The Practicality of Finding Purpose
When establishing your own goals and aspirations, you should match each one up with a definite purpose. Knowing why you are attempting to achieve something is as important as knowing what it is that you are trying to achieve. Your purpose should be short-term, and one that you can see in the very near future.
Setting a lengthy, complicated goal or a grand, futuristic purpose will stunt your chances of developmental growth. Getting discouraged because of lofty goals will not motivate you toward your desired end.
As you are beginning to define your goals and corresponding purposes, keep the following three tips in mind at all times:
1. Keep Your Purpose Short-Term.
Often times we approach our goals at the beginning with enthusiasm and fervor, but as time passes we become less and less confident. This is partially because we become discouraged when these goals are too time-dependent. In other words, some of our goals are too far off, and before we can achieve them, we become bored or disappointed in the results.
Keeping your purposes short-term and breaking the larger goals up into smaller, more quickly reachable ones will systematically build your confidence and allow you to do great things.
2. Remember to Reward Yourself for Purposes Achieved.
Once you’ve carried out each one of your goals, you should never forget to reward yourself in some way. The idea is to consistently encourage yourself in a way that will push you to bigger and better goals ahead.
3. As Soon as One Goal/Purpose is Accomplished, Replace it with a New One.
It is easy to become satisfied with completing your initial goal, and convincing yourself that you are content with doing just that. The reason why we are setting short-term goals and purposes is so that we can set more of them in the long-run. If you set short-term goals so that you can finish them and stop there, you have cheated yourself of being successful in the long-term. As each goal is accomplished, set a new one that is a little more challenging, but can be just as quickly achieved.
Knowing that you are able to successfully accomplish your visions will help you to continue the process throughout your entire life. Before long, you will be following these steps without having to think about them at all!
PJ McClure helps aspiring entrepreneurs to multi-million dollar business owners destroy roadblocks and seize opportunities to achieve their ideal vision of success. He is an award-winning speaker and the best-selling author of Flip the SWITCH: How to Turn On and Turn Up Your Mindset and Unlock Your Life: How to go beyond Time-Management to the Life of Your Dreams. You can download a copy of Flip the SWITCH for Free by clicking here.
-
Thanks for the post, enjoyed reading @PJMcClure @maraglazer
I agree that goals are lost when they are time dependant and not tied to a higher purpose. But I do think that our goals should be ‘far off’, with the right goals being tied to a purpose, then set shorter goals that relate and build upon that purpose.
For example, instead of say, earn $5,000 extra this year as a goal. Your goal could be re-written as:
Have financial independence to enable more charity work. (If charity work is part of your purpose)
You then are looking for more ways to be financially independent, so that you can build on your purpose to have more time (and maybe money) to give to charity.
WIth this you can stay a lot more motivated, as you are not focused on attempting to earn more money simply for the sake of it, but motivated to do so as it builds, as an ingredient to a purpose.
Higher level goals/purpose are rarely accomplished, they are lived and you can always get more motivation and do more when you engaged in living your purpose.
Comments