Goals summary

Most of us can list plenty of things we’d like to have or do in life, from owning a mansion to becoming a pro golfer. But there’s a difference between a realistic goal and a whim. If you want to achieve something specific, you need to put aside the time for three crucial goal-setting steps. 

First, identify what you’re aiming for. Then, evaluate whether you really want to put the effort in. And finally, plan how you’re going to achieve it.

The author used to be severely overweight, so much so that his doctor told him to lose 37 pounds – an intimidating prospect for someone obsessed with French chocolate almond ice cream.

At the time, the author was working on a new book, which, he expected, would take him ten months. So he decided to deal with his extra weight over the same period. That meant losing under four pounds a month – not even a pound a week! Breaking the task down like that made the goal feel manageable.

If you heat water to 211 degrees Fahrenheit, you can make a cup of tea. If you heat it just one more degree, you end up with steam. Steam’s no use if you want a hot drink, but it can do something far more impressive: it can propel a locomotive. That one last degree is what transforms potential into power.

Many people think that an expensive education is the key to success. But you can graduate from the best school in the country and still fail to achieve your goals. This happened in America in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Parents spent nearly three times more on education than in previous decades, and yet SAT scores fell dramatically.

A US Education Department publication shed some light on this. It found that the best way to predict educational achievement wasn’t to look at school fees or class size. No, the best predictor was homework. Students who completed quality homework got the best grades, whatever school they attended. 

Thomas Edison was one of America’s most prolific inventors. But despite his genius, success didn’t come easily. Before he invented the light bulb, Edison conducted 10,000 failed experiments. He didn’t see these experiments as failures, though. He saw them as successfully discovering 10,000 ways incandescent light didn’t work.

There’s no such thing as overnight success. It takes time and commitment to achieve challenging goals. What often seems like a sudden breakthrough is almost always the result of effort and hard work that happens behind the scenes.