Twelve months later, they followed up on the respondents in this study, and what they found was astonishing. Of the people who had set New Year’s resolutions but had
not
written them down,
only 4 percent
had actually followed through on their resolutions. But among the group who
had
written down their New Year’s resolutions (an exercise requiring only a couple of minutes),
44 percent had followed through
on them. This is a difference of more than 1,100 percent in success, and it was achieved by the simple act of crystallizing the resolutions or goals on paper.
The Discipline of Writing
In my experience of working with several million people over the past twenty-five years, the disciplined act of writing out goals, making plans for accomplishing them, and then working on those goals daily increases the likelihood of achieving your goals by ten times, or 1,000 percent.
This does not mean that writing out your goals
guarantees
success, but rather that it increases the
probability of success
by ten times. These are very good odds to have working in your favor, especially when there is no cost or risk involved in putting pen to paper—just a little time.
Writing is called a “psycho-neuro-motor activity.” The act of writing forces you to think and concentrate. It forces you to choose what is more important to you and your future. As a result, when you write down a goal, you impress it into your subconscious mind, which then goes to work twenty-four hours a day to bring your goal to reality.
Sometimes I tell my seminar audiences, “Only 3 percent of adults have written goals, and everyone else works for those people.” In life, you either work to achieve your own goals or you work to achieve the goals of someone else. Which is it going to be?
Success Versus Failure Mechanisms
Your brain has both a success mechanism and a failure mechanism. The failure mechanism is the temptation to follow the undisciplined path of least resistance, to do what is fun and easy rather than what is hard and nec - essary. Your failure mechanism operates automatically throughout your life, which is the major reason why most people fail to fulfill their individual potentials.
While your failure mechanism functions automatically, your success mechanism is triggered by a goal. When you decide on a goal, you override your failure mechanism, and can you change the direction of your life. You go from being a ship without a rudder, drifting with the tide, to being a ship with a rudder, a compass, and a clear destination, sailing in a straight direction toward your goal.
THE POWER OF GOALS
A client of mine recently told me an interesting story. He said he had attended one of my seminars in 1994, where I spoke about the importance of writing down goals and making plans for accomplishing them. At that time, he was thirty-five years old, selling cars for a dealership in Nashville, and earning about $50,000 a year.
He told me that day changed his life. He began writing out his goals and plans and working on them daily. Twelve years later, he was earning more than $1 million a year and was the president of a fast-growing company that sells services to some of the biggest companies in the country. He told me he could not imagine what his life would have been like if he had not taken out a piece of paper and written down the goals he wanted to achieve in the years ahead.
Take Control of Your Life
Aristotle wrote that human beings are
teleological
organisms, which simply means that we are
purpose driven
. Therefore, you feel happy and in control of your life only when you have a clear goal that you are working toward each day. This also means that this ability to become a lifelong goal setter is one of the most important disciplines you will ever develop.
In nature, the homing pigeon is a remarkable bird. It has an uncanny instinct that enables it to fly back to its home roost, no matter how far away it starts or in what direction it must go. You can take a homing pigeon out of its roost, put it in a cage, put the cage in a box, cover the box with a blanket, and put the covered box in the back of a pickup truck. You could then drive 1,000 miles in any direction, open up the truck, take out the box, take off the blanket, open the cage, and throw the homing pigeon up into the air.
The homing pigeon will circle three times, get its bearings, and then fly straight back to its home roost. This is the only creature on earth that has this ability—except for human beings. Except for
you
.
You also have this remarkable homing ability within your own brain, but with one special difference. The homing pigeon seems to know
instinctively
exactly where its home roost is located. It then has the ability to fly directly back to that roost. In contrast, when human beings program a goal into their minds, they can then set out without having
any idea
where they will go or how they will achieve that goal. But by some miracle, they will begin to move unerringly toward that goal, and the goal will begin to move toward them.
Still, many people are hesitant to set goals. They say, “I want to be financially independent, but I have no idea how I’m going to get there.” As a result, they don’t even set financial success as a goal. But the good news is that
you don’t need to know how to get there.
You just need to be clear about what you want to accomplish, and the goal-striving mechanism in your brain will guide you unerringly to your destination.
For example, you can decide that you are going to find your ideal job, in which you work for and with people you like and respect and do work that is both challenging and enjoyable. You take some time to write down an exact description of what your ideal job and workplace would look like, and then you go out into the job market and begin searching.
