Goals and Success
(Transcript of Audio)

 

Everybody dreams of something that they want in life, but unfortunately, not everybody is willing to do the work necessary to turn those dreams into reality.

 

Turning dreams into reality begins with turning your dreams into a goal. Dreams are what you wish would happen, but goals are what you’ve decided you’re going to make happen. And if you interviewed a thousand successful people, that’s the one thing that would separate them from all the rest. At some point they decided exactly what they wanted and they went out after it. They created their outcome in their mind and then each day gathered whatever they could to complete that outcome.

 

If you think about it, this is really the only logical approach. If you want to arrive somewhere in life, you first have to decide where that “somewhere” is.  Creating clear goals for ourselves and focusing on them on a regular basis is the most important work we can do if we want to steadily increase the level of success we experience in our life.   

 

And it’s important to note, when it comes to setting these goals, if we really plan on making them real the least we’ll do is take the time to write them down.

 

Lets face it: Our minds are a confusing blob of electrical energy…We’ve got intangible ideas, and beliefs, emotions, thoughts, hopes, and fears bouncing around in there.

 

But we live in a physical world…so we’ve got to convert those intangible things into real things before we can really get our hands on them. And one way to translate all that into a physical form is to put words to paper.

 

Once we pull those things out of our mind it’s much easier to put them in perspective. It’s easier for us to structure the ideas, for us to prioritize them, or, just take apart the bad and improve upon the good.  And it also frees up a lot of mental energy that we had been using trying to keep track of everything in our head.

 

Keep in mind, we’re not writing a novel here. Nobody has to see what we’ve written and nothing is cast in stone.  Just get it out, and start working with it. 

 

Of all the things people avoid, this seems to be the favorite.

And I’ve got to admit, when I first started trying to improve my life, I didn’t want to do this either. …But in my case, it was just a matter of being afraid to do it.

 

I was afraid I’d take the time to think about every detail, get really excited, write it all down, and then not be able to make it happen. I was afraid I’d look at exactly what I wanted in life and then feel like I might have to settle for less.

 

Fortunately, at some point I started thinking about how stupid it was for me to think that way.

 

Seriously, if it was painful for me to think about NOT having what I truly wanted in life, why would I choose the one course of action that GUARANTEED I’d never have it? How could I ever move closer to what I truly wanted, if I wouldn’t even take the time to figure out what that was, write it down, and commit to getting there?

 

Well, I did some more thinking and I realized something… there was really only three things that could happen once I’d set my mind to a particular goal:

 

I was either going to:

 

A) Make progress towards the goal

B) Achieve the goal, or

C) Give up on it

 

Whether I wanted to lose 10 pounds or save the world, that was pretty much all that could happen. 

 

And I’ve got to figure; the same rule applies for everyone else.

 

Look, here are the facts:

 

5 years from now our lives are going to be different whether we want them to be or not. We’ll either have moved closer to what we want in life (By learning and doing what’s necessary to get us there) or we’ll have moved further away from it (by doing nothing and letting time that we could’ve used pass us by.)

 

Whether you’re 8 or 80, starting today, you either begin the process of moving closer to what you want, or you begin the process of moving away from what you want.  Each day is a choice for one or the other.

The excerpt above is from The 1-Hour Guide to Successful Thinking. To access the complete program (Transcript, Audio Files and Workbook) please purchase either the PDF version or the Kindle version.