Your goals are the road maps that guide you and show you what is possible for your life. – Les Brown
What does that mean?
To me, this quote talks about the human journey. Where are you going and how will you know when you get there? Life is full of changing currents, any of which can turn you around. Goals help keep you headed in the direction of your choice, and keeps you making progress towards the goal.
As you start to complete goals, you start to create a trajectory, a path of greater and greater accomplishments. This pattern of accomplishments shows you where you can go. It helps you set new goals, each more challenging, more interesting, more rewarding, and more fun than the last.
Why are goals important?
If you don’t have any goals, how can you figure out what you are going to do? How do you figure out where you are going? How do you know when you’re off course and need to change your course, or try a different road?
If you don’t have goals, your life appears to others (and probably to yourself as well) as a series of random and unrelated events. How are you going to see where your life is going if all you can perceive is randomness?
By having goals, your life can have a direction, a course, a star to steer by, a road map, or whatever your favorite analogy might be. You will know when you’re off course, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what needs to be done to get back on course. You will also have a road map of a larger scale, showing past accomplishments and pointing the way forward to bigger and better things.
Where can I apply this in my life?
I have covered goals before, specifically here and here, so I won’t go over the minutia of how to set a goal (you can check the prior posts above, or search). What we will focus on in this post is the second half of the quote, about how goals can show you what is possible in your life.
Have you ever wondered where you are going? Sometimes I wonder about it quite a bit. However, one thing you can always do is look at what you have accomplished. That can’t be the only criteria you use, or you will be driving forward by looking in the rear view mirror, and that won’t end well.
What you can do with your history of accomplishments is see a trajectory. Are you doing bigger things? Are you getting more satisfaction? Are you finding more rewarding challenges? That sounds like you’re on a good path, or at least headed in the correct direction.
If you aren’t seeing things getting better, you might want to take some time and consider why that might be. Grab some paper and write down two lists, one of the things that you have accomplished, and another of the things that didn’t get accomplished.
Examine the first list and see if you can spot a trend or a common theme. Is anything getting better, are they all about the same, or is it sliding the wrong direction? Take some time to brainstorm ideas about why things aren’t going as well as you might want them to, then see if you can’t come up with some ideas for your next few goals that take you past this temporary road block.
Next, take some time and look at the second list, the things that didn’t get accomplished. Is there a common reason why? In my case, it’s almost always lack of effort on my part, what is it in your case? Take a little while and brainstorm out some ideas as to how to get at least some of the items on the list back on track. You should be able to get at least one of them back up and running, right? How will the completion of that item change your trajectory? Now do something, it can be a little thing, but do something to get the project moving.
Now that you’ve looked at the past (and if necessary, started a remediation plan), what will you do next? What is the next logical step in the progression? There are probably a number of ways to go from where you are. Which one is the most interesting, most profitable, most challenging or the most fun?
Grab some paper and start a plan for the next great adventure. Rough out a plan, figure out what you can do, what you need help with and what you’re going to have to hire out. Break each step down again and again until you know how you are going to do it, or how someone else is going to do the parts you can’t or would prefer not to do.
Finally, take the first step. It’s just a fantasy until you take the first step. Choose something simple and straight forward, and do it. Even something as simple as calling around to find out who can do the tough parts, get quotes, or round up buddies for a beer-n-pizza night. Make it real, then work it until it gives in. Re-plan if you hit a snag, but keep moving forward. You’ll be amazed at what is possible.
From: Twitter, @motivatquotes
confirmed at : http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/lesbrown385799.html
Photo by o5com
