Goals and Desires

 By Weldon Smith | Submitted On January 17, 2011

Goals are essential to leadership. That's true. True leadership means choosing a worthy destination by way of a correct direction, and then going. Leadership does not allow for staying in place, and to arrive at a place worth being requires goals. Leadership is essential to goals. That also is true. Many-perhaps most-goals are not attained or accomplished. Most people hate setting goals. Many people think setting goals doesn't work. The fact is, it doesn't work-without leadership. It is a loathsome activity-without leadership. It is mostly a waste of time-without leadership. Most people approach goal setting as a left-brained, logical thing. Goal setting is really a right-brained, emotional thing, at least to start. It begins with wanting something. Most goals are short-lived failures because they pertain to something the person setting the supposed goal doesn't really want. If you don't really want something, you won't do what it takes to get it. And you can't have anything without doing what it takes to get it. A person may think he should lose weight, thus, he should stop eating ice cream, cookies, and candy. So he sets a goal to stop eating fattening food. He may study the matter and feel that he can lose 10 pounds a month, and in seven months he will be down 70 pounds. But on the third day the grocery store has a sale on ice cream and that is the end of that goal. 

What happened? He didn't really want to lose weight enough to do what it takes to accomplish it. He really wanted to keep eating ice cream. Alas, we humans do what we really want to do. We may think we want to be healthier, thinner, richer, friendlier, funnier. But unless we are willing to change, we will stay the same. That was a brilliant statement wasn't it? But it's true. You can't stay the same and be different. People set "goals" based on what other people want for them, or what society demands they be or do, or because there are things that seem like the right things to do. Goals don't work until the person wants the result for himself. It is popular to say and think that if a goal is not written down, it is only a wish, or it will never be accomplished. Teachers and speakers say this as if it were a fact. The truth is that a goal is a goal. If you have a goal in your brain-and it is a goal to get something you really want-it's a goal. There is nothing magical about writing it down. If it's not a goal, it's not a goal, even if it is written down. If you have a goal engraved in stone and gold-leafed, but you don't really want to accomplish it, it 6/28/2021 Goals and Desires https://ezinearticles.com/?Goals-and-Desires&id=5741502 2/2 is not a goal because a goal is only a goal if it will help you get something you really want.

 Otherwise it is a waste of time, and real goals are never wastes of time. To be a smart aleck for just a moment, if a goal has to be written in order to be a goal, then an illiterate person cannot set a goal to become literate because he can't write it down. Okay, enough of that. But I will say this: If you can't write down your goal if you want to, then very likely it isn't a goal. A goal has to clearly state what will happen and by when. And I will also say that I do recommend writing down goals. A person should have enough goals that he doesn't want to try to keep track of them all in his head. Jim Rohn, who was very wise and very rich, suggested having lifestyle goals and financial goals and giving goals and many other kinds of goals from the near future to ten years out. We should all know where we want to be in ten years, and how we're going to get there, or in ten years we will probably be about where we are today. Ten years is a long time, and things change much faster than that. In good goal setting it is permissible to tweak and change goals. In two years we may want to change where we want to be in ten years, but we should be in a better place in two years because we had set ten-year goals. Once a person decides what he really wants and is sure he will do what it takes to get what he wants, then legitimate goal setting can begin. A goal is simply part of an action plan. A goal is exercising leadership. The action plan is what it takes to get what you really want, and to go where you really should be. You're willing to change something toward having a different result at some future, intelligently-arrived-at time. I want to insert here Dave Ramsey's famous saying. "Live like no one else, so that later you can live like no one else." He says that in regards to money, meaning that if you will be intelligent with money now, later you will have so much of it you will be more comfortable and secure and giving than most other people. It works with any goal. Work hard at your goals now so that you will be that much better somewhere down the road. And with continual goal setting, you're constantly investing in yourself and your life for the rest of your life, to have an exceptional life. 

We figure out what we have to do to get what we want or to arrive where we want to be. As we set off to achieve those things, we understand better what we want or where we should be, and what is necessary to get there in the best way. Goals do have to be measurable. We have to be able to count in some way what we're doing. If we can't tell how well we're doing as we go along, we'll get lost. We'll give up. If we can't tell what good our activities are doing, we won't waste the time. We can set a goal only for what we can control. A boss cannot set a goal for an employee. He can threaten the employee if the employee doesn't do certain things by certain times, but that is not a goal. That is an assignment or a poor delegation. A salesman cannot set a good and legitimate goal for how much of his company's product he will sell because he cannot force anyone to buy what he is selling. He knows from experience that if he does certain things, he will probably sell approximately so-much of his company's products in so-much time, with so-much effort. But he cannot control others' wants, the economy, or whether a different company or product will enter the market and blow him out of the water. A salesman may decide he wants to sell a certain amount of product and be paid a certain amount for doing so. Now it's time to set goals about what he'll do, how much he will do, and by when, to try to get it to happen. As leaders, we must set goals. We must work hard to leave behind things that don't work and move toward things that do work. Weldon Smith is the author of the book True Leadership and False Counterfeits, which explains what True Leadership is, and why any other idea of what Leadership is does not work. Furthermore, Leaders are not only those who have followers. Every success in every aspect of life is the result of practicing Leadership. Please visit the website at http://www.leadwithtruth.com/ to subscribe to the free newsletter or to read the book. 

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