GOALS
Part-7
How to Get Everything You Want –
Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible
By Brian Tracy
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
_________________________________________________
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
Chapter-15
Review Your Goals Daily
Chapter-16
Visualize Your Goals Continually
Conclusion: Take Action Today
DEDICATION
To Rick Metcalf, a good friend, a great American, an extraordinary entrepreneur,
one of the best salesmen who ever lived, and an inspiration to everyone who knew him.
I only wish you could be here to read this book. You left us all too soon.
PREFACE
This book is for ambitious people who want to get ahead faster. If this is the way you think and feel, you are the person for whom this book is written. The ideas contained in the pages ahead will save you years of hard work in achieving the goals that are most important to you.
I have spoken more than 2000 times before audiences of as many as 23,000 people, in 24 countries. My seminars and talks have varied in length from five minutes to five days. In every case, I have focused on sharing the best ideas I could find on the particular subject with that audience at that moment. After countless talks on various themes, if I was only given five minutes to speak to you, and I could only convey one thought that would help you to be more successful, I would tell you to “write down your goals, make plans to achieve them, and work on your plans every single day.”
This advice, if you followed it, would be of more help to you than anything else you could ever learn. Many university graduates have told me that this simple concept has been more valuable to them than four years of study. This idea has changed my life, and the lives of millions of other people. It will change yours as well.
The Turning Point
A group of successful men got together in Chicago some time ago, talking about the experiences of their lives. All of them were millionaires and multi-millionaires. Like most successful people, they were both humble and grateful for what they had achieved, and for the blessings that life had bestowed upon them. As they discussed the reasons why they had managed to achieve so much in life, the wisest man among them spoke up and said that, in his estimate, “success is goals, and all else is commentary.”
Your time and your life are precious. The biggest waste of time and life is for you to spend years accomplishing something that you could have achieved in only a few months. By following the practical, proven process of goal setting and goal achieving laid out in this book, you will be able to accomplish vastly more in a shorter period of time than you have ever imagined before. The speed at which you move onward and upward will amaze both yourself and all the people around you. By following these simple and easy-to-apply methods and techniques, you can move quickly from rags to riches in the months and years ahead. You can transform your experience from poverty and frustration to affluence and satisfaction. You can go far beyond your friends and family and achieve more in life than most other people you know.
In my talks, seminars and consulting, I have worked with more than two million people all around the world. I have found, over and over, that an average person with clear goals will run circles around a genius who is not sure what he or she really wants.
My personal mission statement has not changed in years. It is: “To help people achieve their goals faster than they ever would in the absence of my help.”
This book contains the distilled essence of all that I have learned in the areas of success, achievement and goal attainment. By following the steps explained in the pages ahead, you will move to the front of the line in life. For my children, this book is meant to be a road map and a guide to help you get from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. For my friends and readers of this book, my reason for writing it is to give you a proven system that you can use to move onto the fast track in your own life.
Welcome! A great new adventure is about to begin.
INTRODUCTION
This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more opportunities for creative and determined people to achieve more of their goals than they can today. Regardless of short-term ups and downs in the economy and in your life, we are entering into an age of peace and prosperity superior to any previous era in human history.
In the year 1900, there were five thousand millionaires in America. By the year 2000, there were more than five million, most of them selfmade, in one generation. Experts predict that there will be another ten to twenty million millionaires created in the next two decades. Your goal should be to become one of them. This book will show you how.
A Slow Start
When I was 18, I left high school without graduating. My first job was as a dishwasher in the back of a small hotel. From there, I moved on to washing cars, and then washing floors with a janitorial service. For the next few years, I drifted and worked at various laboring jobs, earning my living by the sweat of my brow. I worked in sawmills and factories. I worked on farms and ranches. I worked in the tall timber with a chain saw and dug wells when the logging season ended.
I worked as a construction laborer on tall buildings, and as a seaman on a Norwegian Freighter in the North Atlantic. Often I slept in my car, or in cheap rooming houses. When I was 23, I was working as an itinerant farm laborer during the harvest, sleeping on the hay in the barn and eating with the farmer’s family. I was uneducated, unskilled, and at the end of the harvest, unemployed once more.
When I could no longer find a laboring job, I got a job in straight commission sales, cold calling from office-to-office and from door-todoor. I would often work all day long to make a single sale so that I could pay for my rooming house and have a place to sleep that night. This was not a great start at life.
The Day My Life Changed
Then one day, I took out a piece of paper and wrote down an outrageous goal for myself. It was to earn $1,000 per month in doorto-door and office-to-office selling. I folded up the piece of paper, put it away and never found it again.
