Imagine a ship leaving a harbour, but there’s no destination. There’s a crew on board ready to guide the ship to a specific place, but the crew haven’t been told where the ship’s going.
Now as this ship leaves the safe haven of the dock, the ropes are untied and the ship starts to move away. I think you’ll agree that if it even gets out of the harbour, it will end up in some random deserted island beach because it doesn’t have a destination. None of the crew know where it’s going.
At best, they could stop it crashing into things, but that’s no way to sail a ship. You’d just be mindlessly floating around the ocean. And the same is true of the human mind. It can be compared to a powerful ship, only the human mind can achieve a lot more than a ship.
A human mind has the power to change the world. Enormous power beyond belief, and yet if you don’t give the mind a goal, something to aim for, it will behave like a ship. It will float through life and not go anywhere i particular. At best it will try to ‘stop crashing’.
Now Imagine a man going through life with no destination.
He’s a clever man and he has a lot of potential. He ‘could’ do great things. Now imagine this man getting a job. He gets a job to survive, to pay the bills. He doesn’t really like this job, but he gets up each morning and goes to work, using a car that’s paid for by the job he’s going to.
Now, he will do his best to ‘not crash’ just like a ship with an able bodied crew would, but he doesn’t achieve anything. He just starts afloat. That’s not enough in life, and when you’re honest with yourself, you don’t really want to be an average individual. If you asked anyone if they really wanted to be just a mediocre sort of person they’d say no, I want to be exceptional.
This is the reason it’s so very important to have goals. Not just vague goals that you can convince yourself you’re working towards, oh no. I mean clear, concise and measurable goals. Goals that you can write down on a piece of paper, and at the end of the month look back and clearly see whether you’ve achieved them.
Without that, it’s just going to be the ship situation all over again. the goal is too vague, so you just end up ‘heading for land’. Sure it’s better than just floating around, but you should always work towards one certain thing. That’s what this page is for. To provide you with a small resource to help you with goal setting.
Setting yourself goals and objectives in life
When you think about setting goals for yourself, you may conjure up images up writing a list of things you have to do on a large piece of paper and then sticking it on the fridge, right? That’s good, but it’s not ideal. You see, when you just stick a load of goals on a list, and hope that it will remind you to go after them, it gives you an escape route.
If you give yourself a way to escape, your mind will take it. In this case, the escape route is that you can stick the list up, and forget about it after a few days. I know because I’ve done the same thing. Sticking up lists of words that I wanted to learn in another language, only to realize after a few months that I’d ‘tuned them out’ even though they’re right there on the wall.
I have seen the paper on the wall so many times, but I still haven’t learned the words, or even bothered to learn the language after having been reminded by the note. This is because it gets to be a part of the room and you can tune it out or just forget about it very easily. There is an alternative though! Keep reading..
The most effective way to set and achieve goals
When you’re writing out your list of objectives and goals that you want to accomplish, make them such that you KNOW if you’ve achieved them or not. Write objectives such as ‘get up before 8’ or ‘write 4 pages of an eBook a day’ so that at the end of each day, you know for certain whether you’ve reached your goals or not.
This way, you’re not able to talk yourself out of it or try to justify your failures, you either reached your objective, or you failed. Simple as that. Doing it this way means that you can be honest with yourself and see exactly what’s going on, in the sense that you know without doubt whether you’re on track or not.
Many people set goals that are too ambiguous, goals that you don’t really know how you’re doing with them, or if you’re even achieving them. Things like –
- Get healthier
- Get up earlier
- Write an eBook
These are goals that are so vague that you don’t really know when you’ve achieved them. What counts as being ‘fit’? Who knows. It’s different for everyone. A better set of goals would be..
- Get your bodyweight to 11 Stone, and be able to do 30 pull-ups in a row by the end of this year
- Get up before 7 every day for a month
- Write an eBook on Personal Development that’s 80 pages long
Do you see? These objectives are easy to measure because they’re SPECIFIC. they are clear and concise, and it’s easy to see whether you’ve achieved them or not. That’s the most effective way to set goals, make them specific and measurable. They don’t need to be difficult or large goals at first, make small ones that are very specific. Get used to reaching and achieving them, and then move on.
Setting bigger goals and objectives
When you’ve mastered setting and achieving smaller goals, it’s time to start thinking about the bigger ones. Things like your life purpose, and how you can move towards that. Don’t get me wrong, setting small goals is in fact a part of achieving the big ones.
Even the little ones I used as examples are part of my ultimate life goal, which is to help as many people as possible become the best version of themselves. Getting up earlier helps me to do this by giving me more time to create content like this blog.. It all links together.
So the first step with this is to decide on your life purpose. Sometimes it takes years to discover this, but for others it can be realised in a few minutes. When you’ve thought long and hard about your life purpose, or about what you want to do with your life, then start thinking about a ‘life goal’.
This is a new type of goal, because you’ll need to do some research. You’ll need to look up exactly how to achieve this goal, I can’t show you how on here, because firstly, I don’t know what your life goal is, and also it’s personal. It’s different for everyone.
Search on Google, ask your family and friends about the best way to get to where you want to get to. If you’re trying to start a blog, or make money doing what you love, I can help with those types of goals, but anything else will need to be researched by you!
When you’ve researched how to do it..
Break the large goal up into lots of easy goals. Think about the smaller picture that you can work on every day, if your goal is to become a doctor, then you’ll have to pay the price of long years of study probably at a university. So start getting your application ready, work on your interview skills etc…
Whatever your goal is, make sure it’s broken down into lots of smaller and more actionable things. Breaking it down like this keeps you focused. It’s much easier to focus on eating a solid breakfast every day than it is to think about ‘drastically changing your body’ in 6 months. It’s much easier, but it’s a start!
To change your body, you’ll need to work on your diet, so start with that. To write a blog, you’ll need to have something to say, so start reading a book or so every week. Start with the SMALL things, and then eventually you’ll have achieved the big things. Imagine building a wall..
You don’t think in terms of the whole wall, rather think in terms of laying ONE brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. Then lay another, as best as you can possibly do it, and soon enough you’ll not only have a wall, but you’ll have a perfect and amazing wall.