When you decide upon a goal, you override your failure mechanism and change the direction of your life.

Your ability to discipline yourself to set clear goals and then to work toward them every day, will do more to guarantee your success than any other single factor. 

You’ve heard it said that, “You can’t hit a target you can’t see.” 

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there”.

Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss every shot you don’t take.” 

It seems that only 3% of adults have written goals and plans, and they earn more than the other 97 % put together.  Why is this? The simplest answer is that, if you have a clear goal and a plan to achieve it, your focus is fixed on a set course of action, instead of becoming sidetracked by distractions and diversions. Your time is focused on a straight line from start to finish. This is why people with goals accomplish so much more than people without them. The tragedy is that everyone thinks they already have goals. But what they really have is hopes and wishes. Hopes and wishes are not a strategy.  

Goals that are not written down and developed into plans are like bullets without powder in the cartridge.  People with unwritten goals go through life shooting blanks.  Because they think they already have goals, they never engage in the hard, disciplined effort of goal setting, the master skill of success. A wish has been defined as a “goal with no energy behind it.” Among a group that took a few minutes to record their New Year’s resolutions, 44% followed through on them.  This difference of more than 1100% proves the simple act of crystallizing resolutions or goals on paper increases likelihood of success. 

It has been reported that the disciplined act of setting goals, making plans for your accomplishments, and then working on them daily, increases the likelihood of achieving your goals by ten times, or 1000%.   

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 necessary. Your failure mechanism triggers automatically throughout your life, which is the major reason why most people fail to fulfill their individual potentials. When you decide upon a goal, you override your failure mechanism and change the direction of your life. 

Have you written your goals down? Have a great month.