CHAPTER TWO
“Success is goals, and all else is commentary.”
—Lloyd Conant
Hitting your bull’s-eye in life requires that you know exactly what it is and where it is. Your selection of a major definite purpose, the one goal that is more important to you than any other, is the starting point of massive success.
The goal-setting process is both simple and powerful—and potentially life changing. It consists of seven steps:
Decide exactly what you want. Imagine that you have no limitations. Imagine that you have all the talent and ability, all the knowledge and skill, all the contacts and relationships, and all the money and resources you need to achieve any goal you really want in life.
Practice no limit thinking. Forget about the past and whatever problems or limitations you may have had. Think instead about the future. Your future is limited only by your own imagination, and since your imagination has no limits, your future is unlimited as well.
1.Be specific about what you want. This will separate you from more than 80 percent of the population who, generally speaking, have no clear idea what they want.
2.Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
3.If you ask people “Do you have goals?” they will always say something like “Of course I have goals!”
4.But when you ask them what their “goals” are, they will say things like “I want to be rich,” “I want to be thin,” “I want to be happy,” “I want to have a nice house, car, and clothes,” “I want to travel.”
5.But these are not goals. These are wishes or fantasies. A wish is a goal with no energy behind it.
The great tragedy is that most people think they already have goals when all they really have are wishes. As a result, they never sit down to establish clear, specific goals for themselves. Because of this, they seldom accomplish even a fraction of what is truly possible for them.
Write it down. Make it measurable. Only 3 percent of adults have written goals, and these people, according to studies done at Yale and Harvard, eventually earn ten times as much as people without goals.
The very act of writing down your goals moves you into the top 3 percent of adults living today. Writing down your goals activates the Law of Attraction and begins attracting into your life the people, ideas, and resources that will help you move toward the goals and to start the goals moving toward you.
Set a deadline. Tell your subconscious computer exactly when you want to achieve your goal. Your subconscious mind loves deadlines, “forcing systems,” that enable your mind to work twenty-four hours a day to bring the goal into your life.
If it is a big enough goal, set smaller deadlines. If it is a one-year goal, break it down into one-month goals, even one-week goals.
What if you don’t achieve your goal by the deadline? Simple—set another deadline, and another and another if necessary. Remember, there are no unrealistic goals—only unrealistic deadlines.
Sometimes you will achieve the goal before you expect to, sometimes after. But you must have a target and a timeline to follow.
Make a list. Write down everything you will have to do to achieve your goal. Identify the additional knowledge and skills you will require. Identify the obstacles you will have to overcome. Identify the people whose help you will require.
This part of the process is very important. When you set a big goal for yourself—to double your income or to achieve financial independence, for example—it can seem so overwhelming at first that you can become discouraged before you even begin.
But when you write out a list of all the individual tasks and activities you can engage in to achieve the goal, your goal starts to become more believable and achievable. You start to think, “I may not be able to achieve this entire goal, but I can do this one thing, and then this other thing.”
Henry Ford once said, “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”
Keep adding ideas and activities to your list until your list is complete.
Organize the list into a plan. Just as you would plan any project, organize your list by sequence and priority.
Your sequence of activities refers to what you do first, what you do second, and what you do third to achieve your goal. Make a checklist to work from. Organize every activity, from the first to the last, just as you would with any worthwhile project. The use of a checklist to achieve your goal will increase the likelihood of success by ten times or more.
Organize your list by priority as well. Use the 80/20 Rule, which says that 20 percent of the items on your list will account for 80 percent of the value of the results you accomplish.
Once you have a written list of activities organized by sequence and priority, you have a plan you can use to accomplish almost any goal you can set for yourself. A person with a goal and a plan is like an archer or a dart thrower with everything they need to step up to the line and hit a bull’s-eye.
Take action on your list of activities. Do something. Do anything. As Einstein said, “Nothing happens until something moves.”
Nothing happens until you move as well. Take the first step. The key to success has always been to have courage, overcome the inertia most people have, and simply take the first step.
When you take the first step on the path to your goal, three wonderful things happen simultaneously. First, you immediately get feedback that enables you to make course corrections, assuring that you are moving the fastest way possible toward your goal.
Second, when you take the first step, you immediately get more ideas for additional actions that you can take to move ahead faster.
Third, when you take the first step, your self-confidence increases immediately. You feel more positive and powerful. Your self-esteem and self-respect go up. You feel stronger and more capable of achieving even more goals.
Once you have set a goal, you can always see the first step. And when you have the courage to take the first step, the second step will appear. When you take the second step, the third step will appear. You can achieve the biggest goal in your life if you just take it one step at a time. And you can always see the next step.
Do something every day that moves you toward your most important goal. When you take an action every day that moves you toward your goal, no matter how small, you eventually develop what is called the Momentum Principle of Success.
You start to move faster and faster toward your goal, and your goal starts to move faster and faster toward you. Perhaps the two most powerful principles for success are first, get going and second, keep going!
Practice the Ten Goal Method. Take a clean sheet of paper and write the word Goals at the top, along with today’s date. Then, write down ten goals you would like to achieve in the next twelve months or so.
For the rest of your life, when you write down your goals, always use the three Ps. It seems that your subconscious mind only responds to commands that are phrased in a particular way. They must be personal, positive, and in the present tense, as though you have already achieved your goal.
Personal means that you use I and an action verb for each goal. For example, you say “I earn…,” “I drive a…,” or “I achieve…”
Write it in the positive tense. Instead of saying “I will quit smoking,” you say “I am a nonsmoker.”
And write it in the present tense. Write your goal as though the time has passed and you have already achieved the goal. You are describing it as though it is a current reality.
If your goal is to double your income, you would select the amount that is double your income and write the goal as “I earn this amount of money each year.”
Set a deadline after each of your goal statements. For example, you would say “I earn $XX, XXX by year-end.”
Each time you write down your goal in the personal, positive, present tense, it is immediately transferred to your subconscious mind, which then goes to work twenty-four hours a day to help you achieve that goal. Many people have transformed their lives in a very short time by simply sitting down and writing out a series of goals using this process.
Once you have written down ten goals that you would like to accomplish in the next twelve months, you are ready for the next step.
Imagine that you have a magic wand. Imagine that you could accomplish all of the goals you have written down sooner or later—if you want them enough and are willing to work for them. But with this magic wand, you could wave it over the page and you could have any one goal on your list within twenty-four hours.
Here’s the question: If you could achieve any one goal in life within twenty-four hours, which one would have the greatest positive impact on your life today?
Whatever your answer, this then becomes your major definite purpose. It becomes your number one most important goal around which you design your entire life.
You can have a series of different goals, in different areas of your life, but you must always have one goal that is more important than any other.
You then take a clean sheet of paper. You write your goal at the top of the page in personal, positive, present tense language and add a deadline.
For example, you could write “I will earn $100,000 by year-end.”
You then make a list of everything you can think of that you could possibly do to achieve this goal. What subjects will you have to learn? What problems will you have to overcome? Whose cooperation and assistance will you require? And, especially, what actions will you have to take every day to achieve this goal?
You then take immediate action on your goal. You take the first step by doing at least one thing on your list.
From this day forward, you do something every day that moves you one step closer to your most important goal.
Here is a remarkable discovery. As you begin to work each day toward your major definite purpose, you start to make progress on many of your other goals as well. By focusing on a single goal, you begin to achieve many other goals at the same time.
This process of writing down ten goals, selecting one goal as your major definite purpose, making a plan for its accomplishment, and then doing something every single day will change your life and virtually assure that you hit your bull’s-eye, far sooner than you may have ever imagined possible.