We often hear and see the two terms, objectives and goals used interchangeably in conversations about achieving success. Did your teacher or school’s guidance counselors ask, “what are your career goals?” In conference rooms, haven’t you heard presenters mention “the objective” of their presentation?
Well, while in pursuit and constant study of paths to success, I was enlightened by a simple method of how to use goals and objectives to create paths to anything you want to achieve. I’ll share the details below along with concepts you can start implementing today to achieve your own successes.
First, allow the words objective and goal, to have their own, separate identity and purpose in your plan. Allow the objective to be the destination and the goals to be the steps along the way. If we were running a marathon from Michigan to Florida, Florida would be the destination but the goals would be to reach Ohio by a certain time, then Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and then Florida.
Setting Goals
This was an area of struggle for several years as I thought settings goals was soooo boring. It just seemed more exciting to just jump in and start running toward success. I would go full steam ahead right out the gate, but would soon reach burn-out, become discouraged and then lose interest. Why, what was I doing wrong, I started out giving it my all and working hard?
Well, the problem was, no pace was set in order to provide measurement of progress. This would trigger the discouragement and the feeling of wanting to give up when “success” hadn’t been realized yet. See, one of the values and purposes of setting goals is that it helps you establish a pace by setting specific goals along your path and determining a time you plan to reach each one of the goals along the way. At any point along your journey, you can then look back at each of the goals you reached to determine where you are, how far you’ve come and maintain the encouragement to keep going as a reminder that you’re almost there!
Setting goals in general, takes a little practice for those who haven’t mastered it yet. It’s challenging but gets easier as you practice it. Before setting goals for the major life achievements you’re after, start settings small goals in daily life. For instance, write down three goals to achieve around the house this weekend, like: (1)Rake up all the leaves (2)Replace the batteries in the smoke detectors (3)Oil the hinges on that bedroom door that sounds so creepy when you open or close it. The exercise here is to set a short list of attainable goals that can be achieved within a very short span of time, no more than a day or two.
As you hit each goal, it’s important to visually draw a line through it or mark it in some way so your eyes can see it and your mind can record it in memory. Now, the objective is to complete them all however, if you complete two of the three, you are successful in every since of the word. That’s what success is, setting out to do something and getting it done. Now if you complete all three, you will experience a sharp spike in motivation and adrenaline as your endorphins start to fire off to celebrate you achieving this objective. Your mind doesn’t discriminate between the size or type of goal, it views it as success either way.
Now, there was a very important key given in the previous paragraph. Did you catch it? It was to make a visual indication of you accomplishing each goal by drawing a line through it or marking it is some way. This is training your mind to experience what success feels like. This is the secret to conditioning your mind to create the neuropathways in the brain that establish the mindset required to consistently achieve success of any level or magnitude.
This means that the same simple discipline of goal setting to reach the objective of getting chores completed, can be used to attain extraordinary physical fitness or even build a fortune 500 company from the ground up. Please notice the second key I used just above. I referred to goal setting as a discipline. A discipline is a teaching, a method, a practice that is respected and viewed as sacred in some instances. So when taken seriously and followed as directed, it will yield a desired result.
Reaching the Objective
If you caught the picture presented at the opening of this segment, you see a child at the bottom of a massive series of steps. The child is contemplating the objective of getting to the top of those stairs. The goals mentioned above represent each of those steps on the way to the top. That’s the final key, break the objective down into small attainable goals that can be achieved one “step” at a time.
Now to wrap this up, we have to reference an extremely valuable lesson learned from the original Karate Kid movie. Every time I watch this particular scene I get chills of excitement, adrenaline and motivation and if you understand this lesson, so will you.
Daniel is the main character in the film and his desired objective is to learn Karate to defend himself from being bullied. He met an elderly, unassuming neighbor, Mr. Miyagi, who agreed to teach Daniel karate. Well for several days, Mr. Miyagi taught Daniel how to properly sand floors, paint fences and apply wax to cars. One night, Daniel got angry and expressed to Mr. Miyagi that his arms and hands were tired and demanded to know why he was not learning karate instead of doing all these chores.
That’s when Mr. Miyagi stood in front of Daniel and said, “show me, wax on, wax off”. Daniel moved his hand in the same motion he was taught to wax the cars. Then, Mr. Miyagi asked him to do it again, but this time he threw an unsuspecting punch at Daniel and the same hand motion he was taught to wax the cars, he had just used to block that punch. Mr. Miyagi then asked Daniel, “show me, sand the floor”. As Daniel then made the same hand motion he learned to sand the floors, Mr. Miyagi made a kick at Daniel and that same technique for sanding the floor, successfully blocked Mr. Miyagi’s kick.
All those daily chores and goals Daniel accomplished, created the muscle memory and discipline that helped him to not only achieve the objective of learning Karate to defend himself, but it also won him a Karate championship title,(The Karate Kid(1984) starring Ralph Macchio as “Daniel” and Pat Morita as “Mr. Miyagi”).
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Previously published on Medium
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