Someone who is goal-driven always had his goals in his mind. When you become goal-oriented, it means that your goals become a part of your life. You will always think, make decisions, and act in terms of your goals. And that is a characteristic of success.
If you study the biography of extremely successful people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Ali, Kobe Bryant, etc., you will notice that they are goal-driven.
They know what they want, they know what they need to do, and every day, they are living their goals.
- Bill Gates has the goal of ‘putting a personal computer on every desk.”
- Steve Jobs has the goal of building an enduring company that prioritized people, thus, he went on to create products that are user-friendly with beautiful design.
- Elon Musk wanted to make space travel possible for the masses, hence, he started SpaceX with reusable rockets to lower the costs.
- Muhammad Ali wanted to be the best boxer, and every day, he trained and faithfully believed that he was a champion.
These are some of the examples of goals-driven people.
When you have goals that drive you, your goals become a part of your life. You co-living with your goals.
So, how do you become more goal-driven in life? Well, here are 10 useful tips you can work on…
1. Set Exciting and Meaningful Goals
Make sure your goals are exciting and meaningful. You want your goals to be exciting to you so that you will be looking forward to working on them every day.
Don’t set a goal where you feel dreaded to work on. It will only make you feel stressed because you will have to find the external motivation to drive yourself to pursue the goal.
Instead, set a goal where you are intrinsically motivated to achieve. That way, you won’t have to be push, the goal pulls you.
And make sure your goal is meaningful too. When you are working on something meaningful, you will automatically be inspired from within.
In this guide here, I share how when you have a purpose-driven mission, you are intrinsically driven. Everything you do become meaningful.
Adam Grant, best-selling author, and psychologist once conducted a study on a group of employees at a call center who were required to make calls for a fundraising campaign.
Grant discovered that when the employees understand and realize how their work has helped students changed their lives because of the scholarships they have raised, they became motivated.
Read this guide to learn how to tap into the power of meaning: The Power of Having a Purpose Driven Mission.
2. Focus on Lead Measures
Too often, people fail to achieve their goals and become driven because they focus on the wrong thing. They tend to focus on the lag measure instead of the lead measure.
Let me explain…
Leg measures are metrics that you can’t change. They are measures that you cannot work on, hence, you can’t focus on them.
However, that’s what most people do. They set goals based on lag measures and then focus on them. This is not going to help you achieve your goals.
Here are some examples of lag measures:
- To increase 20% sales
- To make $100,000 in profit
- To lose 10 pounds in 3 months
On the other hand, you want to focus on lead measures. Lead measures are metrics that you can work on, hence, they are influenceable.
Here are some examples of lead measures:
- Number of hours working out in the gym
- Number of content published on the website
- Number of out of stock items in a retail store
Lead measures are actionable. You can work on lead measures to achieve your lag measures.
Let me give you a clear example:
Lag measure: lose weight and get back in shape
Lead measure: number of hours of exercise per week
Now, your goal can be a lag measure, but when it comes to focusing, you need to focus on the lead measure, which is the hours of exercise every week.
The more you work on lead measures, the more results you will get. Working on your lead measures will move the needle for your goal.
And if you want to become goal-driven, choose to focus on lead measures. Work on things that will get you the results.
I suggest you read this powerful book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals, written by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey. This book will change the way you look at your goals.
3. Review Your Goals Every Morning
One of the most productive things you can and should do every morning is to review your goals.
It doesn’t matter if you choose to re-write them or just look at them and think about why you want to achieve them or how you want to achieve them, reviewing your goals is key to success.
Let your goals motivate and drive you each day. Let your goals direct your life every morning.
You see, when you constantly remind yourself of your goals, you become goals-oriented. You know what you need to do to get there. You become proactive and make things happen.
But when you have no goals, you are like a lost sheep. You have no idea what to do and all you do is following the crowd. You end up becoming reactive. You respond and react to things. You wait for things to come to you rather than being the one who makes things happen.
This is one of the most profound differences between someone who is goal-driven and someone who is not.
People with an exciting and meaningful goal wake up with inspiration and passion. They look forward to pursuing their goals.
