Want to Crush Your Goals? Stop Doing These 5 Things
Repent from these sins, and get em’ Goals!
Let’s face it:
You have unmet goals that make you wonder what you’re doing with your life.
If you’re a principled person, you understand that not every goal will be achieved — and that’s okay. As long as you’re making good progress towards your top three goals, you’re good.
But for the better majority, goals keep slipping up, plans keep getting shattered, and frustration sets in because your big vision is lagging.
You’ve tried everything, but nothing helps.
Perhaps you could be committing one of these goal-setting sins:
1. Talking too much about your goals before getting started.
It’s great to talk about your goals.
But when talk precedes action, you set yourself up for failure.
Talking about your desired results gives you a false sense of achievement.
You’ve broken it down, have an intelligent roadmap, and sound smart. You then get the admiration of people and trickles of encouragement.
The problem, though?
You’ve gotten nowhere near your goal, but already feel like you’ve achieved something.
That false sense of achievement cripples your ability to make actual progress because you’re already getting the same feeling you should get from putting in the work by talking.
2. Not asking why
When you don’t achieve what you set out to do, ask why.
Why did I not read this book today? Why is this project management program lagging? Do I feel demotivated? Are there some steps I overlooked? Is this goal unrealistic?
Instead of holding themselves accountable early, many people simply let unattained goals — small or big — slide past them.
They do not examine the heart of the matter; why they failed at hitting a particular target.
As a result, they lose track of the underlying problem, and chase surface-level solutions like planning more, pushing too hard, or removing difficult goals they can meet.
3. Sitting on the scroll for more than 24 hours 📜
Every goal must be backed up by a plan.
But as a rule, you shouldn’t make plans and think over it for more than twenty-four hours.
(Except for big projects that need more brainstorming.)
What moves you forward are the actions you take, not the plans you make. Plans simply help you take the right actions.
And sometimes, you need to fail to make good plans.
When you plan and plan and plan, you eventually end up not achieving that goal.
You’ve invested most of your effort into overthinking and lack of inertia.
What makes you think you’ll do less when you start working on the goal?
4. Not appreciating the little seeds
Most individuals lose motivation when there’s is little to show for the goal they are working on.
For example, if you desire to become a front end developer, you probably have a plan to study a programming language for thirty minutes everyday.
You don’t become a full fledged developer in the first month. And that’s okay.
Progress doesn’t always look like progress, especially when you’re working on long term goals.
Don’t eat your seeds by giving up early.
5. Lack of self control
"Without self-discipline, success is impossible, period."
- Lou Holtz
Many goals fail because of compromises here and there. Not sticking to the schedule, not taking the cost, not hoping on that meeting with your mentor.
The list goes on.
You need discipline to achieve anything in life. If you can’t say “no” to temporal pleasure, you can’t get long term gain.
Thanks for reading 👏🏼
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