“The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean unsailed,
a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released
and channeled toward some great good.”
Brian Tracy
Success is goals, and all else is commentary. All successful people are
intensely goal oriented. They know what they want and they are
focused single mindedly on achieving it, every single day.
Your ability to set goals is the master skill of success. Goals unlock
your positive mind and release ideas and energy for goal attainment.
Without goals, you simply drift and flow on the currents of life. With
goals, you fly like an arrow, straight and true to your target.
The truth is that you probably have more natural potential than you
could use if you lived one hundred lifetimes. Whatever you have
accomplished up until now is only a small fraction of what is truly
possible for you. One of the rules for success is this, it doesn’t matter
where you’re coming from; all that matters is where you’re going.
And where you are going is solely determined by yourself and your
own thoughts.
Clear goals increase your confidence, develop your competence and
boost your levels of motivation. As sales trainer Tom Hopkins says,
Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement.
Perhaps the greatest discovery in human history is the power of your
mind to create the aspects of your life. Everything you see around
you in the man-made world began as a thought or an idea in the
mind of a single person before it was translated into reality.
Everything in your life started as a thought, a wish, a hope or a
dream, either in your mind, or in the mind of someone else. Your
thoughts are creative. Your thoughts form and shape your world and
everything that happens to you.
The great summary statement of all religions, philosophies,
metaphysics, psychology and success is this: “You become what you
think about — most of the time.” Your outer world ultimately
becomes a reflection of your inner world, and mirrors back to you
what you think about. Whatever you think about continuously
emerges in your reality.
Many thousands of successful people have been asked what it is that
they think about most of the time. The most common answer given
by successful people is that they think about what they want, and how
to get it most of the time.
Unsuccessful, unhappy people think and talk about what they don’t
want most of the time. They talk about their problems and worries,
and who is to blame, most of the time. But successful people keep
their thoughts and conversation on the topics of their most intensely desired goals.
They think and talk about what they want most of the time.
Living without clear goals is like driving in a thick fog. No matter
how powerful or well engineered your car, you drive slowly,
hesitantly, making little progress on even the smoothest road.
Deciding upon your goals clears the fog immediately and allows you
to focus and channel your energies and abilities. Clear goals enable
you to step on the accelerator of your own life and leap ahead rapidly
toward achieving more of the things you really want.
Imagine this exercise: you take a homing pigeon out of its roost, put it
in a cage, cover the cage with a blanket, put the cage in a box and
then place the box into a closed truck cab. You can then drive a
thousand miles in any direction. If you then open the truck cab, take
out the box, take off the blanket and let the homing pigeon out of the
cage, the homing pigeon will fly up into the air, circle three times and
then fly unerringly back to its home roost a thousand miles away.
This is the only creature on earth that has this incredible cybernetic,
goal-seeking function, except for man.
You have the same goal achieving ability as the homing pigeon, but
with one marvelous addition. When you are absolutely clear about
your goal, you do not even have to know where it is or how it is to be
achieved. By simply deciding exactly what it is you want, you will
begin to move unerringly toward your goal, and your goal will start to move unerringly toward you. At exactly the right time, and in
exactly the right place, you and the goal will meet.
Because of this incredible cybernetic mechanism located deep within
your mind, you always achieve your goals, whatever they are. You
move toward them and they move toward you. If your goal is to get
home at night and watch television, you will almost certainly achieve
it. If your goal is to create a wonderful life full of health, happiness
and prosperity, you will achieve that as well. Like a computer, your
goal seeking mechanism is non-judgmental. It works automatically
and continuously to bring you what you want, regardless of what
you program into it.
Nature doesn’t care about the size or scope of your goals. If you set
little goals, your automatic goal achieving mechanism will enable
you to achieve little goals. If you set large goals, this natural
capability will enable you to achieve large goals. The size, scope and
detail of the goals you choose to think about most of the time is
completely up to you.
Here is a good question: If goal setting is automatic, why is it that so
few people have clear, written, measurable, time-bounded goals that
they work toward each day? This is one of the great mysteries of life.
I believe there are four reasons why people don’t set goals.
First, most people don’t realize the importance of goals. If you grow
up in a home where no one has goals, or you socialize with a group
where goals are neither discussed nor valued, you can very easily
reach adulthood without knowing that your ability to set and achieve
goals will have more of an effect on your life than any other skill.
Look around you. How many of your friends or family members are
clear and committed to their goals?
The second reason that people don’t have goals is because they don’t
know how to set them in the first place. Even worse, many people
think that they already have goals, when in reality, what they
actually have are a series of wishes or dreams like, “Be happy,” or
“Make a lot of money,” or “Have a nice family life.”
But these are not goals at all. They are merely fantasies that are
common to everyone. A goal however is something distinctly
different from a wish. It is clear, written and specific. It can be
quickly and easily described to another person. You can measure it,
and you know when you have achieved it, or not.
It is possible to take an advanced degree at a leading university
without ever receiving one hour of instruction on goal setting. It is
almost as if the people who determine the educational content of our
schools and universities are completely blind to the importance of goal setting in achieving success later in life. And of course, if you
never hear about goals until you are an adult, as I experienced, you
will have no idea how important they are to everything you do.
The third reason that people don’t set goals is because of the fear of
failure. Failure hurts. It is emotionally and often financially painful
and distressing. Everyone has had failure experiences from time to
time. Each time, they resolve to be more careful next time and avoid
failure experiences in the future. They then make the mistake of
unconsciously sabotaging themselves by not setting any goals at
which they might fail. They end up going through life functioning at
far lower levels than are truly possible for them.
The fourth reason that people don’t set goals is because of the fear of
rejection. People are afraid that if they set a goal and are not
successful, others will criticize or ridicule them. This is one of the
reasons why, when you begin to set goals, you should keep your
goals confidential. Don’t tell anyone. Let them see by your results
and achievements what you have accomplished, but don’t tell them
in advance. What they don’t know can’t hurt you.
