by Ray White
We’re talking about a definition of success, and not a group of goals. We will address goals in the next chapter. So keep your definition of success at a higher level. Make it something you can apply daily in many different circumstances. It should be something against which you can evaluate your day at work, your day with friends or family, or your day of relaxation.
1.What is your Higher Purpose? (From Previous Chapter)
2.Why do you want to be successful?
3.What are some success scenarios you dream about?
4.What do people say about you when you are successful?
5.What contributions are you making to other people’s lives when you are successful?
Take a few moments to imagine yourself as successful. Sit back, close your eyes, and really immerse yourself in what success feels like. What are those feelings? Where do they come from? How are you interacting with the people around you? What have you done or accomplished every day to get here? What happened today that made it a successful day?
6.Write your definition of success. Make it something you can evaluate your actions against daily for a long period of time. Note: If you can achieve it in three months, it is a goal, not a definition for success.
Write something in the box. Don’t try to make it perfect or make sure it fits certain parameters. Just write something down so you have a place to start. Use this definition until you can craft a better one.
Refine and Adjust
It is important that you feel comfortable, determined, and hopefully a little excited about your definition of success. Often though, people feel a little unsure. “Is it what I really want?” “Is it realistic?” “Is it bold enough?” These are common questions to ask upon seeing success defined and written down for the first time. The solution is to live with it for a while and continue to test and refine it. Write your definition of success down on a piece of paper, an index card, or as a daily reminder on your electronic calendar. Read it every day and challenge its fit for you. Below are some ideas to help you test and refine.
1.Think of how you will feel at the end of each day. Think of what you will want to have accomplished at the end of each day. Who will you want to have been with each day? Will living your definition of success support that?
2.Meet with your friends and family. Ask them to give you their definitions of success. Share your ideas about your definition of success and get their input. You don’t have to change it to make them happy, but they may provide insight that helps you understand how you really feel.
3.Who do you know that is successful? What can you learn from them? What do you think is working for them? How do you think they are defining success?
Every day, see what you can do to work toward fulfilling your definition of success. Success doesn’t come from innate skill or ability. It comes from hard work done every day, and some scientists say that means doing it every day for as long as 10 years. So how do you stay focused so that every day brings you one step closer to achieving your goals? How do you enjoy today and feel successful today? Having and knowing your definition of success course-corrects you every morning. You start out the morning and end the day knowing what you should be doing to be successful. It is a journey where you take one more step each day. So instead of waiting to reach that one pinnacle moment in your life you can call success, you can take satisfaction each day that you are moving toward and even implementing your definition of success. You are successful each day. You can feel good about your accomplishments on a daily basis, knowing you are doing the things that fit your definition of success. By stringing a lot of moments of success into days and eventually years of success, you will live a successful life.
“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” Michelangelo
Chapter 21
Clarify and Prioritize
"First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends: wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end."
Aristotle
The next two chapters are about how we “…adjust all your means to that end.”
Now that we have defined success, we can clarify and prioritize the steps necessary to be successful. Remember, success is what we take steps toward every day. It is not something that happens one day in the future, it is something we work on every day. Our goals are milestones along the journey that help us confirm that our daily path is on track. We will create three to five major goals and then a list of actions we can take that will have the most impact on reaching our milestones and living our definition of success. There may be more than five areas of your life you that would include in your definition of success. We want to prioritize the top three to five so we can focus on a few things and do them well, rather than trying to take on too many actions and not succeeding at any of them. Research by Latham and Locke showed that the probability of reaching your goals decreases when your workload is too heavy. In other words, if you don’t prioritize and focus on the important goals, you may end up with too much to do and not reach any of your goals.
We can also add, change, and make adjustments to our goals as we establish daily habits that put one area or another on track. A friend of mine pointed out that his faith was an important part of his definition of success. But he already practiced his faith through daily and weekly habits that he was unlikely to change. His question was, should faith be one of his top three to five goals. The answer will be different for everyone, but since he has already established solid daily habits for his faith, he can move on to other goals that will have an impact on his definition of success. At the same time, he can periodically confirm that he is on track for his faith and its impact on his definition of success, and prioritize it higher if he feels it is getting off track.
We use the terms goals and milestones interchangeably. Since success is a daily process, rather than something you wait to reach, the term milestones more accurately reflects the signs of accomplishment on your journey of success. Goals are the more common nomenclature and are the same as milestones.
