Goals!: How to Get Everything You Want -- Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible

by Brian Tracy

The third reason that people don’t set goals is because of the fear of failure.

Many people then make the mistake of unconsciously sabotaging themselves by not setting any goals at which they might fail.

People are afraid that if they set a goal and are not successful, others will criticize or ridicule them. This is one of the reasons why you should keep your goals confidential when you begin to set goals.

What they don’t know can’t hurt you.

A deadline is a “best guess” of when you will attain the goal.

You will achieve fully half of the goals that you set for yourself before your deadline, and you will probably achieve half of your goals after the deadline.

If your goal is big enough, break your deadline down into subdeadlines.

superior people always look into themselves and ask, “What is it in me that is holding me back?”

To go beyond your current level of accomplishment, you will have to acquire knowledge and skills you

have never had before

Relationships are everything. To achieve anything of consequence, you will need the help of lots of people. The more and better relationships you develop, the faster you will achieve your goals and the better will be every part of your life.

In goal achieving, you decide exactly what it is that you want and write it down. You analyze your starting point and determine the reasons you want to achieve the goal. You set a deadline and subdeadlines. You list the obstacles you will have to overcome and the problems you will have to solve. You determine the skills, knowledge, and information you will have to learn or acquire to achieve your goal. You decide upon the people whose help you will need and what you will have to do to get their help and support. You then take all of these elements and combine them into a plan of action.

A plan is a list of activities organized by time, sequence, and importance. What do you have to do first, and what do you do second? What is more important, and what is less important? What has to be done before other things can be done? Of all the things that you have to do, what are the activities that are more important in achieving your goal than anything else?

Repeat this visualization, combined with the feeling that goes with it, over and over during the day.

Whenever you start something new, you can expect to do it poorly. You will feel clumsy and awkward at first. You will feel inadequate and inferior. You will often feel silly and embarrassed. But this is the price that you pay to achieve excellence in your field. You will always have to pay the price of success, and that price often involves the hard work of mastering a difficult skill that you need to move to the top of your field.

For example, worry is a form of negative goal setting. It is the process of thinking about, imagining, and visualizing, with fear and anxiety, exactly what you don’t want to happen. When you worry, you are using visualization in a negative way. Exactly those problems that you don’t want will be attracted into your life. In Job 3:25, Job says, “The thing which I greatly feared has come upon me.” This refers to the unhappy consequences of negative visualization. You must be very careful how you use the visualizing power.