But 30 days later, my entire life had changed. During that time, I discovered a technique for closing sales that tripled my income from the very first day. Meanwhile, the owner of my company sold out to an entrepreneur who had just moved into town. Exactly thirty days after I had written down my goal, he took me aside and offered me $1,000 per month to head up the sales force and teach the other people what it was that I was doing that enabled me to be selling so much more than anyone else. I accepted his offer and from that day forward, my life was never the same.
Within eighteen months, I had moved from that job to another, and then to another. I went from personal selling to becoming a sales manager with people selling for me. I recruited and built a 95 person sales force. I went literally from worrying about my next meal to walking around with a pocket full of $20 dollar bills.
I began teaching my salespeople how to write out their goals, and how to sell more effectively. In almost no time at all, they doubled and tripled and increased their incomes as much as ten times. Many of them are today millionaires and multi-millionaires.
It’s important to note that, since those days in my mid-20s, my life has not been a smooth series of upward steps. It has included many ups and downs, marked by occasional successes and temporary failures. I have traveled, lived and worked in more than 80 countries, learning French, German and Spanish along the way, and working in 22 different fields.
As the result of inexperience, and sometimes sheer stupidity, I have spent or lost everything I made and had to start over again - several times. In every case when this happened, I would begin by sitting down with a piece of paper and laying out a new set of goals for myself, using the methods that I’ll explain in the pages ahead.
After several years of hit and miss goal setting and goal achieving, I finally decided to collect everything I had learned into a single system. By assembling these ideas and strategies in one place, I
developed a goal setting methodology and process, with a beginning, middle and end, and began to follow it every day.
Within one year, following this blueprint for goal achieving, my life had changed once more. In January of that year, I was living in a rented apartment with rented furniture. I was $35,000 in debt and driving a used car that wasn’t paid for. By December, I was living in my own $100,000 condominium. I had a new Mercedes, had paid off all my debts and I had $50,000 in the bank.
Then I really got serious about success. I realized that this “goal setting” stuff was incredibly powerful. I invested hundreds and then thousands of hours reading and researching on goal setting and goal achieving, synthesizing the best ideas I could find into a complete goal setting and achieving process that worked with incredible effectiveness.
Anyone Can Do It
In 1981, I began teaching my system in workshops and seminars that have now reached more than two million people in 35 countries. I began audiotaping and video taping my courses so that others could use them. We have now trained hundreds of thousands of people in these principles, in multiple languages, all over the world.
What I found was that these ideas work everywhere, for everyone, in virtually every country, no matter what your education, experience or background may be when you begin.
Most of all, these ideas have made it possible for me, and many thousands of others, to take complete control over our lives. The regular and systematic practice of goal setting has taken us from poverty to prosperity, from frustration to fulfillment, from underachievement to success and satisfaction. This system will do the same for you.
What I learned early on is that any plan is better than no plan at all. And it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. All the answers have already been found. There are hundreds of thousands, and even millions of men and women who have started with nothing and achieved great success following these principles. And what others have done, you can do as well, if you just learn how.
In the pages ahead, you will learn twenty-one of the most important ideas and strategies ever discovered for achieving everything that you could ever want in life. You will find that there are no limits to what you can accomplish except for the limits you place on your own imagination. And since there are no limits to what you can imagine, there are no limits to what you can achieve. This is one of the greatest discoveries of all. Let us begin.
“A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. Confucius
CHAPTER 15
Review Your Goals Daily
“It is a psychological law that whatever we wish
to accomplish we must impress on the subjective or subconscious mind.”
__________________________________________________________
Orison Swett Marden
Sometimes I ask my audiences, “How many people here would like to double their incomes?” Not surprisingly, everyone raises his or her hand. I then go on to say, “Well, I have good news for you. Everybody here is going to double their income – guaranteed- if you live long enough!”
If your income increases at the rate of 3% to 4% per year, the average annual cost of living increase, you will double your income in about 20 years. But that is a long time to wait!
So the real question is not about doubling your income. The real question is, “How fast can you do it?”
Double The Speed of Goal Attainment
There are many techniques that can help you to achieve your personal and financial goals faster. In this chapter, I want to share with you a special method that has taken more people from rags to riches than any other single method ever discovered. It is simple, fast, effective and guaranteed to work – if you will practice it.
Earlier, I said, “You become what you think about, most of the time.” This is the great truth that underlies all religion, philosophy, psychology and success. As a teacher of mine, John Boyle, once said, “Whatever you can hold in your mind on a continuing basis, you can have.” This is the key.
