Goal setting has implanted its roots overtime as a primary path and necessary action that needs to be taken to reach any level of success. It’s always been said that if you don’t have clear goals and understand what you are trying to achieve, then how can you ever reach your goals, milestones, dreams, and aspirations? Some people disagree with this theory. Many believe that goals don’t have anything to do with success and that it’s more driven behind work ethic and forming good habits.
I’d argue to say that even to form the good habits that we need to reach success, at some point goal setting will be involved even if it’s on a small scale. Additionally, you can research some of the top icons in the world who have built empires, and it seems to be a fundamental personality trait that all of them have.
They set goals, they remain disciplined, and they get things done. They don’t allow outside distractions to create too much noise or place a roadblock in front of their goals and visions. That’s what this post is all about.
In this post, the idea is to demonstrate, how goal setting can lead to success and to illustrate and point out some sound examples. Hopefully, after reading through this post, it will be clear that goal setting is imperative to your success and overall ability to reach anything worth-while. Let’s dive into some more of the fundamentals about why goal setting can help lead to success.
Goals Can Help You Understand the Entire Roadmap Needed to Succeed
People will most likely go back and forth about whether goal setting really does lead to success or not. Financial advisors, top of the chain company leaders and other successful people have always been torn on the subject. Some of these influential people believe that goals are 100% necessary to achieve anything and some absolutely hate the idea of goal setting and think it makes no impact.
I happen to be one of those people that believe that goal setting is critical toward achieving any level of success. I also think that the most influential people you can think of all performed goal setting of some sort. Without the goals they set, things could look much different for these individuals. Now, I have no way of knowing that for sure, but it’s a gut feeling and here’s why I believe that to be true.
Goals Help You See the Entire Picture- Even If That Picture Is Small and Blurry at First
You see, the world moves fast. Very fast. When you have no clear path toward what you are doing it’s tough for every little thing not to be a distraction. Why would you make a change or even know this was happening to you? Another point Is this, without goals, you don’t even know when you are off track. You are flying blind and hoping for the best which rarely works.
It helps dramatically to know where you are going and at least some form of an idea of how you intend on getting there. It will keep the focus clear, and you will begin to recognize when things are becoming destructive or getting in the way of what you are trying to achieve. Keep that in mind. Goal setting paints a picture no matter how blurry and tiny that picture starts as.
Goals and Goal Setting Track Failures During the Process- Extremely Needed Piece of the Puzzle
Perhaps my favorite part of goal setting. Tracking failures. Trust me, I hated this part of goal setting in the beginning. Having every mistake and every goal that you couldn’t quite hit the benchmark for can be frustrating in the beginning. Especially seeing it on paper constantly as a reminder that you failed. However, with goal setting, this slowly starts to shift. You begin to get excited to see the failures.
The important thing to always remember is that with goals and goal setting, failures are not avoidable. It’s going to happen no matter what you do or how hard you try to avoid it. With goal setting, however, the beautiful thing is to learn to track and always have these failures recordable. This does a few things for you.
1.) It reminds you of that failure so that you don’t make it again
2.) It Motivates You to Correct the initial error and mistake
3.) It Allows You to See how far you have come when looking back
All three of these items are crucial to staying motivated, building confidence and limiting mistakes over time. Always track failures and learn from them and avoid making the same mistake twice.
Goal Setting Tracks and Records the Successes Experienced During the Process
Now for a real motivation boost. Tracking successes can put you into a mood, you may not have known existed. When you achieve something or hit a benchmark, it’s quite the adrenaline rush, and it’s a one of a kind feeling. Without setting goals while attempting to achieve success, you don’t really know what you have accomplished.
Sure, you have good days and bad days. However, if you aren’t using goals to reach success, how do you really distinguish the results and how you arrived at them? Is a good day just not losing your job? Or is a good day getting that promotion? There is no clear path that you are targeting and no way to laser focus.
When goal setting, don’t only track the failures and mistakes mentioned previously. Be sure to monitor the successes and pat yourself on the back when a milestone is reached. You deserve it.
Goals Can Increase the Likelihood of Making Good Decisions- Goals Slow Things Down
Acting requires speed and a lot of it. So, don’t take this the wrong way. Goal setting is different. Goal setting should be performed before you ever even begin acting. You should know what actions you’re going to take, how many of them, why you are doing it and the possible result it will produce.
When you take the time to set goals before running full speed ahead, it forces you to analyze the situation carefully. You break down what’s important to you, and you begin learning and pinpointing exactly what you want and why you want it.
This only creates an environment built with more carefully planned good decisions as opposed to on the spot quick and hasty decisions. Remember when goal setting to slow down and take a breath. Analyze everything around you until you know exactly what you want and how you are going to get to it.
Be careful never to think too long or slow down too much. Careful planning and decision making are good, but they can’t also destroy everything. Don’t sit and wonder what if for days and weeks. If you know your goals, create a smart path, prioritize it and get moving.
Don’t Become Frozen
Lying around and being overly cautious is a recipe for disaster and I can assure you, you will achieve nothing using this method. Be smart but take chances. I’m not talking about gambling either.
