The ability to set goals and to make plans for their accomplishment is the master skill of success. Developing this skill will do more to ensure your success than anything else you could ever do. In twenty-five years of study and experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that success equals goals, and all else is commentary. Intense goal orientation is an essential characteristic of all high-achieving men and women, in every study, in every field. It’s not possible to realize even a fraction of your potential until you have learned how to set and achieve goals as normally and as naturally as you brush your teeth or comb your hair in the morning.
Everything we’ve talked about in this book so far has been intended to bring us to this chapter on goals. It has been part of the necessary preparation for you to put the master skill to work in every part of your life. All the material concerning the clearing of your mind and the development of a calm, optimistic attitude toward yourself and your possibilities has been essential. Learning how your mind works, and how the elements in your thinking, based on your past experiences, can affect your behavior and your outcomes today has gone to lay the foundation for what lies ahead.
I was twenty-three years old before I first learned about goals. I knew they existed in sports but the idea of mapping out my life using goals and plans had never occurred to me.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have goals, nor was it that I hadn’t achieved any. I had already traveled three-quarters of the way around the world, including going from the West Coast of the United States to Capetown, South Africa—by land and sea—and then traveling from London, England, to Singapore the same way.
I had just never given any thought to the process of goal attainment. I had never realized that it is a specific procedure that I could use to accomplish amazing things. Like most people, I was moving randomly through life, reacting and responding rather than focusing and concentrating. As motivational speaker Zig Ziglar says, I was a “wandering generality rather than a meaningful specific.”
Then I discovered goals and was never the same again. My whole life has been different since I learned the master skill, and yours will be, too.
Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement. A person without goals is like a ship without a rudder, drifting aimlessly and always in danger of ending up on the rocks. A person with goals is like a ship with a rudder, guided by a captain with a map, a compass, and a destination, sailing straight and true toward a port of his own choosing. Thomas Carlyle wrote that “a man with a half volition goes back and forth and makes no progress on even the smoothest road, whereas a person with a full volition moves ahead steadily no matter how difficult the path.”
Human beings, you and I, are goal-centered organisms. We are teleological in that we are motivated by purposes, by desired end states. We are engineered mentally to move progressively and successively from one goal to the next, and we are never really happy unless, and until, we are moving toward the accomplishment of something that is important to us.
Your brain has within it a goal-seeking mechanism that guides and directs you unerringly over time toward the accomplishment of your objectives. This cybernetic faculty is like the guidance system in a missile; it continually takes in feedback from the target and automatically corrects your course. Because of this mechanism in your brain, you accomplish almost any goal you set for yourself, as long as the goal is clear and you persist long enough. The process of achieving your goals is almost automatic. It is the goal setting in the first place that seems to be the big problem for most people.
It is a truism that each of us is achieving the goals we have set. You are where you are and what you are because you have decided to be there. Your thoughts, your actions and your behavior have gotten you to your present position in life, and they could have brought you to no other place, rightly considered.
If your goal is to get through the day and then get home and watch television, you will achieve it. If your goal is to be fit and healthy and to live a long life, then you will achieve that, too. And if your goal is to be financially independent or even wealthy, if that is truly your goal, then there is nothing that can stop you from reaching it, sooner or later. Your only limitation is your desire: How badly do you want it?
You are equipped with both a “success mechanism” and a “failure mechanism.” Your failure mechanism is your natural tendency to follow the path of least resistance, your impulse toward immediate gratification with little or no concern for the long-term consequences of your actions. Your failure mechanism operates automatically twenty-four hours per day. Every minute, every hour, it ticks away, and most people allow their desire for what is fun, easy and convenient to determine most of what they do.
However, you also have a success mechanism built into your brain. Your success mechanism can override your failure mechanism. And your success mechanism is triggered by a goal. The bigger your goal and the more intensely you desire it, the more likely you will be to exert your powers of self-discipline and willpower, and the more capable you will be of making yourself do the things that you need to do to get where you want to go.
After a career of fifty years, during which he personally worked with and trained more than twenty thousand sales people, Elmer Letterman concluded that the one quality that was most predictive of success was what he called “Intensity of Purpose.” Taking any two people with the same relative levels of intelligence, background, education and experience, the one with the greatest intensity of purpose will always win out over the other.
The famous oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, who went bankrupt raising cotton in Arkansas and then went on to build a fortune of several billion dollars and become one of the world’s richest men, was once asked his formula for success.
He said that in America, you only needed two things to be successful: “First,” he said, “decide exactly what it is you want. Most people never do that. Second, determine the price you’re going to have to pay to get it, and then resolve to pay that price.”
The great weakness of most people is that, even if they have some idea of what they want, they have never sat down and thought through what it will take to get it, and whether or not they are willing to pay that price.
We only know two things for certain about the price of success. First, in order to get whatever you desire, however you define it, you must pay the price in full. You must sow before you reap. And you may have to work a long time before you harvest the crop. This is the working of the Iron Law, the immutable Law of Cause and Effect. Most frustration in goal attainment comes from trying to violate this timeless principle.
Second, you have to pay the full price in advance. Success is not like going to a restaurant where you can pay the bill after you’ve enjoyed the dinner. The success that you desire requires payment in full, in advance, every single time.
And how can you tell if you have paid the full price of success? That’s easy. When you have paid the full price, the success will be there in front of you for all to see. It will happen by law, not by chance. When you’ve sown, you will reap; cause and effect, action and reaction. The life you are enjoying today is a reflection of the price you’ve paid up to now. The life you enjoy in the future will reflect the price you pay between now and then.
I described several mental laws in earlier chapters. You may be a bit unsure about how you are going to remember to use and apply all of these laws. Fortunately, you don’t have to. When you have a clearly defined goal toward which you are working every day, all these laws work automatically and in harmony with your purposes. You align yourself with the powers of the universe. You unlock the incredible reserves of potential that lie within you. When you organize your whole life in concert with these timeless principles, you begin accomplishing things that you never dreamed possible, and with less effort than you had believed necessary.
The greatest single enemy of your potential for greater success and achievement is your comfort zone, your tendency to get stuck in a rut and then to resist all change, even positive change, that would force you out of it.
Everyone naturally fears and avoids change. We want things to stay the same, but simultaneously to get better. However, all growth, all progress, all advancement requires change. And change is inevitable. In spite of anything you do, life never goes on the same way for very long. It is always changing in one direction or another. Things are either getting better for you or getting worse, but they never stay the same.
As you recall, the Law of Control states that you feel positive about yourself to the degree to which you feel you’re in control of your own life. The first benefit of goal setting is that goals allow you to control the direction of change in your life, ensuring that change is predominantly positive and self-determined. No one fears a change that represents an improvement. With clear goals, backed by detailed plans of action, you ensure that the changes that are taking place represent improvements in your life and you eliminate a major cause of fear and insecurity.
The Law of Cause and Effect states that for every effect in your life there is a specific cause. Goals are causes: Health, happiness, freedom and prosperity are effects. You sow goals and you reap results. Goals begin as thoughts, or causes, and manifest themselves as conditions or effects. The primary cause of success in life is the ability to set and achieve goals.
That’s why people who do not have goals are doomed forever to work for those who do. You either work to achieve your own goals or you work to achieve someone else’s goals. The best work of all is when you are achieving your own goals by helping others to achieve theirs.
You trigger the Law of Belief by intensely believing that you will achieve your goals, and by taking actions consistent with those beliefs. This is the foundation of faith and self-confidence.
You trigger the Law of Expectations by confidently expecting that everything that is happening, positive or negative, is moving you toward the realization of your goals. You look for something beneficial in every event, a valuable lesson, something you can use to your advantage.
You activate the Law of Attraction by thinking continually about your goals. With your goals as your dominant thoughts, you invariably begin to attract into your life people and circumstances in harmony with those goals. You attract ideas, opportunities and resources that can help you.
The Law of Correspondence states that your outer world will correspond to your inner world. When your inner world is dominated by thoughts, goals and plans to achieve the things that are important to you, your outer world of manifestation and effect soon mirrors your inner hopes and aspirations.
