Get what you want out of life

- Robert McGarvey

Set goals and follow through them. You transform yourself from one of life’s
spectators into a real participant.

We all have dreams and desires, but relatively few people have goals.
Strongly held wishes – “I want to be rich” or “I wish I were thinner”- do not qualify.

Though they begin as dreams, goals are specific objectives, attained

only through concrete action.

“If you can’t measure it, rate it or describe it, it is not probably a goal”, says a
business consultant.

A lot of little goals lie between a wish and actual goal. …there is no
magical pathway that leads you straight away to your goal. You
have got to move step by step, clear hurdle by hurdle…….

Here are the steps to follow to make our dreams come true.

Define your Objective

First define your objective. Know exactly where you want to go. And it
should be within your capability. Too often people set a difficult task, then
give-up. Goals should be focused on what is achievable.

Put it on the paper

Once you’ve defined your goal, write it down. Writing out a goal crystallizes
it in your mind. So that you can quickly evaluate whether decisions will take you
towards the objective or away from it.

Map your strategy

Breaking a goal down in to manageable pieces makes achieving it seem less

intimidating. A technique called backward planning consists of setting an
objective and then retracing the steps needed to achieve it.

Set a deadline
A goal is a dream with a deadline. Deadlines provide a time-frame for action and
get us moving in pursuit of our dreams. Rather than setting dread deadlines,
add sense and direction to them, Divide each big task into subtasks and in turn
subtasks into manageable chunks of one chunk at-a-time.
Commit yourself

When you are committed then you can make a positive decision, at the time of
ambiguity. If you are really committed, you will make that goal a reality.
Set an ambitious target and make a commitment to your boss that you’ll achieve
it. You will find you can rally resources you never thought you had.

Don’t fear failure

As most of our fears won’t turn into reality, fear of failure is also a mere hang-up.
Usually the anticipation of failure that paralyses, not the failure itself.
We can survive our failures by picking ourselves up and trying again. We have to
try again. The only way one can overcome the fears of failing is to take small
steps in one step at a time.

Persist, persist

Along the way to any goal, you will be confronted with obstacles. Belief in
yourself can act as an anesthetic against these setbacks.
When you confront a setback, just push away the thought of quitting
and get back to work.

It’s never too late

Age is not a barrier to achievement. As we grow older and learn more, we gain
the confidence to take on new challenges.

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This is the power of goals : they can give us new energy, new direction ,a purpose
we might have lacked. They can help us get the most out of life.

A Reader’s Digest article , August 1992