Positive Thinking Versus Positive Knowing
Many people today talk about the importance of “positive thinking.” Positive thinking is important, but it is not enough. Left undirected and uncontrolled, positive thinking can quickly degenerate into positive wishing and positive hoping. Instead of serving as an energy force for inspiration and higher achievement, positive thinking can become little more than a generally cheerful attitude toward life, and whatever happens to you, positive or negative.
To be focused and effective in goal attainment, positive thinking must translate into “positive knowing.” You must absolutely know and believe, in the depths of your being, that you are going to be successful at achieving a particular goal. You must proceed completely without doubt. You must be so resolute and determined, so convinced of your ultimate success, that nothing can stop you.
Program Your Subconscious Mind
Everything that you do to program your subconscious mind with this unshakeable conviction of success will help you achieve your goals faster. This method I am going to share with you can actually multiple your talents and abilities, and greatly increase the speed at which you move from wherever you are to wherever you want to go.
One of the important mental laws is, “Whatever is impressed, is expressed.” Whatever you impress deeply into your subconscious mind will eventually be expressed in your external world. Your aim in mental programming is to impress your goals deeply into your subconscious mind so that they “lock in” and take on a power of their own. This method helps you to do that.
Systematic Versus Random Goal Setting
For many years, I worked away at my goals, writing them down once or twice a year and then reviewing them whenever I got a chance. Even this was enough to make an incredible difference in my life. Often, I would write down a list of goals for myself in January for the coming year. In December of that year, I would review my list and find that most of the goals had been accomplished, including some of the biggest and most unbelievable goals on the list.
I then learned the technique that changed my life. I discovered that if it is powerful for you to write down your goals once a year, it is even more powerful for you to write down your goals more often. Some authors suggest that you write down and review your goals once a month, others once a week. What I learned was the power of writing and rewriting your goals every single day.
Write Down Your Goals Each Day
Here is the technique. Get a spiral notebook that you keep with you at all times. Each day, open up your notebook and write down a list of your 10-15 most important goals, without referring to your previous list. Do this every day, day after day. As you do this, several remarkable things will happen.
The first day you write down your list of goals, you will have to give it some thought and reflection. Most people have never made a list of their 10 top goals in their entire lives.
The second day you write out your list, without reference to your previous list, it will be easier. However, your 10-15 goals will change, both in description and order of priority. Sometimes, a goal that you wrote one day will not appear the next day. It may even be forgotten and never reappear again. Or it may reappear later at a more appropriate time.
Each day that you write down your list of 10-15 goals, your definitions will become clearer and sharper. You will eventually find yourself writing down the same words every day. Your order of priority will also change as your life changes around you. But over time, after about 30 days, you will find yourself writing and rewriting the same goals every day.
Your Life Takes Off
And at about this time, something remarkable will happen in your life. It will take off! You will feel like a passenger in a jet hurtling down the runway. Your work and personal life will begin to improve dramatically. Your mind will sparkle with ideas and insights. You will start to attract people and resources into your life to help you to achieve your goals. You will start to make progress at a rapid rate, sometimes so fast that it will be a little scary. Everything will begin to change in a very positive way.
Over the years, I have spoken in 23 countries and addressed more than two million people. I have shared this “10 Goal Exercise” with hundreds of thousands of seminar participants. The exercise that I give them is a little simpler than the exercise that I am giving you here. Here it is.
I ask my audience members to make a list of 10 goals that they want to accomplish in the coming year. I tell them to put the list away for 12 months and then open it up. When they open up the list after a year, it will be as though a magic trick has been performed. In almost every case, eight out of their ten goals will have been accomplished, sometimes in the most remarkable ways.
I have given this exercise all over the world, to people in every language and culture. In virtually every case, when I return to their cities and countries, people line up to talk to me, like in a wedding receiving line, and tell me story after story about how their lives have changed after writing down their 10 goals a year or more ago.
Putting This Method to Work
In the exercise that we are discussing in this chapter, you will learn to get results that are far greater and far faster than those enjoyed by people who write their goals down only one time. Your results will double and triple and increase five and ten times as you use the same power of goal setting we have discussed earlier, but you will now be writing your goals down every day.
There are some special rules that you must follow to get the most out of this exercise. First, you must use the “Three ‘P’ Formula.” Your goals must be written and described in the positive, present and personal tenses.