The Law of Subconscious Activity says that whatever thoughts you hold in your conscious mind, your subconscious mind works to bring into your reality. More and more of your subconscious mind is dedicated to making your words and actions fit a pattern consistent with what you really want to achieve.
The Law of Concentration says that whatever you dwell upon, grows. What do you dwell upon continually? Your goals! The more you dwell upon, reflect upon, and think about the things you want and how you can attain them, the more sensitive and aware you become of opportunities to attain them.
The Law of Substitution says that you can substitute a positive thought for a negative one. What positive thought do you use to substitute for negative thoughts or experiences? Your goals! Whenever something goes wrong, think about your goals. Whenever you have a bad day, think about your goals. The very thought of a goal, something that you want to accomplish in the future, is inherently positive and uplifting. It is impossible to think about your goals continually without being optimistic and highly motivated.
When you begin using all these mental laws behind a clearly defined purpose to which you are totally committed, you become an unstoppable powerhouse of mental and physical energy that will not be denied. With clear, specific goals, you develop and use all your mental powers. You then accomplish more in a few years than most people accomplish in a lifetime.
With everything that we know about goal setting, you would think that everyone would be doing it. You have probably been told for years that you have to have goals. You’ve been told that you have to be working toward your goals on a regular basis. You know you can’t hit a target you can’t see.
Yet the sad fact is that very few people have any real goals at all. Less than 3 percent of men and women have their goals in writing. Fewer than 1 percent of them read and review their goals regularly. Most people seem to have no idea just how important goals are.
Many people have attended seminars, read books and listened to tapes on goal setting, and yet if you ask them if they have clear written goals, and plans for their accomplishment, they will confess sheepishly that they do not. They know that they are supposed to have goals, and they intend to set some goals fairly soon, but they just haven’t yet gotten around to it.
When I began studying and applying these principles of goal setting, I got such extraordinary results that I eagerly shared these ideas with anyone who would listen. That’s how I started speaking in public and giving seminars.
However, I was continually amazed at how readily people would agree with me, but then go away and do nothing. I began to question and try to figure out why it was that people don’t set goals. I finally concluded that there are basically seven reasons why people don’t set goals. It is important to be aware of them and to determine whether they apply to your situation. Ignorance is not bliss. Not knowing about these mental obstacles, and not learning how to counteract them, can be fatal to your prospects for the future.
The first reason people don’t set goals is that they are simply not serious. They are talkers instead of doers. They want to be more successful, they want to improve their lives, but they are not willing to make the necessary effort. They do not have the “fire in the belly” that translates into a burning desire to make something of themselves, to make their lives bigger and better and more exciting.
The only way you can tell what a person really believes is by actions, not words. It is not what you say, or what you intend, or what you wish or hope or pray for, but only what you do that counts. Your true values and beliefs are only and always expressed in your behavior. One person who will take action is worth ten brilliant talkers who do nothing.
I get countless phone calls, letters and proposals from all kinds of people with all kinds of ideas during the course of a year. But the only ones who impress me, or anyone else, are the ones who actually do something. Remember, only action is action, and nothing else counts for much. Don’t tell people what you are going to do, show them. Get serious!
The second reason people don’t set goals is that they have not yet accepted responsibility for their lives. I used to think that goals were the starting point of success until I realized that, until people accept that they are fully responsible for their lives and for everything that happens to them, they will not even take the first step toward goal setting.
The irresponsible person is the person who is still waiting for real life to begin. Such a person uses up all his or her creative energies making elaborate excuses for his or her failure to make progress, and then buys lottery tickets and goes home to watch television. We’ll talk about this in detail in Chapter Seven.
The third reason people don’t set goals is their deep-seated feelings of guilt and unworthiness. A person who is so low mentally and emotionally that he or she has to “look up to see bottom” is not the kind of person who confidently and optimistically sets goals for the months and years ahead. A person who was raised in a negative environment, leaving him or her with feelings of undeservingness and the attitudes of “What’s the use?” and “I’m not good enough,” is hardly capable of serious goal setting.
The fourth reason people don’t set goals is that they don’t realize the importance of goals. If you are raised in a household in which your parents do not have goals and the setting and achieving of goals is not a regular topic of family discussion, you can reach adulthood without even knowing that there are such things as goals, outside of sports.
If you move in a social circle in which people do not have clearly defined goals toward which they are working, it will be natural for you to assume that goals are not a particularly important part of life. Since 80 percent of the people around you are going nowhere, if you are not careful you will end up drifting with the crowd, following the followers, and going nowhere as well.
If people knew that all their hopes and dreams and plans, all their aspirations and ambitions, are dependent upon their ability and their willingness to set goals—if people realized how important goals are to a happy, successful life—I think far more people would have goals than do today.
The fifth reason people don’t set goals is that they don’t know how. You can earn a university degree in our society, the equivalent of fifteen or sixteen years of education, and never once receive an hour’s worth of instruction on goal setting, even though goal setting is more important to your long-term happiness than any other single subject that you could ever learn. An even worse mistake that people make is to assume that they already know how to set goals. A person who assumes that he or she has a critical skill when, in reality, his or her understanding of it is rudimentary at best, is in great danger of failing at life.
I have been studying and practicing goal-setting techniques for more than twenty years. I have taught hundreds of thousands of men and women how to set goals for their lives and I have done strategic planning and goal setting for billion-dollar corporations. I know very few people who have studied the subject and applied it as thoroughly as I have, and I still feel that I have an enormous amount to learn. If someone truly knows goal setting down cold, he or she is probably either very rich or very happy, or both.
The sixth reason people don’t set goals is quite simply the fear of rejection, or the fear of criticism. From the time we were children, we have had our hopes and dreams slapped down by the criticism and laughter of others. Maybe our parents didn’t want us to get our hopes up, or to be disappointed, so they quickly pointed out all the reasons we would not be able to achieve our goals. Our siblings and friends might have laughed at us and ridiculed us for thinking about being someone or doing something far beyond what they could imagine for themselves. These influences can affect your attitude toward yourself and goal setting for years.
Children are not dumb. They soon learn that “if you want to get along, you go along.” Over time, a child who is constantly criticized or discouraged stops coming up with new ideas, new dreams, or new goals. He begins the lifelong process of playing it safe, of selling himself short, and accepting underachievement in life as inevitable and unavoidable.
The solution to this fear of criticism or sounding foolish is simple: Keep your goals confidential. Don’t tell anybody. All effective goal-setters finally learn to keep their goals to themselves. No one can laugh at you or criticize you if he or she doesn’t know what your goals are.
There are two exceptions to this practice of confidentiality. The first are the people, such as your boss or spouse, whose help you will need to achieve your goals.
And second, you can share your goals with other goal-oriented people, people who will encourage you in the direction you want to go. You should also make it a policy to encourage everyone you speak to who tells you about a goal they have. Tell them to “go for it!” Tell them, “You can do it.” Encouraging others motivates you, as well. It is one of the best applications of the Law of Sowing and Reaping. If you would like others to encourage you, take every opportunity to encourage them.
The seventh and most predominant reason people do not set goals is the fear of failure. I cannot repeat often enough, the fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. It is what keeps people in their comfort zones. It is what makes them keep their heads down and play it safe as the years pass by.
The fear of failure is expressed in the attitude of, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” It is learned in early childhood as the result of destructive criticism and punishment for doing things your parents disapproved of. Once entrenched in the subconscious mind, this fear does more to paralyze hope and kill ambition than any other negative emotion in the human experience.
The major reason for the fear of failure is that most people don’t understand the role of failure in achieving success. The rule is simply this: It is impossible to succeed without failing. Failure is a prerequisite for success. The greatest successes in human history have also been the greatest failures. In the same year that Babe Ruth became the home run king of baseball, he also struck out more than any other player.
