Q&A How Do You Set And Stick To Goals?

Hi there. Throughout the year I've received a lot of questions from my friends on Facebook. So we've decided to sit down and answer these questions and let me give you my thoughts and insights and experiences and they may be helpful to you. And questions from one person may be a question that you might have asked yourself. So let's get started.

Priya from Facebook asked I set goals but tend to change them continuously because somewhere deep inside I believe I can't reach them. Or I suffer from the shiny object syndrome, which is something else that attracts at the moment. Or I have too many contradicting goals and tend to switch between them because I can't choose. Any tips to solve this matter?

Well, that is a great question. With regard to goals, I am probably the best selling author and authority in the world on the subject of goals in 22 languages. So let me give you some thoughts. The number one reason why people don't achieve goals is because of fear of failure. They don't feel that it's possible to achieve them. Probably the reason for that is because they set goals that are enormous and big goals do not motivate you. Big goals destroy your motivation and take your heart away. When I first heard about goal setting, I decided to double my income in 30 days. And at the end of 30 days I went into a slump. And then I realized that doubling your income in 30 days is pretty ridiculous. It's taken you your whole life to get to where it is today. Doubling your income in 30 days is ridiculous. So I set a goal to increase my income by 50% in 12 months. And then I sat down and I made a list of all the different things that I could do or stop doing that would contribute toward me increasing my value and increasing my income. And of course, since I was in sales and business, I had a lot of control over my activity levels. People say, well, I work for a company, I have a fixed salary. Well, it's not possible to double your income in a situation like that. It's just you have to be realistic. So when we talk about goals, they have to be definite, they have to be realistic, they have to be achievable, and they have to be measurable. You have to be able to write down a very clear number and then you have to write down month by month, week by week, even day by day or hour by hour, the things that you need to engage in, the activities you need to engage in in order to achieve the goal. Here's another point is in order to be successful, you must have one Big goal. I give a goal setting exercise all over the world that is life changing. I go back a year later or two years later, or three years later, and I have thousands of people come up to me almost like a guru or a sage, and they say, you changed my life, you made me rich. And I said, it was the goals, wasn't it? And they said, yes, it was the goals. How did you know? And what I teach is this is take a piece of paper, make a list of 10 goals that you'd like to achieve in the next 12 months. These are one year goals. Now sometimes I'll have a one day, a one week, a one month, three months, six months. But they're all goals that you want to accomplish within 12 months. Then you look over this list and you say, if I could wave a magic wand and achieve any one goal on this list within 24 hours, which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on my life? And then you look at your list of 10 and the answer will jump out at you. And that becomes your major definite purpose. This becomes your major goal. Then you transfer this to a clean sheet of paper and you write a deadline. When you want to achieve this goal, you make a list of everything that you could think of, that you could do to achieve this goal. You then organize this list like a checklist in order of sequence. What do you do first, what do you do second, what do you do third? And then you take action on your goal. And then you do something on that goal every day, seven days a week. It's a very simple system. Decide the most important goal, write it down, make a plan, work on it every day, and then all of your other goals will start to move forward. You'll start to make progress on the big goal, but all the other goals will start to move forward almost without you even paying attention to them. So that's really the key to success, is single focus. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were at a dinner party with Bill Gates father and a large number of other people at Bill Gates home in Seattle last year. And they were chatting with each other, they're very good friends. And somebody came up to them and said, excuse me, gentlemen, I don't mean to interrupt you, but you're three of the most important, most successful people in the world. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are number one, number two wealthiest men in the world. What would you say is the most important ingredient for success? And they all stopped, broke off their conversation, and all turned simultaneously and looked at the man and said, focus. Focus is the most important quality for success. If you can focus, you can do anything. If you can't focus, you must always work for someone else who will make you focus now, wonderfully enough, focusing is like learning how to ride a bicycle or type with a keyboard. It's a learnable skill. You can learn to focus by practicing focus until it becomes automatic. One of my favorite quotes is from Goethe, the German philosopher, and he said, everything is hard before it's easy. So the formation of any new habit is hard. Before it's easy, you have to keep working at it. It's just like a bicycle. You keep falling down, you have to keep getting back up again until finally it becomes easier and easier, and soon it becomes automatic. And when you automatically get up each day, plan your day and work on your most important goal, your whole life will transform. Now, I've given you a couple of ideas, so the most important thing that you can do is to take action. So what one action are you going to take as a result of these key ideas that I've just given you? Whatever it is, jot it down and let me know. Remember, one action that you take that you would not have taken in the absence of this discussion can change your life forever.