Goal Setting and Hitting Your Target

Many of you already know that I am very goal oriented person.  I know what I want in life, but I am also “man enough” to admit that I am not necessarily the fastest, strongest, or the smartest person that I know. One special personal trait I do highly value however is my willingness to persevere through difficulties in order to achieve my goals in life- I just don’t stop until I “hit my target.”  I have to admit that most of the time my goals take longer than I anticipate, which may be the result of my overly optimistic attitude, but this same trait has also been one of my best saving graces in times of my toughest personal trials.  Inside my 3-inch thick dream book that is categorized into 11 different aspects of my life, I have included the following quote: “Beyond talent lie all the usual words:  discipline, love, luck- but most of all, endurance.”1 When I was in high school, a math teacher one day asked me what I wanted to study in college and I said “engineering.”  Her response to my answer will be eternally etched into my memory.  She looked at the ceiling and with an exasperated voice said “heaven help us!”  What was so surprising, even to me, was how I reacted to her comment.  It was at that moment that I knew that I was going to be an engineer.  Someone had just told me that I did not have the capacity to do something and, for good or for bad, I could not allow that person to impose a limitation on my success in life. After saying countless prayers asking for help to endure through some seemingly insurmountable personal struggles and failures, combined with and a very determined and disciplined work ethic, I eventually earned a masters degree in Civil Engineering and then passed a very rigorous 20 hours of engineering licensure examinations, collectively referred to as the EIT and the California PE.

Like me, you too, may face people in your personal life who decide to impose limitations on your potential for one silly reason or another:  You’re too old, you’re too young, you’re not this and you’re not that. Fortunately, I am smart enough to distinguish when someone is trying to give me sincere advice, directed towards my best well being, and those who derive no other pleasure than to see me fail in order to justify their own self imposed shortcomings.  In my personal life, l do my best to avoid being around people who I refer to as “dream vampires,” no less vigilantly than one would run away from the plague. I do this because I am a winner and I want to maintain an environment as much as possible where I am around other winners who inspire me to be better and I them. Disclaimer: I am not a winner because I was born to be one, but rather because I do not accept to be anything but one. And I believe that I am the only person who has control over that designation. 

Of course, if I were to judge my “success” based on a short term perspective, yes, I have been designated “second place,” “third place,” and a countless number of “no places” for as long as I can remember.  So fortunately, that is not how I judge my success.  My success has always been based on identifying the specific things in life that motivate me, that inspire me, and that make me happy. I then clearly write these things on paper and/ or cut out pictures that help me clearly visualize what my “targets” are.  I keep everything in a three ring binder to view regularly and I am regularly adding items that inspire me, and I also subtract items that no longer motivate me.  I have found the following principle to be a good rule of thumb for choosing my targets:

Images and statements only get to stay in my dream book if they continue to inspire me to spend the necessary energy to achieve the desired result.

But please don’t misunderstand; I realize that most, if not all of my goals requires hard, consistent, and persistent effort to achieve. And I believe that anyone who thinks or tells you otherwise, about any aspect of life’s most meaningful achievements, is either lying to you or is living in a fantasy world themselves.  And the more lofty the success, the harder you will have to work to attain it. A mountain climber who endeavors to reach a difficult summit- if and when he or she actually makes it to the top- arrives at the top sweating, bruised, and fatigued from the long climb, but the breathtaking view at the summit replaces all the fatigue with sheer exhilaration of accomplishing the task. That’s the reward for hitting the target!