I’m talking about rolling the dice differently. Some of the most significant rewards are right on the other side of fear. It’s tough to get any big rewards without rolling the dice and taking a chance from time to time. Just be as smart as possible about where you roll the dice and who you roll the dice with, and you should be okay.
Goals and Goal Setting Create Motivation and Help Channel Discipline
Goal setting helps create motivation in many ways. We all know how important motivation can be on the road to success. Without motivation, it becomes easy to want to give up or just “take a day off.” This only creates a slippery slope that’s tough to recover from when it begins. Goal setting helps eliminate ending up on this path, to begin with.
When you achieve a goal, and you have it recorded and documented, this can be monumental towards setting the next target, and the next target and the goal following that. It creates a steaming train of momentum.
Not only that but with goal setting, especially when you take the advice to write your goals down, something else great happens. You stayed disciplined and focused on your goals.
You begin making sure that everything you have on that piece of paper is taken care of before doing anything else which can do nothing but increase the likelihood that you ultimately reach success. Keep that motivation at high levels and keep that discipline and eventually, you will achieve success.
When you start to lose motivation, don’t beat yourself up. Take a step back. Take a breath. Evaluate and think about the situation. What’s going wrong? Where are you losing focus or interest? How do we get you back on track? Are you facing the fear of the unknown or are you just plain bored with the goals you created?
Only you can answer these questions, but they need to be answered and discussed in your head and on paper. You need to find the root of the problem if you want to fix it. The first step in fixing any problem is recognizing that there is a problem. If you are losing motivation, don’t just sit back and mope around. Get back up and start fighting for your success and figure out what adjustments need to be made.
Goals and Goal Setting Create Emotion
Goals help you find the “reason why” behind everything you do. In most circumstances, this is going to trigger some emotion or at least it should trigger some feeling. Most worthy goals are hard to achieve and need that strong reason why behind them.
This alone should be enough to spark some emotion. Not only that but goal setting allows you to dig a little deeper about what you really want. This isn’t a time to be setting goals based on what other people want from you. These kinds of goals will always fail in most circumstances, so it’s important to focus on you and find something you genuinely want to achieve.
A goal failed should always spark something from you. Whether it’s anger, fear, sadness or disappointment. It should never be a shoulder shrug and move onto the next fun thing I can do. If this is the case, you need some help with goal setting, and you need to find your reason why which will be discussed in the next session.
Get Fired Up
Find goals that get you so fired up until it’s hard to sit still. Grant Cordone likes to say, either be obsessed or be average. He doesn’t think there is a middle ground. You should believe that there is no other option but pulling this off and when you don’t, sadly, it should be devastating.
When you set goals with these kinds of heavyweights attached, it becomes much more meaningful to you to succeed, and you have everything in your stomach, mind, and soul trying to push. This creates a hell of a force toward achieving and this is what separates the people that DO and the people that DON’T. Emotion and a reason to succeed is a vast fundamental step if goals are going to help you reach success.
Goals Re-Create Your “Reason Why” On A Daily Basis
Goals can lead to success purely because it can be your daily reminder. Every day you should have your goals written down. Me personally, I also like to write the reason behind the goal down. Sometimes it doesn’t even need to be written traditionally to have a strong enough reminder to drive you to success. A picture of your kid at your desk or in your calendar can be a strong reminder and reason why that can help remind you exactly why you are trying to accomplish something harder than everyone else around you.
Keep this reminder close and your chances of reaching success through goal setting increase significantly. This is going to be your primary driving force throughout life and through the entire journey to success. You see, reaching success should never end.
Never Stop Growing- Keep Pushing Forward
Only the ceiling and expectations should grow and change over time. Once you hit your benchmark, you should always be setting a new one. Without doing so, you stop growing.
When you stop growing, you stop living. Your reason why may change many times along the way but should never be forgotten. You always need to find clever ways of reminding yourself of the important things that drive you, and you will notice results happening much faster, and you will begin working like you have a purpose. Not like you just got dropped in a situation by mistake. Always remember your reason why.
Goals Can Create A Pyramid of Task and Stepping Stone to Reach Success
Going back to example 1. Goals help create a staircase type of roadmap toward success. We talk about this in short-term and long-term goal setting. A beautiful combination of both objectives is essential. When you combine the two with some discipline and action, it’s easy to paint an upward staircase where your goal is at the of the pyramid, and you begin at the bottom.
Without goal setting, it would be tough to create this visual or a nice clean path/road to reaching your dreams and aspirations. Create the roadmap but be sure to use short-term goals and long-term goals.
Goals Direct Focus to The Things in Life That Can Make an Impact- Eliminate the Other Things
Another benefit and reason why goals can lead to success are purely out of the bonus of getting rid of outside noise and creating a tunnel vision. When you set goals, you tend to eliminate some of the things in life that no longer matter (if the goal is important enough to you). When this is the case you have a much stronger probability of gaining some results with your actions and your time can be used much more wisely. Remember, we all only have 24 hours in a day. What are you going to do with them?
We talk about this in our common obstacles people often face article that you can see here. We all have people, hobbies and daily routines that sabotage our goals and chances at reaching success. You must find ways to place the important things at the top of the list.
