Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  Take a few minutes and write out your answers to each of these seven questions. Once you have your answers on paper, go over them and select just one as your major definite purpose in life right now.

  By this simple act of deciding what you really want, and writing it down, you will have moved yourself into the top 3 percent. You will have done something that few people ever do. You will have established a written set of goals for yourself. You are now ready to make a giant leap forward.

  CONTINUOUS GOAL SETTING

  The most important contribution you can make to your success and happiness is to develop the habit of continuous goal setting. The key to developing this habit is learning how to deliberately set and achieve one clear, challenging goal. When you have set a specific goal for yourself and then achieved it according to your plans, you change from having an attitude of positive thinking to possessing an attitude of positive knowing. You must reach the point in your own mind where you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you can accomplish any goal you set for yourself. From that point on, you are a different person. You are the master of your fate.

  The thrill of achievement, the feeling of having overcome adversity and won through, in spite of the odds, gives you a sense of pleasure and excitement that can come from no other source. The habit of continuous goal setting, of using all your mental powers, soon becomes a positive addiction. You reach the point where you can hardly wait to get up in the morning, and you hate to go to bed at night. You become so positive and self-confident that your friends hardly recognize you.

  The most difficult mental obstacle you have to overcome is inertia, the tendency to slip back into your comfort zone and to lose your forward momentum. That is why perhaps the best definition of character is “the ability to carry through on a resolution after the mood in which the resolution was made is past.”

  Anyone can set goals and many people do. Probably half the population makes a series of resolutions every New Year’s. But that is not enough. It is the way the goals are set and the way plans are made to accomplish them that determines what happens afterward. To maximize your goal-achieving ability, you need a method. You need a proven process that you can use over and over, with any goal, in any situation, to bring all the powers of your mind to bear on accomplishing whatever it is you desire.

  THE TWELVE-STEP SYSTEM

  The twelve-step system you are about to learn is perhaps the most effective goal-achieving process ever developed. It has been used by hundreds of thousands of men and women all over the world to revolutionize their lives. It has been used by corporations to reorganize themselves and to go on to greater sales and profitability. It is simple, as all true things are simple, but it is so astonishingly effective that it continues to amaze even the most skeptical people.

  The purpose of this goal-achieving system is to enable you to create the mental equivalent of what you wish to achieve in your external world. The Law of Mind states that your thoughts objectify themselves in your reality. You become and you accomplish what you think about. If you think about something with tremendous clarity and intensity, you will bring it about much faster and more predictably than in any other way.

  There is a direct relationship between how clearly you can see your goal as accomplished, on the inside, and how rapidly it appears on the outside. This twelve-step system takes you from abstract fuzziness to absolute clarity. It gives you a track to run on, a track that enables you to get from where you are to wherever you want to go.

  Step one: Develop desire—intense, burning desire. This is the motivational force that enables you to overcome the fear and inertia that holds most people back. The greatest single obstacle to setting and achieving goals is fear of all kinds. Fear is the reason you sell yourself short and settle for far less than you are capable of. Every decision you make is made on the basis of emotion, either fear or desire. And a stronger emotion will always overcome a weaker emotion. The Law of Concentration states that whatever you dwell upon, grows. If you dwell upon your desires, if you think about them and write them out and make plans to accomplish them continually, your desires eventually become so strong that they override and push aside your fears. An intense, burning desire for a specific goal enables you to rise above your fears and move forward over any obstacles.

  Desire is invariably personal. You can only want something for yourself, not because you feel someone else wants it for you. In setting your goals, and especially your major definite purpose, you must be perfectly selfish. It must be your own goal. You must be absolutely clear about what it is that you want to be, to have or to do.

  What is your major definite purpose? What is your overarching goal? If you were guaranteed success in any one area, what would you want to accomplish? Review the seven goal-setting questions until you become perfectly clear about what would make you the very happiest. Deciding what you really want is the starting point of all great achievement.

  Step two: Develop belief In order to activate your subconscious mind and, as you will learn, your superconscious capabilities, you must absolutely believe that it is possible for you to achieve your goal. You must have complete faith that you deserve the goal and that it will come to you when you are ready for it. You must nurture your faith and belief until they deepen into an absolute conviction that your goal is attainable.

  Because belief is the catalyst that activates your mental powers, it is important that your goals be realistic, especially at first. If your goal is to earn more money, you should set a goal to increase your income by 10 or 20 or 30 percent over the next twelve months. These are believable goals, goals that you can get your mind around. They are realistic and can therefore be a source of motivation for you.

  If your goal is too far beyond anything you’ve accomplished in the past, setting it too high actually makes it a demotivator. Because it is so distant, you seem to be making little or no progress toward it. You become discouraged more easily and you can soon stop believing that it is possible for you.

