The Simple Guide To Goal Setting and Achieving Your Dreams

This article is the “purple cow” if you will of self help and organizational business content. Why? Because we aren’t just giving you a “how to”. We are leveraging you own personality to your benefit. In this way, you are guaranteed to set goals that you actually want to achieve. You achieve them in a way that is natural and comfortable for you and you stay with those goals for the duration that you planned. Furthermore, you can be sure to use the same techniques with any goal.

Here we will take you through who you are as an entrepreneur or business owner of any kind. We will teach you first, how to discover how your personality can help you in each step. The selection of a goal, the execution of the process to meet that goal and then to stay with that goal.

You may have already seen the article How to Achieve your Goals In 2015. This article tells you the steps you have to take to achieve your goals. It makes a great compliment to this article.

However in this article you will learn more about goal setting and it will tell you more in depth.

Each personality responds to a reward system for your accomplishments. It drives you automatically to do well. So, this is where your powers lie. If you follow the concept of the book, you will be able to achieve what you want through knowing yourself and your strengths and weaknesses.

Choosing And Setting The Right Goals For You

First, congratulations for deciding to set some solid goals for yourself. Entrepreneurs are often left frustrated because they don’t have the guidance and a lot of times—the money—to achieve the goals they need to achieve. But, did you know that with a little of the right guidance and a  few examples from some famous entrepreneurs, you can achieve goals much easier. Since you are reading this book, you have probably done one of two things. You’ve put yourself through the ringer a few times and failed or, you want guidance before you start trying in order to make sure you’re doing it all the right way. In either case, you’ve come to the right place.

Targeting the Right Goals for You:

The first thing we need you to figure out is what the right goals are for you. In other words, what goals are targeting your outcome in a crystal clear way. We’ll explain what we mean.

Most new or young entrepreneurs will set ‘business goals’ according to what they were taught in business college or if they aren’t a college graduate, then, from a business mentor. This is not “wrong” but we feel that if you are only following advice that is standard, cookie cutter—you risk the idea failing. Why? Because you have to first understand that entrepreneurship is a passion first and foremost. What you decide to become an entrepreneur in, should be directed by that passion. So, therefor, you should have goals and a way to meet those goals that mirror that passion.

 

Steps to Target the Right Goals for You:

Before you take the time to follow steps to achieving goals you have to be able to understand yourself enough to know what you will actually follow through on. This means facing yourself with resolute honesty. You will do this throughout this book many times. Why? Because it’s important to whether or not you will actually stick with it. This is the ultimate goal. Otherwise you’ve just wasted a lot of time and effort and most times—money and investment. Entrepreneurship is not a cheap endeavor.

1. Take the first of many looks at yourself: Ask yourself a few good, honest questions. First. “Am I good with follow through?” This is one of the biggest issues with entrepreneurs. Follow through. Sometimes it’s not in the personality to be good with follow through. Sometimes it’s because you are so dynamic and creative that you get side tracked. And sometimes it’s because what you’re doing is not something you really want to do. All too often, entrepreneurs jump on the bandwagon that’s popular or makes money fast or another reason. When what they need to be doing is what they are passionate about as a person. NOT what they are passionate about because of any of the aforementioned reasons.
2. What IS my passion? As we just stated. Starting a fitness guru business just because it’s the next best fad on the market when you really wanna sell cupcakes is a dangerous thing to do. Now, if you look at an example like say Donald Trump who had no issue making money. He’s started countless startups as an entrepreneur. However, not all of them made it. Does he care? No, of course not because he has the means not to have to care. When you are worth billions or in your case, even eventually a few hundred thousand—then—you can be an entrepreneurial playboy or play girl. But, with your first big one—play with your passion. Why? Listen carefully to why at this point. You’ll want your first entrepreneurial experience to be enjoyable. People learn easier and are able to endure the pitfalls better when they are in something that’s a passion for them. You are less likely to endure the pitfalls and hardships when it’s not a passion. Why? Because it adds to the stress and the strain that you are already experiencing.
3. Set the Right Goals: First, let’s explain briefly what we mean by the RIGHT goals. There are no right or wrong goals in a moral sense. But, there ARE appropriate goals for your passion. This is beyond the scope of step by step business goal setting—this is more making sure they are appropriate for you as a person. So, we’ll redirect you back to question one. “Am I good with follow through?” If you aren’t then you need to figure out which of the reasons we gave you is true of you. Are you just a flaky creative? Is it because you aren’t doing what you’re passionate about? Or is it something else. Without this knowledge—you are not going to fare well with goals. So, the next steps are for people struggling with follow through.