Success is a numbers game. There is a direct relationship between the number of things you attempt and your probability of ultimately succeeding. Even if you were the worst player in baseball, if you swung with all your heart at every ball that came over the plate, you would eventually get a hit, and if you kept swinging, you would finally get a home run. The important thing is to swing with all your might and to keep swinging, and not worry about striking out occasionally.
Thomas Edison was the most successful inventor of the modern age. He received patents for 1,093 inventions, 1,052 of which were brought into commercial production during his lifetime. But as an inventor, he was also the greatest failure of his age. He failed more times, in more experiments, attempting to develop more products, than any other living scientist or businessman. It took him more than 11,000 experiments alone before he finally discovered the carbon-impregnated filament that led to the production of the first electric light bulb.
There is a story about Edison that, after he had conducted more than 5,000 experiments, a young journalist came to him and asked him why he persisted in these experiments after having failed more than 5,000 times. Edison is said to have replied, “Young man, you don’t understand how the world works. I have not failed at all. I have successfully identified 5,000 ways that will not work. That just puts me 5,000 ways closer to the way that will.”
Napoleon Hill said, “Within every adversity is the seed of an equal or greater opportunity or advantage.” The way to deal with temporary failure is to seek within each setback for the valuable lesson that it contains. Approach every difficulty as if it were sent to you at that moment and in that way to teach you something you need to learn so you can continue moving forward.
Become an “inverse paranoid”: Tell yourself that everything that is happening is moving you toward the achievement of your goals, even when temporary failures seem to be moving you away from them. Keep looking for the good. Great successes are almost always preceded by many failures. It’s the lessons learned from the failures that make the ultimate successes possible.
Decide, in advance, to take every setback as a spur to greater effort, especially in business and sales, knowing that you are getting closer and closer to success with every experience.
Look upon temporary defeat as a signpost that says “STOP, go this way instead.” One of the qualities of leaders is that they never use the words failure or defeat. Instead, they use words like “valuable learning experiences” or “temporary glitches.”
The great football coach Vince Lombardi had the right spirit. After a game in which the Green Bay Packers were defeated, one of the reporters asked Lombardi how he felt about losing. Lombardi replied, “We didn’t lose, we just ran out of time.”
You can learn to overcome the fear of failure by being absolutely clear about your goals, and by accepting that temporary setbacks and obstacles are the inevitable price you pay to achieve any great success in life.
Goal setting can be a powerful, life-changing experience, if you do it properly. There are five basic principles of goal setting that are essential for maximum achievement.
The first is the principle of congruency. For you to perform at your best, your goals and your values must fit together like a hand in a glove. Your values represent your deepest convictions about what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, and what is important and meaningful to you. High performance and high self-esteem only happen when your goals and your values are in complete harmony with each other.
The second principle of goal setting is your area of excellence. Each person has the capacity to be excellent at something, and perhaps several things. You can achieve your full potential only by finding your area of excellence and then by throwing your whole heart into developing your talents in that area.
You will never be happy or satisfied until you find your heart’s desire and commit your life to it. It is the one thing that you are uniquely capable of doing in an excellent fashion. It is your job to identify it, if you haven’t already.
Your area of excellence may change as your career evolves, but all truly successful men and women are those who have found it. And your area of excellence is invariably doing what you most enjoy and doing it well.
The third principle of goal setting is the acres of diamonds concept. Acres of Diamonds was the title of a talk by a minister named Russell Conwell. The talk became so popular that he was eventually asked to give it more than five thousand times, word for word.
In the story, an old African farmer became very excited one day upon hearing from a traveling merchant of men who had gone off into Africa, discovered diamond mines and become fabulously wealthy. He decided to sell off his farm, organize a caravan, and head into the vast interior of Africa to find diamonds so he could crown his life with fabulous wealth.
For many years, he searched the vast African continent for diamonds. Eventually, he ran out of money and was abandoned by everyone. Finally, alone, in a fit of despair, he threw himself into the ocean and drowned.
Meanwhile, back on the farm that he had sold, the new farmer was out watering a donkey one day in a stream that cut across the farm. He found a strange stone that threw off light in a remarkable way. He took it into the house and thought no more of it. Some months later the same merchant, traveling on business, stopped for the night at the farm. When he saw the stone, he grew very excited and asked if the old farmer had finally returned. No, he was told, the old farmer had never been seen again, but why was he so excited?
The merchant picked up the stone and said, “This is a diamond of great price and value.” The new farmer was skeptical, but the merchant insisted that he show him where he had found the diamond. They went out on the farm to where the farmer had been watering the donkey, and as they looked around, they found another diamond, and another, and another. It turned out that the whole farm was covered with acres of diamonds. The old farmer had gone off into Africa seeking for diamonds without ever looking under his own feet.
The moral to this story was that the old farmer did not realize that diamonds do not look like diamonds in their rough form. They simply look like rocks to the uneducated eye. A diamond must be cut, faceted, polished and set before it looks like the kind of diamond that you see in the jewelry stores.
Likewise, your acres of diamonds probably lie right under your own feet. But they are usually disguised as hard work. “Opportunities come dressed in work clothes.”
Your acres of diamonds probably lie in your own talents, your interests, your education, your background and experience, your industry, your city, your contacts. Your acres of diamonds probably lie right under your own feet if you will take the time to recognize them and then go to work on them.
Remember the words I quoted earlier from Theodore Roosevelt who said, “Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are.” You don’t need to move across the country or to make a major upheaval in your life. In most cases, what you are looking for is right at your fingertips. But it doesn’t look like an opportunity on the surface. In many cases, your great opportunity will simply look like hard, hard work.
The fourth principle for success in goal setting is the principle of balance. The principle of balance states that you need a variety of goals in the six critical areas of life in order to perform at your best. Just as a wheel on an automobile must be balanced for it to go around smoothly, you must have your goals in balance for your life to go smoothly.
You need family and personal goals. You need physical and health goals. You need mental and intellectual goals, and goals for study and personal development. You need career and work goals. You need financial and material goals. Finally, you need spiritual goals, goals aimed at inner development and spiritual enlightenment.
To maintain proper balance, you need two or three goals in each area, a total of twelve to eighteen goals in all. This kind of balance will enable you to be constantly working on something important to you. When you’re not working on your job, you can be pursuing family goals. When you are not working on physical fitness, you can be working on personal and professional development. When you are not practicing meditation, contemplation and other inner development work, you can be working on your material goals. Your objective is to make your life one continuous stream of progress and achievement.
The fifth principle of goal setting is the determination of your major purpose in life. Your major purpose is your number-one goal, the goal that is more important to you than the accomplishment of any other single goal or objective at this time. You may have a variety of goals but you can only have one major central purpose. The failure of a person to choose an overarching, dominating major goal is the primary reason for diffusion of effort, wasting of time and the inability to make progress.
The way you choose your overarching goal is by analyzing all your goals and asking, “Which goal, if I accomplish it, would do the most to help me achieve all my other goals?”
Usually, this is a financial or business goal, but sometimes it can be a health or relationship goal instead. The selection of your central purpose is the starting point of all great success and achievement. This goal becomes your “mission,” the organizing principle for all your other activities. Your major purpose becomes the catalyst that activates the Laws of Belief, Attraction and Correspondence. When you are excited about achieving a clear major goal, you start to move forward rapidly in spite of all obstacles and limitations. All the forces of the mental universe begin to work on your behalf. You become an irresistible force of nature. You become virtually unstoppable.
There are several important rules that accompany effective goal setting.
First of all, your goals must be in harmony with one another, not contradictory. You cannot have a goal to be financially successful, or to build your own successful business, and simultaneously have a goal to spend half your day at the golf course or at the beach. Your goals have to be mutually supportive and mutually reinforcing.
Second, your goals must be challenging. They must make you stretch without being overwhelming. When you initially set goals, they should have about a 50 percent or better probability of success. This level of probability is ideal for motivation, yet not so difficult that you can become easily discouraged. After you develop some skill in setting and achieving goals, you will quite confidently set goals that may only have a 40 percent, or 30 or 20 percent probability of success, and you will still be motivated and excited as you strive to achieve them.
