My friend Michael Angier at SuccessNet.org had a great post on his blog that is worth some contemplation. And it doesn’t just apply to money. It applies to everything.

I’m writing this message while attending Rick Raddatz’s Business Makeover.

I’m spending two days in Denver—then two more days hanging out at Rick’s home in Breckinridge—with several other business owners masterminding about our business, how it works and what we’d like it to be. We brainstorm ways to take their business to the next level.

Rick is brilliant—smart, quick, experienced and very perceptive. He cuts right to the chase.

I’ve learned a lot, shared a lot and gained tons of ideas and gotten great clarity on how to simplify, grow and add value to those we serve.

Yesterday, while we were brainstorming with one of the participants, we asked how much they wanted to earn per year. They were unsure, so we asked again: $100,000? $500,000? A million?

This person was still thinking about their answer when Rick said, “It takes about the same amount of work to earn $100,000 as $1,000,000.”

That really made me stop and think.

Is that really true? With only a little reflection I could see that it was.

I realized that I had worked harder to make $50,000 a year than I worked to make $100,000 a year. And I’m not working any harder today when I’m making a lot more than that.

So what changed?

Well, I know more now. I have more experience. I’ve built upon my strengths and I’ve gained confidence. But mostly I’m thinking bigger and seeing more opportunity.

So I believe Rick’s viewpoint is accurate.

It doesn’t neccessarily take more work to earn a million dollars a year than it does $100K per year.

It does require a good attitude. And it helps if you believe this premise to be true.

With that—plus consistent effort and dedication—you can do it, too.

My note: Most people think the solution to more income, or more of anything, is simply to work harder. I know a lot of broke people who work very hard. If working harder was the answer they’d already be wealthy. The right, consistent activity is always required to reach every goal, but that doesn’t mean you have to work any harder than you are now.

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Remember when you thought you could do and be anything? The innocence of early childhood is perhaps the last time you were unencumbered by perceived limitations and labels. Personal goal setting was simple, and there was no doubt you could achieve anything.

When asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” you would have responded with whatever struck your fancy that day, whatever you were “in to.” You did not concern yourself with how you would do it, if you could do it, or if you should do it. Your dreams were based on what you wanted, pure and simple. You set personal goals based on wonder and curiosity, not practicality.

The dreams of childhood were big dreams. Travel into space, win a medal at the Olympics, become a rock star. Soon enough the dreams become modified to reflect what is practical and expected of us. This is precisely when most people start having trouble setting personal goals. The dreams are no longer larger than life, so why take steps to achieve them?

Read more here….

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Typically speaking, science is a pretty dry subject. But this article on goal setting at sciencecareers.org is anything but dry. This is a great article for goal setters in all careers. It’s called “Mastering Your Ph.D.: Setting Goals for Success” and I’d suggest you check it out before the end of the year and incorporate the principles into your action plan for 2007.

Read the article on setting goals for success here…

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There’s still time to let your family and friends know what you really want for a Holiday gift.  Tell them you want Goal! The Dream Begins, an outstanding video you can pick up at Amazon.com or other video stores.  And if they don’t buy it for you — buy it yourself.  It’s the kind of stuff that reaching big dreams and big goals is all about!  Watch the preview.

And when you’re ready to begin YOUR dream click here….

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I’m a big believer in yellow legal pads. I have scads of them around my house for jotting ideas and doing mind maps and the like.  John Goddard became the world’s #1 Goal Achiever starting with a legal pad, so its use is not such a bad idea.

During this time of reflection on the year just passed and in anticipation of the year to come, here are five probing questions you should commit some serious effort to while recording the responses on a trusty legal pad.

1) What do I really enjoy doing?  What seems almost effortless to me?

2) How can I monetize it (create income from it)?  Don’t automatically assume you can’t make any money from it.  That’s probably just an old paradigm raising its ugly head.  Elaine Hodgson loved to play video games and found herself increasingly drawn to the idea of creating them.  Her company, Incredible Technologies, now has $60 million in sales.

3) What are five things I can do this week to determine the feasibility of #2?

4) Who can I get to help me?

5) What is my deadline to “fish or cut bait?”

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My friend and mentor Jim Rohn is one of the wisest people I’ve ever known and this is some of his most classic wisdom:

“The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.

When Andrew Carnegie died, they discovered a sheet of paper upon which he had written one of the major goals of his life: to spend the first half of his life accumulating money and to spend the last half of his life giving it all away. And he did!

Some people are disturbed by those tough days because all they have are the days. They haven’t designed or described or defined the future.

Goals. There’s no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. There’s no telling what you can do when you believe in them. And there’s no telling what will happen when you act upon them.

We all need lots of powerful long-range goals to help us past the short-term obstacles.

The ultimate reason for setting goals is to entice you to become the person it takes to achieve them.

Don’t set your goals too low. If you don’t need much, you won’t become much.

If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.

We all have two choices: We can make a living or we can design a life.”