Without this discipline, things are always going to become more difficult, and the fine-line of who you should be around and what you should be doing will become harder and harder to distinguish over time. Prioritize, eliminate distractions and get the essential things done if you want to see success.
Goals Can Be Easily Prioritized by Importance
Goals, especially when wrote down in a journal or on anything for that matter are easy to shuffle around and gain clarity on the most critical pieces. When you do this, you can effectively eliminate task and other worry type items off your list and get down to business on the essential things. If you learn to do this effectively, you can be quite the force in the driver’s seat and begin seeing the fruits of your labor much faster.
Everyday something pops up. It almost never fails. Learning to plan for these hidden tasks is a key to using goals to get you closer to success. If you don’t and you are an extremely routine person, the slightest pitfall in a day can derail you. That’s why it’s always important to prioritize goals when trying to reach success.
The Power of Completing Just One Simple Task
This way, when you get up for the day and start your day with a task completed, it’s done, out of your hair and distant memory and one more thing accomplished. Now, when 12pm rolls around and you get a call from the babysitter that your child is ill and needs to go to a doctor, your entire day and goals are not sabotaged. You have already completed the vital task for the day, and they are behind you.
Is this ideal? Of course not. We want to be able to work and continue pushing towards our goals and not have roadblock after roadblock gets in our way. However, I’ve learned quickly that it never works like this and getting a day that’s free of distractions is less common than people think.
Something will come up, and it’s imperative that the critical things are hammered out early in the process. Trust me, if you don’t take the advice here, you will begin to learn it the hard way.
Goals Require Critical Thinking and Planning
Goals and success go hand and hand together because it requires you to think and critique what’s essential and what needs to be done. Some of us don’t have the discipline to remember every aspect of what we daydream about, and it can become tough to remember why you are doing any work in the first place. With effective goal setting, you can inch your way towards success strictly because you have taken a minute, used some critical thinking skills and devised a definite plan.
Keep in mind that critical thinking and using goals to get closer to your success also requires critical thinking to pivot and adjust on the fly. A crazy amount of wrong turns and mistakes are going to come out the woodwork when chasing success. Learning to adapt quickly and make decisions quickly is still a vital piece of catching up with success. Analysis paralysis is a surefire way for a goal to ultimately lead to nothing and take you nowhere close to victory.
Goals Can Help You Stay the Course and Weather the Storm During the Tough Times
This is one of the most important factors to mention on why and how goal setting can lead to success. Setting goals is a fundamental reason behind staying motivated but also, helps propel you through you the tough times. It’s impossible that you will make it to success even with goal setting without hitting a rough patch. Lots of rough spots is a better and more honest way of wording it.
When you can go back to the original plan you drew up, see that you failed before and made it through once which can give you the spark to push through again. You also look at the successes that you have enjoyed along the way, it becomes much easier to understand that failure and rough times are all just part of the game. Setting goals to lead toward success is imperative when attempting to fight through the tough times and find a way to keep the motivation and confidence high.
Goals Force You to Dream and Envision What Success May Taste Like
Goals also do what people fail to mention too often. They force you to dream a bit. This is so important that I can’t be stated enough times. It’s important to remain realistic, but it’s also essential to shoot for the stars in your mind. Anything that you want in life, you can have. You need to take it, claim it and work hard to get it. If you can begin visualizing and placing yourself in the life that you are chasing eventually, you will find a way to bring this into reality. This is known as the law of attraction.
You must keep your dreams alive, keep dreaming and keeping finding current paths and avenues that you can bring your goals to reality. If you can reverse solve a goal you will always be in better shape than you think.
First Home Purchase Example
For example, let’s say you dream to purchase a 300,000 home for you and your family. That’s a great goal, but you need a path to reach it. So, what does it take to get to 300,000.00 for a home? How much of a down payment do you need? Does your credit score need any work? How much income will you need per year to afford it going forward?
Can you see where it begins as a great dream, but early in the process and it becomes easy to poke holes in it? That wasn’t designed to say it’s a bad dream, it’s designed to show you that those little steps such as repairing your credit are small goals that can make or break the process. If you keep envisioning this dream and taking those active steps to go through the process of problem-solving, eventually, something good will happen.
Just don’t give up and keep finding the small steps that need to be accomplished to bring that dream into reality.
Putting It, All Together- Goals Clearly Lead to Success- So What Are You Waiting For?
I think we have made a strong case as to why goal setting is imperative towards reaching success. People will continue debating for years to come if it’s essential or if good habits are all that’s needed to achieve any level of success. However, we aren’t all the other people. I firmly believe in goal setting and think that it’s only going to bring positivity into your life and toward your future success. Do you need good habits as well? Absolutely. It’s all part of the total package. Goal setting, however, is fundamental, trackable and secure in the fashion of planning and prioritizing. All those items mentioned are a recipe for success when used correctly.
So, what are you waiting for? What goals are you going to set today and what is a success to you? What are you chasing and how do you intend on getting there? Will you use goal setting, or do you have another favorite method you use instead? Be sure to drop a comment below.