by Brian Tracy
The seventh and most predominant reason people do not set goals is the fear of failure. I cannot repeat often enough, the fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. It is what keeps people in their comfort zones. It is what makes them keep their heads down and play it safe as the years pass by.
The fear of failure is expressed in the attitude of, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” It is learned in early childhood as the result of destructive criticism and punishment for doing things your parents disapproved of. Once entrenched in the subconscious mind, this fear does more to paralyze hope and kill ambition than any other negative emotion in the human experience.
The major reason for the fear of failure is that most people don’t understand the role of failure in achieving success. The rule is simply this: It is impossible to succeed without failing. Failure is a prerequisite for success. The greatest successes in human history have also been the greatest failures. In the same year that Babe Ruth became the home run king of baseball, he also struck out more than any other player.
Success is a numbers game. There is a direct relationship between the number of things you attempt and your probability of ultimately succeeding. Even if you were the worst player in baseball, if you swung with all your heart at every ball that came over the plate, you would eventually get a hit, and if you kept swinging, you would finally get a home run. The important thing is to swing with all your might and to keep swinging, and not worry about striking out occasionally.
Thomas Edison was the most successful inventor of the modern age. He received patents for 1,093 inventions, 1,052 of which were brought into commercial production during his lifetime. But as an inventor, he was also the greatest failure of his age. He failed more times, in more experiments, attempting to develop more products, than any other living scientist or businessman. It took him more than 11,000 experiments alone before he finally discovered the carbon-impregnated filament that led to the production of the first electric light bulb.
There is a story about Edison that, after he had conducted more than 5,000 experiments, a young journalist came to him and asked him why he persisted in these experiments after having failed more than 5,000 times. Edison is said to have replied, “Young man, you don’t understand how the world works. I have not failed at all. I have successfully identified 5,000 ways that will not work. That just puts me 5,000 ways closer to the way that will.”
Napoleon Hill said, “Within every adversity is the seed of an equal or greater opportunity or advantage.” The way to deal with temporary failure is to seek within each setback for the valuable lesson that it contains. Approach every difficulty as if it were sent to you at that moment and in that way to teach you something you need to learn so you can continue moving forward.
Become an “inverse paranoid”: Tell yourself that everything that is happening is moving you toward the achievement of your goals, even when temporary failures seem to be moving you away from them. Keep looking for the good. Great successes are almost always preceded by many failures. It’s the lessons learned from the failures that make the ultimate successes possible.
Decide, in advance, to take every setback as a spur to greater effort, especially in business and sales, knowing that you are getting closer and closer to success with every experience.
Look upon temporary defeat as a signpost that says “STOP, go this way instead.” One of the qualities of leaders is that they never use the words failure or defeat. Instead, they use words like “valuable learning experiences” or “temporary glitches.”
The great football coach Vince Lombardi had the right spirit. After a game in which the Green Bay Packers were defeated, one of the reporters asked Lombardi how he felt about losing. Lombardi replied, “We didn’t lose, we just ran out of time.”
You can learn to overcome the fear of failure by being absolutely clear about your goals, and by accepting that temporary setbacks and obstacles are the inevitable price you pay to achieve any great success in life.
THE PRINCIPLES OF GOAL SETTING
Goal setting can be a powerful, life-changing experience, if you do it properly. There are five basic principles of goal setting that are essential for maximum achievement.
The first is the principle of congruency. For you to perform at your best, your goals and your values must fit together like a hand in a glove. Your values represent your deepest convictions about what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, and what is important and meaningful to you. High performance and high self-esteem only happen when your goals and your values are in complete harmony with each other.
The second principle of goal setting is your area of excellence. Each person has the capacity to be excellent at something, and perhaps several things. You can achieve your full potential only by finding your area of excellence and then by throwing your whole heart into developing your talents in that area.
You will never be happy or satisfied until you find your heart’s desire and commit your life to it. It is the one thing that you are uniquely capable of doing in an excellent fashion. It is your job to identify it, if you haven’t already.
Your area of excellence may change as your career evolves, but all truly successful men and women are those who have found it. And your area of excellence is invariably doing what you most enjoy and doing it well.
The third principle of goal setting is the acres of diamonds concept. Acres of Diamonds was the title of a talk by a minister named Russell Conwell. The talk became so popular that he was eventually asked to give it more than five thousand times, word for word.
