Wake Up
I heard a great phrase this week. “The first thing you have to do to
make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
That is an interesting concept. How many people do you know live in a
perpetual dream state as far as their live is concerned. I know a lot of people
in that state. What do I hear all around me every day? People tell what their
dreams are. They are dreaming of a vacation. Dreaming about retirement.
Dreaming of a new car. Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. It is time to wake up.
Zig Ziglar says something like “a goal is a dream with a deadline”. What
does that mean to you? It means to me that as soon as I put a deadline on
something, it starts to become true. That may seem over simplified to some but
I believe in the concept. I used to have a lot of dreams. I have lived long
enough to see a lot of my dreams have passed me by. And seeing a dream
disappear from your mind like fog melting over a lake is not soul building. So
I woke up. Now what have I got? Goals.
I now have a list of goals. Not only do I have goals, I have a plan
of achieving them. One of my favourite books is The Compound Effect by Darren
Hardy. The premise of the book is simple – great things can be achieved by
taking small steps. Small steps taken with an almost diabolical focus on being
consistent.
Does it work? Yes it does! How can I illustrate this,….
OK, for the first 45 years of my life, I was what I now look on as a
looser. I was a bit of a paradox though. I had belief in most of the success
principles but I was not living them. I was blaming other people and my
circumstances for my “lot in life”. Now I understand that life is my own damn
fault. Good and bad. I woke up.
Making your dreams come true is relatively easy. The challenge is in
understanding that one must take complete and utter control of one’s own life.
The “good” and the “bad”. I have realized that the “bad” is usually my reaction
to a situation that is likely out of my control. So I must learn to control my
emotional response to “bad” situations and attack them with logical thinking. I
woke up.
Making your dreams come true is checking to see if your dream is SPECIFIC.
Rather than saying “I want a new car!”, make a specific plan. Map out the make,
the model, the colour, everything. Make sure the goal is well defined. Wake up.
Making your dreams come true is making them MEASURABLE. Instead of
just saying “I want to pay off my credit cards!”, make the goal measurable. Say
“I want to pay off my $14,000 MasterCard debt by December 2015!”. This way you
can track your progress. Wake up.
Make your goals ATTAINABLE. Instead of saying “I want a Lamborghini!”
when you are working in landscape construction. Set an attainable goal. Now, a
Lamborghini is not a BAD goal, and it may very well be attainable, but make
sure the horizon you are setting for yourself is close in enough you can see
progress. Wake up.
Make sure your goals are RELEVANT. Make sure your goals align to your
core values. If you are a granola groupie there is no sense in making a goal in
owning a Hummer. I see people setting goals that are not relevant in order to
fit in. For example, one of the leaders in ACN was telling us how all of his
peers have Bentleys. I wonder how many of them would prefer a different car but
made that goal even though it was not relevant. If you are that granola
groupie, make your goal a Prius or a SMART car. Wake up.
Make sure your goals are TIME SENSITIVE. Remember what I said at the
beginning about Zig Zigglar? A dream with a deadline. Time sensitive. Set
deadlines for all of your goals. Wake up.
I believe what I just wrote I gleaned from Dennis Waitley. I sure
hope it was him, I didn’t cite anyone in my notes! Make your goals SMART:
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Relevant
T – Time sensitive
And here is my illustration:
I started making a habit of setting goals. I make my goals very
specific. (that credit card example was indeed mine). It is very measurable, my
credit card provider is very nice and sends me a statement each month. It is
attainable. I can pay off the debt by December 2015 – but not much earlier. It
is relevant as my core belief is to be debt free and never looking back. It is
time sensitive. Once my credit card debt is taken care of, a portion of the
payment savings will be put into personal savings and the other portion will be
put into paying off the line of credit. I woke up.
Dennis Waitley and Darren Hardy have also taught me something else
about setting goals. Make small steps and as Dennis says, “ratchet your way to
success.” Making a big hairy audacious goal is not bad to do. It is key to
break large goals into smaller, easier to complete mini-goals. My credit card
situation is merely one step in becoming completely debt free.
Dennis also talks about 90 day goals. He chooses 90 days as that is 3
months, or a season. When I lok at successful people like my Uncle Ralph or my
dad, they planned their life by the season. My Uncle was pruning pears and grapes,
tying grapes and stretching wire, summer pruning and other care and finally the
harvest. My dad’s was personal tax time, corporate tax time, general accounting
and auditing, and preparation for tax time. Both of these men understood perfectly
well the Law of Compensation. Or as Emerson put it, “Do the thing and you shall
have the power, but he who does not the thing shall not have the power.”
Wake up and start changing those dreams into goals. If you follow the
SMART formula, it will work very well for you. There is nothing like looking at
a credit card statement and seeing the balance is lower than last months. And the
interest payments smaller. Wake up.
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