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Goals? Who Needs Goals?
By Kent E. Butler
©2004 All Rights Reserved
You do.
When you set out on a trip, do you just load up the car and start driving? Do you go to the airport and buy a ticket on the next available flight, no matter where it's going? Probably not. There's no telling where you might end up, and it could be someplace you really don't want to be.
Your destination is your goal. If you're feeling bluesy and hungry for great bar-b-que, you want to go Memphis. But if you want to enjoy the view from the top of the Empire State Building, you'd best head for The Big Apple. Does it seem reasonable to have goals? No point in going to Chicago when you want to swim in the Caribbean. Success, whatever you believe it to be, is every bit as much a destination as is a physical place.
You have hopes and dreams, don't you? If you really want to achieve them, you need to make them goals. Well, no, a mid- forties gent who wants to be the next Leonardo DiCaprio can't make that a goal - he has a fantasy.
Hopes and dreams are great and we all need them, but goals are their more **business-like** cousins. Goals require commitment and dedication if you are to achieve them, and they must be written. Unwritten, they are not goals, but hopes and dreams - and fantasies. Pleasant, perhaps, but ineffective.
The reason most people never reach their goals is that
they don't define them, or ever seriously consider them as
believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they
are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who
will be sharing the adventure with them.<BR>
Denis Watley
The whole idea of committing what you want to paper may be a little unsettling, a little scary. Good! That means you're taking the idea seriously, and we all need to have our mental cobwebs cleared away from time to time. Complete this starting project:
Using two pages, mark one and the other . Write down everything you want to achieve on the appropriate page. Don't make any judgments, don't include any time limits, don't worry about how you'll accomplish them, just write. No matter what interruptions you have, keep returning to your writing until there is nothing more to add to the lists.
That's it? You've drained your brain of stuff you want to do? Put your list aside - just for now - and go to work on setting your priorities on your list. Which of your entries is the most important to you? Do you need to accomplish other things first in order to secure the most important one? Most likely, so put them in the most reasonable order and create your **To Do** list.
In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become
strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.
Anonymous
By arranging your business goals in a logical order needed to attain your ultimate end, you have roughly divided them into Short, Intermediate, and Long Term goals, which you can now refine to suit yourself. Your short-term goals might be each day's **To Do** list, or each week's.
What? You don't keep such lists? How do you stay organized and focused? Tiger Woods didn't become a golfing legend while still in his 20s by working on his putting one day, playing tennis the next, and baseball the day after. We're not talking about locking yourself into a **straightjacket of achievement**, but of your making the best use of your time and efforts toward claiming the ultimate prize - your personal version of success. Your intermediate goals may be six months or a year away; long term may be one year, might be five.
After organizing your goals into, in effect, a time line (short, intermediate and long term), you're ready to create your Action Plan. My what? Hey! We're just talking about goals here and now you're....Relax! You put your goals in writing not just to organize them, but because doing so is an act of personal commitment: those are your goals and you are the person who will achieve them. Not by chance, but by design.
The victory of success is half won when one gains the
habit of setting goals and achieving them. Even the most
tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through
each day convinced that every task, no matter how menial
or boring, brings you closer to fulfilling your dreams.
Og Mandino
Keeping **To Do** lists also affords you the enormous satisfaction of crossing things out as you accomplish them. Everybody needs encouragement and motivation, and one easy way to get them is to draw a big, bold line through an item on your list of tasks.
You Action Plan is nothing more than the things you need to do, in logical order, to realize each goal. It's your road map to success. Your goals, your plan, your success - about the only thing holding you back is inertia. So get rolling!
KENT E. BUTLER ,
has worked at home since 1994. He edits the Home
Based Journal, a free ezine providing useful info on a wide range of relevant topics. It takes a whole person to wholly succeed. Are you a whole person? Join us, we'd love to have you in the family.
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