By USDR
Are you becoming accustomed to watching self-set deadlines slip by? Increasingly worried that you won’t achieve your most ambitious goals? Resigned to the notion that your life won’t turn out the way you envisioned in the halcyon days?
Join the club. Many leaders walked in your shoes at one point.
For most successful people, success does not come effortlessly. One trait in particular that sets apart the most successful among us is the ability to set, pursue, and achieve goals big and small. This is how they do it — and how you can too.
- Define Your Goals
Before you can possibly achieve your goals, you need to know what they are. Not just in the 30,000-foot sense — in granular, nitty-gritty detail. The definition stage is akin to creating a roadmap for your goals: what you’re going to achieve, when, and how you’re going to get there.
It’s no accident that Jack Welch, one of the 20th century’s most brilliant business leaders, puts knowing “where you are going, what your dream is, where you are going to be,” at the top of his “leadership crash course.”
- Embrace Your Freedom and Autonomy
In a blog post aptly entitled “Freedom Is Power,” noted philosopher Arnold Siegel writes, “what serves as an unforgiving master here in America is the demand to behave responsibly with respect to our autonomy and life.” In other words, the ability to live, let live, and imbue your own life with meaning.
Goal-setters who fully embrace their own personal freedom and autonomy know that while they can rely on others to advance their interests and bring them closer to their desired outcomes, they alone are the ultimate arbiters of their own success or failures. Once you embrace your own freedom to change your life for the better, you’ll realize just how much power you have.
- Place Your Trust in a Mentor
Even Warren Buffett had a mentor, writes Jag Shoker in an Entrepreneur piece of the same name. While you can’t expect your mentor to do everything for you, you can expect them to give you pragmatic, realistic, honest advice about the path you’re on. Take their words to heart — they’ve been around longer than you.
- Embrace Expert Advice
Not all mentors are experts, and not all experts are mentors. If your goals stretch you far outside your comfort zone or involve more work than one person can reasonably accomplish, you’ll need to find others willing and able to assist on your journey. Most professional goals involve external expertise, especially if they involve building a new venture from the ground up.
- Celebrate Key Milestones
Ambitious goals take months or years, to reach. One of the leading causes of “goal fatigue,” and eventual abandonment, is the lack of clear wins along the way. Prevent your march toward your goals from turning into a slog by celebrating milestones, however small. Don’t be afraid to treat yourself for a job well done, even if there’s much that remains to be achieved.
- Know That You May Fail — and Don’t Let the Perfect Become the Enemy of the Good
This is a maxim to live by — one that all ambitious goal-setters need to remember. Your goals’ ultimate realization will not precisely mirror your initial expectations. Too many variables stand in the way of this sort of carbon-copy actualization, and it’s foolish to expect that they’ll all bend your way when you reach them.
Put another way: you’re going to need to compromise to achieve your goals. If you expect to get your way 100 percent of the time, get ready for disappointment.