Activate Your Subconscious Mind
Your subconscious mind is only activated by affirmative statements phrased in the present tense. You therefore write down your goals as though you have already accomplished them. Instead of saying, “I will earn $50,000 in the next 12 months,” you would say, “I earn $50,000 per year.”
Your goals must be stated positively as well. Instead of saying, “I will quit smoking,” or “I will lose a certain number of pounds of weight,” you would say, “I am a non-smoker.” Or, “I weigh X number of pounds.”
Your command must be positive because your subconscious mind cannot process a negative command. It is only receptive to a positive, present tense statement.
The third “P” stands for personal. From now on, and for the rest of your life, write out every goal beginning with the word “I,” followed by a verb of some kind. You are the only person in the universe who can use the word “I” in relation to yourself. When your subconscious mind receives a command that begins with the word “I,” it is as though the factory floor receives a production order from the head office. It goes to work immediately to bring that goal into your reality.
For example, you would not say, “My goal is to earn $50,000 per year.” Instead, you would say, “I earn $50,000 per year.” Begin each of your goals with phrases such as, “I earn, I weigh, I achieve, I win, I drive such and such a car, I live in a such and such a home, I climb such and such a mountain,” and so on.
Set Deadlines On Your Goals
To add power to your daily written goals, put a deadline at the end of each goal. For example, you might write, “I earn an average of $5,000 per month by December 31 (followed by a particular year).”
As we discussed in an earlier chapter, your mind loves deadlines and thrives on a “forcing system.” Even if you do not know how the goal is going to be achieved, always give yourself a firm deadline. Remember, you can always change the deadline with new information. But be sure you have a deadline, like an exclamation point, after every goal.
How Badly Do You Want It?
This exercise of writing out your 10 goals every single day is a test. The test is to determine how badly you really want to achieve these goals. Often you will write out a goal and then forget to write it down again. This simply means that you either don’t really want to achieve that goal as much as something else, or you don’t really believe that that goal is achievable for you.
However, the more you can discipline yourself to write and rewrite your goals each day, the clearer you will become about what you really want, and the more convinced you will become that it is possible for you.
Trust The Process
When you begin writing your goals, you may have no idea how they will be accomplished. But this is not important. All that matters is that you write and rewrite them every day, in complete faith, knowing that every single time you write them down, you are impressing them deeper and deeper into your subconscious mind. At a certain point, you will begin to believe, with absolute conviction, that your goal is achievable.
Once your subconscious mind accepts your goals as commands from your conscious mind, it will start to make all your words and actions fit a pattern consistent with those goals. Your subconscious mind will start attracting into your life people and circumstances that can help you to achieve your goal.
Your Mental Computer Works 24 Hours Per Day
Your subconscious mind works 24 hours a day, like a massive computer that is never turned off, to help bring your goals into reality. Almost without your doing anything, your goals will begin to materialize in your life, sometimes in the most remarkable and unexpected ways.
Some years ago, I met with a businessman in Los Angeles who had an absolutely ridiculous idea. He wanted to raise many millions dollars in investment capital to create an amusement park in Hawaii that would be composed of restaurants, displays and exhibits from a variety of different countries from around the world. He was absolutely convinced that it would be a big attraction and that he could get the support and backing of all these different countries, as long as he could raise the start up money to launch the project.
In my youth and experience, I gently told him that I thought his idea was a complete fantasy. The complexity and expense of such a massive undertaking was so vast for a person of his limited resources that it would be a complete waste of time. I thanked him for his offer of a job in putting this whole plan together and politely departed.
This was in the 1960s. The next thing I heard about this project was that the Walt Disney Corporation had embraced it in its entirety, called it the “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Epcot Center),”and had begun construction on it next to its Disneyland in Orlando, Florida. The amusement park and development has gone on to make hundreds of millions of dollars, year after year, and become one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
Activate All The Forces In the Universe
Here is the point. At that time, as a young man, I did not know that when you write down a goal, no matter how big or impossible it seems, you activate a series of forces in the universe that often make the impossible possible. I will explain this in great detail in the chapter on the “Superconscious Mind.”
Whenever you write down a new goal of any kind, you may be skeptical and doubtful about the likelihood of accomplishing it. You may have the idea in your conscious mind, but you will have not yet developed the total belief and conviction that is possible for you. This is normal and natural. Don’t let it stop you from using this method every day.
Just Do It!
All that is required to make this method work is for you to get a spiral notebook and then to discipline yourself each day to write down your 10 goals in the positive, present, personal tense. That’s all you need. In a week, a month or a year, you will look around you and see that your whole life will have transformed in the most remarkable ways.