Third, you should have both tangible and intangible goals, both quantitative and qualitative. You should have concrete goals that you can measure and evaluate objectively. At the same time, you should have qualitative goals, for your inner life and your relationships.
You may have a quantitative goal for your family of acquiring a larger home. Your qualitative goal for your family could be to become a more patient, loving person. The two goals fit nicely together. They balance the inner and the outer.
Fourth, you need both short-term goals and long-term goals. You need goals for today and goals for five, ten and twenty years from today.
The ideal short-term goal for business, career and personal planning is about ninety days. The ideal longer-term period for the same goals is two to three years. These time horizons seem to be the ideal for continuous motivation.
The very best major purpose or overarching goal is quantitative, challenging and aimed at two or three years out. You can then break it down to ninety-day segments, and subsequently break those down to monthly, weekly and daily subgoals with measurable benchmarks to enable you to assess your progress.
The ideal life is focused, purposeful, positive and organized so that you are moving toward goals that are important to you every hour of every day. You always know what you’re doing and why. You have a continuous sense of forward motion. You feel like a “winner” most of the time.
The decision to become a goal-setting, goal-achieving, future-focused person gives you a tremendous sense of control. You feel wonderful about yourself. You feel that you are the master of your own destiny.
Your self-esteem increases as you progress toward your goals. You like and respect yourself more and more. Your personality improves and you become a more positive, confident person. You feel happy and excited about life. You open the floodgates of your potential and begin moving faster and faster toward becoming all that you were meant to be.
Here are seven goal-setting questions for you to ask and answer over and over again. I suggest that you take a pad of paper and write out your responses.
Question number one:
What are your five most important values in life?
This question is intended to help you clarify what is really important to you, and by extension, what is less important, or unimportant.
Once you have identified the five most important things in life to you, organize them in order of priority, from number one, the most important, through number five.
Choosing and defining your values and their order of importance comes before setting your goals. Since you live from the inner to the outer, and your values are the core components of your personality, clarity concerning them makes it possible for you to select goals that are consistent with what is the very best for you.
Question number two:
What are your three most important goals in life, right now?
Write the answer to this question within thirty seconds.
This is called the “quick list” method. When you only have thirty seconds to write down your three most important goals, your subconscious mind sorts out your many goals quickly. Your top three will just pop into your conscious mind. With only thirty seconds, you will be as accurate as if you had thirty minutes.
Question number three:
What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you learned today that you only had six months to live?
This is another value question to help you clarify what is really important to you. When your time is limited, even if only in your imagination, you become very aware of who and what you really care about. As a doctor said recently, “I never met a businessman on his deathbed who said, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office.’ “
Someone once said that you are not ready to live until you know what you would do if you only had one hour left on earth. What would you do?
Question number four:
What would you do if you won a million dollars cash, tax free, in the lottery tomorrow?
How would you change your life? What would you buy? What would you start doing, or stop doing? Imagine that you only have two minutes to write your answers and you will only be able to do or acquire what you have written.
This is really a question to help you decide what you’d do if you had all the time and money you need, if you had virtually no fear of failure at all. The most revealing answers to this question are made when you realize how many things you would do differently if you felt you had the ability to choose.
Question number five:
What have you always wanted to do, but been afraid to attempt?
This question helps you see more clearly where your fears could be blocking you from doing what you really want to do.
Question number six:
What do you most enjoy doing? What gives you your greatest feeling of self-esteem and personal satisfaction?
This is another values question that may indicate where you should explore to find your “heart’s desire.” You will always be most happy doing what you most love to do, and what you most love to do is invariably the activity that makes you feel the most alive and fulfilled. The most successful men and women in America are invariably doing what they really enjoy, most of the time.
Question number seven, and perhaps this is the most important:
What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?
Imagine that a genie appears and grants you one wish. The genie guarantees that you will be absolutely, completely successful in any one thing that you attempt to do, big or small, short- or long-term. If you were absolutely guaranteed of success in any one thing, big or small, what one exciting goal would you set for yourself?
Whatever you wrote as an answer to any of these questions, including the question, “What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?” you can be, have, or do. The very fact that you could write it means that you can achieve it. Once you’ve identified what it is you want, the only question you have to answer is, “Do I want it badly enough, and am I willing to pay the price?”
Take a few minutes and write out your answers to each of these seven questions. Once you have your answers on paper, go over them and select just one as your major definite purpose in life right now.
By this simple act of deciding what you really want, and writing it down, you will have moved yourself into the top 3 percent. You will have done something that few people ever do. You will have established a written set of goals for yourself. You are now ready to make a giant leap forward.
The most important contribution you can make to your success and happiness is to develop the habit of continuous goal setting. The key to developing this habit is learning how to deliberately set and achieve one clear, challenging goal. When you have set a specific goal for yourself and then achieved it according to your plans, you change from having an attitude of positive thinking to possessing an attitude of positive knowing. You must reach the point in your own mind where you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you can accomplish any goal you set for yourself. From that point on, you are a different person. You are the master of your fate.
The thrill of achievement, the feeling of having overcome adversity and won through, in spite of the odds, gives you a sense of pleasure and excitement that can come from no other source. The habit of continuous goal setting, of using all your mental powers, soon becomes a positive addiction. You reach the point where you can hardly wait to get up in the morning, and you hate to go to bed at night. You become so positive and self-confident that your friends hardly recognize you.
The most difficult mental obstacle you have to overcome is inertia, the tendency to slip back into your comfort zone and to lose your forward momentum. That is why perhaps the best definition of character is “the ability to carry through on a resolution after the mood in which the resolution was made is past.”
Anyone can set goals and many people do. Probably half the population makes a series of resolutions every New Year’s. But that is not enough. It is the way the goals are set and the way plans are made to accomplish them that determines what happens afterward. To maximize your goal-achieving ability, you need a method. You need a proven process that you can use over and over, with any goal, in any situation, to bring all the powers of your mind to bear on accomplishing whatever it is you desire.
The twelve-step system you are about to learn is perhaps the most effective goal-achieving process ever developed. It has been used by hundreds of thousands of men and women all over the world to revolutionize their lives. It has been used by corporations to reorganize themselves and to go on to greater sales and profitability. It is simple, as all true things are simple, but it is so astonishingly effective that it continues to amaze even the most skeptical people.
The purpose of this goal-achieving system is to enable you to create the mental equivalent of what you wish to achieve in your external world. The Law of Mind states that your thoughts objectify themselves in your reality. You become and you accomplish what you think about. If you think about something with tremendous clarity and intensity, you will bring it about much faster and more predictably than in any other way.
There is a direct relationship between how clearly you can see your goal as accomplished, on the inside, and how rapidly it appears on the outside. This twelve-step system takes you from abstract fuzziness to absolute clarity. It gives you a track to run on, a track that enables you to get from where you are to wherever you want to go.
Step one: Develop desire—intense, burning desire. This is the motivational force that enables you to overcome the fear and inertia that holds most people back. The greatest single obstacle to setting and achieving goals is fear of all kinds. Fear is the reason you sell yourself short and settle for far less than you are capable of. Every decision you make is made on the basis of emotion, either fear or desire. And a stronger emotion will always overcome a weaker emotion. The Law of Concentration states that whatever you dwell upon, grows. If you dwell upon your desires, if you think about them and write them out and make plans to accomplish them continually, your desires eventually become so strong that they override and push aside your fears. An intense, burning desire for a specific goal enables you to rise above your fears and move forward over any obstacles.
Desire is invariably personal. You can only want something for yourself, not because you feel someone else wants it for you. In setting your goals, and especially your major definite purpose, you must be perfectly selfish. It must be your own goal. You must be absolutely clear about what it is that you want to be, to have or to do.
What is your major definite purpose? What is your overarching goal? If you were guaranteed success in any one area, what would you want to accomplish? Review the seven goal-setting questions until you become perfectly clear about what would make you the very happiest. Deciding what you really want is the starting point of all great achievement.
