How to set Goals

Planning for the future is one of the most effective means of ensuring success.  Only when you plan ahead can you ever truly be prepared, and preparation is essential for success.

But what are you planning ahead for?  It may seem obvious, but it’s a question that requires significant attention.  Everyone knows that it is important to plan ahead for the future, but why?  What are you aiming for?  You see, planning ahead is only one part of the equation.  The other is Setting Goals.  Many people fail to realize just how crucial it is to create clear, realistic Goals to work towards.  But without these Goals, it is extremely difficult to achieve your idea of success.  After all, how can you plan without an endpoint in mind?  Of course, oftentimes the Goal you work for is obvious and does not require significant thought—for example, if you are planning a sales trip, your Goal is clearly to sell as much of your product or service as you can.

But for long term success, Setting Goals is essential.  You must have a solid destination in mind for your future, actual accomplishments in mind that you want to make a reality by a certain time.  Because when it comes to the long term, it is not enough to plan the details of a future sales trip.  You need to determine why you are going to go on that sales trip.  How does that fit into your larger, overall strategy for success?  What is your definition of success?  Only once you are able to answer these questions can you fully prepare for future success.

And yet there is another benefit to Setting Goals, beyond improving your ability to strategize long-term.  By Setting Goals, you actually greatly increase your chances of achieving them.  This is because there is a much greater degree of motivation when you are working towards a tangible Goal, rather than general success.  Imagine, for example, that you are a realtor.  If you do not set a specific Goal, instead deciding to work hard and do the best that you can for the year, then certainly you could have a successful year—but you also might not.  But consider if at the beginning of the year you said to yourself, “I am going to reach $1,000,000 worth of home sales by the end of the year.”  Now you have a specific Goal to work towards, and you’ll regularly compare your success so far with how far you have to go.  It’ll become more obvious to you when a tactic or technique is not working, so you’ll react and adapt more quickly.  If you begin to lag behind, you’ll see that you are heading towards failure, and that will encourage you to dig down and work harder.  When you lack specific Goals, it’s easy to feel detached from your results.  But when you can clearly see whether you are heading towards success or not, you become more invested, which leads to working harder and better, and therefore success.

There is, however, a risk involved with Setting Goals, and that is the risk of failure.  Inevitably, you will sometimes fail to reach your Goals.  The important thing to understand is that that is okay.  You can’t reach your Goals every time.  In fact, you actually should fail to meet your Goals on occasion.  If you never fail to meet your Goals, it’s probably because your Goals were too easy to attain.  You want to challenge yourself with your Goals, not ensure that you are able to match them.  And if you Set a Goal for the year, or even for two or three years, and you don’t make it, that’s okay—now you are prepared to Set a more realistic Goal for the future and to work harder to achieve it.