 

NOTE: If you ARE good with following through then congratulations! You can skip right passed this section!

Steps to Improving your Follow Through:

Now that you’ve pinpointed why you’re not good with follow through. Let’s take some steps to get you in line again.

1. Set small achievable goals: Developing the discipline to follow through, is achievable because it’s just as easy as developing a new habit. The way you do this in this case is to set small goals and make sure you follow through on them. For example, the goals you set don’t have to be business related goals. It could be as mundane as taking out the garbage. If you feel better with setting business related goals then the best ones we can think of are communication related. Make a small goal to call or e mail a certain amount of clients a week. Set a certain day—don’t make it vague—we will explain why in the next point. And set a reminder. The do this for three weeks and then up the ante. Set a larger goal, set it at 2 days per week—specific dates—set a reminder and go!
2. Be date and time specific: Make sure you can set your goals on a specific day a week and a specific time. Why? Because you are less able to make excuses as to when to follow through. It’s a form of procrastination and you don’t want that to compound the situation.
3. Reward Yourself: We said this in the introduction that each personality responds to a reward differently. But, they do respond. It’s imperative that you don’t skip this step. This is where your brain starts to respond better to what you’ve accomplished and starts to welcome the habit. 

Watch the video below to find out more about goal setting

Examples of Successful Goal Setting by Famous Entrepreneurs

We can give you some examples here of some famous or successful entrepreneurs as to how they habituate successful goal setting.

1. Jack Dorsey: Introducing the CEO of Square and the founder of Twitter. You can’t get more publicly successful than that can you? This gentleman does go to some extremes though. We will preface this in saying that you do NOT have to go to such extremes and make yourself unhealthy by mirroring this extreme exactly. This is only an example. We are using this to also showcase the last point we made about knowing yourself. Mr Dorsey obviously knows himself and his own limitations. He’s not doing what he does to compete with anyone else. You can be just as successful at a pace that’s comfortable for you.

Jack’s Routine: Jack actively runs both companies and puts 8 hours a day in each company. This is a crazy lot of hours. He also has to have the ability to switch gears and do what he has to do in each one.

Here’s his secret though. His goal setting. He decided that working himself this hard for a LIMITED period of time was the way. He was quoted in saying that “Even for a short period of time you have to be very disciplined and very practiced”.

What Jacks Week Looked Like:

Jack would set these weekly focus goals for each day Monday through Friday.

• Monday: This day was for his management duties and running each company.
• Tuesday: Tuesday was the day he chose to focus on only the product itself and make sure anything to do with Twitter or Square had his attention.
• Wednesday: Wednesday was his day to focus on communication and marketing the product.
• Thursday: Thursday was the day to manage developers and focus on his partnership.
• Friday: This was the day he recruited for the company or focused on that are as well as company culture.

His issue with focus and follow through was being interrupted constantly. But, he never let that stop him. Because each day had a theme—he could very quickly get back on track just by thinking–”OK it’s Tuesday so I do product stuff” so, barring any emergency shifts of schedule—which happens from time to time—he could still stay on track.

 

 

 

2. Benjamin Franklin: In the days before his presidency, he had a printing business. Back then, this was a big deal. No computers and no printers. The only way anyone read anything was through a printing company that printed newspapers and press releases. This was a taxing environment but Benjamin figured it out.

Benjamin’s Routine: We will sum it up in our own words so as not to have to decipher and interpret the queens English which was spoken in that day. Benjamin had a small goal set for each hour of the day in blocks of time. This means something for each hour with a total of four hour blocks.

What his day looked like:

• Morning Block: Rise, wash, pray. Take account of what good he shall do today. Looking at his writing in his daily journal—that meant he made a specific goal for each day on the morning of, instead of the day before. He was into meditation of sorts about where he should place the most energy.
• Afternoon Block: He scheduled his lunch and his afternoon focus. With whatever the work of the day was—he blocked time to look over his accounts. We assume financial accounts.
• Evening Block: He cleaned up his print room, took part in some kind of diversion. Music was a big thing with him and conversation, then light dining and later, sleep.