Goals add purpose and meaning to our lives by helping to clarify the connection between what we do today and what will happen in the future. They give us responsibilities, deadlines, timetables, opportunities for mastering new skills, and reasons to have social interactions. Setting goals helps us connect today’s actions with the future. Goals provide clarity for our sense of purpose. They are something we can visualize, and they provide support for our beliefs that the actions we are taking today will lead to reaching our milestones. Goals that we create and own are more motivating than goals we pursue to please someone else. People are happier if they pursue goals that are consistent with their interests and values, rather than goals that are a result of work, peer, or family pressure.
Goals have an impact because we are creating conflict in our brain. Setting a goal sends a message to our conscious and sub-conscious minds that we are dissatisfied with our current condition and that a specified aspect of our lives should be different. The bigger the difference, the more motivated our brain is to change, so it can resolve the conflict.
Having goals gives us something to focus our attention on. Without goals, we meander through life experiencing random events that don’t lead us down any discernible path. There is activity without progress. Goals focus our actions to a self-chosen path and bring a pattern and clarity to what would otherwise be a haphazard menagerie of experiences.
Guidelines for Goals
Make your goals specific and challenging, yet achievable. Have a set date for accomplishment, and make them measurable so you can objectively evaluate your progress.
Goals should be specific. Being specific gives you a clear picture of what you need to do. Writing “I will exercise” paints a fuzzy mental picture with too many options to know exactly what you are going to
do. Writing “I will run two miles on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6 am” gives you an objective and concrete action you can take at a designated date and time.
We want our goals to be measurable so we can get feedback and see how we are doing. We also want to be able to say definitively whether we accomplished the goal or not. The obstacles and roadblocks we encounter trying to reach our goals will be significant. Most roadblocks are consciously and even unconsciously created by us. Stating our goal as “I will exercise” gives a lot of wiggle room for the less motivated part of our brains to accept walking to the car from the restaurant as exercise. If our goal is stated as “I will run two miles on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6 am,” then we can clearly measure whether we ran, on what days we ran, and whether we ran far enough to qualify as exercise.
The most effective goals will challenge us and push us beyond our comfort zone. Locke and Latham’s research showed that goals that provided significant challenge were achieved more often because they required significant conscious and subconscious commitment.
Challenging goals offer a higher level of achievement, and that potential achievement provides the extra motivation you need to push yourself a little harder. There is, however, a limit to how challenging you should make your goals. You have to believe that with significant effort you can achieve them. If you can envision the possibility of reaching your goal, but there is some concern about how difficult it will be, you probably have a good balance of challenge and achievability.
Write It Down
Just as we discussed in the last chapter on defining success and writing it down, writing down your goals is the first step to achieving them. Writing your goals on paper activates several physical and neural processes that will increase your chances of reaching your goals. Active engagement of your fingers and hands and activating your working memory help reinforce in your brain that these are important objectives that should get focus and priority. Writing also helps you visualize, evaluate, and organize your goals, which creates clarity. Writing activates the RAS (reticular activating system), which sends a signal that we should pay attention to opportunities related to these goals. As a result, your awareness increases, and you become more receptive to cues in your environment that will help you reach your goals.
Written goals can be more easily shared with your friends. Research by Dr. Gail Mathews from the Dominican University of California shows that sharing your goals with friends and meeting with them weekly significantly improves your chances of achieving those goals.
Most importantly, written goals give you something to refer back to that refreshes your memory. As our lives get busy, the goals get pushed to the background; and we need to re-read them to bring them back to being part of our conscious intentions. We should also evaluate our progress in reaching those goals on a regular basis.
One of the key aspects of successful goal-setting is feedback and evaluation on our progress. Written goals provide an objective system for measuring our progress.
Creating our Goals and Milestones
Let’s start by building clarity around what our milestones for success will be and what we specifically want to accomplish. In order to reach our goals or milestones, we need to have a clear picture of what they are. We need to see the shot so we can make the shot. Begin by closing your eyes and imagining what the milestones of success look and feel like. Are you married or single? Do you have children? What kinds of things are you doing? Who are you spending your time with? How are you helping others? Are you traveling to a foreign land, or sitting on a beach? What kind of car do you drive? What kind of house do you live in? How healthy are you? What have you accomplished? What activities make your days great?
Why Visualize?
Visualizing our dreams and setting goals provides us with clarity and focus. A clear picture of what we want to accomplish opens up our minds to the opportunities we will encounter that can move us forward in reaching our milestones. Also, a clear plan helps us measure our progress and determine what actions will help us reach our goals and what actions will distract from our goals.