Even if you are skeptical about this method, it only requires about five minutes per day to try it out for yourself. The good news is that I have never met a person, in more than 20 years, who has ever told me that this method does not work. It is quite the opposite. I get letters, phone calls, emails and personal testimonials almost every day from people all over the country, and all over the world, whose lives have transformed so dramatically with this method as to be beyond belief!
Multiply Your Results
You can multiply the effectiveness of this method with a couple of additional techniques. First, after you have written down your goal in the positive, personal, present tense, write down at least three actions that you could take immediately to achieve that goal, also in the present, positive, personal tense.
For example, your goal could be to earn a certain amount of money. You could write, “I earn $50,000 dollars over the next 12 months.”
You could then write, immediately underneath: 1) I plan every day in advance; 2) I start in immediately on my most important tasks; 3) I concentrate single mindedly on my most important task until it is complete.
Whatever your goal, you can easily think of three action steps that you can take immediately to achieve that goal. When you write down the action steps, you program them into your subconscious mind along with the goal. At a certain point, you will find yourself actually taking the steps that you wrote down, sometimes without even thinking about it. And each step you take will move you more rapidly toward your ultimate objective.
Use 3 x 5 Index Cards
Another way that you can increase the effectiveness of daily goal setting is by transferring your goals to 3 x 5 index cards. Write one goal on each card in large letters. Carry these cards with you at all times. Whenever you have a few spare moments, take out your index cards and review your goals, one by one.
Each of these goals should be written as a personal, positive, present tense affirmation. Someone once said, “I would rather a morning without breakfast than a morning without affirmations.” Each time you use these cards, take a few moments, breath deeply and relax, and then review each of your goals, one at a time.
As you read the goal to yourself, imagine the goal as though it were already a reality. Actually see yourself at the goal, enjoying the goal, feeling the pleasure of having achieved the goal.
Alternately, as you read your index cards, you can imagine specific steps that you can take immediately to achieve that goal. You should actually imagine yourself taking those steps. Then relax, and go on to the next goal.
Ideally, you should review your goals on index cards twice per day. Read them once in the morning before you start off and once in the evening before you go to bed. You can also carry them around with you and review them during the day, whenever you have a few spare moments.
The Best Times For Mental Programming
There are two times of the day that are ideal for writing and rewriting your goals, and for reading and reviewing your index cards. These are: the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed, and the first thing in the morning, before you start off.
When you rewrite and review your goals in the evening, you program them into your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind then has an opportunity to work on your goals all night long while you are sleeping. You will often arise with wonderful ideas for things to do or people to call to help you achieve your goals.
When you rewrite and review your goals in the morning, before you start off, you set yourself up for positive thinking and positive acting all day long. Just as physical exercise in the morning warms up your physical body and muscles, reviewing your goals in the morning warms up your mind and prepares you to be at your very best throughout the day.
The sum total result of rewriting and reviewing your goals each day, morning and evening, is that you will impress them ever more deeply into your subconscious mind. You will gradually move from positive thinking to positive knowing. You will develop a deep and unshakeable conviction that your goals are attainable, and that it is only a matter of time before you achieve them, and you will be right.
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.
Create a set of 3x5 index cards with your goals written out in the positive, personal, present tense to carry with you wherever you go.
Visualize and imagine your goals as they would be when you have achieved them each night before you go to sleep
Think of three things you could do to achieve each of your goals. Always think in terms of specific actions you could take.
Discipline yourself to rewrite your goals every day, without reviewing your previous list, until you become absolutely convinced that achieving your goals is inevitable.
CHAPTER 16
Visualize Your Goals Continually
“Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul;
the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.”
__________________________________________________________
Napoleon Hill
Sometimes I ask my audiences, “How many people here would like to double their incomes?” Not surprisingly, everyone raises his or her hand. I then go on to say, “Well, I have good news for you. Everybody here is going to double their income – guaranteed- if you live long enough!”
If your income increases at the rate of 3% to 4% per year, the average annual cost of living increase, you will double your income in about 20 years. But that is a long time to wait!
So the real question is not about doubling your income. The real question is, “How fast can you do it?”
Double The Speed of Goal Attainment
There are many techniques that can help you to achieve your personal and financial goals faster. In this chapter, I want to share with you a special method that has taken more people from rags to riches than any other single method ever discovered. It is simple, fast, effective and guaranteed to work – if you will practice it.
