You have now learned perhaps the most comprehensive strategy for setting and achieving goals that has ever been put together in one book. By practicing these rules and principles, you can accomplish more in the coming months and years than most people accomplish in a lifetime. The most important quality you can develop for lifelong success is the habit of taking action on your plans, goals, ideas and insights. The more often you try, the sooner you will triumph. There is a direct relationship between the number of things you attempt and your accomplishments in life. Here are the 21 steps for setting and
achieving goals, and for living a wonderful life.
1. Unlock Your Potential
Always remember that your true potential is unlimited. Whatever you have accomplished in
life up to now has only been a preparation for the amazing things you can accomplish in the future.
“The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward some great good.”
Brian Tracy
Unlock Your Potential:
1. Imagine that you have the inborn ability to achieve any goal you could ever set for yourself. What do you really want to be, have and do?
2. What are the activities that give you your greatest sense of meaning and purpose in life?
3. Look at your personal and work life today and identify how your own thinking has created your world. What should you, could you change?
4. What do you think and talk about most of the time, what you want, or what you don’t want?
5. What is the price you will have to pay to achieve the goals that are most important to you?
6. What one action should you take immediately as the result of your answers to the above questions?
Unlock Your Potential
2. Take Charge of Your Life
You are completely responsible for everything you are today, for everything you think, say
and do, and for everything you become from this moment forward. Refuse to make excuses or to blame others. Instead, make progress toward your goals every.
“A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with – a man is what he makes of himself.”
Alexander Graham Bell
Take Charge of Your Life
1.Identify your biggest problem or source of negativity in life today. In what ways are you responsible for this situation?
2. See yourself as the President of your own company. How would you act differently if you owned 100% of the shares?
3. Resolve today to stop blaming anyone else for anything and instead accept complete responsibility in every area of your life. What actions should you be taking?
4. Stop making excuses and start making progress. Imagine that your favorite excuses have no basis in fact, and act accordingly.
5. See yourself as the primary creative force in your own life.You are where you are and what you are because of your own choices and decisions. What should you change?
6. Resolve today to forgive anyone who has ever hurt you in any way. Let it go. Refuse to discuss it again. Instead, get so busy working on something that is important to you that you don’t have time to think about it again.
Take Charge of Your Life
3. Create Your Own Future
Imagine that you have no limitations on what you can do, be or have in the months and years ahead. Think about and plan your future as if you had all the resources you needed to create any life that you desire.
“You will become large as your controlling desire; or as great as your dominant aspiration.”
James Allen
Create Your Own Future:
1.Imagine that there is a solution to every problem, a way to overcome every limitation, and no limit on your achieving every goal you can set for yourself. What would you do differently?
2. Practice “back from the future thinking.” Project forward five years and look back to the present. What would have to have happened for your world to be ideal?
3. Imagine your financial life were perfect in every way. How much would you be earning? How much would you be worth? What steps could you take, starting today, to make these goals a reality?
4. Imagine your family and personal life was perfect. What would it look like? What should you start doing more of, or less of, starting today?
5. Plan your perfect calendar. Design your year from January to December as if you had no limitations. What would you change, starting today?
6. Imagine that your levels of health and fitness were perfect in every way. What could you do, starting today, to make your vision for yourself into a reality?
Create Your Own Future
4. Clarify Your Values
Your innermost values and convictions define you as a person. Take the time to think through what you really believe in and care about in each area of your life. Refuse to deviate from what you feel is right for you.
“One universe made up of all that is: and one God in it all, and one principle of being, and one law, the reason shared by all thinking creatures, and one truth.”
Marcus Aurelius
Clarify Your Values:
1.Make a list of your 3-5 most important values in life today. What do you really believe in, and stand for?
2. What qualities and values are you best known for today among the people who know you?
3. What do you consider to be the most important values guiding your relationships with others in your life?
4. What are your values regarding money and financial success? Are you practicing these values daily?
5. Describe your picture of an ideal person, the person you would most want to be, if you had no limitations?
6. Write your own obituary, to be read to your friends and family at your funeral, exactly as you would like to be remembered.
7. What one change could you make in your behavior today that would help you to live in greater harmony with your values?
Clarify Your Values
5. Determine Your True Goals
Decide for yourself what you really want to accomplish in every area of your life. Clarity is essential for happiness and high performance living.
“Realize what you really want. It stops you from chasing butterflies and puts you to work digging gold.”
