How do you ensure goal success? While goals rarely even make it past week 3, you can use your current state to carry through and motivate you to goal success. Entrepreneurs that succeed, almost always possess some of this. Why are immigrants so successful even though English may be new to them?

Today I want to discuss a topic that is very, very dear to me. It first came about because I was asked one time when I was at an event, somebody that was one of the speakers asked me if I would come up and speak. I said: “What do you want me to speak on?” He said: “Whatever. Maybe the why, or something like that.” Which is similar to what we had in the last episode, that is: why you do something, what your purpose is, what your goals are. I got up, and it was somewhat extemporaneous at the moment. I got up and I said: “What I’m going to talk about is the opposite, that is the why not.”

Explaining that a little bit, what I mean by the “why not” is: what happens if you don’t make it? That is: how do you get above and beyond what you wanted to do? How do you make it so that failure on your goals or your purpose is not an option? That’s what I’m going to share today. Actually, what I did which I’ll share is actually what got me not only through college, but through graduate school and it helped me build an internationally well-respected consulting firm.

When you look towards your goal and you set up your goals… Lots of people do that. As a matter of fact, right now this is December, so this time of year people are starting to think or maybe they’ll wait until New Years’ Eve, but they start thinking about: how are they going to start of the New Year right? What are going to be their New Years’ resolutions?

Why do New Years’ resolutions fail? Yes, 20 to 25% never make it through the first week. Close to 90%. I hear numbers of 90%, I hear 95%. Whatever it is, never make it to week three. What’s even more damning is that these goals that people never make it to week three are usually just one specific item. They’re usually just: “I want to lose weight,” or: “I want to lose so many pounds,” or: “I want to exercise regularly,” or: “I want to schedule myself to work out on a regular basis,” or: “I want to schedule more time to spend with my family,” whatever it is, it’s just one little goal and they can’t make it for a month; they can’t even make it to week three.

What happens and what’s wrong with these goals? Some people want to be the best they can be, but they spend most of their time complaining about why they couldn’t get to where they wanted to be. As we discussed in the last episode where we were talking about taking your dreams and goals, and not just having a vision board which you walk by, but to make them more alive and make them real-life. Go back to the last episode and you can see that, you can see what we’re talking about there. That can certainly help.

You need something else to make your goal, besides the current vision you have. It is not just the dreams that drive people. You need something else to drive people and make you succeed.

We often hear of the immigrant mentality. A lot of people move into this country, maybe they have a little education or they have some education, but they don’t speak the language, they have to adapt to the culture, the language, they have to find out what it’s like here, and they do things with wish, hope, promise, and they work and overcome in order to either get the education or get the skills necessary to succeed.

What is it about that, and how do we do it, and how do we make ourselves do it? Imagine instead of just one simple goal that we’ve defined, like losing weight, instead your goal is to have a different life, to be successful in whatever situation you have envisioned, to have a great job, to have developed a set of skills. How do you get there? How do you get there if you can’t even get through one goal?