  In my own case, when I first started using this process of goal setting, I was earning about $40,000 per year. I got really excited and decided to set a goal to earn $400,000 per year within twelve months.

  What happened was that instead of increasing my income, nothing seemed to happen at all. The goal of $400,000 was much more than I could believe, so my subconscious mind simply refused to accept it as a possibility. It ignored my commands because I had no real faith behind them. When I realized my mistake, I adjusted my goal down to $60,000, a 50 percent increase over the previous year. And I achieved that by changing jobs six months later.

  Napoleon Hill wrote, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” However, completely unrealistic goals are a form of self-delusion, and you cannot delude yourself into goal attainment. It requires hard, practical, systematic effort, working in harmony with the principles we have been discussing.

  If you want to lose weight, don’t set a goal to lose thirty or forty or fifty pounds. Instead, set a goal to lose five pounds over the next thirty to sixty days. As you lose the first five pounds, set a new goal to lose another five pounds, and so on until you achieve your ideal weight. A five-pound weight loss is believable, whereas a thirty-pound weight loss is so much beyond your current self-concept that your subconscious mind doesn’t take you seriously.

  One of the kindest and most helpful things you can do for your children is to help them to set realistic and believable goals. Help them to develop the habit of setting and achieving goals, not necessarily the ability to set big goals. There’s an old saying that if you save your pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves. If children develop the habit of setting and achieving small goals, they will eventually move on to medium-sized goals, and then to goals of any size.

  Before you can achieve big goals, major efforts are necessary. Sometimes you will require weeks, months and even years of hard work and preparation before you will be ready to achieve really big things
. In every field, you must pay your dues in advance. Unless you are extraordinarily brilliant or talented, you must be honest with yourself and accept that, if the goal is worth achieving, it is worth working for patiently and persistently.

  Many people set goals that are far beyond their capacity to achieve, work at them for a little while, and then quit. They become discouraged and conclude that goal setting doesn’t work, at least for them. The primary reason this happens is that they have tried to do too much too fast.

  Your responsibility is to create and maintain a positive mental attitude by confidently expecting and believing that if you continue to do the right things in the right way, you will eventually attract to yourself the people and the resources you need to reach your goal right on schedule. You must absolutely believe that if you keep on keeping on, you will ultimately be successful.

  Step three: Write it down. Goals that are not in writing are not goals at all. They are merely wishes or fantasies. A wish is a goal with no energy behind it. When you write a goal down on a piece of paper, you crystallize it. You make it something concrete and tangible. You make it something that you can pick up and look at and hold and touch and feel. You have taken it out of your imagination and put it into a form that you can do something with.

  One of the most powerful of all methods for implanting a goal into your subconscious mind is to write it out clearly, vividly, in detail, exactly as you would like to see it in reality. Decide what’s right before you decide what’s possible. Make the description of your goal perfect and ideal in every respect. Crystallize the ideal images you created in Chapter One, Make Your Life a Masterpiece. Don’t worry, for the moment, about how the goal is going to be achieved. Your main job in the beginning is to be absolutely certain about exactly what it is that you desire, and not to worry about the process of achieving it.

  Some years ago, in the middle of a recession, my wife and I had to sell our home to raise cash and pay our bills. We moved into a rented house temporarily and ended up living there for two years. During this time, we decided to get serious about our dream home. Even though we had financial problems, we subscribed to several magazines filled with pictures and descriptions of beautiful homes.

  About once a week, Barbara and I would sit down and page through these magazines, discussing the various features that we would like to see in our ideal home. We put all thought of cost, location and down payment out of our minds temporarily. We eventually drew up a list of forty-two features that we wanted in our home someday. We then put the list away, put our heads down, and continued to work.

  Three years passed and a thousand things happened. We bought a beautiful home and moved out of the rented house. All kinds of unexpected and unpredictable events took place. And when the dust finally settled, we had moved again and we were in a beautiful five-thousand-square-foot home in sunny San Diego, California.

  While we were unpacking our belongings, we found the list we had drawn up three years before. The house we had just moved into turned out to have forty-one of the forty-two features that we had written down. The only thing it lacked was a built-in vacuum cleaner system, which was, perhaps, the least important.

  We knew the house would be somewhere in California. That was on our list under the heading “Location.” Barbara envisioned a house that had no fence in the backyard. She could clearly see “an unbroken view with no obstructions.” I explained to her that, for security reasons, virtually all homes in California had fences. Some of them even have gated neighborhoods with security guards and barbed wire. But she was adamant. She saw a completely wide-open backyard stretching as far as the eye could see.

  As it turned out, our dream house backs onto a beautiful valley containing a lovely golf course surrounding two lakes. The long slope behind our home, plus the valley, plus the lakes, gives ample security and makes a fence unnecessary. The visualization came true.