Step two: Develop belief In order to activate your subconscious mind and, as you will learn, your superconscious capabilities, you must absolutely believe that it is possible for you to achieve your goal. You must have complete faith that you deserve the goal and that it will come to you when you are ready for it. You must nurture your faith and belief until they deepen into an absolute conviction that your goal is attainable.
Because belief is the catalyst that activates your mental powers, it is important that your goals be realistic, especially at first. If your goal is to earn more money, you should set a goal to increase your income by 10 or 20 or 30 percent over the next twelve months. These are believable goals, goals that you can get your mind around. They are realistic and can therefore be a source of motivation for you.
If your goal is too far beyond anything you’ve accomplished in the past, setting it too high actually makes it a demotivator. Because it is so distant, you seem to be making little or no progress toward it. You become discouraged more easily and you can soon stop believing that it is possible for you.
In my own case, when I first started using this process of goal setting, I was earning about $40,000 per year. I got really excited and decided to set a goal to earn $400,000 per year within twelve months.
What happened was that instead of increasing my income, nothing seemed to happen at all. The goal of $400,000 was much more than I could believe, so my subconscious mind simply refused to accept it as a possibility. It ignored my commands because I had no real faith behind them. When I realized my mistake, I adjusted my goal down to $60,000, a 50 percent increase over the previous year. And I achieved that by changing jobs six months later.
Napoleon Hill wrote, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” However, completely unrealistic goals are a form of self-delusion, and you cannot delude yourself into goal attainment. It requires hard, practical, systematic effort, working in harmony with the principles we have been discussing.
If you want to lose weight, don’t set a goal to lose thirty or forty or fifty pounds. Instead, set a goal to lose five pounds over the next thirty to sixty days. As you lose the first five pounds, set a new goal to lose another five pounds, and so on until you achieve your ideal weight. A five-pound weight loss is believable, whereas a thirty-pound weight loss is so much beyond your current self-concept that your subconscious mind doesn’t take you seriously.
One of the kindest and most helpful things you can do for your children is to help them to set realistic and believable goals. Help them to develop the habit of setting and achieving goals, not necessarily the ability to set big goals. There’s an old saying that if you save your pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves. If children develop the habit of setting and achieving small goals, they will eventually move on to medium-sized goals, and then to goals of any size.
Before you can achieve big goals, major efforts are necessary. Sometimes you will require weeks, months and even years of hard work and preparation before you will be ready to achieve really big things. In every field, you must pay your dues in advance. Unless you are extraordinarily brilliant or talented, you must be honest with yourself and accept that, if the goal is worth achieving, it is worth working for patiently and persistently.
Many people set goals that are far beyond their capacity to achieve, work at them for a little while, and then quit. They become discouraged and conclude that goal setting doesn’t work, at least for them. The primary reason this happens is that they have tried to do too much too fast.
Your responsibility is to create and maintain a positive mental attitude by confidently expecting and believing that if you continue to do the right things in the right way, you will eventually attract to yourself the people and the resources you need to reach your goal right on schedule. You must absolutely believe that if you keep on keeping on, you will ultimately be successful.
Step three: Write it down. Goals that are not in writing are not goals at all. They are merely wishes or fantasies. A wish is a goal with no energy behind it. When you write a goal down on a piece of paper, you crystallize it. You make it something concrete and tangible. You make it something that you can pick up and look at and hold and touch and feel. You have taken it out of your imagination and put it into a form that you can do something with.
One of the most powerful of all methods for implanting a goal into your subconscious mind is to write it out clearly, vividly, in detail, exactly as you would like to see it in reality. Decide what’s right before you decide what’s possible. Make the description of your goal perfect and ideal in every respect. Crystallize the ideal images you created in Chapter One, Make Your Life a Masterpiece. Don’t worry, for the moment, about how the goal is going to be achieved. Your main job in the beginning is to be absolutely certain about exactly what it is that you desire, and not to worry about the process of achieving it.
Some years ago, in the middle of a recession, my wife and I had to sell our home to raise cash and pay our bills. We moved into a rented house temporarily and ended up living there for two years. During this time, we decided to get serious about our dream home. Even though we had financial problems, we subscribed to several magazines filled with pictures and descriptions of beautiful homes.
About once a week, Barbara and I would sit down and page through these magazines, discussing the various features that we would like to see in our ideal home. We put all thought of cost, location and down payment out of our minds temporarily. We eventually drew up a list of forty-two features that we wanted in our home someday. We then put the list away, put our heads down, and continued to work.
Three years passed and a thousand things happened. We bought a beautiful home and moved out of the rented house. All kinds of unexpected and unpredictable events took place. And when the dust finally settled, we had moved again and we were in a beautiful five-thousand-square-foot home in sunny San Diego, California.
While we were unpacking our belongings, we found the list we had drawn up three years before. The house we had just moved into turned out to have forty-one of the forty-two features that we had written down. The only thing it lacked was a built-in vacuum cleaner system, which was, perhaps, the least important.
We knew the house would be somewhere in California. That was on our list under the heading “Location.” Barbara envisioned a house that had no fence in the backyard. She could clearly see “an unbroken view with no obstructions.” I explained to her that, for security reasons, virtually all homes in California had fences. Some of them even have gated neighborhoods with security guards and barbed wire. But she was adamant. She saw a completely wide-open backyard stretching as far as the eye could see.
As it turned out, our dream house backs onto a beautiful valley containing a lovely golf course surrounding two lakes. The long slope behind our home, plus the valley, plus the lakes, gives ample security and makes a fence unnecessary. The visualization came true.
This is just one of a hundred stories that I could tell you that flow from the act of writing down your goals clearly and then thinking about them all the time. The most important reason for writing them down, aside from clarifying them in your mind, is that the very act of writing them down intensifies your desire and deepens your belief that they are achievable.
Too many people do not write their goals down on paper because, deep in their hearts, they don’t think that their goals are achievable. They don’t think writing them down will do any good. They attempt to protect themselves from disappointment. And in so doing, they only assure themselves disappointment and under-achievement on their journeys through life. But when you discipline yourself to write your goals down, the very act overrides your failure mechanism and turns your success mechanism on to full power.
Step four: Make a list of all the ways that you will benefit from achieving your goal. Just as goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement, reasons “why” are the forces that intensify your desire and drive you forward. Your motivation depends upon your motives, your reasons for acting in the first place, and the more reasons you have, the more motivated you will be.
The German philosopher Nietzsche wrote, “A man can bear any what if he has a big enough why.” You can only motivate yourself to accomplish great things if you have a big exciting dream of some kind. Your reasons “why” must be uplifting and inspiring. They must be big enough to drive you onward.
It is when you have big reasons for achieving your major goal that you develop the “intensity of purpose” that makes you irresistible. If your reasons are big enough, your belief solid enough and your desire intense enough, nothing can stop you.
A young man once went to Socrates and asked him how he could gain wisdom. Socrates replied by asking the young man to come with him while they walked together into a nearby lake. When the water got to be about four feet deep, Socrates suddenly grabbed the young man and pushed his head under the water. Then he held it there. The young man thought it was a joke at first and did not resist. But as he was held under the water longer and longer, he became frantic. He struggled desperately to get free as his lungs burned for lack of oxygen. Finally Socrates let him up, coughing and spluttering and gasping for air. Socrates then said, “When you desire wisdom with the same intensity that you desired to breathe, then nothing will stop you from getting it.” It’s the same with your goals.
One of your jobs is to keep your desire burning brightly by continually thinking of all of the benefits, satisfactions and rewards you will enjoy as a result of achieving your goal. Each person is excited and motivated by different things. For example, the English novelist E. M. Forster said, “I write to earn the respect of those I respect.” Some people are motivated by money and the possibility of living in a big house and driving a beautiful car. Others are motivated by recognition, status and prestige, by the idea of earning the admiration of others.
