Success is a choice.
You alone decide what you want and how you’ll achieve it.
If you don’t set goals, then you’re implicitly handing your life over to divine fate and betting on luck to provide for your needs.
When you set goals, you’re pro-actively choosing a life path with self-responsibility and playing an active role in your destiny – and that can make the difference between success and failure.
Additionally, if you aren’t writing your goals down and reviewing them regularly, then you aren’t setting yourself up to win. You are shortchanging yourself and your financial future.
Without goals, your life is like a sailboat without a rudder: it’ll just spin in circles. Without goals, your daily life is as purposeless as driving a car without a destination in mind.
In fact think of a GPS in your car, this is turn by turn (step by step), guide lines to get where you want to go.
Goals are the focal point that gives your life direction and drives successful forward momentum.
In order for you to realize your potential as a human being, then goal setting is as necessary as breathing.
I like to think of the time spent writing and reviewing my goals as an investment in my future. It doesn’t cost me time: it saves me time by eliminating waste.
The process creates amazing results, and nobody will charge you a dime for it. Where else can you risk nothing and get a huge potential reward? It’s a no-brainer: everyone should do it.
Yet, surprisingly few people take advantage of this free and proven formula to success. In fact, Harvard Business School conducted a study on goal setting and found:
After a 30-year follow up, the conclusion was the 3% with written goals earned an astounding 10 times the amount of the 83% group. Impressed?
Well, other studies have shown people with written goals also tend to have better health and happier marriages. Do any of those results motivate you to write out your goals?
The bottom line is proper goal setting is essential to your success, yet few people do it.
Shocking, but true.
If you want to retire early and wealthy and be part of the 5% who create financial security in their lives, then you’ll make maximum use of this free and incredibly valuable tool.
Your life is an endless series of daily choices, and how you manage those choices will determine the outcome of your life.
Yet, most of our decisions are made subconsciously.
By setting goals, you set a context from which you are consciously making your daily decisions. You’re applying the resources of your mind to accomplish a specific outcome. As a result, your life moves toward the goal.
The reason goal setting works so well is because specific changes occur in your mind as a result of writing out your goals. Your awareness is affected in five different ways, each giving you a competitive advantage over others who do not set goals:
“More men fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent.” – Billy Sunday
I had that experience recently when I decided to buy a Lazy Daze brand motor home and started noticing them everywhere.
I never noticed the Lazy Daze brand before, but my eyes were guaranteed to pick that particular brand out from all other vehicles on the road. I didn’t notice other brands of motor homes or other vehicles; I only noticed what my mind had set its sights on acquiring.
Your mind works the same way with wealth and investing. You’ll see possibilities and solutions you never would have noticed had you not set the goal and committed to it.
Creating a heightened awareness around your financial objectives by setting goals prepares your mind to recognize opportunity when it appears.
“Penicillin was indeed the product of accidental discovery, but the discovery was made, and the knowledge developed, because certain scientists had definite goals in mind. ‘Chance,’ Pasteur wrote, ‘favors only the prepared mind.'” – Saturday Review
You can think of setting goals as planting a seed in your mind.
When you develop a plan to achieve the goal and practice daily habits congruent with achieving the goal, it’s like giving the seed water, sunlight and nutrition.
With this nurturing, the seed becomes a tree with a good strong trunk, full of branches. In the fullness of time, it will produce delectable fruit and a lifetime of happiness and meaning.
The same will happen with your wealth building goals if you set them in writing and nurture them every day.
Goal setting works: it’s worth the effort.
But how do you do it?