Enough Time – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

Three keys to setting clear goals and reaching them

Many things may have been left unfinished last year. That feeling of not completing everything we set out to do usually comes down to three fundamental issues:

How clear our goals are

Everything within our reach that we can do to achieve them

How well they align with a fundamental purpose

In strategic planning, the plan often turns out extremely inspiring. It excites the people who write it, fills them with energy and makes them want to start right away.

Many strategies and goals are stillborn without anyone noticing. How can we get some sense of whether we’ll achieve our greatest aspirations? I once read in a book by Michael Hyatt, an author I greatly admire, that simply writing your goals down makes you more likely to reach them. Much of this first stage is moving from ideas to something concrete, getting specific about what we want: the classic examples of losing weight, learning a new language, changing jobs, saving money and so on. Beyond tips on how to write goals, I’d like this post to go a step further, toward the awareness of having identified a single purpose in life, with each year’s goals revolving around it. It’s never too late to discover our purpose in life, yet at the end of every year we’ll feel late once we find "the missing piece I needed to make my goals happen." That piece is called Purpose in Life, Company Purpose or simply Purpose.

Clarity of goals comes from being able to see on the horizon the place we want to reach. Without knowing our purpose, though, we move through the world like a ship without a compass. A storm hits early, and the first instinct is to abandon ship, give up the venture, close the business, quit the diet, drop out of the race. When a goal is fully aligned with something more transcendent, rooted in who we are and beyond the material, a drive to achieve emerges so powerful that it lifts our well-being and shapes a new attitude that keeps us firm until we reach what we set out to do.

What is in our hands to reach our goals may be what we’re least aware of. Many goals are set in a way that depends, if not 100%, then 99% on other people. Habits are built only by those who practice them. We can’t acquire a habit by having someone else practice it for us. Likewise, any goal involves a great deal of personal effort, effort that will rarely get our full commitment unless it has meaning (in other words, a purpose). Willpower for the worst moments comes from preparation and from the meaning we give to what we want to achieve. With that clear around the clock, we’ll have the answer to the key question: of everything I want to achieve, what is in my hands to make it happen?

Another big reason we run out of time for our goals is how many we set. We all know resources are limited while our needs can be endless. Since time is very scarce and we’re on this earth for only an instant, one way to sift our goals is to ask: how aligned is what I want to achieve with my purpose, or with our purpose? The answer may surprise us. Many of the things we long for don’t "hit" anything. They’re arrows shot with no clear target, which makes them an unnecessary drain on our precious resources, especially time.

It’s the start of the year. Clarity about the results we expect, the right amount of work and effort to reach them and alignment with a purpose will decide whether we succeed or feel we fell short on any goal we set. It’s always a good time to pause along the way and answer these questions honestly:

Am I clear about what I want to achieve?

Will I do what is in my hands to do?

What purpose does what I, or we, want to achieve align with?

I’d love to hear about your results, and if we can share experiences I’ll be more than grateful. All my best wishes for the wonderful 2022 ahead of us. It will be the best year of our lives.

With all my appreciation,

Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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