Probably the single most important thing behind creating a useful goal is to have a compelling “why”. Sure, it sounds obvious once you know it, but if you don’t know it, there’s a good chance you’ll miss your goals. You why is your staying power and your guide. If you have a compelling why, you’ll find the strategies.

Now, assuming you have your compelling whys and your ladder is up against the right wall, how do actually carve up an effective plan? Not everybody is familiar with creating work breakdown structures. Not everybody has a reliable mentor or somebody they can model their success from.

I think it really is a case where proven practices go a long way for effective goal crafting and reaching your goals. A lot of action without insight is a recipe for learned helplessness, just like a lot of insight without action, is yet another path to unfullfilled dreams.

I’d add some perspective on: the role of goal-setting in our lives, and the great pattern of life.

Somehow, in the successful-entrepreneur-to-be culture I find myself in, I find a wealth of selfish goals: Make $X dollars, by year such-and-such; Get a house, a boat, find a pretty wife, live by the beach, and so on. It’s not that I’m angry about this; But rather: they seem to be on the small side. The genie from the bottle can demonstrate: “What would you like?” and the person responds: “Wealth, castle, and pretty wife.” This is a shallow dream. Contrast with Oberto Airaudi, founder of Damanhur, or the dreams of activists, many of whom are doing the work of saving the Earth, and so on. Now who is dreaming large, and who is dreaming small?

And why are we reading (success) books that encourage small dreams?

I’d point to Napoleon Hill’s later works, nearer to the end of his life; He wrote a book called, “You Can Work Your Own Miracles.” Most people don’t point to this book, but I found it intensely interesting and invigorating. Napoleon Hill goes deeper into his true cards (spirituality,) and he notes that he was short-sighted to pay attention only to extravagant stories of personal wealth accumulation. I believe he saw that much of the work that goes on is not in steel and empire (which, surely, is important,) but much closer to the ground.

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I’ve found for me I always couldn’t stand setting goals, formally, anyhow. However, everything I had studied regarding succeeding encouraged goal setting. So, I kept doing it. It was rare that I met an objective on time, and yet I was always further ahead.

Then, something magical happened. No, it wasn’t the Beatles, tho that was pretty cool, too. Through this process of writing goals and moving forward, finding motivation and moving forward, creating ideas and moving forward; I was led to a point beyond MOTIVATION, and INSPIRATION was the rule, not the acception. The difference is PUSH vs. PULL. I am ‘pulled’ to excel, pulled forward, pulled to great abundance.

I want to share this message of personal experience for all those out there who shudder to think about setting goals, yet again; one more time.

Keep doing it. Keep doing it. Keep doing it. You establish your goals, and today, tomorrow, or years from now (they’re going to pass anyway), the goals will be ‘establishing you.’ They will lift YOU, they will motivate YOU. What a great personal discovery.

–Dave Charbonneau
http://www.TheNetworkCapitalist.com
http://www.TheChickenWIRE.com

The kind of rhetoric that you advance here - set a goal, make a plan, follow that plan no matter what - does not work for a lot of people.

True, some of the people who are not achieving their goals are just not working hard enough. But more often, in my experience, people have the wrong goals - and in this case, more effort is not the solution.

If you keep failing to reach your goals, I think it’s much more useful to examine your goals, than to just work harder to reach them. In fact, I find, that when I have the right goals, I tend to reach them much more efficiently.

However, I agree completely that this is not controversial at all :o)