William Moulton Marsden
Determine Your True Goals:
1.Write down your three most important goals in life right now.
2. What are your three most pressing problems or worries right now?
3. If you won a million dollars cash, tax free, tomorrow, what changes in your life would you make immediately?
4. What do you really love to do? What gives you the greatest feelings of value, importance and satisfaction?
5. If you could wave a magic wand over your life and have anything you wanted, what would you wish for?
6. What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you only had six months left to live?
7. What would you really want to do with your life, especially if you had no limitations?
Determine Your True Goals
6. Decide Upon Your Major Definite Purpose
You need a central purpose to build your life around. There must be a single goal that will help you to achieve your other goals more than any other. Decide what it is for you and work on it all the time.
“There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.”
Napoleon Hill
Decide Upon Your Major Definite Purpose:
1.What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?
2. Make a list of ten goals you would like to achieve in the months and years ahead, in the present tense. Select the one goal from that list that would have the greatest positive impact on your life.
3. Determine how you will measure progress and success in the achieving of this goal. Write it down.
4. Make a list of everything you can think of to do that will move you toward your goal. Take action on at least one thing immediately.
5. Determine the price you will have to pay in additional work, time and commitment to achieve your goal, and then get busy paying that price.
Decide Upon Your Major Definite Purpose
7. Analyze Your Beliefs
Your beliefs about your own abilities, and about the world around you, will have more of an impact on your feelings and actions than any other factor. Make sure that your beliefs are positive and consistent with achieving everything that is possible for you.
“The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible.”
Richard M. DeVos
Analyze Your Beliefs:
1.“Act as if!” If you were one of the most competent and highly respected people in your field, how would you think, act and feel differently from today?
2. Imagine that you have a “golden touch” with regard to money. If you were an extremely competent money manager, how would you handle your finances?
3. Identify the self-limiting beliefs that could be holding you back. How would you act if they were completely untrue?
4. Select a belief that you would most like to have about yourself at a deep inner level. Pretend as if you already believe this to be true about you.
5. Look into the most difficult situation you are dealing with right now. What valuable lessons does it contain that can help you to be better in the future?
Analyze Your Beliefs
8. Start At The Beginning
Do a careful analysis of your starting point before you set off toward the achievement of your goal. Determine your exact situation today and be both honest and realistic about what you want to accomplish in the future.
“Your problem is to bridge the gap between where you are now and the goals you intend to reach.”
Earl Nightingale
Start At The Beginning:
1.Determine the reality of your current situation relative to your major goals. Where are you now, and how far do you have to go?
2. Apply the zero based thinking principle to every area of your life. What are you doing today that you wouldn’t get into again if you had it to do over, knowing what you now know?
3. Do a complete financial analysis of your life. How much are you earning today, and how much are you worth? What are your goals in these areas?
4. Do a complete skills analysis on yourself and your work. Where are you good? Where do you need to improve?
5. Determine exactly how much you earn each hour, and what it is you do to earn that amount. What do you have to do to increase your hourly rate in the months ahead?
6. Imagine your future was perfect in every way. What would have to happen to make that vision a reality?
Start At The Beginning
9. Measure Your Progress
Set clear benchmarks, measures, metrics and scorecards for yourself on the road to your
goals. These measures help you to assess how well you are doing and enable you to make necessary adjustments and corrections as you go along.
“There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience.”
Jean de la Bruyere
Measure Your Progress:
1.Determine a single measure that you can use to grade your progress and success in each area of life. Refer to it daily.
2. Determine the most important part of your job as it affects your income, and measure your daily activities in that area.
3. Set a minimum, specific amount for daily, weekly, monthly saving and investment, and discipline yourself to put away
those amounts.
4. Break every large goal down into measurable, controllable parts, and then focus on accomplishing each part on a fixed deadline.
5. Make it a game with yourself to set benchmarks, measures, scorecards, targets and deadlines for every goal, and then focus on those numbers and dates. The goals will take care of themselves.
6. Resolve to accomplish at least one specific part of a larger goal each day, and never miss a day.
Measure Your Progress
10. Remove The Roadblocks
Success boils down to the ability to solve problems and remove obstacles on the path
to your goal. Fortunately, problem solving is a skill you can master with practice, and thereby achieve your goals faster than you ever thought possible.
“The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process getting to the top.”