  This is just one of a hundred stories that I could tell you that flow from the act of writing down your goals clearly and then thinking about them all the time. The most important reason for writing them down, aside from clarifying them in your mind, is that the very act of writing them down intensifies your desire and deepens your belief that they are achievable.

  Too many people do not write their goals down on paper because, deep in their hearts, they don’t think that their goals are achievable. They don’t think writing them down will do any good. They attempt to protect themselves from disappointment. And in so doing, they only assure themselves disappointment and under-achievement on their journeys through life. But when you discipline yourself to write your goals down, the very act overrides your failure mechanism and turns your success mechanism on to full power.

  Step four: Make a list of all the ways that you will benefit from achieving your goal. Just as goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement, reasons “why” are the forces that intensify your desire and drive you forward. Your motivation depends upon your motives, your reasons for acting in the first place, and the more reasons you have, the more motivated you will be.

  The German philosopher Nietzsche wrote, “A man can bear any what if he has a big enough why.” You can only motivate yourself to accomplish great things if you have a big exciting dream of some kind. Your reasons “why” must be uplifting and inspiring. They must be big enough to drive you onward.

  It is when you have big reasons for achieving your major goal that you develop the “intensity of purpose” that makes you irresistible. If your reasons are big enough, your belief solid enough and your desire intense enough, nothing can stop you.

  YOUR REASONS WILL PROPEL YOU

  A young man once went to Socrates and asked him how he could gain wisdom. Socrates replied by asking the young man to come with him while they walked together into a nearby lake. When the water got to be about four feet deep, Socrates suddenly grabbed the young man and pushed his head under the water. Then he held it there. The young man thought it was a joke at first and did not resist. But as he was held under the water longer and longer, he became frantic. He struggled desperately to get free as his lungs burned for lack of oxygen. Finally Socrates let him up, coughing and spluttering and gasping for air. Socrates then said, “When you desire wisdom with the same intensity that you desired to breathe, then nothing will stop you from getting it.” It’s the same with your goals.

  One of your jobs is to keep your desire burning brightly by continually thinking of all of the benefits, satisfactions and rewards you will enjoy as a result of achieving your goal. Each person is excited and motivated by different things. For example, the English novelist E. M. Forster said, “I write to earn the respect of those I respect.” Some people are motivated by money and the possibility of living in a big house and driving a beautiful car. Others are motivated by recognition, status and prestige, by the idea of earning the admiration of others.

  Make a list of all the benefits, tangible and intangible, that you can possibly enjoy as a result of achieving your goal. You will find that, the longer the list, the more motivated and determined you will become. If you have only one or two reasons for achieving a goal, you will have a moderate level of motivation. You will be easily discouraged when the going gets rough, as it surely will. If you have twenty or thirty reasons for achieving your goal, you will become irresistible. Nothing will discourage or dissuade you from keeping on until you accomplish what you have set your mind on.

  Step five: Analyze your position, your starting point. If you decide to lose weight, the very first thing you do is to weigh yourself. If you want to achieve a certain net worth, the first thing that you do is to sit down and create a personal financial statement to find out how much you are worth today.

  Determining your starting point also gives you a baseline from which you can measure your progress. Again, I cannot emphasize too strongly that the clearer you are about where you are coming from and where you are going, the more likely it is that you will end up where you want to be.

>   Step six: Set a deadline. Set deadlines on all tangible, measurable goals, such as increases in income or net worth, or losing a certain number of pounds, or running a certain number of miles. But don’t set deadlines on intangible goals, such as the development of patience, kindness, compassion, self-discipline or other personal qualities.

  When you set a deadline for a tangible goal, you program it into your mind and activate your subconscious “forcing system,” which ensures that you accomplish your goal by that date, at the latest. When you set a deadline for the development of a personal quality, this same forcing system ensures that your deadline will be the first day you begin to actually demonstrate the quality you’ve chosen.

  Often people resist setting deadlines for fear that they will not achieve their goals by the time they’ve set for themselves. They do everything possible, including leaving the deadline vague, to avoid the feelings of discouragement that might occur.

  What if you do set a goal and a deadline and you don’t achieve it by your deadline? Simple: You set another deadline. It just means that you’re not ready yet. You guessed wrong. You were too optimistic. And if you don’t achieve your goal by your new deadline, you set still another deadline until you finally do achieve it. As my friend sales trainer Don Hutson says, “There are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic deadlines.”

  But in probably 80 percent of cases, if your goals are sufficiently realistic and your plans are sufficiently detailed, and you work your plans faithfully, you will achieve your goal by your deadline.

  If your major definite purpose has a two-, three- or five-year deadline, your next step is to break your goal down into ninety-day subgoals. Then break the ninety-day goals down into thirty-day goals. With your long-term goal as your Mount Olympus, you can more readily set realistic short- and medium-term goals that enable you to make steady progress day by day.