A popular internet marketer once quipped “failures have goals, winners have systems.” Nothing in the world could be farther from the truth. A system with no goal in view sets you up as a wanderer, a tramp – with nowhere to go. Don’t be a tramp with no goal.
How Do You Define A Goal?
To me, a goal is a definite course of action or things you wish to do to achieve your heart’s desire, ambition, and dream. Or simply put, the thing(s) you want to achieve. It could be the thing or things you want to achieve within a few months, a year or within a lifetime.
A goal is always bound by action and direction. Without these two ingredients, action and direction, a goal becomes wishful thinking. So goal, ambition and dreams go hand in hand. Ambition is the lofty side of a goal.
According to authors James Champy and Nitin Nohria, “good ambition is the lifeblood of human achievement.” Dream on the other hand is the spiritual side of all goals. That’s why we talk about an unfulfilled dream.
Why You Need a Goal
A goal is like a beacon or a lighthouse or a magnet drawing you to your destiny: the person you want to be, the type of individual you want to become, the type of life you want to live, and the type of things you want to achieve or own – either for yourself, your loved ones, your country or humanity.
If you look at the most successful people in all of humanity, they are or were all driven by tall ambition and BIG dreams. While luck plays a part, the most desirable ingredients are personal drive, ambition, and action.
You could be “lucky” to have a mentor early in life, like Warren Buffet (Benjamin Graham), Bill Gates (James Allen), and Tony Elumelu (Ebitimi Banigo – now the King of Okpoama). What of Arnold Schwarzenegger? Who was his mentor? Was he lucky?
Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Austria. He spoke no English. His father wanted him to join the police force (his father was a police officer); his mother wanted him to marry early and settle down.
But he had other ideas. He had a big dream and a big ambition. He wanted to immigrate to America – the home of the free and the land of the brave.
He wanted a piece of the American Dream. And he did. He did not just succeed and thrived, he expanded.
He achieved all the goals he’d set for himself and more, becoming at age 55, the governor of California, the third largest state in the US, in 2003.
So seize the card you have been dealt, set goals, follow your arc of ambition, and march forward to achieve your dreams.
Horizons of Goals
As a young aspiring consultant still wet in the ears, I was commissioned by a top bank way back then to take their entire management team, from managers and above, on Time Management.
I was in my elements, waxing lyrical on the four generations of time management until the bank’s deputy managing director, a huge Pakistani, stopped me and asked, “Is strategy set once and for all time?”
As simple as the question is or was, I didn’t know the answer off the bat back then. I started rambling and beating about the bush until the man said something to which I latched onto and said, “Yes, yes, strategy is a moving target.”
So goals are not set once and for all time. Goals as you would expect will be shifting targets depending on your station in life.
David Allen, the productivity guru and author of Getting Things Done, calls horizons of goals “horizons of focus.”
His system has five levels beginning with “the runway and ending with 50 thousand feet”, which he calls “your life’s purpose. As you can see, he uses the air plane flight analogy.
My horizon of goals includes vision, mission, purpose, and superordinate goal. While vision sets your general direction, missions guides you on the way to go, purpose illuminates why you want to go there, and superordinate goal tells you how you will get there.
As far as purpose is concerned, you sometimes hear people say, “I was born for this.” For Nelson Mandela for instance, “the struggle is my life”, was his mantra – his purpose.
Without going deeper than necessary, an example will make it clearer. Let’s look at the example of Alexander the Great. His vision was to “bring Greek civilization to the rest of the world”. His mission was by conquest starting with the unification of all the Greek city states. His purpose was enlightenment (because he genuinely believed Greek civilization and culture was the best in the entire known world so the barbarians needed to be enlightened) and his superordinate goal was to be ruler of the entire world.
Without a vision, the people perish. So don’t perish. Your vision could be “to build the most customer-centric company in the planet” a la Jeff Bezos.
Your mission could be to set up an online business running at a loss for 14 years like Amazon because you could see what others didn’t or don’t.
Your purpose could be to scale the business rapidly, gaining momentum and remaining completely technology and customer driven.
Finally your superordinate goal could be to dominate world commerce and ultimately become the richest man the world has ever known – which is always the unintended result or outcome.
Dimension of Goals
You need goals in all dimensions of your life. So goals will follow the trajectory of your life. We can break life into two broad dimensions: spiritual and material.
According to Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, we can look at life as having four primary dimensions: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
For sustained high performance and full engagement, according to the authors, you want your life to be:
- Physically energized
- Emotionally connected
- Mentally focused
- Spiritually aligned
While it’s important you set firm goals on your spiritual wellbeing, whether you’re a true believer, free thinker, or a non-believer, we will not belabor the point here.
We’ll focus on the physical or material side of life, with the following seven sub-dimensions:
- Learning/Education/ Intellectual
- Health
- Finance
- Wealth
- Career/Political
- Family
- Leisure/Hobby/All others
So we will have to set goals in all the dimensions and sub-dimensions. No two people will have the same goals since we all have different needs, preferences and aspirations. In all, your goal will be strongly influenced by your values.