After a series of interviews, you will often walk into the right place at the right time and find yourself in exactly the right job. Almost everyone has had this experience at one time or another. You can have it by
design
rather than by chance simply by developing absolute clarity about what you really want.
The Seven-Step Method to Achieving Your Goals
There are seven simple steps that you can follow to set and achieve your goals faster. There are more complex and detailed goal-achieving methodologies, but this Seven-Step Method will enable you to accomplish ten times more than you have ever accomplished before, and you will do so far faster than you can currently imagine.
Step 1: Decide
Exactly
What You Want.
Be specific. If you want to increase your income, decide on a specific amount of money rather than to just “make more money.”
Step 2: Write It Down.
A goal that is not in writing is like cigarette smoke: It drifts away and disappears. It is vague and insubstantial. It has no force, effect, or power. But a written goal becomes something that you can see, touch, read, and modify if necessary.
Step 3: Set a Deadline for Your Goal.
Pick a reasonable time period and write down the date when you want to achieve it. If it is a big enough goal, set a final deadline and then set subdeadlines or interim steps between where you are today and where you want to be in the future.
A deadline serves as a “forcing system” in your brain. Just as you often get more done when you are under the pressure of a specific deadline, your subconscious mind works faster and more efficiently when you have decided that you want to achieve a goal by a specific time.
The rule is “There are no unrealistic goals; there are only unrealistic deadlines.”
What do you do if you don’t achieve your goal by your deadline? Simple. You set another deadline. A deadline is just a “guesstimate.” Sometimes you will achieve your goal before the deadline, sometimes at the deadline, and sometimes after the deadline.
When you set your goal, it will be within the context of a certain set of external circumstances. But these circumstances may change, causing you to change your deadline as well.
Step 4: Make a List of
Everything
You Can Think of That You Could Possibly Do to Achieve Your Goal.
As Henry Ford said, “The biggest goal can be accomplished if you just break it down into enough small steps.”
• Make a list of the
obstacles and difficulties
that you will have to overcome, both external and internal, in order to achieve your goal.
• Make a list of the additional
knowledge and skills
that you will need in order to achieve your goal.
• Make a list of the
people
whose cooperation and support you will require to achieve your goal.
• Make a list of everything that you can think of that you will have to do, and then add to this list as new tasks and responsibilities occur to you. Keep writing until your list is complete.
Step 5: Organize Your List by Both Sequence and Priority.
A list of activities organized by
sequence
requires that you decide what you need to do first, what you need to do second, and what you need to do later on. In addition, a list organized by
priority
enables you to determine what is more important and what is less important.
Sometimes sequence and priority are the same, but often they are not. For example, if you want to start a particular kind of business, the first item in order of sequence might be for you to purchase a book or enroll in a course on that business.
But what is most important is your ability to develop a business plan, based on complete market research, that you can use to gather the resources you need and actually start the business you have in mind.
Step 6: Take Action on Your Plan
Immediately
.
Take the first step—and then the second step and the third step. Get going. Get busy. Move quickly. Don’t delay. Remember: Procrastination is not only the thief of time; it is the thief of life.
The difference between successes and failures in life is simply that winners take the
first step
. They are action-oriented. As they said in
Star Trek
, they “go boldly where no man has ever gone before.” Winners are willing to take action with no guarantees of success. Though they’re willing to face failure and disappointment, they’re always willing to take action.
Step 7: Do Something
Every Day
That Moves You in the Direction of Your Major Goal.
This is the key step that will guarantee your success: Do something, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Do
anything
that moves you at least one step closer to the goal that is most important to you at that time.
When you do something every day that moves you in the direction of your goal, you develop
momentum
. This momentum, this sense of forward motion, motivates, inspires, and energizes you. As you develop momentum, you will find it increasingly easy to take even more steps toward your goal.
In no time at all, you will have developed the discipline of setting and achieving your goals. It will soon become easy and automatic. You will soon develop the habit and the discipline of working toward your goals all the time.
The Ten-Goal Exercise
This is one of the most powerful goal-achieving methods I have ever discovered. I teach it all over the world, and I practice it myself almost every day.
Take out a clean sheet of paper. At the top of the page write the word “Goals” and today’s date. Then, discipline yourself to write down ten goals that you’d like to accomplish in the next twelve months. Write down financial, family goals, and fitness goals, as well as goals for personal possessions, like a house or a car.
Don’t worry for the moment about how you are going to achieve these goals. Just write them down as quickly as you can. You can write as many as fifteen goals if you like, but this exercise requires that you write down a minimum of ten within three to five minutes.