On the other hand, people without goals wake up with no aim. They have no clue what they want to do. Hence, they end up wasting time on Facebook and Netflix, watching people pursuing their goals and dreams while they become spectators.
So, review your goals every morning.
Here’s a guide you should read: The Importance of Daily Goal Setting and How to Do It Right
4. Track Your Progress
Don’t just set goals, track them. This is another habit of goal-driven people. They don’t just set goals, they track their progress and find out where they can improve to produce more and better success.
You have to learn to do the same. Track your progress.
It doesn’t need to be something difficult. For example, if you want to keep track of something simple, you can use the Calendar Method.
Every time you successfully acted on the goal, such as writing 1,000 words, exercise for 15 minutes, or publish on your Facebook business page, mark a big “X” on your calendar.
The key is to keep the chain of “X” going and don’t break the streak. That’s one simple way to track your progress.
Check out this guide to learn more about measuring your progress: How to Track Your Goals: 5 Fabulous Ways You Should Consider.
It is important to track your progress because you don’t want to lose track and lose sight of your goals.
When people stop tracking, they started to lose sight of their goals. And slowly, they lose interest in their goals, which eventually they will give up on their goals.
Never let that happens to you. Measure your success and track your results. That’s how you become goal-driven and progress through success every day.
5. Get an Accountability Partner
There is no point in talking about how committed you are unless you get yourself an accountability partner.
It is easy to procrastinate when there is no one to check on your progress and monitor your work. After all, you are the one who knows what your goals are and what you want to accomplish.
Thus, when you procrastinate, there is no one to hold you accountable. And that’s why most people are living in mediocrity.
They have goals, but they lack the commitment and the accountability to make the goals a reality.
Think about it, everyone wants to be rich, to have a great family, to be fit and healthy, and to live an amazing life, but in reality, most people fail to achieve their dream life.
Why? Lack of commitment and no accountability.
Therefore, get yourself an accountability partner.
It doesn’t need to be your boss, business partner, or your mentor. It can be anyone as long as your accountability partner is someone who supports your goals.
What you need to do is simple, just commit to sending your progress report to your accountability partner every week on the same day and time.
Of course, you need to inform your partner what you need to do throughout the week. And when the time comes, send the progress report to your accountability partner.
When you know someone is there watching you, you will feel the pressure and the accountability to keep your promise and get the work done.
That’s how you can increase your commitment to your goals and be accountable for the results you want to create.
Again, you can learn more about building the cadence of accountability from the best-selling book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals.
6. Focus on the Wildly Important Goal
I know, you have a lot of goals you want to accomplish in your life. I do too, we all do. But one thing for sure, if you try to work on 10 goals at the same time, you are sure to fail at every one of them.
Thus, the key to success is to become extremely focused on just the vital goal.
Imagine if you have 90 days to work on just one goal, what one goal would you pursue?
This question above will help you discover your wildly important goal to focus on. A lot of people lose focus because they have too many things on their plates. They lose focus and hence, they lose their motivation too.
You don’t want that to happen. Focus on just one goal.
And if you insist, you can choose to have 2 goals, one personal goal, and one professional goal. And that’s it.
It is always better to have a completed project that can truly impact your life than 10 incompletes that do nothing but collect dust.
As a blogger, I know this because there are so many things I want to do. I want to start another blog that talks about internet marketing, I want to sell stuff on Facebook, I want to start a YouTube channel about café (I love coffee), but I just can’t split myself too thin.
The same goes for you. Focus on just one goal at a time.
What if you could achieve the most impactful goal in 90 days? Don’t you think your life will change? And don’t you think this is exactly what you need to do?
Become obsessive with your wild important goal and give it 100% attention in just 90 days. And in 90 days, you will see your life change.
Focus on just one goal, my friend.
Read: 10 Amazing Ways How to Improve Your Focus
7. Create a Supportive Environment
To become goal-driven, you need the help of your environment. As the saying goes…
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
– Alexander Den Heijer
Yes, you change the environment, not the flower.
We are human beings and we are easily affected by our surroundings and environment. That includes the people you mix with too.
Try to read a book in a noisy wet market. Think you can do it? No, there are too many distractions and too noisy there.