In the story, an old African farmer became very excited one day upon hearing from a traveling merchant of men who had gone off into Africa, discovered diamond mines and become fabulously wealthy. He decided to sell off his farm, organize a caravan, and head into the vast interior of Africa to find diamonds so he could crown his life with fabulous wealth.
For many years, he searched the vast African continent for diamonds. Eventually, he ran out of money and was abandoned by everyone. Finally, alone, in a fit of despair, he threw himself into the ocean and drowned.
Meanwhile, back on the farm that he had sold, the new farmer was out watering a donkey one day in a stream that cut across the farm. He found a strange stone that threw off light in a remarkable way. He took it into the house and thought no more of it. Some months later the same merchant, traveling on business, stopped for the night at the farm. When he saw the stone, he grew very excited and asked if the old farmer had finally returned. No, he was told, the old farmer had never been seen again, but why was he so excited?
The merchant picked up the stone and said, “This is a diamond of great price and value.” The new farmer was skeptical, but the merchant insisted that he show him where he had found the diamond. They went out on the farm to where the farmer had been watering the donkey, and as they looked around, they found another diamond, and another, and another. It turned out that the whole farm was covered with acres of diamonds. The old farmer had gone off into Africa seeking for diamonds without ever looking under his own feet.
The moral to this story was that the old farmer did not realize that diamonds do not look like diamonds in their rough form. They simply look like rocks to the uneducated eye. A diamond must be cut, faceted, polished and set before it looks like the kind of diamond that you see in the jewelry stores.
Likewise, your acres of diamonds probably lie right under your own feet. But they are usually disguised as hard work. “Opportunities come dressed in work clothes.”
Your acres of diamonds probably lie in your own talents, your interests, your education, your background and experience, your industry, your city, your contacts. Your acres of diamonds probably lie right under your own feet if you will take the time to recognize them and then go to work on them.
Remember the words I quoted earlier from Theodore Roosevelt who said, “Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are.” You don’t need to move across
the country or to make a major upheaval in your life. In most cases, what you are looking for is right at your fingertips. But it doesn’t look like an opportunity on the surface. In many cases, your great opportunity will simply look like hard, hard work.
The fourth principle for success in goal setting is the principle of balance. The principle of balance states that you need a variety of goals in the six critical areas of life in order to perform at your best. Just as a wheel on an automobile must be balanced for it to go around smoothly, you must have your goals in balance for your life to go smoothly.
You need family and personal goals. You need physical and health goals. You need mental and intellectual goals, and goals for study and personal development. You need career and work goals. You need financial and material goals. Finally, you need spiritual goals, goals aimed at inner development and spiritual enlightenment.
To maintain proper balance, you need two or three goals in each area, a total of twelve to eighteen goals in all. This kind of balance will enable you to be constantly working on something important to you. When you’re not working on your job, you can be pursuing family goals. When you are not working on physical fitness, you can be working on personal and professional development. When you are not practicing meditation, contemplation and other inner development work, you can be working on your material goals. Your objective is to make your life one continuous stream of progress and achievement.
The fifth principle of goal setting is the determination of your major purpose in life. Your major purpose is your number-one goal, the goal that is more important to you than the accomplishment of any other single goal or objective at this time. You may have a variety of goals but you can only have one major central purpose. The failure of a person to choose an overarching, dominating major goal is the primary reason for diffusion of effort, wasting of time and the inability to make progress.
The way you choose your overarching goal is by analyzing all your goals and asking, “Which goal, if I accomplish it, would do the most to help me achieve all my other goals?”
Usually, this is a financial or business goal, but sometimes it can be a health or relationship goal instead. The selection of your central purpose is the starting point of all great success and achievement. This goal becomes your “mission,” the organizing principle for all your other activities. Your major purpose becomes the catalyst that activates the Laws of Belief, Attraction and Correspondence. When you are excited about achieving a clear major goal, you start to move forward rapidly in spite of all obstacles and limitations. All the forces of the mental universe begin to work on your behalf. You become an irresistible force of nature. You become virtually unstoppable.
GOAL-SETTING RULES
There are several important rules that accompany effective goal setting.
First of all, your goals must be in harmony with one another, not contradictory. You cannot have a goal to be financially successful, or to build your own successful business, and simultaneously have a goal to spend half your day at the golf course or at the beach. Your goals have to be mutually supportive and mutually reinforcing.
Second, your goals must be challenging. They must make you stretch without being overwhelming. When you initially set goals, they should have about a 50 percent or better probability of success. This level of probability is ideal for motivation, yet not so difficult that you can become easily discouraged. After you develop some skill in setting and achieving goals, you will quite confidently set goals that may only have a 40 percent, or 30 or 20 percent probability of success, and you will still be motivated and excited as you strive to achieve them.