His routine was a passive and more tame one that Jack Dorsey. But, no less successful. You see how each of these men took their goal setting and made it to compliment who they were.

Evan Williams: Co founder of Twitter. Founder of Blogger and Medium. This fellow has a lot on his plate. This should mean that he is at work more than we would like to imagine. But he isn’t. He deliberately takes the middle of the day off and goes to the gym.

His example really relates well to making sure you have set the right goals that match who you are. He states that his focus is great in the early morning but, he gets foggy in the afternoon. So, this means he takes that part of it off and pumps iron for a while. He felt it was a great shift in his routine but admitted that it felt weird in the beginning.

 

3. Barack Obama: One of his goals that fit him perfectly is to stay up a little later and get a head start on the next day—the night before. His routine fit his personality. He considers himself a family man and will eat breakfast with his daughters and his wife and then helps his kids get ready for school. He will then have his gym time and finally make it to the oval office around 9 am. He may stay as late at 10 pm but, he will break in the evening to make sure he eats dinner with his family.
4. Tim Ferris: This is a great example a way out routine. Why? It’s very skeletal. He doesn’t really have one. Well, the important stuff, yes but each day is different, one from the next. There is one hard and fast rule—the only one. He makes Monday through Friday his time to not take any calls from his assistants. He lets them handle it all. Barring any emergency, he says that there is nothing he needs to do that is financially driven that he can’t cancel to go have fun. Every Monday he does his calendar and prioritizes things to do for the week as well as handling administrative tasks. What’s the secret? Having a staff that is chosen so well, the company runs by itself.
5. Leo Babuta: This entrepreneur is an early riser. 4:30 am. His body and personality is naturally attuned to the early morning but not for work—for planning that work. It’s a process that includes meditation, eating light and drinking water. It also includes making lunches for his kids and breakfast for his wife who he wakes up at 6:30 am. He is very into Zen practices and philosophy.

So, in this section you’ve heard from five top entrepreneurs of our day and yesterday. They were chosen for a reason. We chose these people because in this article we are talking about setting goals that match your personality. Which means having short-term daily goals that develop follow through habits. We also wanted to showcase the fact that you don’t have to have a routine with a set intensity. Entrepreneurship is a wild place. The name itself means in part—no set boundaries. It’s a place that you make your own.

Check out the Slide deck below to see how you can set goals

Recap: Setting Goals you can Easily Achieve:

So, instead of recapping what we already said but shorter like most books do—we’ll put it in action words so that it’s easier to remember and follow.

1. Know what works for you: In school we are taught that we must excel at everything we do and make high grades of it. But, the truth is, we are all different. We all have strengths and weaknesses. We all have what we are good at and what we aren’t we shouldn’t have to stress over or waste the time getting better at. In the entrepreneurial world it means you just need to delegate better to others. If you aren’t at the point that staff is in the picture then you need to think outside the box and work around what you aren’t good at. The idea is structuring the goal to play at the strengths you have. For example a goal to be more in shape may mean a much hated trip to the gym. If you force yourself to go to the gym, you’ll fail—bar none. If you love to ride a bike though—you could make a goal to bike to work or somewhere pleasurable twice weekly.
2. Find out what doesn’t work: Once you know what doesn’t work then again, think outside the box in order to achieve a goal another way. If you are spending too much time researching what affects your clients because research is a weak point or maybe time management is a weak point then streamline your research. Get alerts that tell you when a piece comes out that you should be reading. Google and Feedly have those.

 

3. Know where your time goes: If you are a normal entrepreneur, you’ll catch yourself saying “Where did the day go?” and this means that something is competing for your time. The one surefire way to figure out where your time goes is to write down what you do and the time from when you wake up until you go to sleep. This is important. Having follow through is the first thing we had you look at and resolve by setting small, achievable goals. But if you are a reader with a follow through issue, then the time is now for you especially to see what is eating your time.

I would like to thank you for reading this article and hope it has helped you. If you think this article would benefit any one else then please share it with them.

What goals have you set for yourself? How do you plan on achieving your goals? If you need help with your goals let me know and I will do my best to help you.

Post your comment in the comment section below and I will get back to you.