Visualize your goal and then the steps it will take to reach the goal. Rather than focusing on the completed goal, focus on what it is going to take to get there. This helps you prepare your mind for the obstacles you are going to face and will help you fight through them. Visualizing a completed goal without including the steps you will take gives you a sense of fulfillment, but reduces your motivation to achieve that goal.
Visualizing our goals and milestones will not make them easier, it will make them inevitable. Reaching the goals that create success is difficult. It takes a lot of hard work, mistakes, challenges, and perseverance. Visualizing helps you keep your eye on the prize so you can push through the tough times and overcome all the obstacles. Knowing the challenges you will face on your way to reaching a goal will prepare you for the battles to come so you can face them with confidence and determination because you can visualize a clear picture of the result of your efforts.
I have three teenagers--two boys, and my youngest is a girl. Having kids is the most rewarding and fun challenge I have ever experienced. But it is really hard. It is incredibly hard to watch them be sad or hurt and to feel their pain, while you can’t do anything to stop it. It is even worse to see them learn hard lessons, feel their pain, and choose not to take action, because it is better they learn the lessons now rather than later, when the consequences will be much worse. But I stay focused on my goal of raising three happy and healthy kids, as well as the steps I need to take as a parent to get them there. By visualizing both, I am able to fight through the challenges and make decisions that will prepare my children for success and happiness every day, and not just today.
Specifying our goals will also give us something to prioritize. If we have a lot of goals and milestones rattling around inside our head, it is hard to know what comes first and what actions keep us on the path of accomplishing those goals.
As an example, we can use the analogy of a map and real destination to substitute for goals. If we are in Texas and we want to get to New York, we need to know where New York is and stay on the path to get there. We need clarity in our priorities and goals so we don’t turn toward Georgia on a whim or follow some “red herring” idea that will distract us for a while, but not result in reaching any milestones. We should only go to Georgia if we make a conscious decision to substitute Georgia (our new goal) for New York (our original goal).
Once we set our goals, we need to build a plan of action that will get us there. Most importantly, we always need to know our next step. If we want to be president of our company someday, our action plan might include getting an MBA, getting experience in various areas of the company, and getting promoted in our current job. Our next steps might include reading about various company presidents and what types of education or experience they had. Even better, we might schedule lunch with or find other ways to interview presidents of companies to get their advice. A next step might include making a list of schools where we could get an MBA and researching what it might cost. Make a list of actions and always have a next step.
Step 1: Activity - Create a Dream Board
On the following page, cut pictures out of magazines that reflect your dreams and what you want to accomplish, and then paste them into the box. They don’t have to be in any particular order or structure. Be sure to find at least one image to represent every milestone that represents your definition of success. Find images that reflect who you want to be or what you want out of life. Categories could include physical, intellectual, career, financial, creative, adventure, relationships, charity, and many others. You can use Microsoft PowerPoint or similar presentation software programs to collect and arrange digital images, then print out the collage and paste it onto the following page. As you choose pictures, keep repeating your Higher Purpose and your definition of success, then finding images that represent them.
Dream Board – A Reflec
tion of What I Want to Be and Accomplish
Step 2: Activity – Make Your List of Goals and Milestones
On the chart below, make a list of the pictures you included on your dream board. But don’t write the name of the picture, write down the goal or milestone it represents. Put the picture into words. For example, if you included a picture of a Tesla, your list would include: “Own a Tesla Model S.” Be specific, and be sure to add a date for when you want to accomplish this milestone. If you included a picture of a healthy person, your list might include “Be physically fit with a cholesterol level below 140 by December 31st, 2017.” For this exercise we are going to write more than five goals. In the next step we will prioritize and narrow down to the top three to five.
Goals/Milestones
Date
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5.
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8.
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Once you have your list of goals based on your dream board, check it over to make sure there is nothing else you want to add.
Step 3: Activity – Prioritize your goals and milestones
Now let’s re-order the goals from Step 2. On the next page, write your goals from the most important to the least important. Start with the question, “If I could only accomplish one thing, what would it be?” Think about your Higher Purpose and definition of success. They will help guide your decisions. Now, assume you’ve accomplished the first thing on the list; then ask the question again: “If I could only accomplish one more thing, what would it be?” Keep going through this process until you feel like you have captured the three to five goals that will have the most impact on your definition of success.