Earlier, I said, “You become what you think about, most of the time.” This is the great truth that underlies all religion, philosophy, psychology and success. As a teacher of mine, John Boyle, once said, “Whatever you can hold in your mind on a continuing basis, you can have.” This is the key.
Positive Thinking Versus Positive Knowing
Many people today talk about the importance of “positive thinking.” Positive thinking is important, but it is not enough. Left undirected and uncontrolled, positive thinking can quickly degenerate into positive wishing and positive hoping. Instead of serving as an energy force for inspiration and higher achievement, positive thinking can become little more than a generally cheerful attitude toward life, and whatever happens to you, positive or negative.
To be focused and effective in goal attainment, positive thinking must translate into “positive knowing.” You must absolutely know and believe, in the depths of your being, that you are going to be successful at achieving a particular goal. You must proceed completely without doubt. You must be so resolute and determined, so convinced of your ultimate success, that nothing can stop you.
Program Your Subconscious Mind
Everything that you do to program your subconscious mind with this unshakeable conviction of success will help you achieve your goals faster. This method I am going to share with you can actually multiple your talents and abilities, and greatly increase the speed at which you move from wherever you are to wherever you want to go.
One of the important mental laws is, “Whatever is impressed, is expressed.” Whatever you impress deeply into your subconscious mind will eventually be expressed in your external world. Your aim in mental programming is to impress your goals deeply into your subconscious mind so that they “lock in” and take on a power of their own. This method helps you to do that.
Systematic Versus Random Goal Setting
For many years, I worked away at my goals, writing them down once or twice a year and then reviewing them whenever I got a chance. Even this was enough to make an incredible difference in my life. Often, I would write down a list of goals for myself in January for the coming year. In December of that year, I would review my list and find that most of the goals had been accomplished, including some of the biggest and most unbelievable goals on the list.
I then learned the technique that changed my life. I discovered that if it is powerful for you to write down your goals once a year, it is even more powerful for you to write down your goals more often. Some authors suggest that you write down and review your goals once a month, others once a week. What I learned was the power of writing and rewriting your goals every single day.
Write Down Your Goals Each Day
Here is the technique. Get a spiral notebook that you keep with you at all times. Each day, open up your notebook and write down a list of your 10-15 most important goals, without referring to your previous list. Do this every day, day after day. As you do this, several remarkable things will happen.
The first day you write down your list of goals, you will have to give it some thought and reflection. Most people have never made a list of their 10 top goals in their entire lives.
The second day you write out your list, without reference to your previous list, it will be easier. However, your 10-15 goals will change, both in description and order of priority. Sometimes, a goal that you wrote one day will not appear the next day. It may even be forgotten and never reappear again. Or it may reappear later at a more appropriate time.
Each day that you write down your list of 10-15 goals, your definitions will become clearer and sharper. You will eventually find yourself writing down the same words every day. Your order of priority will also change as your life changes around you. But over time, after about 30 days, you will find yourself writing and rewriting the same goals every day.
Your Life Takes Off
And at about this time, something remarkable will happen in your life. It will take off! You will feel like a passenger in a jet hurtling down the runway. Your work and personal life will begin to improve dramatically. Your mind will sparkle with ideas and insights. You will start to attract people and resources into your life to help you to achieve your goals. You will start to make progress at a rapid rate, sometimes so fast that it will be a little scary. Everything will begin to change in a very positive way.
Over the years, I have spoken in 23 countries and addressed more than two million people. I have shared this “10 Goal Exercise” with hundreds of thousands of seminar participants. The exercise that I give them is a little simpler than the exercise that I am giving you here. Here it is.
I ask my audience members to make a list of 10 goals that they want to accomplish in the coming year. I tell them to put the list away for 12 months and then open it up. When they open up the list after a year, it will be as though a magic trick has been performed. In almost every case, eight out of their ten goals will have been accomplished, sometimes in the most remarkable ways.
I have given this exercise all over the world, to people in every language and culture. In virtually every case, when I return to their cities and countries, people line up to talk to me, like in a wedding receiving line, and tell me story after story about how their lives have changed after writing down their 10 goals a year or more ago.
Putting This Method to Work
In the exercise that we are discussing in this chapter, you will learn to get results that are far greater and far faster than those enjoyed by people who write their goals down only one time. Your results will double and triple and increase five and ten times as you use the same power of goal setting we have discussed earlier, but you will now be writing your goals down every day.
There are some special rules that you must follow to get the most out of this exercise. First, you must use the “Three ‘P’ Formula.” Your goals must be written and described in the positive, present and personal tenses.
