By: D. A. Slinkard
The ABCs of success in life are not nearly as complicated as many people make it out to be. We have ventured through the alphabet to start this year and we are now to the letter ‘G’ for Goals. It has been my experience not many people truly have goals they want to accomplish. More and more people have dreams they would love to achieve but many do not have goals. It has been said that dreams are something you create in your mind that can take any shape or form, while goals are based on taking action.
Dreams are easy to make, and they are imaginary. They do not produce any tangible results, and I have been told in the past that until a person writes down their goals and commits these goals to paper, they are merely dreams. There are many people living life who have an idea of what they want to achieve, what they want to accomplish, however, they have never taken the opportunity to jot down their dreams so they can become a reality.
I chuckle as I look back on the things I have accomplished in my life knowing that some of the things I have been able to achieve all started because of a wishful dream. Dreaming is not bad; we need to get our creative juices flowing especially if we want to make something out of our lives. I am a firm believer that we must think BIG in order to achieve results, but I also know we need to be committed to goal setting.
I have seen it too often when people do not set goals, they do not track the results they are getting, and they have no idea how to get where they want to go. We see the issues plaguing our society in which we have educators wanting to teach another “G” word such as genderism, but how much more productive could our members of society be if goals and goal setting became a priority over pushing partisan agendas?
I am a graduate of the public school system, and I cannot remember one time in which I had an educator talk to me about goal setting and what it takes to have success. Honestly, we have a lot of character traits that are lacking in our society. We have people who want to taste success, but they do not want to put in the effort it takes to achieve the success. We have too many people desiring to be the next viral sensation, and it just is not going to happen. I question how much more could I have achieved growing up if someone would have been more vocal with me pertaining to goals.
I have tried my very best to do this with my daughters, and I believe we all need reminders sometimes. In fact, I think every one of us should take the time right now to sit down and think about the goals we want to achieve in life. I heard a motivational speaker suggest to take out a clean sheet of paper and write down the word “Goals” and today’s date on it. Then write ten goals you would like to accomplish in the next twelve months. With this exercise, you will write these ten goals in the present tense such as, “I earn […], I achieve […], I drive such and such car, I own […].” Then you will take this list of ten goals and look it over and ask yourself, “If I could achieve one of these goals in the next 24 hours, which one goal would have the greatest, positive impact on my life?” Typically, this will jump out at you, and you want to circle that one goal. That is the goal you will transfer to another clean sheet of paper.
The next thing is to follow these six steps: 1.Write it down. 2. Set a deadline. 3. Make a list of everything you must do to accomplish this goal. 4. Organize the list into a checklist. 5. Take massive action. 6. Do something every day to accomplish this goal. If you do this simple exercise, you will find that nothing can stop you but yourself. We all have one life to live and one opportunity to achieve success. Our goals will vary from person to person, but we should all have goals. There is so much more we can accomplish, but we must take time to make goals.
By: D. A. Slinkard
D.A. Slinkard would love your feedback. You can contact him at da.slinkard@gmail.com
November 14, 2024
