Goals
You want to set a big goal, you want to leave a legacy and fulfil a dream, your inspired to pursue this thing so much, you believe you can achieve it. Be it you want to own a business, start a photography studio, develop a ground-breaking app, release an album or publish a best-selling book.
There is a well know concept in entrepreneurship which involves long-term goals, called a 5 year plan. Which is, dedicating 5 years of your life to focus specifically on this 1 goal you have that you want to achieve.
5 years gives you good time to learn and master a skill, to become a professional in that field, develop connections and build an audience, if you were to start from day 1 and show up every single day.
If you set your goals too small, you will never achieve larger goals. A big goal is a mindset. But if you set your goals too big and don’t achieve them, the results can be paralysing and you may not wish to keep pursuing them.
You need to set sub goals within your bigger goal and celebrate them when they are achieved.
The key to achieving your goal is having a solid plan. The clearer your goal is, the clearer the plan to get there will be. Making it easier to take action on the steps necessary to get there. If the plan is too vague, this makes it harder to take action on the steps needed to get there. The first steps are the easiest ones, the hardest part is being consistent.
Having harder actionable steps can lead to burnout and completely dropping the goal altogether. Which may see your earlier efforts at starting the goal a waste of time. This is why you see so many blogs with only 1 or 2 posts, or even posting sporadically every few months about various non-related topics. There is no plan. There is no consistency. We’ve all seen them.
You can’t wait for inspiration to strike, you need to take action, you need to show up.
To make it easier for yourself, you will need to disassociate the goal you wish to achieve to the money you make. So there is no pressure to make money from the goal while you are trying to achieve it, this will lead to scarcity and cutting corners, thus devaluing the goal and it’s results. It will become a chore and you won’t be driven to pursue it anymore.
Don’t rely on money to achieve the goal.
Just because you have a 5 year plan, doesn’t mean you are limited to this one thing for the next 5 years, which can be daunting. In your plan, assign time for a secondary passion, or even a tertiary passion that you have. Make it clear in your mind which one has priority, and what it is that needs to be done that best affects the primary passion and goal.
Your only fooling yourself if you’re allowing the other passions to distract you from the main goal.
Even if one passion doesn’t work out, you can then always pivot to another, one thing leads to the next, you’re not limited to one thing to the rest of your life. You may discover that you enjoy something else even more halfway through this goal, but you would never have found out if you hadn’t pursued this long-term goal in the first place.
Quick-step guide to achieving your goal;
- Find your passion – What do you love to do? Do you love it enough to do it everyday for 5 years? Are you willing to have your name associated with this profession / skill?
- Set your goal – What do you want to do? What do you want to be known for? What do you hope to achieve in the next 5 years? What are you willing to sacrifice in order to pursue this long-term goal?
- Plan – Brainstorm your goal and write down the potential pitfalls and barriers to over come to get there. What tasks / steps can you do right now to be one step closer? Do you need to learn something new to achieve this goal? There will always be barriers that you cannot account for on when making the initial plan, so write down the actionable steps you can do right now in order to be one step closer to the goal.
- Selectively share – Share your goal with a small amount of very supportive people, you want to surround yourself with the right kinds of people. The wrong people will shoot you down.
- Work hard – You have the goal in mind, you know what you want to do and what needs to be done because you have the plan. Now you just need to do it. Ideas are worthless and talk is cheap.
Prioritize what you can do next. That next step that will take you closer. Ultimately, it comes down to putting in the hard work and showing up everyday.
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