How to Set and Achieve Goals

Setting and achieving goals are essential to living a productive and successful life. Here are some suggestions on how to successfully accomplish your ambitions, both large and small.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Decide what you want out of life. No matter what stage of life you are in you should know what you want for your life. Ask yourself questions such as: Do I want to work in this career the rest of my life? Do I need more education? Do I want to buy a house? What age do I want to retire? How can I have a successful marriage? How can I be a better parent to my kids?

2. 
    
   Write down your plan.

   Make a plan and then write it down. You can write down all you want out of life but unless you know how to achieve those goals it will just be a dream. Decide what steps you need to take in order to accomplish your plans.

3. Set large and small goals. Some people set 5 or 10 year goals but leave out the time in-between. It is much easier to accomplish a large goal if it is divided into smaller goals. Example: You want to build a house in the next 5 years. So what do you do in the meantime? Goal 1 would be to start saving money. Goal 2 might be finding a house plan and/or researching contractors, etc. Big goals take time and preparing to accomplish. The last step would be the actual building of the house.

4. Be productive. Find things to do in your spare time that will help you accomplish your goals. If you know someone who has a similar goal that is ahead of you, spend time with that person in order to gain the knowledge for yourself in the future.

Tips & Warnings

• Dream big ... but dream realistically, too. Most people want to be a millionaire but few have the actual goal setting skills and ambition to fulfill that goal. Maybe dreaming of being debt free is a more realistic venture.
• Don't give up. Big goals take time to accomplish and sometimes setbacks occur. That's real life.

[triciagoss]

on 5/4/2009 Good advice!