Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement. – Brian Tracy
"Don't care, so long as it has 4 wheels, well, have I got a beauty for you!"
What does that mean?
To me, this speaks of the mental image or picture that helps keep you moving until you achieve the end you had in mind. Without a goal, without a mental image or a picture of where you want to get to, how are you going to keep motivated to achieve anything? How will you know when you get there, if you have no idea where you’re going or what it looks like?
Why are Goals important?
If you say you want a car (as an example of your goal), but not a specific car (so the goal is very shallow and not specific), what are you going to get? Whatever happens to show up. Why is that? It’s because you only have enough fuel in your furnace to take one shot achieving your goal and you’ll take the first thing that comes along.
That’s how I ended up with a 1977 Dodge Aspen (affectionately known as the Gaspen, due to an accelerator pump problem, which was solved with a $5 rebuild kit from the local parts store). A similar thing tends to happen at bars. As it gets later, the goal gets fuzzier, weaker, until it’s devolved into “something with a pulse”. Of course, you only know of this from stories your friends told about other people they saw at bars. 8)
The clearer and more specific your goal is, the easier it is to recognize it when you see it, and the harder you are willing to work for it. If your mental image is fuzzy and black and white, you’d better be hunting Nessie or UFO’s. Color and clarity help immensely. So do sound, scent and motion.
This is the same technique we used a while back, but run to the opposite end of the spectrum. A picture of your goal is useful, especially if it’s somewhere you see it all the time – your desktop wallpaper, for example. Keep your goal visible, or like an untended fire, it will go out.
Where can I apply this in my life?
Come up with ten goals and write them down. The first five will probably be easy, they’re the usual New Year’s Eve resolutions. Then dig a little deeper and see if you can’t find something you really want, but may have buried because you thought it was unattainable (posters of specific people are probably not useful here, unless all you want to do is meet them).
Find one goal that seems fairly easy to attain (get an easy one down, to help build momentum). If you don’t have one on your list, come up with number eleven on the list. It should be something that will take at least a couple of weeks, but not more than two months. We want to get it done soon enough to provide encouragement, not relief (so you are glad that you were able do it, not saying “whew, glad that’s over with”).
Can you come up with a mental image of what this goal looks like? If the goal is to make an extra $50 a week, how would you spend it? Or would you save it? Save long term, or until you could afford to buy something nice? What is the end result of your newly earned wealth, so you can start imagining it (unless you are really motivated by a picture of Grant in green-and-creme).
Would you treat yourself to a very nice meal, or share it with a special someone? Would you save it up to buy a better computer monitor? Perhaps the radio in your car is crummy or the speakers are dying. Figure out what you’re going to do with the money and imagine it. Scour the web to find a decent picture of what you want to do.
Perhaps it’s a couple eating a nice dinner. Or a bright pink piggy-bank. Or the stereo you want to put in the car. Notice I haven’t yet discussed HOW you’re going to make the money. That’s next. First you need a goal, the fuel that will feed the furnace of achievement. First Thomas Edison wanted an electric light, then he figured out how to make it.
OK, now you have an image saved on your computer, or a picture clipped from a magazine and taped to the mirror or the fridge. That’s a good start. But that’s a two dimensional, paper representation (hopefully in color), not exactly the greatest representation of your goal, right?
Can you stop somewhere, say once or twice a week, and see the item or something like it? Drive by the restaurant and park down wind, smell the yummy food. Get hungry (figuratively and literally). If it’s a stereo, be a pest and visit ‘your’ unit at the local store and listen for a couple of songs, see the item in 3D and hear it.
Perhaps you can allocate an hour a week scouring second hand stores for the perfect piggy bank to hold your new earnings. The point is to make the goal real; to touch it, smell it, see it in 3D, in the real world. The more senses you can bring to bear, the more real it will become in your mind (just realize people will stare at you if you start licking the radio). Some of this is the planning prior to starting to execute the goal, and some is motivation while pursuing the goal. Both are the fuel described in the quote.
Now for the HOW, in this case, earning an extra $50 a week. Only you know what you can do, how much time you have, what your skills are, what you are willing to do. A paper route? Flipping burgers once a week, or washing dishes in the back (so no one sees you)? Standing on a street corner on the weekend spinning a sign for a business?
Work one night a week with a janitorial temp company, filling in for people who called in sick. There are some home based (and legitimate) opportunities to make a little cash on the side. You will need to brainstorm ideas for how to get from where you are to where the goal is, and plan to have several plans (as Plan A rarely works out, at least for me).
Then all that is left is to execute the plan, and collect the rewards. That is the easy part if you did your homework, got yourself a goal, and motivated yourself (put gathered the fuel). Achievement completed! Congratulations. What’s your next goal?
As you get better at this, you may find that one-at-a-time is slow going. Perhaps you have a financial goal (another $50 a week, for gym fees), a person improvement goal (drop my BMI by a point), a relationship goal (be the kind of person that will attract the person I want to spend time with).
You might even set a car goal (something better than a 77 Dodge Aspen – like an 85 Buick Estate Wagon – sometimes it takes me a few tries to learn a lesson). In case you hadn’t guessed, these were some of my goals from a few years back. You’ll have to come up with your own. 8)
I have given you a fairly superficial example. Now it’s crunch time. What do you want and how bad do you want it? Work on the ways to help you to want it even more. Most of us are creatures of habit. Objects at rest on the couch tend to remain on the couch. That’s where your goal comes in, it’s gotta be an outside force powerful enough to move you off the couch and get you busy.
If your goal is big enough, you’ll have enough fuel to get you over any obstacle in your path, and achieve the desired result. While I will wish you “Good Luck”, I think you know that luck will have very little to do with the end result. Get busy, and stay busy!
From: Twitter, undocumented feed (my bad)
confirmed at: http://www.inspirational-quotes.info/goals1.html (1/4 of the way down)
Photo by Lara604
