Golden Principles
Set Big Goals
If you’re going to set yourself up for success in life, then you need to set some mighty meaningful goals for yourself. So as a starting point, the first and foremost thing to remember on the journey of personal success is a positive attitude towards everything.
If you fail once, brush up your knees and get back out there. If you get rejected the first time, better yourself with a positive outlook and prove yourself instead of bringing yourself down with negativity. Tell yourself through every obstacle and hardship, ‘I did not come this far to ONLY come this far.’ No success is achieved overnight; no mountain is climbed without a few falls or two. If others can put up a fight to achieve personal success despite countless hardships, so can you.
Better To Aim High And Miss, Than To Aim Low And Achieve
It’s always better to aim high, even if you don’t succeed at first. When you aim big, you dream big, and tell yourself that you stand a chance against all odds.
The problem with setting lower standards is that the lower you set your aim, the more you confine yourself. You miss more chances, and more of your abilities are left unknown. Likewise, more of your will goes without a test.
Where you could achieve the stars, your low aim of never going that high will hold you back. No matter how many people look down on you and doubt your capability, it’s your own personal belief, unwavering resilience and ambitions that lead you to achieving your ultimate dream. But the moment you start to doubt yourself, the moment you decide you can’t aim higher for the fear of failure, is when your downfall begins.
With a higher aim, you may miss at first, or you may make it on your first try. Take your chances; a leap of faith in yourself. The higher you aim, the more you achieve. Even if you fall short of your goal, you won’t end up too far from it.
Just think of achieving a good score on a test. If you aim low at getting a 50% mark on the test, you might be successful and achieve that. But that’s all it will be an average and low achievement. If you aim higher at getting 90%, you may miss and hit an 80, which is still higher and so much better than the low set aim of 50%. The same goes for all tests and trials life puts you through.
Set Purpose Goals
When setting goals, you need to think about how to achieve them, what you need to do to achieve them, and how much time you need to get there. But the real driving force that’ll make you sweat for any goal is WHY you need to achieve that goal.
Why is it a priority? Why is it so important?
Setting goals is easy. Just think of drawing up a New Year's resolution. Everyone does that every year and has been doing it forever. So much so that it’s become a mere habit and nothing much else. But what people don’t do is pause to think over the goal and question, “Why?” Inevitably, without this driving force, they soon forget all about it.
As such, it’s important to not merely set goals but set purpose-driven goals instead. For example, you may well be thinking of hitting the gym, working out, and getting yourself in shape. With just this in mind, you set a goal in your New Year's resolution to work out every day. You do it the first day and the second, and then something comes up on the third. Then you end up skipping the fourth day because you lose the momentum and get lazier. In the end, you achieve nothing and set the same goal for next year’s resolution.
On the other hand, an obese person on the verge of getting diabetes and a possible heart attack is told by the doctor he needs to work out and lose weight soon if he still wants a chance at a healthy life, or maybe just life. This is his ‘why.’ This is why he won’t skip the third or fourth day no matter what comes up. This is why he will achieve his goal with more determination.
So through every hardship on your way, when you are at the brink of giving up, you can tell yourself again and again WHY you cannot give up and WHY you must go on.
Give Yourself A Timeframe To Work With
Without setting a timeframe to achieve any goal, there will be no sense of urgency. The importance of getting anything done is great, but the importance of getting it done on time is even greater!
Giving yourself a duration for a specific task will make you more productive in that short time than you would be without it. If you know the deadline for a task is 24 hours, you’ll make yourself attend to that task as a priority. You’ll utilize those 24 hours in the most effective way possible to complete the task by hand.
If you set a deadline of one week for the same task, not only will you waste the entire week and be less productive, but you will also waste precious time that you could’ve used to complete other tasks as well.
Having said that, the time frame must be realistic and attainable. You need to be sure whether the goal is a short-term goal or a long-term one. Losing 10 kg in 3 days? Not possible, not attainable, even if you spend most of the hours of the 3 days in the gym.
The timeframe should not be based on some delusion. An understanding of the goal and the priority you’re willing to give it can help you decide better how much time you’ll allocate each day to get it done.
If you have an essay due next week, and you keep delaying it or doing it in bits, paragraph to paragraph a day, it’ll get tiresome and boring. In the end, it might not even make a lot of sense. Plus, you’ll lose the sense of urgency that would make you more productive.
But if you decide to do it in two days, you’ll utilize those two days much more effectively and will even have time for other goals once you finish with that essay. The less you linger on with the task at hand, the better.
