If you want to climb Mount Everest or secure a spot in Big Brother Africa, set a goal. A popular internet marketer once quipped, “Failures have goals; winners have systems.” Nothing could be further from the truth. A system without a goal sets you up as a wanderer, a tramp, with no where to go.

What is a goal?

In very simple terms, a goal is an end you wish to achieve: it can be your heart’s desire, an ambition or a dream. It could be the thing(s) you want to accomplish over the next few months, within a year or during your lifetime.

A goal is always bound by action and direction. Without these two ingredients, a goal would remain a mere wishful thinking. Although 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 unfulfilled dreams.

Why you Need a Goal

A goal is like a beacon or a lighthouse or a magnet drawing you to your destiny: it is 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 own, be it for yourself, your loved ones, your country or humanity at large.

If you look at the most successful people in the existence, you will notice that they are/were all driven by tall ambitions 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 about Arnold Schwarzenegger? Who was his mentor? Was he lucky?

Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Austria. He did not speak English. His father wanted him to join the police force (his father was a police officer); but his mother wanted him to marry early and settle down.

However, 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. Not only did he succeed and thrive, he also expanded.

He achieved all the goals he’d set for himself and more, becoming the governor of California, the third largest state in the US, in 2003 at the age of 55.  

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 behind the ears, I was commissioned by a top bank way back then to coach their entire management team in 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, interrupted me and asked, “Is strategy set once and for all times?”

As simple as the question was, I didn’t know the answer right off the bat back then. I started rambling and beating about the bush until the man said something to which I latched on to and said, “Yes, yes, strategy is a moving target.”

At this point, it is clear that goals are not set once and for all times. Goals, as you would expect, are always shifting targets, depending on your station in life.

David Allen, the productivity guru and author of Getting Things Done, calls the horizons of goals the “Horizons of focus.”

His system has six levels: (1) The runway (2) Projects (3) Areas of Focus and Accountability (4) Goal and Objectives (5) Vision, and (6) Purpose and Principle. It’s at level six you decide the purpose you came to fulfill on this planet.

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 explains 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. That was 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 (he genuinely believed that 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, people perish. So don’t perish. Your vision could be “to build the most customer-centric company on the planet” à la Jeff Bezos.

Your mission could be to set up an online business, which may require running the business for years without profit as Amazon did, because you could see, like Jeff Bezos, what others didn’t or couldn’t.

Your purpose could be to scale the heights of business rapidly, gaining momentum and remaining completely technological 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 to set firm goals on your spiritual well-being, whether you’re a freethinker, a believer or non-believer, we’ll focus on the physical or material side of life, with the following seven sub-dimensions:

1. Learning/Education/Intellectual
2. Health
3. Finance
4. Wealth
5. Career/Political
6. Family
7. Leisure/Hobby/others

We will have to set goals in all the dimensions and sub-dimensions. No two people can have the same goals since we all have different needs, preferences and aspirations. In all, your goal will be strongly influenced by your values.

You can visualize a goal as an onion with many layers. The outer layers are the ephemeral things that attract you every now and then; but, the inner core is what you will eventually settle for. The inner core is determined by your values. You can take a free 5-minute test at the Barrett Values Center to know your values. If you send me your email address via paul@pauluduk.com, I will email you the link to Barrett Values Center.

Having known your values, play according to your strengths (like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s which is physical excellence). Go all out to pursue the things you love. Play to win.

Some people play not to lose. They are defensive. They seek approval from the world. They tiptoe into anything they want to do.

Winners defy the world. They approach anything they want to do with gusto and jump into it with both feet. 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.

To be continued…