Make a list of all the benefits, tangible and intangible, that you can possibly enjoy as a result of achieving your goal. You will find that, the longer the list, the more motivated and determined you will become. If you have only one or two reasons for achieving a goal, you will have a moderate level of motivation. You will be easily discouraged when the going gets rough, as it surely will. If you have twenty or thirty reasons for achieving your goal, you will become irresistible. Nothing will discourage or dissuade you from keeping on until you accomplish what you have set your mind on.
Step five: Analyze your position, your starting point. If you decide to lose weight, the very first thing you do is to weigh yourself. If you want to achieve a certain net worth, the first thing that you do is to sit down and create a personal financial statement to find out how much you are worth today.
Determining your starting point also gives you a baseline from which you can measure your progress. Again, I cannot emphasize too strongly that the clearer you are about where you are coming from and where you are going, the more likely it is that you will end up where you want to be.
Step six: Set a deadline. Set deadlines on all tangible, measurable goals, such as increases in income or net worth, or losing a certain number of pounds, or running a certain number of miles. But don’t set deadlines on intangible goals, such as the development of patience, kindness, compassion, self-discipline or other personal qualities.
When you set a deadline for a tangible goal, you program it into your mind and activate your subconscious “forcing system,” which ensures that you accomplish your goal by that date, at the latest. When you set a deadline for the development of a personal quality, this same forcing system ensures that your deadline will be the first day you begin to actually demonstrate the quality you’ve chosen.
Often people resist setting deadlines for fear that they will not achieve their goals by the time they’ve set for themselves. They do everything possible, including leaving the deadline vague, to avoid the feelings of discouragement that might occur.
What if you do set a goal and a deadline and you don’t achieve it by your deadline? Simple: You set another deadline. It just means that you’re not ready yet. You guessed wrong. You were too optimistic. And if you don’t achieve your goal by your new deadline, you set still another deadline until you finally do achieve it. As my friend sales trainer Don Hutson says, “There are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic deadlines.”
But in probably 80 percent of cases, if your goals are sufficiently realistic and your plans are sufficiently detailed, and you work your plans faithfully, you will achieve your goal by your deadline.
If your major definite purpose has a two-, three- or five-year deadline, your next step is to break your goal down into ninety-day subgoals. Then break the ninety-day goals down into thirty-day goals. With your long-term goal as your Mount Olympus, you can more readily set realistic short- and medium-term goals that enable you to make steady progress day by day.
In your thinking, start from a visualization of your goal as already accomplished and work back to the present. Project yourself forward in your mind to your completed goal, and then look back to where you are today. Imagine the steps that you would have taken to get from where you are now to where you want to be in the future. This process of planning backward from the actual achievement of your goal gives you a special perspective on what you will have to do to achieve it. “Project forward, look backward” is a powerful technique that enables you to see possibilities and pitfalls that you might otherwise miss. It sharpens your perceptions and gives you insights you can get in no other way.
Step seven: Make a list of all the obstacles that stand between you and the accomplishment of your goal. Wherever great success is possible, great obstacles exist. In fact, obstacles are the flipside of success and achievement. If there are no obstacles between you and your goal, it probably is not a goal at all, merely an activity.
When you have listed every obstacle you can think of, organize the list in order of importance. What is the biggest single obstacle that stands between you and your goal? This is your “rock.” On your pathway to the accomplishment of anything worthwhile, you will experience a series of obstacles, detours and roadblocks. But almost invariably, there is one big rock or major obstacle that lies across your path and blocks your progress. It is this rock that you must focus on removing before you get sidetracked dealing with smaller obstacles and problems.
Your main obstacle, or “rock,” may be internal or external. It may be within yourself or within the situation. If it is internal, it may be that you lack a particular skill, ability or attribute that you must have to achieve your goal. You must be completely honest with yourself and ask, “Is there anything about myself that I will have to change, or any ability that I will have to develop in order to achieve my goal?”
Your major obstacle may be external. You may be in the wrong job, or with the wrong company or in the wrong relationship. You may find that you need to start over, doing something else, somewhere else, if your goal is to be achieved. What is your personal “rock”?
The second question you must ask yourself in identifying what might be holding you back is, “What is my limiting step?” What part of the process of moving from where you are now to the achievement of your goal determines the speed at which you reach it? If you are in sales, and your goal is higher income, your limiting step is the size and number of the sales that you make. Your limiting step to more sales could be the number of new prospects that you generate. It might be your ability to ask for the order.
In almost every case, there is a limiting step. This bottleneck determines how rapidly you move toward your goal. Your job is to identify your limiting step and then do everything possible to relieve it. Sometimes the alleviation of one chokepoint, if it’s the right one, can do more to move you forward than any other single thing you could do.
Step eight: Identify the additional information you will need to achieve your goal.
We live in a knowledge-based society, and the most successful people are those who have more essential information than others. Almost all mistakes that you make in your financial life and your career will be the result of having insufficient or incorrect information. One of your responsibilities is to learn what you need to know, so you can accomplish what you want to accomplish.
If you do not have the knowledge or information yourself, where can you get it? Is it a core skill or ability that you need to develop yourself through study and practice? Or can you hire someone else with this knowledge? Can you employ someone temporarily, such as a consultant, or a specialist, with the knowledge you require? Who else has achieved success in your particular field, and could you go to him or her for advice?
Make a list of all the information, talents, skills, abilities and experience that you will need and then make a plan to learn, buy, rent or borrow this information or skill as quickly as you can. Determine the most important information that you lack. Since 80 percent of the value of the information that you need in any area will be contained in 20 percent of the information available (the 80/20 rule), what is the most important information or ability that you will require to achieve your goal?
Step nine: Make a list of all the people whose help and cooperation you will require. This list may include your family, your boss, your customers, your bankers, your business partners or sources of capital, and even your friends. To accomplish anything worthwhile, you’ll need the help and cooperation of many people. Take this list and organize it in order of priority. Whose help is the most important? Whose help or cooperation is the second most important?
The law of compensation is a special variation on the Law of Sowing and Reaping. It is a restatement of the Law of Cause and Effect. It has its counterpart in physics in a law that states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It states that, for everything you do, you will be compensated in kind. You will get out what you put in.
This law also states that other people will help you achieve your goals only if they feel that they will be compensated for their efforts in some way. No one works for nothing. Everyone has his or her own personal motivation. This should be your starting point in gaining the cooperation of others. Ask yourself the question, “What are you going to do for them to get them to help you?”
You must continually tune in to each person’s favorite radio station, WIIFM, “What’s in it for me?” Our social and business relations in America are all based on the Law of Reciprocity. The Law of Reciprocity states that people are internally driven to be even, to reciprocate for anything done either to or for them. They will be willing to help you achieve your goals only when you have demonstrated a willingness to help them to achieve their goals.
The most successful people in our society, in all fields, are those who have helped the greatest number of other people to get the things they want. They build up a reservoir of goodwill and create a propensity in others to help them, to reciprocate for having been helped in the past.
The Law of Overcompensation is triggered by the habit of always doing more than you are paid for. Successful people and successful businesses are those that always exceed expectations, who always do more than is expected of them. And the only part of the equation of compensation and reciprocity that you can control is the amount that you put in. The amount you get out is determined by yourself. Because this is part of the Law of Sowing and Reaping, if you take every opportunity that you can to help others, others will eventually give you all the help you need.
Your returns in life come back to you as a result of your contributions to others. If you contribute hard work, helpfulness and honesty, you will get back riches, rewards and the respect of other people.
If you want to increase the quantity and quality of your returns, your rewards, you need but to increase the quantity and quality of your service. By always doing more than you’re paid for, you’ll eventually be paid more than you’re getting now. By putting more in, you’ll get more out. By “overcontributing” you’ll end up being “overcompensated.”
The principle of organized effort, working together in harmony with other people toward mutually agreed upon goals, is the basis for all great accomplishment. Your willingness and your ability to cooperate effectively with others, to help them achieve their goals so that they will help you achieve yours, is indispensable to your future success.
