desire.” What might it be for you?
5) SIX MONTHS TO LIVE
Imagine that you visit your doctor for a complete examination. He then sits you down and tells you that he has good news for you and bad news. The good news is that you are going to enjoy superb physical health for the next six months. The bad news is that you are going to drop dead of an incurable illness on the 181st day.
If you only had six months left to live, how would you spend your time? What would you do? Who would you spend your time with? What would you want to complete? What kind of legacy would you want to leave?
These questions help you clarify what it is that you value and what is really important to you. You’ve heard it said that “No one on their deathbed ever said that they wished they had spent more time at the office.”
6) YOUR FEELING OF IMPORTANCE
What sorts of activities give you your greatest feeling of importance, of personal value and self- esteem?
Dale Carnegie once said, “Tell me what gives a man his greatest feeling of importance and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.”
What activities or accomplishments have been most responsible for your greatest happiness in life to date? What do you do especially well? What has been most responsible for your biggest successes? What would you like to do, all day long, even if you didn’t get paid for it?
7) ONE GREAT GOAL
What one great goal would you dare to set for yourself if you knew you could not fail?
The fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success and the primary cause of failure in adult life. Imagine that you have no limitations. Imagine that you have all the time and money, all the people and relationships, all the friends and contacts, and all the talent and ability that you need to accomplish any goal that you can set for yourself. What would it be?
Your ability to think clearly about who you are and what you really want is central to your living a high-performance life. Asking and answering these questions on a regular basis help you to develop clarity, focus, and concentration.
Goal-Setting Process
Napoleon Hill once wrote that the key to success is to use “proven success formulas.” Find out what other successful people do over and over, and then do the same things that they do. By the Law of Cause and Effect, if you do what other successful people do (the causes), you will soon get the same results (the effects) that they do.
There is a simple but powerful process of setting and achieving goals that you can use immediately to transform and even supercharge your life. Here it is:
1.Decide exactly what you want. Most people never do this. Most people want many different things but no one thing in particular.
A major reason for failure in adult life is that most people think they already have goals. But what they have are not goals. They are merely wishes, hopes, and fantasies. A real goal, on the other hand, is something clear and specific.
Einstein said, “If you cannot explain your goal to a six-year-old child, you probably aren’t clear about it yourself.”
2.Write it down. A goal that is not in writing is merely a wish or a hope. It is said that goals are “dreams with deadlines.” When you write down a goal, you take it out of the air and make it clear and tangible. You can see it, touch it, and read it. It now exists, whereas before it was merely a figment of your imagination, like cigarette smoke in a large room, with no form or substance.
Only 3 percent of adults have clear, written goals, and everyone else works for them. They earn and accomplish ten times as much as the average person over the course of their working lifetimes. People with written goals often accomplish more in one year than the average person accomplishes in five or ten years.
Here is the discovery: Each goal you write down, and each time you write it, you are actually writing and programming into your subconscious mind.
Once you have written down a goal, your subconscious mind accepts this as a command and begins working to bring this goal to you, and bring you to this goal, twenty-four hours a day, waking and sleeping. Written goals are very powerful.
3.Set a deadline. A deadline acts as a “forcing system” for your subconscious mind. It gives your subconscious and superconscious powers a target to aim at. From the time you write down your goal and set a deadline, you will be more motivated than ever to take the steps necessary to achieve
it.
A written goal with a deadline activates the Law of Attraction. You begin to attract into your life people, ideas, resources, and opportunities to help you to move faster toward your goal.
What happens if you don’t achieve your goal by the deadline? Simple—set another deadline. Many things can happen over which you have no control that can set back the accomplishment of your goal. No problem. Just set another deadline. Remember, there are no unrealistic goals, merely unrealistic deadlines.
4.Make a list. Write down everything you can think of that you could do to achieve your goal. Include the people, knowledge, and resources you will need. Keep adding to this list until it is complete.
The very act of making a list of everything you can think of to achieve your goal increases your belief that the goal is attainable. It motivates and stimulates you. As Henry Ford said, “Any goal can be achieved if you break it down into enough small parts.”
5.Organize the list into a plan. The first way you organize the list is by sequence. Create a checklist, a list of all the steps, one after the other, that you will have to take to achieve your goal. Working from a written checklist will increase the speed at which you achieve your goal by perhaps five or
ten times.
The second way you organize your list is by priority. What is more important, and what is less important? Twenty percent of the items on your list will account for 80 percent of your success. What are they?
6.Take action immediately on your plan. Do something. Do anything. Take the first step. As Einstein said, “Nothing happens until something moves.” Nothing happens until you move as well.
7.Do something every day to move you toward the achievement of your most important goal, whatever it is at that time. Never miss a day, seven days a week.
When you do something every day, you trigger the “momentum principle” of success. It may be hard to take the first step, to get going toward your goal, but after that it becomes easier and easier. You develop more and more momentum. You move faster toward your goal, and your goal moves faster toward you. And you can always see the first step.
Goal-Setting Exercise
Here is a simple exercise that has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It is so effective because it is so simple.
1.Take out a clean sheet of paper and write the word “Goals,” plus today’s date, at the top of the page. Then write down ten goals that you would like to achieve within the next twelve months.
These may be one-week goals, one-month goals, six-month goals, or twelve-month goals. But they are all goals that you would like to achieve over the next year.
It seems that goals you want to achieve within one year are more motivational than goals that reach five or ten years into the future, even though you will eventually set these goals as well.
When you write down your goals, use the three Ps. Make them present tense, personal, and positive. Your subconscious mind can only work on a goal that is properly phrased this way. Each goal starts with the word “I” followed by an action verb.
For example, your goal could be, “I earn Ksh XXX by December 31 of this year.”
Write your goal as though you have already achieved it and you are explaining to someone else what you have already accomplished.
Instead of saying, “I am going to quit smoking,” you would write, “I am a nonsmoker.”
Write down the first ten goals you can think of in the present tense, and make them personal and positive.
2.Once you have your list of ten goals, ask this question: “Which one goal on this list, if I were to achieve it, would have the greatest positive impact on my life?”
There is always one goal that fits this description. Once you have selected this goal, it becomes your “major definite purpose” in life.
3.Transfer this goal to the top of a clean sheet of paper, making it personal and positive and in the present tense. For example, “I earn this specific amount of money by this date.”
4.You then make a list of everything you can think of to achieve this goal. Write down at least twenty ideas.
Write down the obvious answers and then the opposite to each of those answers. Keep writing until you have twenty different actions you could take that would help you to achieve this goal.
5.Organize this list into a plan, a checklist with the things that you could do, from first to last.
6.Take action immediately on one task, the first item on your list, and complete this one task as soon as possible.
7.From then on, do something every day on this list to move you toward your major goal. Never allow an exception. Do this seven days a week.
Think About Your Goal
Remember the great truth: You become what you think about most of the time. Each morning when you get up, think about your goal. All day long, think about your goal. In the evening, review your progress on your major goal.
The more you think about your goal, the more ideas you will get to achieve it. Intense goal orientation stimulates your subconscious and superconscious minds toward goal attainment. The more you think, plan, and work on your major goal, the faster you move toward it, and the faster it moves toward you.
Begin today to become a goal-focused person. This will help to unlock your mental powers, stimulate your creativity, channel your energies, and motivate you forward more than any other single activity.
ACTION EXERCISES
1.Decide exactly what you want in one area of your life, the one goal that could have the most positive impact on your life.
2.Write it down, making it personal, positive, and in the present tense, as if it were already a reality.
3.Make a plan to achieve this one goal, and then do something every day that moves you closer to it.