“Someone like you should have a goal of at least a $10,000,000 net worth.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” my mentor said confidently. “You have the kind of drive to make big things happen so your goals should reflect it.”
If it hadn’t been for the three previous years of goal setting failures, I would have jumped on my mentor’s recommendation and started mapping
out my goal for a $10,000,000 net worth. It’s not like it wasn’t appealing. I mean, the only people who wouldn’t want to be worth $10,000,000 are the ones worth more than that.
Something about the idea gave me pause though. Since learning about goal setting a few years prior, I had successfully set great, detailed, and impressive goals. I knew the action steps needed and none of them required me to be taller, stronger, or learn how to fly. However, my track record of accomplishment was pathetic. I also witnessed countless peers in the same situation. Why couldn’t we get it together?
How could we set goals that rivaled the most successful people in our company and not get anywhere close to their results? My answer was actually in my question.
Think of your own goal setting past.
- Where did the goals come from?
- How many of them started with an amount of money or promotion?
- How often did you set a goal based on an observation of someone else and their goals?
Before we establish timelines, implement tracking systems, and map out our action steps, we need to have a good goal. A goal that means enough to us that we don’t wimp out or get distracted. Good goals don’t come from other people’s goals or “stretching” ourselves to seek a bigger pile of cash.
Good goals are a natural bi-product of an engaged mindset and that mindset begins with a purposeful vision.
Thousands of people have released wonderful tools to teach us how to structure a goal once we have it, but no one had talked in detail about where a good goal should even come from. I didn’t learn it myself until I became obsessed with all facets of success.
The deeper I got, the more obvious it became. Whether they were conscious of it or not, mega successes didn’t and don’t set goals and then figure out how to fit them into their lives. They figure out what they want their lives to look like, why they want them to look that way, and goals emerge as the means to achieve that life.
If you’ve struggled with goals I hope that last statement hits you like a ton of bricks. Creating a goal without concern for how it fits your life and why it really matters is like climbing on a plane without knowing where it’s going or if the aircraft is safe. It might seem like an adventure, but you could end up a million miles from success and everything could crash in the slightest turbulence.
So how to do it? Here are the high-points for the sake of brevity.
Create a vision of the life you desire. You can break it down into individual pieces of business, home, relationships, health, and so on, but make sure to start with your overall life. It’s crucial to keep the big picture in mind or you could end up gaining in one area and losing it all in another.
In my life, it became obvious that the life I really wanted didn’t require the amount of money I was pursuing. By looking at the whole picture, I made adjustments that brought everything else into alignment and my goals harmonized. Remarkably, I replaced the income I willingly gave up while being much, much happier and more fulfilled.
Establish your purpose. Why do you want your life to look that way? Life is full of potential detours, pitfalls, and distractions. To maintain a course toward the life we want, it’s important that we have a drive within us and a sense of direction to guide us. Purpose provides both of those.
When I looked at the reasons that I wanted my life to look like my vision, I gained a clarity and resolve that I had never experienced. This is the common thread running between all great achievers. They have a WHY big enough to sustain them in all conditions.
With a vision, you’ll see things that need to be accomplished in order to draw closer to the life you desire. With a purpose, the decisions on how to accomplish those things is obvious. The combination of the two brings clear, strong goals.
Work these elements into your life and see how quickly your perspective toward goals change.
Be your best,
PJ
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