Step ten: Make a plan. Write out, in detail, what you want, when you want it, why you want it and where you are starting from. Make a list of the obstacles you must overcome, the information you will require, and the people whose help you will need. With answers to steps one through nine, you have all the ingredients of a complete master plan for the achievement of any goal.
A plan is a list of activities organized by time and priority. A list organized on the basis of time starts with the first thing that you have to do, in order, through to the last task that must be completed before your goal is achieved. Many activities can be worked on simultaneously. Other tasks have to be done in sequence, one after the other. Certain activities have to be done continuously from the beginning of the process through until the end.
A plan organized by priority lists activities in their order of importance. What is the most important thing that you have to do? What is the second most important thing? Keep asking this question until you have listed every activity based on its value to the completed goal.
Some years ago, the chairman of a large company for which I was working offered me an opportunity. He had been approached by a Japanese automobile company and offered the distributorship for their vehicles for a large geographical area. He asked me if I would like to do a market study with a view toward taking on the distributorship. This would involve setting up several dealerships, and then importing and distributing the vehicles through them.
Not really thinking about it too much, I accepted immediately. But there was just one problem. I did not have the slightest idea of where to start or what to do. So I immediately went out and did two solid months of research on the importation and distribution of Japanese automobiles. I visited every dealership selling similar cars. I asked everybody I could find for help and advice. And I got lucky. One of the consultants I spoke to had been hired four years earlier by a large corporation to do a complete feasibility study on automobile importation from Japan. Nothing had come of his study, but he still had all his notes.
I asked him if I could take a look at his notes and he showed them to me. Among his notes, I found a list of forty-five things that a company had to do to import and distribute Japanese vehicles through a network of dealerships. It was a blueprint for the business.
I took a copy of the list and used it as my road map. I carried it with me day and night. I began with item number one. Within three months, I had completed every item on the list and the first vehicles rolled off the ship from Japan. We went on to set up sixty-five dealerships and sell $25 million worth of vehicles. The division earned millions of dollars in profits for the company.
It was not easy. There was a tremendous amount of effort and ability involved in sales, service, parts, promotion, people, financing and administration. But the starting point was a detailed list of what needed to be done from beginning through to completion.
A good list gives you a track to run on and dramatically increases the likelihood of your achieving your goal. It is the essence of all personal planning and individual effectiveness. And all it takes to start is a pad of paper, a pen, a goal and you.
Once you have a detailed plan of action, get started. Accept that your plan will have flaws in it. It will not be perfect the first time out. Don’t worry about it. Avoid the temptation of “perfectionitis.” If every possible obstacle must first be overcome, nothing will ever get done.
One of the characteristics of superior men and women is that they can accept feedback and make course corrections. They’re more concerned with what’s right than with who’s right. Keep working on your plan until you have all the bugs out. Each time you hit a roadblock or an obstacle, go back and review your plan and make the necessary changes. Eventually you will have a plan that will work for you like a well-oiled machine.
The more detailed and the better organized your plans, the more likely you are to achieve your goals on schedule, and exactly as you have defined them.
Inc. magazine recently reported on interviews with the presidents of more than fifty corporations. They found that there was a direct relationship between the amount of detail that had gone into preparing their business plans and the level of success that the businesses had achieved.
But, in almost every case, the business that developed was different from the original plan. According to the study, it was the process of planning itself, of thinking through every single detail in advance, that led to ultimate success. It was having a well-designed plan to which modifications could be made, as they got feedback from the market, that ensured their sales and profitability.
The development of a detailed, constantly revised and finely honed personal plan is essential to the achievement of your major goals, as well.
Step eleven: Use visualization. Create a clear mental picture of your goal as it would appear if it were already achieved. Replay this picture over and over again on the screen of your mind. Each time you visualize your goal as accomplished, you increase your desire and intensify your belief that the goal is achievable for you. And what you see is what you get.
Your subconscious mind is activated by pictures. All your goal setting and planning up to this point has given you the details of an absolutely clear picture that you can feed repeatedly into your subconscious mind. These clear mental pictures concentrate your mental powers and activate the Law of Attraction. You immediately begin attracting to you, like iron filings to a magnet, the people, ideas and opportunities you need to attain your objectives.
Step twelve: Make the decision, in advance, that you will never, never, give up. Back your goals and plans with persistence and determination. Never consider the possibility of failure. Never think about quitting. Decide to hold on, no matter what happens. And as long as you refuse to quit, you must eventually be successful.
Develop the ability to persevere in the face of the inevitable obstacles and difficulties you will face. Sometimes, your ability to persist is what it takes to overcome the most difficult obstacles. Goal-setting begins with desire and comes full circle to persistence. The longer you persist, the more convinced and determined you become. You finally reach the point where nothing can stop you. And nothing will.
There are many poems on persistence and determination, and here is one of the most helpful that I’ve ever come across:
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.
For life is queer with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won if he’d stuck it out.
Success is just failure turned inside out,
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt.
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far.
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit,
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit!
—ANONYMOUS*
Once you have clearly established your goals and plans, and you have made the decision that you will never give up until you achieve them, you begin to use the continuous action technique to maintain your momentum toward your objectives.
The continuous action technique keeps you on track toward your goal. It is based on Isaac Newton’s physical principles of inertia and momentum. These principles state that a body in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. They also state that while it may take a large amount of energy to get a body from a resting position to a state of forward motion, it takes a smaller amount of energy to keep it in motion at the same speed. This is one of the most important of all principles underlying great success.
The principle of momentum also has emotional and spiritual dimensions. You feel it in the sensations of motivation and excitement you experience as you move toward the achievement of something you care about. You have more energy and enthusiasm. You move faster toward your goal and it seems to move faster toward you.
Many people launch themselves toward a goal and then allow themselves to slow and stop. Once they stop, they often find that getting themselves going again is so difficult that they can’t do it. Don’t let this happen to you. The maintenance of momentum, once you’ve begun, is essential to great success and achievement.
You maintain your forward momentum by taking continuous action toward goal attainment. You keep up the pressure. You define your goals in terms of the activities necessary to accomplish them, and then you discipline yourself to perform the activities. You do something every day to move you toward the achievement of your major goals.
“Nothing succeeds like success.” You must develop the success habit by doing something every single day to move you toward your goals. Review them every morning and think about them every day. Always be looking for something you can do to contribute to their achievement.
It may be major or minor, but for you to maintain momentum and keep yourself positive and motivated, you must be continually taking actions consistent with what you hope to achieve.
Use the continuous action technique every day until you become a perpetual-motion, goal-setting and goal-achieving individual. Make sure that you mark each day with an accomplishment of some kind, the earlier in the day, the better. Remember, fast tempo is essential to success. The more things you do and try, and the faster you do and try them, the more energy and enthusiasm you will have and the more you will achieve.
Here is an example of how effective this goal-achieving system can be. I was giving a lecture on the importance of goal setting to a public audience of about eight hundred people when a man I recognized from a previous seminar came up out of the audience and asked if he could have the microphone. He said he had a story to tell about what had happened to him after he began implementing this system in his life.
He told the audience that he had attended our seminar about six weeks before with his girlfriend. He was an insurance executive, and he explained that he had been through many personal and professional development seminars in his fourteen years in the insurance industry. He and his girlfriend had planned to come for the first morning of the two-day seminar and then leave and go shopping. He was convinced that there was nothing new for him to learn after all the courses he had already attended.
He said that they ended up staying for the entire two days. When they left, they were excited about what they had learned and eager to put it into practice, especially the system for goal setting. He went on to tell the audience that he had taken the following day off so that he and his girlfriend could spend the entire day planning the next few years of their lives with this goal-setting methodology. It took them ten full hours to complete their plan.
They had been dating for two years and had discussed marriage, but had made no decisions or commitments. They decided that one of their goals was to get married, and in accordance with what they had learned, they wrote it down and set a specific deadline for the wedding to take place.