Joyce Brothers
Remove the Roadblocks:
1.Identify a major goal and then ask, “Why aren’t I there already? What is holding me back?” List everything you can think of.
2. Look into yourself and face the possibility that it is your own fears and doubts that are your biggest roadblocks to success.
3. Identify the constraint or limiting factor, in yourself or the situation, that sets the speed at which you achieve your goal.
4. Develop several definitions of your major problem or obstacle. Ask, “What else is the problem?”
5. Define your best solution as a goal, set a deadline, make a plan of action and then get busy on your plan. Work on it every day until the problem is solved or the obstacle is removed.
Remove The Roadblocks
11. Become An Expert In Your Field
You have within you, right now, the ability to be one of the very best at what you do, to join the top 10% in your field. Set this as a goal, work on it every day, and never stop working at it until you get there.
“The uncommon man is merely the common man thinking and dreaming of success and in more fruitful areas.”
Melvin Powers
Become An Expert In Your Field:
1.Resolve to day to join the top 10% of people in your field. Make a lifelong commitment to excellence.
2. Identify the key result areas of your job, the things you “absolutely, positively” have to do well to be successful in your field.
3. Identify your weakest key area and start a “do-it-to-yourself” project to become excellent in that area.
4. Determine the additional knowledge you will need to get to the top of your field and then develop a plan to acquire that knowledge.
5. Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. Read, listen to audio programs, attend courses and seminars, and then put what you learn into action as quickly as you can.
Become An Expert In Your Field
12. Associate With The Right People
Your choices of people with whom to live, work and socialize will have more of an effect on your success than any other factor. Resolve today
to associate only with people you like, respect and admire. Fly with the eagles if you want to be an eagle yourself.
“Your outlook upon life, your estimate of yourself, your estimate of your value are largely colored by your environment. Your whole career will be modified, shaped molded by your surroundings, by the character of the people with whom you come in contact every day.”
Orison Swett Marden
Associate With The Right People:
1.Make a list of the most important people in your work and business life. Develop a plan to help each person in some way.
2. Make a list of the most important people in your personal life. Determine the kind of relationships you want to have with them, and what you will have to do to achieve them.
3. Identify the groups and organizations in your community and your field that it would be helpful to you to join. Phone today and arrange to attend the next meeting.
4. Make a list of the top people in your community, or in your field, and make a plan to get to know them personally.
5. Look for every opportunity to expand your social and business circle. Send people letters, cards, faxes and emails. Build bridges at every opportunity.
Associate With The Right People
13. Make a Plan Of Action
An ordinary person with a well thought-out plan will run circles around a genius without one. Your ability to plan and organize in advance will enable you to accomplish even the biggest and most complex goals.
“Thoroughness characterizes all successful men. Genius is the art of taking infinite pains…All great achievement has been characterized by extreme care, infinite painstaking, even to the minutest detail. “
Elbert Hubbard
Make A Plan Of Action:
1. Make a list of everything that you can think of that you will have to do to achieve your goal. Leave nothing out.
2. Organize your list by priority; what is the most important task or activity? The second most important? And so on.
3. Organize your list by sequence; what must be done before something else can be done?
4. Determine how much time and money it will take to achieve your goal or complete your task. Do you have the time and resources necessary for success?
5. Revisit and revise your plan regularly, especially when you get new information, or things are not going as you had expected. Be prepared to change if you need to.
Make a Plan Of Action
14. Manage Your Time Well
Learn how to double and triple your productivity, performance and output by practicing
practical and proven time management principles. Always set priorities before you begin, and then concentrate on the most valuable use of your time.
“Time slips through our hands like grains of sand, never to return again. Those who use time wisely are rewarded with rich, productive and satisfying lives.”
Robin Sharma
Manage Your Time Well:
1. Make a list of everything you would like to be, do or have in the months and years ahead. Analyze your list and select those items that can have the greatest possible consequences on your life.
2. Make a list of everything you have to do the next day the evening before. Let your subconscious mind work on your list while you sleep.
3. Organize your list by priority using the 80/20 Rule and the ABCDE Method. Separate the urgent from the non-urgent and the important from the non-important, before you begin.
4. Select the most important task, the one with the greatest possible consequences for completion or non-completion, and circle it, making it your A-1 job.
5. Begin immediately on your most important task and then discipline yourself to concentrate single-mindedly on this one task until it is 100% complete.