Third, you should have both tangible and intangible goals, both quantitative and qualitative. You should have concrete goals that you can measure and evaluate objectively. At the same time, you should have qualitative goals, for your inner life and your relationships.
You may have a quantitative goal for your family of acquiring a larger home. Your qualitative goal for your family could be to become a more patient, loving person. The two goals fit nicely together. They balance the inner and the outer.
Fourth, you need both short-term goals and long-term goals. You need goals for today and goals for five, ten and twenty years from today.
The ideal short-term goal for business, career and personal planning is about ninety days. The ideal longer-term period for the same goals is two to three years. These time horizons seem to be the ideal for continuous motivation.
The very best major purpose or overarching goal is quantitative, challenging and aimed at two or three years out. You can then break it down to ninety-day segments, and subsequently break those down to monthly, weekly and daily subgoals with measurable benchmarks to enable you to assess your progress.
The ideal life is focused, purposeful, positive and organized so that you are moving toward goals that are important to you every hour of every day. You always know what you’re doing and why. You have a continuous sense of forward motion. You feel like a “winner” most of the time.
The decision to become a goal-setting, goal-achieving, future-focused person gives you a tremendous sense of control. You feel wonderful about yourself. You feel that you are the master of your own destiny.
Your self-esteem increases as you progress toward your goals. You like and respect yourself more and more. Your personality improves and you become a more positive, confident person. You feel happy and excited about life. You open the floodgates of your potential and begin moving faster and faster toward becoming all that you were meant to be.
HOW TO IDENTIFY YOUR GOALS
Here are seven goal-setting questions for you to ask and answer over and over again. I suggest that you take a pad of paper and write out your responses.
Question number one:
What are your five most important values in life?
This question is intended to help you clarify what is really important to you, and by extension, what is less important, or unimportant.
Once you have identified the five most important things in life to you, organize them in order of priority, from number one, the most important, through number five.
Choosing and defining your values and their order of importance comes before setting your goals. Since you live from the inner to the outer, and your values are the core components of your personality, clarity concerning them makes it possible for you to select goals that are consistent with what is the very best for you.
Question number two:
What are your three most important goals in life, right now?
Write the answer to this question within thirty seconds.
This is called the “quick list” method. When you only have thirty seconds to write down your three most important goals, your subconscious mind sorts out your many goals quickly. Your top three will just pop into your conscious mind. With only thirty seconds, you will be as accurate as if you had thirty minutes.
Question number three:
What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you learned today that you only had six months to live?
This is another value question to help you clarify what is really important to you. When your time is limited, even if only in your imagination, you become very aware of who and what you really care about. As a doctor said recently, “I never met a businessman on his deathbed who said, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office.’ “
Someone once said that you are not ready to live until you know what you would do if you only had one hour left on earth. What would you do?
Question number four:
What would you do if you won a million dollars cash, tax free, in the lottery tomorrow?
How would you change your life? What would you buy? What would you start doing, or stop doing? Imagine that you only have two minutes to write your answers and you will only be able to do or acquire what you have written.
This is really a question to help you decide what you’d do if you had all the time and money you n
eed, if you had virtually no fear of failure at all. The most revealing answers to this question are made when you realize how many things you would do differently if you felt you had the ability to choose.
Question number five:
What have you always wanted to do, but been afraid to attempt?
This question helps you see more clearly where your fears could be blocking you from doing what you really want to do.
Question number six:
What do you most enjoy doing? What gives you your greatest feeling of self-esteem and personal satisfaction?
This is another values question that may indicate where you should explore to find your “heart’s desire.” You will always be most happy doing what you most love to do, and what you most love to do is invariably the activity that makes you feel the most alive and fulfilled. The most successful men and women in America are invariably doing what they really enjoy, most of the time.
Question number seven, and perhaps this is the most important:
What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?
Imagine that a genie appears and grants you one wish. The genie guarantees that you will be absolutely, completely successful in any one thing that you attempt to do, big or small, short- or long-term. If you were absolutely guaranteed of success in any one thing, big or small, what one exciting goal would you set for yourself?
Whatever you wrote as an answer to any of these questions, including the question, “What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?” you can be, have, or do. The very fact that you could write it means that you can achieve it. Once you’ve identified what it is you want, the only question you have to answer is, “Do I want it badly enough, and am I willing to pay the price?”