Activate Your Subconscious Mind
Your subconscious mind is only activated by affirmative statements phrased in the present tense. You therefore write down your goals as though you have already accomplished them. Instead of saying, “I will earn $50,000 in the next 12 months,” you would say, “I earn $50,000 per year.”
Your goals must be stated positively as well. Instead of saying, “I will quit smoking,” or “I will lose a certain number of pounds of weight,” you would say, “I am a non-smoker.” Or, “I weigh X number of pounds.”
Your command must be positive because your subconscious mind cannot process a negative command. It is only receptive to a positive, present tense statement.
The third “P” stands for personal. From now on, and for the rest of your life, write out every goal beginning with the word “I,” followed by a verb of some kind. You are the only person in the universe who can use the word “I” in relation to yourself. When your subconscious mind receives a command that begins with the word “I,” it is as though the factory floor receives a production order from the head office. It goes to work immediately to bring that goal into your reality.
For example, you would not say, “My goal is to earn $50,000 per year.” Instead, you would say, “I earn $50,000 per year.” Begin each of your goals with phrases such as, “I earn, I weigh, I achieve, I win, I drive such and such a car, I live in a such and such a home, I climb such and such a mountain,” and so on.
Set Deadlines On Your Goals
To add power to your daily written goals, put a deadline at the end of each goal. For example, you might write, “I earn an average of $5,000 per month by December 31 (followed by a particular year).”
As we discussed in an earlier chapter, your mind loves deadlines and thrives on a “forcing system.” Even if you do not know how the goal is going to be achieved, always give yourself a firm deadline. Remember, you can always change the deadline with new information. But be sure you have a deadline, like an exclamation point, after every goal.
How Badly Do You Want It?
This exercise of writing out your 10 goals every single day is a test. The test is to determine how badly you really want to achieve these goals. Often you will write out a goal and then forget to write it down again. This simply means that you either don’t really want to achieve that goal as much as something else, or you don’t really believe that that goal is achievable for you.
However, the more you can discipline yourself to write and rewrite your goals each day, the clearer you will become about what you really want, and the more convinced you will become that it is possible for you.
Trust The Process
When you begin writing your goals, you may have no idea how they will be accomplished. But this is not important. All that matters is that you write and rewrite them every day, in complete faith, knowing that every single time you write them down, you are impressing them deeper and deeper into your subconscious mind. At a certain point, you will begin to believe, with absolute conviction, that your goal is achievable.
Once your subconscious mind accepts your goals as commands from your conscious mind, it will start to make all your words and actions fit a pattern consistent with those goals. Your subconscious mind will start attracting into your life people and circumstances that can help you to achieve your goal.
Your Mental Computer Works 24 Hours Per Day
Your subconscious mind works 24 hours a day, like a massive computer that is never turned off, to help bring your goals into reality. Almost without your doing anything, your goals will begin to materialize in your life, sometimes in the most remarkable and unexpected ways.
Some years ago, I met with a businessman in Los Angeles who had an absolutely ridiculous idea. He wanted to raise many millions dollars in investment capital to create an amusement park in Hawaii that would be composed of restaurants, displays and exhibits from a variety of different countries from around the world. He was absolutely convinced that it would be a big attraction and that he could get the support and backing of all these different countries, as long as he could raise the start up money to launch the project.
In my youth and experience, I gently told him that I thought his idea was a complete fantasy. The complexity and expense of such a massive undertaking was so vast for a person of his limited resources that it would be a complete waste of time. I thanked him for his offer of a job in putting this whole plan together and politely departed.
This was in the 1960s. The next thing I heard about this project was that the Walt Disney Corporation had embraced it in its entirety, called it the “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Epcot Center),”and had begun construction on it next to its Disneyland in Orlando, Florida. The amusement park and development has gone on to make hundreds of millions of dollars, year after year, and become one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
Activate All The Forces In the Universe
Here is the point. At that time, as a young man, I did not know that when you write down a goal, no matter how big or impossible it seems, you activate a series of forces in the universe that often make the impossible possible. I will explain this in great detail in the chapter on the “Superconscious Mind.”
Whenever you write down a new goal of any kind, you may be skeptical and doubtful about the likelihood of accomplishing it. You may have the idea in your conscious mind, but you will have not yet developed the total belief and conviction that is possible for you. This is normal and natural. Don’t let it stop you from using this method every day.
Just Do It!
All that is required to make this method work is for you to get a spiral notebook and then to discipline yourself each day to write down your 10 goals in the positive, present, personal tense. That’s all you need. In a week, a month or a year, you will look around you and see that your whole life will have transformed in the most remarkable ways.
