How to set your goals and how to implement a plan and stick to your goals

Goal setting is easy but achieving your goals is hard. Most people set goals but with the lack of motivation and discipline, they end up giving up half way through.

How do you set the motivation and discipline to reach your goals and how to you stay focused on your goals? Here is a little hack on what I do to stay focused, motivated and disciplined.

First of all, you need determination and willpower. If you wish to learn a new skill to advance your career, you need to first make a decision that this is something you want to do and then estimate how much time and money it might require to get there, what are the steps you need to take to get to your end goal. What are you willing to cut out of your life to reach your goal? Because one can’t have everything in life, if you want something, you will need to give up something else to make space/time for the other thing. Of course, you also need to have talent in what you do, because without talent, some goals are not achievable. I could never be a mathematician even if I tried with all my might.

Second, you need to implement a plan of how you want to execute, and what are the steps you need to take, if you need to take training, then access and research what trainings are suitable and financially feasible for what you wish to learn, and give yourself an estimated timeline.

Third is probably one of the most important factors, you need self- discipline, some days we lack motivation, yet we still have to discipline ourselves to do something we might not want to do to keep our progress on track, even a little bit of progress is better than no progress, incrementally we will get there, but if we procrastinate, we will never see progress and our goals will steer further from us. Have you procrastinated on your college assignment, and then pulled an all nighter the day before it’s due to finish it? Well, in college you might get a passing grade, but there isn’t a shortcut in life, how much you put in is how much it will fruit.

To sum it up, we need talent (god given), determination and willpower, plan and how to execute the plan, and self-discipline. In some of the cases, we will also need passion, however some goals don’t require passion, it depends on what your goals are in life but I can’t stress how important self-discipline is because without it, one can’t get very far with their goals.