So you can visualize a goal as an onion, with many layers. The outer layers are the ephemeral things that attract you now and then but the inner core is eventually what you will settle for. The inner core is determined by your values. You can take a five minute free test at the Barrett Values Center to know your values.
Having known your values, play to your strengths (like Arnold Schwarzenegger – physical excellence). Go all out to pursue the things that you love. Play to win.
Some people play not to lose. They are defensive. They want approval from the world. They tiptoe into anything they want to do.
Winners defy the world, approach anything they want to do with gusto, jump in with both feet, and when they win, the world gives them approval: Nelson Mandela, Lee Kwan Yew, Mother Theresa, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, James Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Tony Elumelu, and Aliko Dangote are in this cohort.
Levels of Goals
While your vision, mission, purpose and superordinate goals should guide you as the North Star, your general goals will wax and wane as you execute your strategy.
Your VMPS (vision, mission, purpose and superordinate goals) must stand as the Rock of Gibraltar anchored on the messianic belief in the righteousness of the path you have chosen.
Remember the legendary tenacity of Thomas Edison. When derided he had failed, he replied he’d not failed, he’d only learnt 10,000 ways his light bulb did not work. Your general goals on the other hand will be fluid, flexible and malleable, depending on where you are on your journey.
In this context your level of goals will encompass short, medium and long term goals. With short term goals you’re looking at those factors you need to tweak, recalibrate and adjust within 3 to 6 months.
For your intermediate goals, you’re looking at those things that will come into focus within 6 to 18 months, while anything longer than 18 months falls into long term goal.
Depending on the gestation period of what you want to accomplish these time line will vary. Nothing is cast on stone except your values.
The reasons we adopt these time frames are because the rate of change is breathtaking, unrelenting and unforgiving. Let down your guard for a moment and you’re what Americans call passé. At the same time, you must base your decision to change things on well-informed metrics not fashion or popularity.
Remember what we are saying here has nothing to do with strategy, plans, objectives and activities.
Strategy is about how you will move from here to there based on the goals you’ve set. Plans are what you will do as your strategy unfolds, while objectives are the concrete milestones you’ll hit as defined by your goals.
Activities are the day-to-day concrete actions that drive you forward as you execute your plans and achieve your objectives and specific targets, e.g. meetings, reports, customer or sales visits.
In the context of an individual, activities will include calling a thought leader for an advice, learning SEO or another language or writing an email to a long-lost friend to rebuild a relationship. Little drops of water will erode a mighty boulder so focus on your activities and the big goals will be hit. Be consistent and tenacious.
Setting Your Goals
Setting goals for every aspect of your live is what happens when the rubber meets the road as the Americans say. It is not easy. If it were easy, everybody would have goals that say I want to make $10 million before the age of 30 and go all out and achieve it.
As you must have heard or read somewhere else, in a world of 7.8 billion people, there are only 2,095 billionaires with a total networth of $8 Trillion (Forbes, CNBC).
And there are 46.8 million millionaires and they collectively own approximately $158.3 trillion, nearly half of the world’s entire wealth (ABC News).
Do the arithmetic. Less than 1% (0.6 % to be precise) of the world’s billionaires and millionaires control almost half of the world’s entire wealth.
Money or wealth is the yardstick for measuring your contribution or the value you’re adding to the world. The best way to increase your impact and contribution is to set goals and pursue them with messianic zeal.
Measuring your contribution in monetary terms enables you to confirm you’re adding value to the world. This applies to for-profit and non-profits – like Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross, or Caritas.
When asked why he dropped out of Harvard, Bill Gates said the opportunity the computer era presented would never happen again in his lifetime so he set out to become the world’s best coder and software expert.
So how do you set goals? We have covered what a goal is, why you need one, the dimensions and levels of goals and now let’s focus on how to set a goal.
As it is with everything in life, the best time to have started, was 20 years ago, today is the next best time so to “how do you set goals?”, we scurry.
As the saying goes, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. So we cannot have a blanket recommendation for everybody. There is no magic bullet. There is no magic wand. There is no talisman.
Internet gurus like James Altucher, Ramit Sethi, and Suze Orman have written tons on how to become a millionaire. They have written tons on how to set audacious goals, and advise us all to dream BIG.
Other gurus have propounded the law of attraction, and visualization and day dreaming. Follow these practices at your own peril.
This is how you set goals. The process is uncannily simple. But before you start, you have to cleanse your believe system – what my mentor Ramit Sethi calls the hidden scripts your mind has been fed from birth. Erasing these scripts while not mission impossible, is not a walk through the park. You need expert guidance from the likes of Paul Uduk. Kidding.
This is how to go about setting goals:
- Don’t pursue money, pursue your dreams and the money will come.
- Write down your ideal future guided by your VMPS.
