Lasting Motivation Comes From Right Goals

At least once each month I hear from someone who tells me about their goals, and then they want to know why they can’t keep their motivation going.

Sometimes the problem lies in the fact that they have so structured their paths and timelines so as to create undue pressures on themselves. Instead of their journey toward their goal being an exciting expedition it has been reduced to a long list of things to get done. Such a list creates a sense of duty bound deadlines that become more of a whip to drive them than a sail to catch the winds. In other instances the problem lies in the timelines they’ve created. Allowing too much time to achieve a certain step it loses its sense of urgency

Then of course the problem can be with the goals they have set. I recall one young man who came up to me after I finished a speech. He had become frustrated and discouraged because he wasn’t making progress toward his goal. When I asked him to tell me about his goal, he replied “To be a millionaire” (that was in the days when a million dollars was considered a lot of money) “by the time I’m thirty.” Well, there’s nothing wrong with such a goal provided we plan to use the money in a right way, so I asked him how long he had been working on the goal. “I started working on it” he replied, “Two years ago.” I then asked him how old he was when he set that goal and what his line of work was. He told me that he was twenty-seven when he set the goal and that he had just started out as an insurance agent. Now, over the years, I’ve known of several people in insurance who’ve broken the million dollar income figure—but they didn’t do it in two and a half years. The problem for this young fellow was that while his goal was attainable, he had set himself up for failure by not giving himself enough time to acquire the knowledge, skill and clientele required to reach it.

Another situation is created when our goals lack credibility. While credibility shouldn’t be concerned with what other people think about our goal, we must be concerned with what we think about our goal. By that I mean we must be convinced in our own mind that we can, with effort reach it. The purpose of goals and objectives is to stretch us beyond the point we are at, and they must challenge us to reach just a little further than where we can realistically expect to arrive at. But at the same time, as our young insurance agent learned from my talk with him they must not be so far beyond our grasp that our own mind can’t conceive of the possibility of achieving them.

Finally, goals must be worthwhile to provide long-term motivation. As I said earlier, there is nothing essentially wrong with wanting to make a million dollars. However, the Good Lord constructed our minds in such a way as to eventually reject self-centered, selfish goals. Certainly, we do things for our self interest, but when it comes to long-term goals those who are successful seldom derive lasting motivation from such goals and those I’ve met who have achieved purely selfish goals seldom find real fulfillment or satisfaction from reaching them.

What do I mean by saying that our goals must be worthwhile? Simply that those goals that are truly worthwhile provide an emotional stimulus that purely self-centered goals lack. That individual whose sole objective is to have a bigger house or drive a more expensive automobile than others he is acquainted with may achieve that goal—but “after the new wears off” they realize that there are other people with bigger houses and better cars—so the satisfaction is short lived and the quest begins all over, eventually becoming an endless treadmill.

But the person whose goal is to make a million dollars in order to provide a better life for his family and better schools for his children than he had when growing up has such an emotional tie. The individual whose goal is to reach a certain level of income in order to be able to contribute more money to his church, synagogue or a cause near to his or her heart has such an emotional bond to the goal. Such goals not only provide winds for our sails, they also continue to challenge us to climb the next peak when we reach the one we were climbing toward.
Have a GREAT and PROFITABLE Week!
Robert Hidde