Over the years I’ve set out on achieving different goals and luckily I’ve been able to achieve a lot of them. While I still have other goals I’m actively working towards and haven’t yet achieved it’s made me reflect a lot on what I believe to be the foolproof way of achieving your goals.
The first thing you need to do is decide what your goal is. As simple as it sounds this is incredibly important. If you don’t take care to set good goals you’re setting yourself up to fail — you might decide on something you’re not actually passionate about and therefore won’t work towards or you might end up achieving your goal only to realize it’s not actually what you wanted. Setting good goals ensures that you’re steering the ship in the right direction.
Once you’ve set your direction it’s important to calibrate your mentality. Some goals, especially big, important goals, can take years to achieve — don’t kid yourself into thinking that you’ll achieve goals like this overnight. With longer terms goals it’s helpful to set milestones you can hit on the way to your overarching goal to help keep you motivated. Without calibrating appropriately it can be easy to give up on goals and throw in the towel.
With your goals set and a good mentality adopted it’s now time to figure out your roadmap. Like driving, without a roadmap and actionable steps to take it’s impossible to get from point A to point B regardless of how close the points may be. A great way to determine your roadmap is to find the main components that will contribute to you successfully reaching your goals and breaking them down. For example, let’s say getting in shape is your goal. You can easily reverse engineer the main components that are required to be in good physical shape.
Some of these things might include exercising regularly, eating healthy, understanding your body. You can then take these three pillars and further distill them into actionable steps you need to take. Exercising regularly might mean devising workout plans that focus on things like cardiovascular endurance and muscle strength and following them three to six times a week. Eating healthy could involve subjects like learning about macronutrients, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, and how to prepare nutrient rich, healthy meals at home. Finally, learning about your body could be accomplished by studying muscle groups, their connectivity, and how your body produces muscle.
The final steps is to do the work that will move you along your roadmap to eventually get you from point A to point B. This is where most people get lost. Oftentimes it’s more fun to tell people about what you’re working on achieving as opposed to actually doing the work required to do so. If you’re feeling like this, I suggest you reevaluate if the goal you’ve set is truly something you want. I strongly believe that most people are capable of achieving most goals they set. I even more strongly believe that when most people fail to achieve a goal it’s due to a lack of discipline, not a lack of skill. People fail to accomplish goals because they’re unwilling to make dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of small, sequencial, locally optimal decisions. When you view goals through this lens you realize that getting in shape is as simple as deciding to eat a salad and going to the gym day after day after day. Similarly if you fail to get in shape it’s because you failed to create a long enough string of locally optimal, correct, decisions.
Set good goals and work to achieve them. Most people can accomplish most things.
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Fantastic breakdown, Kevin! These 4 steps are pure gold. It’s all about turning big ambitions into small, achievable actions day by day.
Good, concise post. There are a lot of books that go into more detail, I personally like Jon Acuff. Another thing I like to do is think about what are the daily or weekly things, habits, I can do to help reach this goal.