Put Your Goals in Writing Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants, can’ts into cans, dreams into plans and plans into reality. The act of writing clarifies your goals and provides you with a way to check your progress.
They included: exploring the River Nile, climbing the world’s highest mountains, following a career in medicine, playing Clair de Lune on the piano, marrying and having children, owning a cheetah, learning 3 foreign languages, visiting the birthplaces of both his grandfathers in Denmark and England, running a mile in 5 minutes, and riding a horse in a Rose Bowl Parade.
John wrote down 127 goals and when the 21st century dawned, he achieved his 109th goal – which was to live to see the 21st century. How did he achieve so many of his goals? By writing them down as a way of giving commitment to his dreams.
Dream Big: One of the factors that restricts the realisation of our full potential is the belief that we shouldn’t go for big goals. Yet all the evidence of those who realize big goals is that we can always achieve far more than we think. David Schwartz says in
But you need to remember that a goal and a dream are not always the same thing. In his book, “Straight From the Gut”, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch recalls a meeting with the top people from his nuclear engineering division.
For over an hour, the executives laid out their goals to sell three nuclear reactors a year in the United States. At the end, Welch thanked his executives but said that, no matter how well-intentioned, it was no more than a dream to expect the USA to buy nuclear reactors again. A more realistic and pragmatic goal would be to perhaps service existing nuclear facilities.
Today, GE are top in their category of servicing nuclear plants. They don’t invest in reactors any more.
Pitch Each Goal: Once you have set your ultimate goal, you then need to set the intermediate goals that will get you where you want.
Don’t pitch these too easily or too ambitiously or they will drop into the Drop Zone. Aim to make them challenging: out of reach, but not out of sight.
Imagine Yourself Succeeding When your will, your rational left-brained self, comes into conflict with your imagination, your creative right-brained self, your imagination wins every time. Mark Victor Hansen tells the story of the child who was frightened of monsters under her bed. To calm the little girl down, Hansen suggests it’s better to appeal to the little girl’s imagination than her reason. So, instead of saying something like, “Don’t be silly, there are no monsters there”, say something like, “Don’t worry, sweetheart, our monsters are the kind that look after kids”.
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