Think About This When Selecting Goals
Setting goals is essential for top performance, that’s no secret. Every Olympic athlete, market leading business or worker interested in retiring before age 90 understands that it helps to set a goal and have a plan for how to get there.
This post is about how to approach your goals. As the saying goes, it’s a sad day in the neighborhood to find out that you’ve climbed your ladder of success, only to find out it was leaning against the wrong wall.
Here’s a proven idea that will help insure you have the right mindset as you make that vital decision about which fork in the road to take.
- Think long term!
As with most of the ideas I have, it’s not actually mine. 🙂 I first ran across this notion in Brian Tracy’s “Eat That Frog”, but it’s easy to see he’s right.
Short-term thinking and the desire for immediate gratification have derailed many otherwise well-intended goal seekers. It’s more appealing to think about getting that new BMW, taking a great European vacation or spending your evenings watching TV, until you begin to realize where you’ll be in 5 years with those kinds of decisions.
Another bit of wisdom I picked up somewhere along the way is that we tend to overestimate what we can do in the short run, but underestimate what we can do in the long run. Think of what you could accomplish in 5 years with a clear goal and a willingness to do something every singe day to move closer to that goal. Fortunes are built in 5 years. Entire lives can be changed in 5 years.
But we more frequently tend to think in the short term, one week or 30 days out, and it can be hard to it’s hard to accomplish something meaningful that soon. We can certainly get something meaningful started in that period of time, but far better to decide where we want our lives to be in 1, 3 or 5 years – not 30 days.
Thinking long term is a good predictor of future success.
Thinking long term is a great hedge insure that your decisions are wise ones.
