How to Achieve Any Goal

“A goal is a dream with a deadline” -Napoleon Hill

If you are the type of person who reads self help material and articles, odds are you have dreams that you want to achieve.  They can be smaller dreams like creating a side business that produces extra income for you and your family or huge dreams like being the CEO of your own billion-dollar tech company.

The size of the dream does not necessarily mean that it is harder to accomplish.  It is the approach you take to achieve the dream that largely determines the probability of realizing it.

What Do You Want?

The first step is to quantify the dream into a definite, precise goal.  If your dream is to own a vacation property at the beach, you need to be specific about what exactly it is that you want.  “I want to own a home on the beach in Fort Lauderdale” is much clearer.  Now you know what you want and where you want it.

Be Specific

This is where the fun begins.  Now, you would do your research to see how much beach houses in Fort Lauderdale cost and what types of homes you like.  If the homes you like are $200,000, that is another detail you have.  Now you know it is a beach home in Fort Lauderdale that costs $200,000.

Write it Down

Now that you know that, write it down somewhere you can see if every day.  There is no point in having a dream if you forget about it.  In that case you won’t do anything to advance the goal.  You must keep it front of mind and think about it. 

Put Up Pictures of the Goal

It is also helpful to have pictures of the goal that you can look at every day.  Picture enjoying yourself in the home on the beach with your family.  This visualization will make the goal very real to you and will help you achieve it.

Set a Deadline

The next step is very important:  set a deadline.  You can look at pictures of homes all day long but if you don’t decide when you want it by, it is a vague goal that is hard for your mind to relate to.  Choose a realistic time frame as part of the goal.  Maybe when you look at your finances, you figure you can come up with half of the money in 5 years and finance the other half.  Now the goal would read: “I want to own a $200,000 beach home in Fort Lauderdale in 5 years.”  We can work with this goal because it is specific and has a deadline.

So far so good.

Make a List

The next step is to make a list of everything you will need to achieve your goal.  We said that in 5 years, you would save half of the money, $100,000 and borrow the rest.  Now you need to make a list of all of your assets and determine which of them you will use for the purchase.  Then, you need to come up with a savings plan for the rest to equal $100,000.

If you had $30,000 saved, for example, you would need to save $70,000 in the next 5 years or approximately $1,200 per month.  So, you need to create a savings plan for that amount.  Add it to the list. 

Next, you would have to research how to get a loan for the other $100,000 as well as determine if there are any other costs associated with the home purchase as well as once you own it.  Add these to the list as well.

Put the To Dos in Your Calendar

Once you have a list of all of the items you need to work on to achieve the goal, you can organize it into a plan.  Prioritize which are the most important items, enter them into your personal calendar as “to do” entries and start on the most important one immediately. 

The last thing is to make sure that you work on something every day that will advance the goal. 

If you follow this formula, achieving any goal will be much easier, as it is systematized and broken down into actionable steps.  Even if you don’t feel like working on it, you have a deadline to meet that will make the work urgent for you and easier to do the steps involved.

So, to recap:

  1. Decide what you want in as much detail as possible.
  2. Write it down and keep it where you can read it every day.
  3. Set a definite deadline.
  4. Make a list of everything you need to do to achieve your goal.
  5. Organize the list into a plan.
  6. Take the most important tasks on the list and schedule them into your calendar to be worked on at specific times.
  7. Take action on the most important task immediately to get the process going.
  8. Do something every day to achieve the goal.
  9. ENJOY THE FRUITS OF YOUR LABOR!

1 thought on “How to Achieve Any Goal

    • […] The reasons are twofold.  Firstly, people do not necessarily know how to make a set of goals, but they feel societal pressure to make some changes in their lives, so they create resolutions, but they don’t know how to apply them.  Once you know how to make a goal and the process to achieving it, it becomes much easier to implement.  The process to make effective goals is covered here. […]

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