Introduction
Setting goals correctly - three interesting words about which we know too little for some reason. The ability to set goals is one of the most useful and effective pieces of human thinking. If now this phrase seemed to you banal, ordinary or funny, then this means that you still have not learned the full power of having specific goals in your life.
There is a statistic: only about 3% of people set clear goals in life. Only 1% of people write down their goals on paper and reread them. Think about it, 99 out of 100 people deprive themselves of the opportunity to increase their chances of success just because they don't set specific goals. Let's change this unfavorable situation!
Why set goals
Goals set a certain direction in which we should do things, and set up the mechanism of attraction to work with us, because what you want is kept in our mind. We won't get far without goals, and absolutely any successful person will tell you. Goal setting is the surest and only way to exist the way we would like it to be.
Imagine that you need to get to another city, you really need it, but you don't know which one. There are more than 2.5 million cities on Earth, you shouldn't go for a calculator to explain how tiny the probability of getting where you need is is.
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If we don't know the destination, then we don't know which highway to take (to start voting) or which train to take at the station. Perhaps our city is completely overseas, and it makes no sense to go to the station. When people vote on the highway, none of them writes phrases like “I really need to go to some city” on the cardboard. Surely someone will stop anyway and try to help you, but how can you help here?
This is a simple example with a city, but in life everything is the same: without goals you cannot cook porridge in it, and our thoughts will not materialize on sheer magic.
Setting goals, although a science, is not higher mathematics, a little knowledge, practice, patience and the necessary skill will gradually begin to work out.
Setting goals correctly
So what should be the goals? Before answering this question, you need to understand how things are now. Most often, we set goals like these: “I want to earn a lot of money”, “I want to become a programmer”, “I want to have a happy family” and many more “I want”. It's great when people have goals, but it's sad that they are, because they are all very sucks set.
We return to the situation with the city, and now we even know that it is located somewhere in Africa. Of course, the circle has narrowed a little, but it will still be almost impossible to guess the destination - this is how people are now trying to achieve what they want.
We have counted eight main points that contribute to the correct setting of goals, so let's break them down into atoms!
Having a goal
This may be obvious, but first you should have at least some idea.
People do not live on Earth just like that, everyone strives, for example, to make money, make their relatives happy, know a lot or run fast.
A wish
The goal should be aspirational, so in the search process you should rely on what you love to do. If you have no desire, then nothing will come of it, no matter what goal you set for yourself. And all because it allows a person to do titanic work without feeling any heaviness. So any of the most incredible tasks become achievable if a person truly desires.
Desire is based on two main factors. One of them is the meaning that your goal pursues. Answer yourself to the question: "Why do I need what I am trying to achieve?" The answer should be clear, unrealistic to please and motivate you. Desire becomes unlimited when the meaning of the goal is worthy of its achievement. The second factor will be discussed below.
Specific goals
Our goal setting will be correct only if we specify our desires. Specificity implies two parameters.
Deadline
First, the goal must have a certain amount of time to complete. We need to put ourselves in such conditions if we really really want to achieve something. When there is no specific end date, then a situation occurs to which many of us are already accustomed: the eternal desire to postpone everything for tomorrow, which for some reason never comes. Well, how often has it helped you?
Of course, it is more comfortable not to set a framework for yourself, but this will not come to us the realization that it would be time to move, time passes, so each goal should have its own deadline.
Explicit Result
Second, the goal must have a concrete result. If you want money, how much? If you want to lose weight, how much in kilograms? By describing the result accurately, you can measure your progress towards the goal.
With a specific task, everything is clear: I need to lose 10 kilograms, I have already lost 2, which means there are still eight left before success. But when you just decided to lose weight, without specifying anything more specifically, how to evaluate your progress towards this goal? How to understand that the goal has been achieved? "Lose weight" is what, how much is it? You can lose 500 grams and you technically lost weight, but who are we kidding with this?
Here are some examples of setting goals correctly: "Make $ 100 in the next five days," "finish the kitchen renovation in 10 days," "make the national soccer team within 5 years." These are only sketches, but they are potentially more useful just because we have clearly indicated what we want.
Assessing your strength
The goal must be achievable. There is no need to set goals, knowing full well that they cannot be achieved. It just doesn't make sense.
