DETERMINE YOUR TRUE GOALS

“Realize what you really want. It stops you from chasing butterflies and puts you to work digging gold.” (William Moulton Marsden)

My favorite word in goal setting, and in success in general, is the word “Clarity.” There is a direct relationship between the level of clarity you have about who you are and what you want, and virtually everything you accomplish in life.

Superior men and women invest the time necessary to develop absolute clarity about themselves and what they really want, like designing a detailed blueprint for a building, before they begin construction. Average people just throw themselves at life, like a dog chasing a passing car, and wonder why they never seem to catch anything, or keep anything worthwhile.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Have you built your castles in the air? Good. That is where they should be built. Now, go to work and build foundations under them.”
In this chapter, you begin to crystallize your visions and values into concrete goals and objectives that you can work on, every single day.

Make Your Goals Personal
Earlier I mentioned that intense, burning desire is absolutely essential to the overcoming of obstacles and the achieving of great goals. For your desire to be intense enough, your goals must be purely personal. They must be goals that you choose for yourself, rather than goals that someone else wants for you, or that you want to achieve to please someone in your life. In goal setting, for the process to be effective, you must be perfectly selfish about what is that you really, really want for yourself.
This doesn’t mean that you cannot do things for other people, either at home or at work. This simply means that, in setting goals for your life, you start with yourself, and work forward.

The Great Question
One of the most important questions in goal setting is this: “What do I really want to do with my life?” If you could do or be or have anything at all in life, what would it be? Remember, you can’t hit a target you can’t see. You should return to this question, over and over again, in the months and years ahead. “What do I really want to do with my life?”

In determining your true goals, you start with your vision, your values and your ideals. When you begin, these will often feel a bit like fantasies, detached from reality. However, now your job is to make them concrete, like designing a dream house on paper.

Decide What You Really Want
You start with your general goals and then move to more to more specific goals:
1. What are your three most important goals in your business and career, right now?
2. What are your three most important financial goals right now?
3. What are your three most important
family or relationship goals, right now?
4. What are your three most important health and fitness goals, right now?

Identify Your Major Worries
The flipside of the above questions is for you to ask, “What are my three biggest worries or concerns in life, right now?” What bothers you, worries you, concerns you, and preoccupies you, in your day-to-day life? What aggravates or irritates you? What is robbing you of happiness, more than anything else? As a friend of mine often asks, “Where does it hurt?”

Once you have identified your biggest problems, worries or concerns, ask yourself:
1. What are the ideal solutions to each of these problems?
2. How could I eliminate these problems or worries immediately?
3. What is the fastest and most direct way to solve this problem?”