Getting Those Goals

Goals drive us forward in life.  They give us a purpose.  We get up in the morning and get moving to fulfill our purpose.  Achieving goals in life and in business would be difficult without self-discipline and persistence.

What is self-discipline?  Think of it this way.  You have chores to do around the house.  Your parents promise to pay you $20 a month if you do all the chores they ask you to do.  In the middle of washing the dishes, you suddenly wish you were lying on the couch watching television.  You are tempted to stop but think about all the things you can buy with that money so you stay the course.

This is a little simplified but you get the idea.  When you have a goal to achieve, there will be obstacles and distractions along the way.  No one can keep these things from coming, but you can learn to deal with them before they arrive.

Building self-discipline takes practice, especially with long-term goals.  It’s easy to forget about the success waiting for you when it seems far off.  Start by cutting a long-term goal into smaller, more manageable goals.

If you want to make a certain amount of sales by the end of the year, calculate how many that is per month – that is your monthly goal.  At the end of each month, cheerfully mark it off as done.  Now you are pumped to get on and meet your goal for the next month.  Before long, you are looking at the success of that long-term goal.

Persistence brings to mind the painting by Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Time.  Everything in the picture seems to become fluid and ooze over the landscape.  Sometimes, things seem to go on and on and on just like that.  Overcoming an obstacle also needs persistence.

A goal doesn’t cease to be when you are having trouble accomplishing it.  Actually it seems to loom larger.  Persistence is to keep trying new ways to solve the problem long after others have given up.  What keeps you going?  It’s the realization of the goal and the unwillingness to admit defeat for concrete reasons.  This is not a futile goal, but the rational man’s attempts to complete his task.  Even if there are no more options, you won’t quit – just change direction.

For a business owner, the time between business start-up and establishing a clientele can be long.  No one expects to achieve success overnight, but after a long day you wonder if the goal is worth the agony.  Self-discipline and persistence are there to give a sober answer to that question.  And, you continue on for another day.

Goals require work to be attained.  If it were easy there would be no character-building benefit.  Self-discipline keeps you on the path towards the goal, and persistence ensures that you will do everything in your power to reach it.