Manage Your Time Well
15. Review Your Goals Daily
Take time every day, every week, every month to review and reevaluate your goals and objectives. Make sure that you are still on track and that you
are still working toward things that are important to you. Be prepared to modify your goals and plans with new information.
“It is a psychological law that whatever we wish to accomplish we must impress on the subjective or subconscious mind.”
Orison Swett Marden
Review Your Goals Daily:
- Get yourself a spiral notebook this very day and write down 10-15 goals that you would like to achieve in the foreseeable future.
2. Create a set of 3×5 index cards with your goals written out in the positive, personal, present tense to carry with you wherever you go.
3. Visualize and imagine your goals as they would be when you have achieved them each night before you go to sleep.
4. Think of three things you could do to achieve each of your goals. Always think in terms of specific actions you could take.
5. Discipline yourself to rewrite your goals every day, without reviewing your previous list, until you become absolutely convinced that achieving your goals is inevitable.
Review Your Goals Daily
16. Visualize Your Goals Continually
Direct the movies of your mind. Your imagination is your preview of your life’s coming attractions. Repeatedly “see” your goals as if they already
existed. Your clear, exciting mental images activate all your mental powers and attract your goals into your life.
“Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.”
Napoleon Hill
Visualize Your Goals Continually:
1.Project forward and imagine that your life was perfect in every respect. What would it look like? Whatever your answer, imagine this picture regularly.
2. Cut out pictures of the things you would like to have and the person you would like to be in the future. Look at these pictures and think about what you could do to make them into realities.
3. Practice mental rehearsal before every event of importance. See yourself in your mind’s eye as performing at your very best in everything you do or attempt.
4. Continually feed your mind with clear, exciting, emotional pictures. Remember, your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions
5. Design your own dream house, dream business or dream career. Write down every ingredient it would have if it were perfect in every respect. Visualize this as a reality every day.
Make the process of visualization a regular part of your life. Invest the time regularly to create exciting mental pictures of yourself and your life exactly as you want them to be. Then, have complete faith that your pictures will materialize exactly when you are ready.
Visualize Your Goals Continually
17. Activate Your Superconscious Mind
You have within you and around you an incredible power that will bring you everything and anything you want or need. Take the time
regularly to tap into this amazing source of ideas and insights for goal attainment.
“The subjective mind is entirely under the control of the objective mind. With the utmost fidelity, it works to its final consequence whatever the subjective mind impresses upon it.”
Thomas Troward
Activate Your Superconscious Mind:
1.Think back over your life and recall a time when you had a superconscious experience that solved a problem or enabled you to achieve a goal. Reflect on the process and think about how you can duplicate it.
2. Select your most important goal, your major definite purpose, and visualize it clearly, over and over, with complete confidence that it will materialize at exactly the right time for you.
3. Begin the daily practice of solitude and meditation. During this time, just let your mind relax and float from subject to subject until exactly the right answer to the right question
pops into your mind.
4. Make it a practice to take action on a superconscious idea as soon as it comes into your mind. Don’t hesitate. Have complete faith that only the best can happen when you trust in this power.
5. Try to solve your problem with single-minded concentration, and it that doesn’t work, get your mind busy elsewhere. At exactly the right time, the ideal solution will emerge from your intuition or appear in your life.
Your superconscious mind works for you in direct proportion to your complete trust and confidence in it. Practice letting go on a regular basis and wait patiently until exactly the right answer comes to you, at exactly the right time.
Activate Your Superconscious Mind
18. Remain Flexible At All Times
Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it. Be constantly open
to new, better, faster, cheaper ways to achieve the same result, and if something is not working, be willing to try a different approach.
“When I have finally decided that a result is worth getting, I go ahead on it and make trial after trial until it comes.”
Thomas Edison
Remain Flexible At All Times:
1.Regularly ask yourself the question, “What do I really, really want to do with my life?” and then make sure that your current goals and activities are in harmony with your answer.
2. Be completely honest and realistic with your life and goals. Resolve to see the world as it is, not as you wish it were, or could be. What changes does this practice suggest?
3. Be willing to admit, in each area of your life where you experience stress or resistance, that you could be wrong, or that you have made a mistake. Resolve today to cut your losses wherever possible.
4. If the situation has changed, or you have new information, be willing to change your mind and make a new decision based on the facts as they exist today. Refuse to persist in a course ofaction that does not make good sense.