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With a New Year just around the corner, here are some goal setting tips to keep in mind:

• Make goals meaningful. Goal setting for the sake of goal setting almost always ends in disappointment. Goal setting is simply a tool to use in achieving a favorable outcome — what some people call a “Dream.”
• Use positive language and the present tense when setting a goal. It is better to say “I weigh a healthy, trim and fit 185 pounds” than “I want to lose 20 pounds.”
• Always put your goals in writing. Every expert agrees that setting a goal without putting it in writing drastically reduces your chances of success.
• Goal setting should take place in every area of your life, including Health, Relationships, Spiritual, Career and Financial.
• Setting Life Goals will add dimension, excitement and texture to your life.
• Failure doesn’t always mean that you did something wrong in your goal setting or implementation. It may just mean that the time you allotted for success wasn’t adequate. A thorough review process should be undertaken before setting the goal again.

And when you’re looking for a goal planning solution, be sure an check out all of our outstanding goal setting programs for 2007… 

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While it’s true that there are some super high achievers with an apparent low self-esteem (Terrell Owens comes to mind), it’s also equally true that those who perform consistently at high levels of achievement over an extended time usually have a high self-esteem.

The person who taught me most of my lessons on self-esteem is Dr. Denis Waitley who has served as a performance coach for Olympic and Super Bowl athletes, Apollo Astronauts, returning POW’s, Fortune 500 leaders and millions of people around the world.  Here are some great insights he shares on self-esteem:

Following are six behaviors that increase self-esteem, enhance your self-confidence, and spur your motivation. You may recognize some of them as things you naturally do in your interactions with other people. But if you don’t, I suggest you motivate yourself to take some of these important steps immediately.

First, greet others with a smile and look them directly in the eye. A smile and direct eye contact convey confidence born of self-respect. In the same way, answer the phone pleasantly whether at work or at home, and when placing a call, give your name before asking to speak to the party you want to reach. Leading with your name underscores that a person with self-respect is making the call.

Second, always show real appreciation for a gift or complement. Don’t downplay or sidestep expressions of affection or honor from others. The ability to accept or receive is a universal mark of an individual with solid self-esteem.

Third, don’t brag. It’s almost a paradox that genuine modesty is actually part of the capacity to gracefully receive compliments. People who brag about their own exploits or demand special attention are simply trying to build themselves up in the eyes of others and that’s because they don’t perceive themselves as already worthy of respect.

Fourth, don’t make your problems the centerpiece of your conversation. Talk positively about your life and the progress you’re trying to make. Be aware of any negative thinking, and take notice of how often you complain. When you hear yourself criticize someone – and this includes self-criticism – find a way to be helpful instead of critical.

Fifth, respond to difficult times or depressing moments by increasing your level of productive activity. When your self-esteem is being challenged, don’t sit around and fall victim to ‘paralysis by analysis.’ The late Malcolm Forbes said, ‘Vehicles in motion use their generators to charge their own batteries. Unless you happen to be a golf cart, you can’t recharge your battery when you’re parked in the garage!’

Sixth, choose to see mistakes and rejections as opportunities to learn. View a failure as the conclusion of one performance, not the end of your entire career. Own up to your shortcomings, but refuse to see yourself as a failure. A failure may be something you have done – and it may even be something you’ll have to do again on the way to success – but a failure is definitely not something you are.

Even if you’re at a point where you’re feeling very negatively about yourself, be aware that you’re now ideally positioned to make rapid and dramatic improvement. A negative self-evaluation, if it’s honest and insightful, takes much more courage and character than the self-delusions that underlie arrogance and conceit. I’ve seen the truth of this proven many times in my work with athletes. After an extremely poor performance, a team or an individual athlete often does much better the next time out, especially when the poor performance was so bad that there was simply no way to shirk responsibility for it. Disappointment, defeat, and even apparent failure are in no way permanent conditions unless we choose to make them so. On the contrary, these undeniably painful experiences can be the solid foundation on which to build future success.

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It took me many, many years to learn this secret. So pay close attention. It’s worth my weight and your weight in Gold.

Yesterday as we were getting ready for our big Champions Club 2007 launch, we were working feverishly to meet our launch deadline and had no time to spare. We’ve spent months and many man hours preparing for the event and now on the last day before kickoff everything started to go awry. First, the video wouldn’t work on our test page. Then we had shopping cart problems. And on and on it went. Then to tie a nice little bow on top of everything, I sent someone off in my fairly new Escalade to go do an important errand. When they turned the key nothing happened. It’s completely dead. So after quickly ascertaining it wasn’t the battery, I called the Cadillac dealer who hauled it away on the back of a truck. And I went back to the chaos.

Now, if this had happened twenty years ago (and similar things did), or even ten years ago, I would have gotten so caught up in everything that was going wrong that I would have (1) been in a terrible mood and (2) lost all my focus on the task at hand.

Not so this time. No, this time I actually smiled to myself on one occasion and out loud said, “this launch is going to be huge!”

How could I say that?

Because I’ve learned (after many bumps, bruises and tears) that when I am in hot pursuit of a long-held goal, and things start going haywire, it probably means I’m on the edge of something BIG —- if I don’t get distracted.

