How to Set Solid Goals. Improve Your Goals' Success Rate By More Than 500%.

Why are some goals so hard to achieve while some get done effortlessly? Most people don't ask themselves this question and suffer the consequences. The reality is that if you don't know what determines if your goals will get done or not, your success will be out of your control. It's really important to know the psychology behind a properly set goal since that's what will determine our success in our jobs and personal lives.

Setting goals without knowing how they work is like trying to learn a language without a proper method, it's highly inefficient and you'll waste a lot of effort and time. Probably giving up at the end. Just like how a business man must understand how the market works in order to sell a product, we need to understand our psychology and the factors that determine a solid goal if we want to achieve something.

Why most people don't have real goals

Everybody has goals. Even 5 year old children do, they want to become astronauts or football players someday. And the truth is that it's hard to call that a goal, how can it be a goal when the child has no idea of the implications and what he must be doing to accomplish it? But the truth is that most people's goals are like those of a 5 year old, probably including you. People want a raise and to accomplish certain things, but they don't a have a clear of why they want it, what they must do, and what steps they must take, like the 5 year old, it's just a vague desire.

Do you have goals right now? It might actually surprise you quite a lot to realize that you probably don't. It's quite a realization when you see the blandness of what you call goals. I'm not here to criticize you, but you need to become aware of what you're doing wrong if you want to change that.

So what does it take to have a real, rock-solid goal? It's actually quite simple and easy to overlook at this. Your goals cannot be vague ideas that remain in fantasy land. The strength and solidity of your goals can be assured by making sure it aligns with the 5 factors I will be talking about. If your goal aligns with those, then it is a real goal. If it doesn't, then it's just a desire.

By making sure your goal hits the following factors, your chances of accomplishing the goal multiply exponentially. I'm not joking here, with the way most people goals are set, they have almost no chance of getting them accomplished.

Your goals must be specific

You must know exactly what you want. "I want a big business!", "I want to be very sociable". This goals are nice, but they are so vague that they go right through your head. It's much easier to ignore a goal when it is not specific. It is also harder to know what you must do in order to get it, or even to know whether if you are gonna fail or not. Your target must be clear or you won't hit it. Instead of "My goal is to have a big business" change the goal to something that is clear and specific, a target that is easy to determine like "My goal is to get 4000$ a month gross profit through my business". When your goals are specific, you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, and the exact path you must take to achieve it becomes more obvious.

Specificity is a very important factor because it clears us up psychologically. If you don't know exactly what you want, you won't know exactly what you will get. Even worse, you might get nothing at all because vague goals are easy to ignore.

Your goals must be motivating and rewarding

Out of all the factors, this one is the one that most people get right. After all, why would we chase a goal that is not worth the effort? But yet some people get it wrong, they chase goals because of external reasons that are not motivating enough for them to accomplish their goals.

External reasons like peer pressure don't work that well, we must want to accomplish our goals because we intrinsically want to. We must need and want to accomplish these goals from the deepest parts of our selves. The goals we seek must be important to us and the reward has to be worth the effort. The first step towards doing this is simply to choose goals we truly want to accomplish, after we have done this, there are a few tricks that can help us to establish a deeper, more motivating desire.

You can do this by asking yourself a few questions:

1. Why do you want to accomplish that goal?

What will you get if you accomplish this goal? How will your life change? What will happen to your daily life? How will people perceive you? How much more joy would you derive from your life?

Try to list every possible benefit you can think of to really see the importance and the change it would bring to your life, make yourself truly want it.

2. How would your life be if you didn't follow through?

Now ask yourself what would your life be like if you didn't follow through. Would your life be the same as now? How much joy and success would you miss? list the things that would go worse if you didn't accomplish the goal. List every possible thing that would be worse in comparison?

Don't get emotional, just contemplate how your life would look like in comparison.

You can write the answer to these questions in a piece of paper or you can say them out loud, just make sure that you can clearly see what it would mean to your life if your goal gets accomplished. It is very important to review this questions every once in a while in order to reinforce them and get them clear in your head. I assure you that if you do this every week, your goal will be much more solid and your motivation levels will significantly increase.

Write it down

Whatever your goal is, write it down. When writing It down, your goal changes from an idea that just exists in your head to a real, accountable text in the real world.

Goals that are not written down are just passing clouds, they have no real power and they can easily flow through your head right into the abyss.

The place where you write your goal is also very important. A poor place to write your goals would be a random page in a notebook. The goal would get lost and you'd forget about it. And even if you didn't forget about it, it wouldn't seem that important since it's written is such a random place.

Let's now take an extreme example of a place that would get your goal completed.

You decide that you want to learn french because you are going to move to France and you want to surprise your wife, who's french. In order to follow through because it's very important for you to succeed, you make a tattoo in your hand with your goal. Now that's a goal that you will complete, do i have to explain why?

Making a tattoo would be a crazy thing to do, but you get my point. Now if you happened to make a big altar in your living room just for your goal, the goal would also be more likely to be completed than if you just wrote it in a random notebook.

So make yourself a favor and write your goals in a place where you can see it constantly.

Review your goal constantly

New year's resolution starts strong, you put in the hard work until the goal simply doesn't motivate you that much anymore. You skip a day, then a week, and then the goal is abandoned. At least that's what happens to more than 90% of new year's resolutions.

In order to keep yourself motivated, you must review your goals. Remind yourself why you want it. Remind yourself what the goal would mean to your life. Visualize how your life would be better. Stay connected to the results that you will get if you accomplish your goal. Imagine the results as if you had them right now. Have the end in mind.

If you stop doing what i am telling you above, you will get disconnected from your vision and from the results you will get. If this happens, you will see that your motivation doesn't live up.

Keep reviewing your goal and your motivation will stay high throughout your journey. Forget to review and your motivation will slowly subside.

Measure

If you have a goal with a 1 year timeline, procrastination is dangerous. This is why a goal should be split into many mini-goals. Give yourself a small goal each month that will help you accomplish the bigger goal.

-If your goal is to save 12000$ this year then make it a goal to save 1000$ each month.

-If your goal is to speak french in a year then make smaller goals for each month like getting 70 hours of practice.

having even smaller weekly goals will help you accomplish the monthly goal. And you can go even further and make daily goals.

Measuring goals and splitting them into various sub-goals is helpful because:

-It increases sense of accomplishment

-It makes taking action easier because what you have to do is clear

-It increases motivation

-It prevents procrastination

-It connects you to your vision

Measure your progress and become a strategic motherfucker or loose motivation like the rest of the crowd.

Reviewing

If you make sure that your goal is aligned with these five factors, then your goal is much more likely to be accomplished. I can't really tell you how much more probable it is for you to succeed, but if I had to estimate, i'd say your chances of succeeding are at least 10 times more. Yes, these factors are that very important.

So make sure that your goals are specific, rewarding, written down in a powerful place, reviewed constantly, and measured, and you've got yourself a solid goal. Fail to do this and your goal will crumble.

Thank me later.