We have expectations of the New Year in the beginning of the year.

This year is going to be my best year ever. This year I am going to get rich, thin, fat, famous, popular or independent. It is great to start dreaming again. We often dream as children. We can fly, we can change the world, and we can do the impossible. When we grow older, we see that it is not so easy to achieve what we thought would be relatively easy to achieve. So we tend to stop dreaming and we go to that survival mode where we just live from day to day and make sure that we have enough energy for tomorrow to just live day to day again. So it is good to start the year dreaming or wishing. These dreams may lead to goals and the goals may change your life forever. These goals and our attempt to reach them may force us to make changes that will help us act and behave differently.

So, let us say that your dream is to have enough money to quit your current job that you may have more time to follow your passion. You do have a job that is sapping your energy and you are busy with your life. When the reality of the rat race sets in, it is easy to let that dream slip again. The rate race  is a term used to describe a frustrating, hard-to-break financial lifestyle. It is a lifestyle that is lived by countless people. That means that you are so busy every day that you do not reflect on where you are and where you are going. To reach any goal you need to think about what you want to achieve and what price you are willing to pay for it. To define your goal, you need to go through a number of questions so that you have enough clarity for you to only focus on three things. You need to ask yourself three questions more than once a day and get answers to that. You need to learn how to ask “how?”, “does this support my goal?” (answer “yes” or “no”) and also “what next?”

 

Let us take a closer look at this. Your wish is to have enough money to quit your current job. So how do we make that wish a goal? There are many ways to describe a goal, but the main difference between a goal and a wish is that it is measurable opposed to vague, precise instead of flexible or loose. So the first question would be: how much money would this be on a monthly basis? Let us take $3000 as the example here. The second question will be: how much time are you willing to sacrifice to achieve this goal? The answer to this question is very important to determine what route you should take to reach your goal. There are quite a number of other questions that you need to go through to make sure that you have a clear goal and a clear allocation of time to reach the goal and to maintain the goal in particular.

 

So, let us restate the wish to make it a goal: In ten months from now I see myself earning $3000 per month to enable me to be master of my own time by doing ….

Now you need to start asking the question HOW? The goal is set and it is precise. Ten months from now $3000 per month> How am I going to get it?

There are different answers to this for different people. Let us assume that you are going to sell second hand cars and that your profit per car is $300 on average. That means that you need to sell ten cars per month. If you are selling a product where the profit is $10 per sale, you need to sell 300 units per month to get to your goal. If you do internet marketing and your profit is $1 per product, you need to sell 3000 units of your product to get there. You could reason that you are not so much into sales. That means that you need to find something else where you can add value to people’s lives where you would receive a benefit to get to your desired income.

So once you have the HOW in place, you may start asking the two questions: “What next?” and “does this support my goal now?”

So let us say that you have decided to sell second hand vehicles. This is going to be your plan to get the money in. You have also chosen to devote ten hours per week to this (five over weekends and five during the week). Now you need to ask the question: “what next?”. As you have no idea on how to do this, you may want to google “selling cars” to determine what is next. If you know some-one who is in the business you may want to go to him or her to gain knowledge or to be trained. Once you have the knowledge you may still need to acquire the skills for this. That will be the next step, but you may combine this with selling. So you learn as you go!

To illustrate the other question, consider the following. You have set aside two hours tonight to spend time researching the prices of second hand vehicles in your area. Your friends phone you to watch a game with them and to have a great time. So the question is “does this support my goal now?” Of course the answer is “no”. If you do go, however, you have to make up for the two hours of lost research.

So, to wish is easy. It is but a fleeting expression of a desire that is deep down somewhere. To turn that desire into a goal requires passion and discipline. So your first goal may in fact be to acquire passion and discipline before you tackle that audacious goal.