Living the Significant Life (14 page)

Focus works. If you’re running haphazardly through your life, dabbling here and there, maybe it’s time to sharpen your vision. Like Brad, once you start to focus, you might find that the answer is right in front of your eyes.

PRINCIPLE #6

Set Specific Goals

The purpose of goals is to focus our attention. The mind will not reach toward achievement until it has clear objectives. The magic begins when we set goals. It is then that the switch is turned on, the current begins to flow, and the power to accomplish becomes a reality.

—
from
The Best of Success,
compiled by Wynn Davis

Do you remember what you were doing when you were fifteen? If someone had asked you at that age (and it’s quite likely that someone did—at least, a high school guidance counselor!), “What do you want to do with your life?,” do you have any idea what your answer would have been?

If someone asked you that today, do you know what your answer would be?

Do you have an answer? You must! Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book. The question really is, are you consciously and specifically
aware
of what that answer is?

In 1940, when John Goddard was fifteen years old, he answered that question quite specifically. In fact, he wrote down all the goals he had for his life. He wanted to do the following:

• Run a mile in five minutes or less
  
• Climb Mount Everest
  
• Live with indigenous people in Sudan
  
• Visit all the countries of the world
  
• Read both the Bible and the
  Encyclopedia Britannica
  from cover to cover
  
• Play Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on the piano
  
• Pilot a submarine
  
• Write a book
  

In fact, there were 127 entries on his list of goals!

Today, at age eighty-six, John Goddard is one of the most respected and well-known explorers in the world. He has achieved 108 of his original 127 goals. He has visited 113 countries and intends to visit the rest. He continues to pursue all the goals he has yet to fulfill: exploring the entire length of the Yangtze River in China, walking on the moon, and many, many more exciting adventures.

Such is the power of goals. Where does this power come from, and how can you use it to inspire success for yourself and others? The great New York Yankees philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”

Goals and Fellowship

Your life and work can be either a Sunday drive or a purposeful, by-design journey to your true destination: your destiny.
Destination
and
destiny
come from the same Latin word that means to “establish” or “make fast and firm.”

That’s what goals are all about. They focus us; they make our desires firm and fast. Goals establish the direction for your attention and awareness; they give your imagination a laserlike pointedness and focus your entire arsenal of inspirational tools on the task of turning your dreams into reality.

There is one more thing to consider before we get into goal-setting: you can’t
start
with goals. If you skipped straight to this chapter, go back to the beginning, and especially focus on chapter 2. You must start with your purpose. The reason most goal-setting programs fail is that they’re not linked to a purpose the person cares about. A goal without a worthwhile purpose to back it up is like a New Year’s resolution that gets abandoned by February. What’s going to make you do it when the going gets tough? What’s the overriding purpose that your goals are linked to?

We should warn you right up front: the chances are good that you’ll encounter people who react negatively to your goals. They’ll shake their heads and do their “grave dancing” routine. They’ll talk “no possibility” to you. But don’t ever let that throw you off-track. They are just people who have trouble being in the presence of real courage, determination, and desire. The truth is that your goals scare them.

Do you know why many other people don’t have goals? There are four reasons:

If you’ve ever participated in one of the hundreds of personal development or personal growth seminars out there, you may have heard a workshop leader say something like, “We’re not going to fix anyone here. There is nothing to fix. Get off the thought that you’re broken.”

Well, we’re here to tell you that if you think for one moment that you do not deserve success, happiness, and fulfillment, then something most definitely
is
broken! You do indeed require fixing.

It may be acceptable to some people to walk around with the thought that they don’t really deserve to succeed or be happy, but not to us! As far as we’re concerned, you
must
be successful, happy, and fulfilled, and that’s all there is to it. There is no excuse for not living and working with a level of joy and accomplishment equal to or even beyond your wildest dreams.

If you’re not living a significant life, then you are not living!

The time in which we live has been called the Age of Responsibility. We agree; furthermore, that means that it’s also the Age of Freedom, because freedom and responsibility are two seemingly opposite but actually complementary sides of the same coin. If you’re up for making a better world, if your life purpose has something to do with making a difference to people, with taking a stand for the highest possible quality of life—for yourself and for all the others with whom you come in contact—then
your success
is the most important and powerful contribution you can make.

Your success will have a bigger impact than you can imagine. You can be the one who breaks the logjam of mediocrity that enslaves our world and who propels us all into a future of indescribable beauty, productivity, and joy. Let us explain what we mean by that.

In the areas of Canada where they do the majority of North America’s logging, loggers use rivers rather than roads as their highways, floating the huge logs they cut down the river to the sawmills. Sooner or later, the logs get stuck in what we know as a logjam.

The interesting part is that although the loggers are faced with hundreds, even thousands of these great trees tangled up in a hopeless, immovable traffic jam, they know that moving just one log the right way will free up the entire mess and send all those trees floating freely down the river again. They call this one log the
kingpin.

Is it possible that you are a kingpin? What would happen to the people around you if you were freed up to become a big success? Don’t you think that it would inspire and encourage them? We can promise you it would. We cannot count the number of times we’ve watched organizations and groups of people experience a breakthrough in performance that stems from the success of just one person.

That’s why you must be a success. Your success is contagious. You will inspire many, many people to greater levels of accomplishment and happiness in their lives and work simply by being successful yourself.

People who don’t think they deserve success and happiness have merely forgotten that they do. You can tell them, “What do you think—God put us here to be miserable? Wouldn’t that be a great creation? Come on! Creation is a megamiracle, and you and I are its greatest achievement so far. Of course we’re here to be successful and happy!”

Perhaps the people who don’t believe this have just been worn down by unwanted circumstances. Maybe nobody ever told them that they do, in fact, deserve to be happy. So tell them:
You deserve it!
It’s a birthright and a responsibility as well as the greatest freedom you will ever experience. What’s more, it’s the perfect way to say thank you to the Creator who put this whole program together for us.

Your success is the gift you’ve come into this life to give. Of course, everybody has the right to
expect
success and happiness. However, expectations alone, with nothing else to inspire them—such as a solid structure for accomplishment and a design of thought and action—remain just hollow expectations. Unless that condition changes, the chances are quite good that your expectations will never be fulfilled.

Expectations are powerful! Goals are powerful! The first step for making your goals and expectations real is to write them down.

Write Down Your Goals

In a famous study of the Harvard class of 1953, the researchers discovered that only 10 percent of the graduates had established goals at all and that only 3 percent had written down their goals.

Twenty years later, the researchers again interviewed the same class members, who were now involved in careers and families. They quickly determined that the 3 percent who two decades earlier had written down their goals were now worth more in economic terms than the entire remaining 97 percent of the class combined! Obviously, economic success isn’t everything, but it certainly is a revealing and immediate way to measure the power of having written goals.

Until your goals are written down, they’re not really goals; they are dreams and wishes. And if wishes were fishes, it would be the rare angler who would catch the really big ones.

Without a magic lamp, without action that’s purposeful and by design, wishes rarely come true. We love fairy tales; most people do. They’re the lottery of literature. But we will not bet our lives and the well-being of our families on a trail of bread crumbs scattered in the forest.

Writing your goals down in black and white forces you to focus on them. Then you will commit to them. Furthermore, it’s important to share your goals with like-minded people—your champions.

Do you know what a champion is? In days of old, when knights were bold, an upper-class lady had a champion. He was a shining armor–clad character who defended her—life, honor, and all—against dastardly dragons, bad dukes, and any other negative assaults on her position or person. A champion is one who takes the field on behalf of another. Kings and queens all had champions, and you and I have them, too. Anyone who takes a stand for your greatness is your champion.