What about writing an article behind a TV that plays your favorite drama on Netflix? Do you think you can focus and complete the article?
You know what I mean. These are just some examples of how your environment can affect your mood, emotions, and hence, your results.
If you want to become goal-driven, you need to have a supportive environment that helps you pursue your goal.
Achieving your goals is like growing flowers, you need the right environment for the flowers to bloom. The same goes for your goals, you need the right environment to materialize your goals.
Remember, working in the right environment is like setting yourself up to win.
You don’t want to be around smokers when your goal is to quit smoking. Similarly, if you want to become productive, eliminate all possible distractions.
Read this guide and you will understand how important it is to have a supportive environment that helps you achieve your goals: How to Change Your Environment to Create Better Success in Life.
8. Celebrate Your Wins
I love how Oprah Winfrey says it:
“The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.”
Yes, the more you celebrate your wins, the more wins you will get.
Too often, we don’t celebrate our progress. We thought that it is just a 15 minutes exercise, what is there to celebrate, right?
Wrong, the more you acknowledge your victories, the more victories you are going to create.
When you celebrate your win, you feel good about it. And it boosts your confidence. And when you feel good and have greater confidence, you tend to take more actions that lead you to get more wins.
This is how the Success Cycle works.
Take a look at this picture below and you will understand why it is important to celebrate your progress and wins:
The more you feel good about your actions, the more progress you are going to make. And the more progress you make, the more goal-driven you become.
To learn more about Success Cycle, read my guide here: Success Cycle: How to Leverage Small Success to Build Bigger Ones.
9. Learn from Feedback
There will be no growth without feedback. And as long as you have goals and you pursue them, you will encounter mistakes and failures.
However, goal-driven people like Elon Musk and J.K. Rowling don’t look at mistakes and failures as they are. Extraordinary people look at mistakes and failures as their growth catalysts.
Elon Musk may be known for his successes with Tesla and SpaceX, but do you know that SpaceX almost went bankrupt because of the first few blow-ups for their rockets?
But Musk and his team learned from the lessons, perfected their rocket launches and landing, and finally, they made history by successfully launching over 100 rocket flights. You can read the article here.
The same thing happened to Colonel Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, famously known as KFC.
When Colonel Sanders went out of business, he embarked on a journey to sell his fried chicken ‘recipe’. He has been rejected over 1,000 times before he finally got a ‘yes’.
Goal-driven people have a different view on mistakes and failures. They understand that mistakes are there for them to do better. And failures are not permanent.
Therefore, reframe the meaning of mistakes and failures. And always remember this quote:
“You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated.”
– Maya Angelou
Read: How Successful People Overcome Failures and Bounce Back
10 The Ultimate Goal is Growth
Having goals is good, but you have to understand that the ultimate goal is growth. It is not about the results you get, the car, the big house, or the money you earn, instead, it is about the growth you experience throughout the journey.
I love this book by Ken Honda called Happy Money: The Japanese Art of Making Peace with Your Money.
In the book, Honda explained that money is not the ultimate end. Instead, it is growth. Honda has interviewed thousands of millionaires in Japan.
When he asked someone who has made a million dollars if he thinks he is rich, he always got a no, because that person will say he is yet to make ten million dollars.
And when he asked someone who has made ten million dollars if he thinks he is rich, again, he got a no, because that person will say he is yet to own a private jet.
And then when Honda interviewed someone who owned a private jet if he thinks he is rich, he got another no, because that person said his jet is just a 6-seater.
This is why there will be no end if you pursue materials and collect stuff. Don’t pursue external stuff, instead, pursue experience and growth.
A goal-driven person understands this. They pursue goals that grow them.
This is why you want to set and achieve goals that challenge you, excite you, give you meaning, and ultimately, grow you into a better person in life.
Conclusion
Your goals should drive you in life. If your goals don’t inspire and motivate you, perhaps, you need to re-look into your goals.
If you want to become goal-driven and succeed in life, you need this: Goal Setting Formula. It is a masterclass I created to help people set and achieve their goals, using a systematic approach that never fails.
Remember, to become goal-driven, your goals and your inner desire need to be in harmony. When that happens, you will become unstoppable.