- Write down the list of three things you can do to create massive value for others or impact at least 1,000 people.
- Test the idea you have the most passion for in the market place (controlled experiment, using your MVP-Minimum Viable Product).
- If it flies, you have a winning idea, scale massively; if it flops, try another idea.
- Develop focus and zero in on your winning idea with all the fiber of your body.
- Scale, set a target how to reach your first 1,000 clients.
- Banish procrastination and perfectionism and continue scaling.
- Set concrete benchmarks and targets to guide your progress towards your first 10,000 clients. The world will start to notice you.
- Continue scaling until you reach a point of no return, about 100,000 clients, then pivot to 1 million using strategies and tactics beyond this blog post.
Achieving Your Dreams
As you can see, throughout this piece I’ve not talked about setting SMART goals mumbo jumbo. A SMART goal cannot inspire action because it’s limiting.
Winning starts in the mind. I have a dream… .; Put an American on the moon and safely bring him back to earth; Develop insanely great products and put a dent in the universe; Computer on every desk.
These are stuffs of dreams and not SMART goals. That’s why developing a winning mindset is critical; it starts with cleansing your believe system. That’s why Steve Jobs talked about “connecting the dots.” Indeed when you move, heaven moves.
In 2015, my colleague at Toastmasters, and once the President, Eagle Toastmasters Club in Victoria Island, Lagos, Remi Abere, set a tough goal to conquer Mount Kilimanjaro. At 19,340 feet (5,895 meters), it’s the tallest Mountain in the African continent and the highest free-standing mountain in the world.
In 2016 Remi conquered Kilimanjaro, not once, but twice. The first time she did it to convince herself she could “surmount any obstacle in life”, and the second time, to raise money for internally displaced people in North East Nigeria.
Remi did not sit down to write SMART goals but engaged in mental toughness. Are you facing what you think is an insurmountable obstacle? Confront it head on! You can watch an interview I had with TM Remi Abere here.
The two questions you should ask yourself as you pursue your goals, according to Ryan Hildebrandt, who coaches people how to make TEDx talk, are:
(a) “Is life getting better?”
(b) “How can it get even better?”
Ryan says he uses these two questions for his weekly reviews and according to him, they have made massive difference to his life. I find the questions equally energizing in the context of goals as it prompts you to adjust your sails if things are not getting better.
Arnold Schwarzenegger won the Mr. Universe title in 1968 and Mr. Olympia seven times (1970 – 1975, and 1980). He shared the story that while preparing to debut in Mr. Universe, his detractors kept asking him “why are you preparing so hard?” His answer: “because I want to be the best.”
Do you have a dream but you don’t want to pay the price to actualize it? That is fantasy. In every sphere of human endeavour, the best always works harder than the second best. They practice a few minutes longer, jump a little bit higher, punch a little bit harder, run a little bit faster.
Michael Jordan, Mohammed Ali, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Rihana, you name it. Mohammed Ali said, “I hated every minute of training but I had to, so I could be called a champion for life.” So if you want to be the best, take up your cross and follow these legends.
Whether your goal is to get a job at a Fortune 500 company or in one of the top 10 global consulting firms or to set up and run an award winning SME company like Loshes Chocolate, or an online Expert Empire like Brendon Burchard, James Altucher or Ramit Sethi, it all begins with setting a goal, having a lofty ambition, having BIG dreams and pursuing your dream with messianic seal.
The only resource that each and every one of us has in the same exact measure is time. It doesn’t matter whether you’re young or old, tall or short, poor or wealthy, black or white or yellow we all have 24 hours per day or 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds.
How you focus your mind and spend every God-given second you have will determine whether you end up happy or sad, rich or poor, fulfilled or unfulfilled, impactful or unimpactful.
Peter Diamandis, the author of two mega bestsellers, Abundance and BOLD, tells all who care to listen, “If you want to become a billionaire, impact one billion lives.”
According to Stephen Covey, the three questions everyone on this planet faces while on a sojourn here are: “Did You Live?” “Did You Love?” “Did You Matter?”
Brendon Burchard further popularized the questions in his runaway best-selling book The Charge.
After a quick victory at Pontus, Julius Ceaser said, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” What will you say at the end of your own victorious life? I hope My Ultimate Guide to Setting Goals and Achieving Your Dreams will guide you.
If you’re interested in a quick guide to help you decide the important activities that will enable you achieve your most important goals email me for my individual personal development form at pauluduk@gmail.com or paul@pauluduk.com.
That’s it from me. I hope you enjoyed My Ultimate Guide To Setting Goals And Achieving Your Dreams and now have a much greater sense of clarity regarding how people achieve great results based on focused goals they set.
From here on it’s up to you. If you decide to join my mailing list to gain access to my whole body of work, that will be great and I look forward to seeing you very soon. If not, don’t let go of the dream and keep striving towards your goals – you will get there.
Here’s to your success.