Challenging or easy goals?
What happens when we face an impossible task? Moving towards such a result, we eventually realize how dubious the idea was, hands give up, desire dies out, self-confidence is undermined (after all, I'm not so tough to achieve what I want, and this hits hard on pride).
As a result, we begin to look for any occupation for ourselves, just not to strive for this goal, so as not to disappoint ourselves once again. And who, after such an unpleasant experience, would want to burden themselves with some other tasks in life?
There is also the opposite situation, when a person sets himself too simple goals. There is still nothing cool about it, because the goal should be attractive and not boring, and achieving too small things only suggests thoughts like: “Oh, is this all I can do? Very sorry.
Looking for a challenge
So how difficult should the goals be? Here we return to the second factor, which synthesizes desire in man. So, the goal should be a challenge, that is, difficult, but possible. Such that there was space for the thought "I wonder if I could do this?" The challenge warms up the desire in a person, because it tempts to take himself weakly in an effort to jump out of his pants.
We draw your attention to one word in the heading of this paragraph. This word "friends", it means that when setting goals, you rely only on yourself. Do not think that someone or something will help and contribute to the realization of our desires in life. This kind of thinking makes a person's success the least dependent on other people and external circumstances - and this is exactly what we need!
Detailed plan
If your goal has a specific result and time to complete, then this is a kind of path that needs to be taken. You can't take that and throw the extra ten kilograms of weight into the trash in a second. Therefore, the correct setting of goals implies a whole plan with information to achieve the desired.
If the goal is for a year, then break it down into many small subgoals, each of which is designed for a month (or better for a week), write down the goals specifically, set an end date for each of them.
Now, instead of one sentence, you will have detailed instructions that you can follow and observe the dynamics.
Goal recording
You will often have to adjust and change something in your plan, plus it will be great to mark your progress to maintain desire, so without writing it will not work normally with goals. Plus your goals are already materializing in this way on paper. And everything in the mind is abstract enough, and “abstract” is the worst word if we are talking about setting goals correctly. For more information on how words can be a cool tool in your hands, see the article on the materiality of words.
Make it a rule to always have a special notebook with you that you can quickly use to write down interesting thoughts about achieving your goals.
Correction
A little background. Times were different and once, in search of a job, one of our authors entered a popular cosmetics company. When these guys were trying to finally recruit him into their ranks, a big boss talked to him, who said a phrase like this: “Son, you have to set a goal for yourself and move towards it all your life, in no case change your goal, so you're nothing you will not achieve. At that time, our author still hoped that he could get something useful from that work, in addition to the obvious (money), but after this phrase he realized that the hopes were too optimistic.
A person is so arranged that his interests and preferences change throughout his life. If someone in childhood wanted to be a builder, this does not mean that if he is now a writer, then he has no future. What seemed like a good idea a year ago, now, due to new circumstances, may turn out to be just ridiculous nonsense, which is certainly not worth striving for.
Don't worry if your desires change. You can set goals correctly only by setting a bunch of wrong ones. Therefore, in the created plan, you will have to make many adjustments to the time, your actions, and the final result itself.
Focus
No matter how now Caesar is trying to argue with us together with the female half of humanity, and people are single-tasking creatures. Therefore, maximum productivity is achieved only when you focus on one thing. In this regard, it is unwise to set yourself a thousand goals. Set one, maximum two goals and strive for them every day. Energy must be concentrated.
Misadventure
Great, now is the time to move directly to setting and achieving your goals, but before you start practicing, a few words about the worst thing - failure.
In quantitative terms, there will be much more failures than successes (if the Russian language at all allows one to express it this way). The presence of failures should not scare a person. On the contrary, it is necessary to be grateful for the failures that occur for one simple reason, which Thomas Edison will speak more succinctly for us.
Edison invented the filament, having made over 11,000 failed experiments on the way to this goal. 11 thousand failures per invention. And all these inventions during his life, the famous physicist patented more than a thousand. So, to a logical question from a journalist about how Edison, despite so many failures, was able to create a thread, the inventor answered with a grin:
Thomas Edison was well aware of one simple but fundamental thing that everyone should know: there is nothing negative about failure, on the contrary, it allows us to achieve goals by guiding us.
At the Top of Mind Team