To influence people effectively, you must first learn what it means to be a real influencer.

We all want to influence the world, to make it a better place for ourselves and everyone else. But what’s the best way to actually do that? Merely wanting to improve things isn’t the same as actually making improvements.

So what should we do?

For starters, you need to pinpoint the goal you’re striving for. Most of us have some vague conception of what we want to achieve, and, because of this haziness, we never make concrete plans to get there. As a result, we often fail.

If you want to positively influence the world, you must have a goal – a tangible, measurable goal, and a timeframe for getting there. Take Dr. Don Berwick, former CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Berwick wanted to decrease the mortality rate of people who use health care, for instance, by checking into a hospital. Actually, he claims that health care is one of the main causes of death in the US. So he set a concrete goal: Save 100,000 lives by 9 a.m. on June 14, 2006. Such precision is already a step toward effecting change.

To make headway on your goal, it’s vital that you concentrate on the behaviors that will get you there. True influencers don’t care about behaviors unrelated to the impact they want to have. Instead, they concentrate their efforts on two or three behaviors that will yield the biggest impact once mastered.

Take Dr. Wiwat, Thailand’s Minister for Public Health. Wiwat set out to drastically cut the AIDS rate in his home country. After discovering that 97 percent of HIV infections resulted from intercourse with heterosexual sex workers, he saw that the behavior that needed to change was the sex worker’s decision of whether or not to use a condom. Targeting this behavior only, Wiwat successfully stopped Thailand from becoming the country with the highest percentage of HIV-infected people in the world.