Grab Your Dream! Set Your Goal!

In the blurred lines of life, things get overlooked, so here’s the brass tacks: you and your dreams exist in separate realities. Your dreams aren’t going to fall in your lap, they can’t. You have to grab them and drag them into reality. How? By setting goals.

You can’t turn a dream into reality without a goal in between. Not enough for you?

Well, here’s 8 reasons to start setting goals now:

Get Action

A string of small victories keep you motivated. People get stuck in ruts because they’ve forgotten how to celebrate small victories. Setting a daily or weekly goal is the fuel for your actions.

It’s true that a journey of a million miles begins with a single step, but if you don’t allow yourself to appreciate all the steps between that first step and the last, you’re going to burn out. The winning feeling is infectious. So much so that after a string of accomplished micro goals, a failure won’t even bother you. You know you’re capable of succeeding, any setback becomes only a minor setback.

Stay Focused

The secret to getting things done is prioritizing, taking what’s unnecessary to your dreams and happiness out from your life. A common symptom of being in a slump is clutter. Clutter comes in many forms, literal or otherwise. Every type of clutter has the same effect: it blurs the edges of your vision, ten thousand tiny voices screaming at you from every corner of the room. Before you know it, you’re distracted. Even worse, you’re stuck in an entire cycle of distraction. You slowly forget the feeling of being proactive with your days, your attention is spread thinner than a sheet of Silly Putty and that’s when you’re at your most vulnerable. Now, everything snags your attention, even cheap distractions that you know you are cheap distractions. Set goals. Stay focused.

Devour The Whale

Too large a goal will discourage you. Break it down. Make it as simple and attainable as possible. The process serves as a reality check for most: that huge goal that you thought you could accomplish without breaking a sweat? Yeah, it’s going to take more work than you thought. Breaking goals down is akin to building a staircase: setting down and taking consistent, small steps because you’re not just going to magically get up. Staircases are popular for a reason.

It’s Contagious

Passion, dedication, and discipline radiate. People are naturally attracted to the goal-oriented. Friends, family, colleagues — a positive change in your approach to life can spread throughout your personal circles without being even noticed. The old adage that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with is right, and that influence goes both ways. Goal setting can start a ripple in your circles.

In being the best you can be, you inspire your friends to become the best version of themselves.

Goal setting can’t be limited to one aspect of life, it’s a lifestyle. You’ll start to notice yourself be more efficient, your outlook more rosy, your days more valuable, and your leisure time more deserved.

Hello, Failure

Failure is a great teacher, though it can leave a bitter taste in the mouth at times. There’s much to gain in failing, which may sound paradoxical at first. Having failed means having attempted. Having attempted means putting yourself in a situation where nothing is guaranteed. It’s in this no man’s land that you learn most about yourself. How do you work under pressure? How do you handle failure? Failure prepares you for the next attempt. Without failure, there is no next step.

Once you start shrugging off failure, once you start looking forward to the next attempt, you’re on the right track. Face it, you’re going to stumble on your million mile march to your goals. It’s normal.

Nice To Meet Me

You know that goals help you remove the unnecessary. What’s left is what matters. For those that have been in an extended slump, removing the unnecessary might lead to a surprise.

You might realize that you’re not the person you thought you were.

Habits, hobbies, food, passions, and preferences: a common side effect of being in a slump is that you forget that life is a constant journey of self discovery, change, and learning. You begin to think that things are set, that everything you see around you at the moment is all there is or will be — you’re here now and you’ll be here tomorrow. Wrong.

Set goals and begin to make progress. The slump starts to fade behind you.

Goal setting doesn’t sweep things under the rug. It lifts up the rug.

Be prepared to meet the new, real, you.

Chase Your Own Shadow

Set enough goals and you begin to conquer the practice. The more goals you meet, the more the outside world begins to shift to the peripheral. Don’t misunderstand — by focusing on yourself you’re not ignoring the outside world, you’re actually implementing the best strategy for changing it. Life is a moving tide, a dancing breeze. You can be riding high at times and getting up from a blow at others — all from no real fault of your own. Don’t be fooled into thinking the highs will last forever or that you can control them, the same goes for the lows. You can only aspire to control yourself.

There will be times where you fail more than usual. There will be bad luck, there will be moments where you don’t get what you deserve. Life isn’t fair and rarely on time. Get over it and get ready for it.

Get By (With A Little Help From Your Friends)

Some things are done better together. Goal setting pits you against yourself, today against yesterday, but there are moments when today will be a lot busier or more challenging than yesterday, and some outside motivation is needed. In tough times, a friend’s help shines.

Set goals to grow, set goals to experiment, set goals to fail, set goals to unite. Just set goals. Your dreams will always be on the other side of the mirror unless you grab and drag them into reality. Get action, be remarkable.