They then set three subgoals associated with their wedding. The first goal was that they would buy and pay for their dream house before they got married. This was the end of October and they had been through the seminar in the middle of September. The wedding date was set for February fourth of the coming year. That date therefore became their deadline for their house, as well.
Their second goal was to be married by Dr. Robert Schuller in the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.
Their third goal was to hold their wedding reception aboard the “Love Boat” in Long Beach, California.
After writing out these goals in detail, they immediately took action. They went out for the next few evenings looking at houses and finally found exactly the one they wanted. The asking price was $220,000, but they learned that they could get it for $180,000 if they could come up with the money. The problem was that they had almost no savings at all. They needed to find or earn the entire amount, so they set a new goal, to earn $180,000 within ninety days.
They phoned Dr. Schuller’s office at the Crystal Cathedral to arrange for their wedding on February fourth. They were told, however, that Dr. Schuller no longer did weddings. It was impossible, out of the question. But they were persistent. They asked if there was any way that he would change his mind. The secretary explained that he was far too busy and there was nothing that could be done.
Again, they persisted. Was there any way that they could appeal to him personally? Finally, the secretary, to conclude the conversation, told them that they could write to him personally, but that they shouldn’t hold out much hope.
They immediately sat down and wrote Dr. Schuller a letter. They explained how much they believed in “possibility thinking,” how important being married by him was to them, and how much difference it would make in their lives. They sent off the letter and went on to their second goal, the Love Boat and their reception.
Again, they ran into an obstacle. When they phoned the booking agent for the Love Boat, they were told that the ship would be at sea that day, arriving back at 4:00 P.M. and departing at 8:00 P.M. It would not be possible for them to have their reception on the ship that day.
But they were determined and incredibly optimistic. They had the attitude that they had nothing to lose. They called a friend in the travel business and asked her if she could pull a few strings. She got the same answer back through her channels. It wouldn’t be possible.
Their experience wasn’t unusual. They had set three big goals for themselves and had run into roadblocks on every one. So will you. Remember, if there are no obstacles, it’s probably not a goal at all; it’s just a task.
Whenever you set any goal for yourself that is above and beyond anything you’ve ever done before, you will immediately meet with frustrations and difficulties you had never anticipated. Especially, you will hear a thousand variations on the word “no.”
But again, don’t worry and don’t be disheartened. The negatives you experience are part of the “persistence test.” They go with the territory. They will determine how badly you really want it, whatever it is. And if it’s not worth fighting for, it’s probably not worth having in the first place.
This couple was not about to be stopped. They sat down and wrote another letter, this time to the shipping agent for the Love Boat. They explained their situation and repeated their request to book a stateroom for their reception on the afternoon of February fourth.
Their biggest single obstacle was getting enough money to buy their dream house before it was sold to someone else. But, acting in faith, they put down a one-thousand-dollar deposit with a closing date two months away.
Then, amazing things started to happen. A large corporate insurance policy he had been working on for six months, involving health, pensions, life and property covering every aspect of the company, finally came through. The president of the company called him and told him it had been approved by the board and they wanted to get it all set up and paid for by the end of the year. When the transaction was complete, his commission on the multiyear policy was just over $90,000, the largest commission he had ever made.
But it didn’t end there. A week later, the president of the client company called him and told him that he had been describing his insurance coverage to a friend of his who owned a similarly sized company. His friend was interested in installing the same policy in his own organization. Could he help?
Could he help? You bet he could! Within two weeks, he had put together an almost identical package for the new client. When the sale day closed, his commission on the second policy was another $90,000!
That was just the beginning. A few days later, they got a phone call from Dr. Schuller’s office, from the same secretary they had spoken to two weeks before.
“I don’t know what you said in your letter,” she said, “but Dr. Schuller came out of his office a few minutes ago with your letter in his hand and said, ’I’m going to do this wedding.’ If you can be here on February fourth, he can marry you at 2:00 P.M.”
Then, if that wasn’t enough, a week later they got a call from the shipping company. They had just worked out the sailing schedule for the Love Boat for the new year. The ship would be docking at noon rather than 4:00 P.M. on February fourth and departing at 8:00 P.M. If they still wanted to have their reception aboard the ship, it would be available for them from 4:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M.
He concluded this story from the stage with these words: “I feel I’ve accomplished more in the past six weeks using these ideas than I have in the last five years. I thought I understood goal setting before, but I had no idea how powerful it could be until I actually sat down and approached it in an organized fashion.”
Notice the incredible power these two people put behind their goals by following the twelve steps. They activated all the mental laws and got them working in harmony behind a major definite purpose.
Step one: Desire. They knew exactly what they wanted. It was intensely personal. They felt very strongly about it.
Step two: Belief. They were absolutely convinced that they could have their wedding exactly as they dreamed it could be. They remained confident and optimistic in the face of adversity. They had complete faith that everything would work out for them.
Perhaps most important, they demonstrated their faith by taking specific actions to achieve their goals, even when they had been told that nothing could be done.
Step three: Write it down. They crystallized their hopes and dreams on paper, thereby committing themselves to them. And by writing them out in detail, they reinforced their desires and deepened their beliefs in their ultimate ability to attain them.
Step four: Determine how you will benefit from achieving your goal. They were very clear how every part of their planned wedding, and their dream home, would contribute to laying the foundation for their happiness in the years ahead.
Step five: Analyze your starting point. They sat down and took a serious look at their lives. They assessed where they were relative to where they really wanted to be. Then they made some clear decisions. Everything followed from that.
Step six: Set a deadline. They picked a specific date for their wedding and then worked back from that. When they ran into difficulties, they refused to change the date. They dug in, as soldiers do when they come under fire. They refused to be put off by the initial resistance they encountered.
Step seven: Identify the obstacles that stand in your way. They first determined that they wanted to buy a home in which to start their married life. Their main obstacle was that they did not have the money to purchase it. They began with that. The money for the home was their “rock,” their limiting step.
Step eight: Identify the additional knowledge or information you will require. They got busy and began finding out what they needed to know. They asked questions. They wrote letters. They took action.
Step nine: Identify the people whose cooperation you will require. They made a list of all the people they would need to work with to achieve their goals on the schedule they had set. He went to work with his prospective clients and they jointly went to work on the details of the wedding.
Step ten: Make a plan. Once they had worked through the first nine steps, they had all the ingredients of the plan worked out, like the ingredients in a recipe. It was then a relatively simple matter to put the plan together. With a complete list to work from, they had a unifying force for the next four months that brought them together and brought their goals to fruition.
Step eleven: Visualization. They got a clear mental picture of what they wanted. They walked through every room of their dream house. They got brochures with pictures of the Crystal Cathedral. They watched services conducted there on Sunday television. They looked at photos of the Love Boat and saw it on television as well. Throughout the day, and whenever they were together, they imagined and fantasized about their perfect wedding and their ideal home.
Step twelve: Persistence. They never considered the possibility of failure. They held to their dreams. They looked for ways over or around their obstacles. If one thing didn’t work, they tried something else. They persevered until they finally succeeded.
And then, when all was done, everyone stood around and told them how lucky they were! *
There are very few limitations on what you can accomplish. Most of them are self-imposed. They are the result of fears and doubts that stop you from trying. And you can overcome these self-limiting beliefs by taking actions consistent with your major purpose. The success and happiness you dream of begins with this system of goal setting, with you deciding exactly what you want and then doing what it takes to accomplish it.
The process and the system described in this chapter are far more than simply a mechanical means to make achievement more organized. They contain within them the combination to open the lock of your unlimited potential. These steps not only activate your positive mind and release your creativity, but they also cause all the mental laws to converge harmoniously toward the achievement of your dominant goals.
Most important, practicing these principles and rules for goal attainment unlocks the powers of your superconscious mind. This methodology makes available to you resources that you can use to change your life in ways you cannot yet imagine.
The proper activation and use of your superconscious mind is the most important discovery you can ever make. It is the key to happiness, health, prosperity and complete self-expression. The superconscious mind is the foundation of all personal greatness and high achievement, as you’ll see in the next chapter.