A goal is the object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result. It should take a few weeks, or months (in my case, years) to achieve it. Daily tasks such as “cooking” are not considered goals in this guide.

It should be seen as a big ambition, something that seems slightly out of reach. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Africa’s first elected female president, sees a goal as something that scares you.

I believe that goals are dreams with a deadline.

WHERE IS YOUR HEAD AT?

When it comes to setting goals, you have:

• those who don’t believe in the concept,
• those who can’t find one,
• and those who have too many.

To those people who still don’t believe in the concept of setting goals: it’s better to determine what you want your outcome to be and lay out a series of steps to get there, rather than try to come up with your endgames midway through a project.

Are you a success seeker or a failure avoid-er? – Scott Geller, 2013, Behavioral Psychologist, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Virginia Tech.

To those who can’t seem to find a goal: I was one of you. Eventually I realised that, with a lot of patience and hard work, most of what I day-dreamed about was possible. Once you allow yourself to dream big, you will want everything. Once you’ll believe in your ability to conquer, then you’ll see that ideas of goals will come flooding in your life like there’s no tomorrow.

QUOTES

In his book, E-myth (1986), Michael Gerber asks us in one of this chapters, Primary Aims. He asks you “what would I want to be remembered as?”. He encourages you to imagine yourself at your own funeral: what would people say? This is your imagination, allow it to run wild.

Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality. – Earl Nightingale

To those who have too many ideas, it is time to pick and focus.

FOCUS OR DROWN

I praise these people, but most of us can’t (or should I say won’t) pull that off.

The problem with signing up to too many activities is that we spread ourselves too thin. Indeed, we end up quitting half of their engagements by the end of the first term. Moreover, we end up doing the bare minimum, burnout, and feel like a failure.

This is THE mistake you want to avoid: pick one (max two) goal(s) and focus on excelling at them!

TRUST ME…

I get those reading this and thinking, “I cant give up on the others, I will stick to 5 instead of 10”. I remember thinking that when I first came across this notion of focus.

If you are anything like me, here’s my ultimate adice: pick 1 (MAX 2) goal(s) to focus on. If you don’t, you will lose 3 precious years of your life. You will try doing everything you thought you could do. You will do it badly, you will fail on some… Eventually, after a few disasters, you will acknowledge this lesson of focus.

Unless you are one of these super-genius-high-achiever-incredibly-disciplined humans, you will want to follow this advice. Now it’s up to you.

It’s time to learn how you set good goals.

HOW TO SET GOALS

A big goal is only achieved when every little thing that you do every day, gets you closer to that goal. – Maren Kate, Escaping 9 to 5.

Carrie Green (2014), Founder of The Female Entrepreneur Association, explains in her TED talk that, whilst writing down her goals, she repeats these questions to herself:

• What do I want to achieve?
• Why do I want to achieve it
• What kind of person so I need to become in order to achieve it?

And then proceeds in programming her mind to make it happen.

According to David Allen, a productivity consultant, in his 2014 Ted Talk, our brain is a “master planner”, a brilliant and sophisticated problem solving machine. You are a natural planner.

By practicing and researching, we will come up with a good strategy to live our desired vision.

REVERSE ENGINEER

Brendon Burchard, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author, states that you need to start by working backwards. Secondly, Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur and angel investor, talks about “reverse engineering”. You start from the end goal and then think “what is needed to get there?” at each step of the way.

Once a vague path is constructed, drill down the action/step to the very next physical thing. Estimate the resources you need, so you know what to expect. Stephen Duneier, an investor manager, in his 2017 TED talk, explains to us what stands between us and achieving our most ambitious dreams. It has far less to do with possessing some magical skill or talent, and far more to do with how you approach problems and make decisions to solve them. Duneier reveals to us his one secret to achieve any challenge he desired here (one of the most empowering presentations I listened to).

You take these big concepts, these complex ideas, these big assignments, and you break them down to much more manageable tasks, and then along the way you make marginal improvement to the process.

HIERARCHY OF GOAL

Finally, it is time to create your first hierarchy of goals. You start off by giving a very specific goal at the top. Things like “travel more” or “youtube famous” is not good enough. You need to give the exact number of countries you want to travel to, the exact number of views or subs you want to attract.

You will have to do a bit of research but this will hopefully make you realize how possible your goal is.

To find the steps to get to a goal, life coach Mel Robbins (2011) asks us to Google it. Cyber stalk those who are in the position you dream to be in. Find people who achieved exactly that goal. Find if they’ve been interviewed by anyone about the process or if they own a blog or anything else.

Set yourself sub goals and progress checkpoints to chart your progress in an affirmative manner. – Jim Rohn, 2001

VISION BOARDS

Once you’ve determined your specific hierarchy of goals, I would highly recommend taking half a day to create your vision board! This is suppose to be a fun and creative part of the process. Take a board and stick images, cut outs from magazines and key words to it. It needs to make you think and dream about your goals and outcomes. Look at it daily and it should help you stay on track and help manifest what you aim for.

REAL WORLD

I am not that naïve: all of us have “daily chores” to do, some important, some urgent, some useless. All of these chores gives us the impression that we have so much on our plate when actually, for a large majority of us, that is just not the case. But it’s impossible to start debating if we don’t have a clarifying list in front of us, which will be the subject of our next section.