In fact, James Allen, who wrote the classic As A Man Thinketh, says as much. In describing successful people he says, “They hold fast to an idea, a project, a plan, and will not let it go; they cherish it, brood upon it, tend and develop it; and when assailed by difficulties, they refuse to be beguiled into surrender; indeed, the intensity of the purpose increases with the growing magnitude of the obstacles encountered.”

And that last sentence is the true secret:

“indeed, the intensity of the purpose increases with the growing magnitude of the obstacles encountered.”

If you can internalize and apply that secret, you will have one of the true “keys to the kingdom.”

How did it turn out for me this time?

Well, when we opened the doors to the Champions Club earlier today we were signing people up at the rate of one per minute in the early going. Things have slowed down some, otherwise we would have been out of spots in the first two hours.

As it is, more than half the spots are spoken for (in the first seven hours!) and registrations are still pouring in. It has been an incredible launch and a great bunch of interesting members for 2007.

Here is the link one more time if you missed it:
http://www.goals-2-go.com/champClub2007.htm .

And if you haven’t yet gotten your copy of the widely acclaimed 13 Secrets of World Class Goal Achievers, get it here: http://www.goals-2-go.com/13secrets.htm

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My friend Darren Hardy, who is President of TSTN, posted this to his blog a few days ago and it begs to be shared:

In the hustle and bustle of this technologically packed world you may decide you really don’t want to achieve any lasting success in your lifetime. Sure, you can find a lot of strategies and tips here that can help you increase your success rate. But what about the people who are perfectly happy not achieving anything? So this is for all the people who want to have goals but not achieve them.

1. Make your goals vague – When setting your goals, use adjectives such as “more” and “some.” Goals like “I want to make more money” or “I want to lose some weight” virtually guarantee your progress will be minimal. Be as wishy-washy as possible.

2. Make your goals difficult to visualize – A good way to do this is to keep changing your mind on the details of your goal. If you are thinking a goal such as: “I want to own a red, blue or yellow Corvette or just a Mustang”, then you are definitely on the right track. If you kept that goal planted firmly in your mind, you are virtually guaranteed you’ll never go above a used Hyundai.

3. Think and speak negatively about your goals – Try using words like “I can’t” and “It’s too hard”. Goals such as “I can’t get a promotion, It’s too hard to take on more responsibility” will certainly keep you at the bottom of the food chain.

4. Avoid planning incremental steps – Take a goal – even a specific goal like “I will double my income by this time next year”. Then simply leave it as-is. Don’t write down any tasks or steps you’ll need to complete in order to achieve it. Just consider the goal a wish and nothing more. Creating a step-by-step plan will only confuse matters because it’s all too easy to take action on simple steps. Action in the direction of your goal would lead to success and you definitely don’t want that.

5. Don’t Do – Talk – Because talk is easier than action, this step one of the easiest steps for you to take. Try to fill up as much of your day with socializing as possible. Talk about all the things you will do someday or that you were gonna do. Just make sure you don’t mess it up by doing anything productive. Action is your enemy. Embrace your excuses!

6. Wait until you are motivated - Let’s face it, it’s much too difficult to go jogging or open a mutual fund account when you simply don’t feel like it. So just wait. Waiting gives you the peace of mind that someday, you might do something. But not yet, the timing isn’t right and you aren’t motivated anyway.

7. Don’t set a date – Setting a date when you expect to achieve your goal is too much pressure. Who needs it? Definitely not you if you want to avoid progress. You know that goals with dates get done, so by not setting a date you avoid making a commitment. You can keep putting off stuff.

8. List why it’s impossible – Now we are getting into the mental game of failing. This is quite possibly your greatest weapon against achievement because it destroys hope and optimism. So as soon as possible, set aside some time to create a long list of how impossible your goal really is. No matter what your target is, I am sure you can come up with plenty of reasons why it’s impossible. Be creative, make up some if you have to.

9. Don’t research your goal – You’re the kind of guy or gal who likes to “wing it.” Reading about how others have succeeded achieving a goal similar to you is just a waste of time. Instead of standing on their shoulders, they should be standing on yours! Sure, they might have overcome unbelievable odds to get from homelessness to CEO or 450lbs to 180lbs – but they were probably just “lucky” anyway. Don’t read anything that promises to help you get to your destination.

10. Think of anything except your goal – Here’s another mental strategy that will put you on the fast track to failure. Think of anything except for your goal. Why visualize success when there are plenty of clouds and TV reruns to think about? And while you’re at it, take action on these flights of fancy instead of your goal. Take the easy path, that’s the only way you can fail in record time.

To conclude, I know you might be a bit overwhelmed with all the work you have to do to avoid reaching your goal. You might even think it’s even more work. Never fear! You can do it. Print out a copy and hang it on your bathroom mirror. Post it in your office. Read it every day. Internalize these principals and you can reach depths of failure you have possibly never imagined!

Abridged from Achieve-IT! at www.persistenceunlimited.com

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