Even if you are skeptical about this method, it only requires about five minutes per day to try it out for yourself. The good news is that I have never met a person, in more than 20 years, who has ever told me that this method does not work. It is quite the opposite. I get letters, phone calls, emails and personal testimonials almost every day from people all over the country, and all over the world, whose lives have transformed so dramatically with this method as to be beyond belief!
Multiply Your Results
You can multiply the effectiveness of this method with a couple of additional techniques. First, after you have written down your goal in the positive, personal, present tense, write down at least three actions that you could take immediately to achieve that goal, also in the present, positive, personal tense.
For example, your goal could be to earn a certain amount of money. You could write, “I earn $50,000 dollars over the next 12 months.”
You could then write, immediately underneath: 1) I plan every day in advance; 2) I start in immediately on my most important tasks; 3) I concentrate single mindedly on my most important task until it is complete.
Whatever your goal, you can easily think of three action steps that you can take immediately to achieve that goal. When you write down the action steps, you program them into your subconscious mind along with the goal. At a certain point, you will find yourself actually taking the steps that you wrote down, sometimes without even thinking about it. And each step you take will move you more rapidly toward your ultimate objective.
Use 3 x 5 Index Cards
Another way that you can increase the effectiveness of daily goal setting is by transferring your goals to 3 x 5 index cards. Write one goal on each card in large letters. Carry these cards with you at all times. Whenever you have a few spare moments, take out your index cards and review your goals, one by one.
Each of these goals should be written as a personal, positive, present tense affirmation. Someone once said, “I would rather a morning without breakfast than a morning without affirmations.” Each time you use these cards, take a few moments, breath deeply and relax, and then review each of your goals, one at a time.
As you read the goal to yourself, imagine the goal as though it were already a reality. Actually see yourself at the goal, enjoying the goal, feeling the pleasure of having achieved the goal.
Alternately, as you read your index cards, you can imagine specific steps that you can take immediately to achieve that goal. You should actually imagine yourself taking those steps. Then relax, and go on to the next goal.
Ideally, you should review your goals on index cards twice per day. Read them once in the morning before you start off and once in the evening before you go to bed. You can also carry them around with you and review them during the day, whenever you have a few spare moments.
The Best Times For Mental Programming
There are two times of the day that are ideal for writing and rewriting your goals, and for reading and reviewing your index cards. These are: the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed, and the first thing in the morning, before you start off.
When you rewrite and review your goals in the evening, you program them into your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind then has an opportunity to work on your goals all night long while you are sleeping. You will often arise with wonderful ideas for things to do or people to call to help you achieve your goals.
When you rewrite and review your goals in the morning, before you start off, you set yourself up for positive thinking and positive acting all day long. Just as physical exercise in the morning warms up your physical body and muscles, reviewing your goals in the morning warms up your mind and prepares you to be at your very best throughout the day.
The sum total result of rewriting and reviewing your goals each day, morning and evening, is that you will impress them ever more deeply into your subconscious mind. You will gradually move from positive thinking to positive knowing. You will develop a deep and unshakeable conviction that your goals are attainable, and that it is only a matter of time before you achieve them, and you will be right.
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.
Create a set of 3x5 index cards with your goals written out in the positive, personal, present tense to carry with you wherever you go.
Visualize and imagine your goals as they would be when you have achieved them each night before you go to sleep
Think of three things you could do to achieve each of your goals. Always think in terms of specific actions you could take.
Discipline yourself to rewrite your goals every day, without reviewing your previous list, until you become absolutely convinced that achieving your goals is inevitable.
Conclusion
Take Action Today
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.
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.
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 day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unlock Your Inborn Creativity – You have more creative ability to solve problems and come up with new and better ways for goal attainment than you have ever used. You are a potential genius. You can tap into your intelligence to overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal you can set for yourself.
Do Something Every Day – Use the “Momentum Principle of Success” by getting started toward your goal and then doing something every day that moves you closer to what you want to accomplish. Action orientation is essential to your success.
Persist Until You Succeed – In the final analysis, your ability to persist longer than anyone else is the one quality that will guarantee great success in life. Persistence is self-discipline in action, and is the true measure of your belief in yourself. Resolve in advance that you will never, never give up!
There they are, the twenty-one most important principles of goal setting and goal achieving ever discovered. Your regular review and practice of these principles will enable you to live an extraordinary life. Nothing can stop you now.
Good luck!
