I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we tend to overcomplicate the goal-setting process and how to fix that.
It’s a shame that we tend to do this, but making goals harder than they need to be is all over the place. From SMART goals to over-ambitious ones, there are plenty of ways to overcomplicate your goals that make it harder to achieve them.
It’s easy to fall into these traps. But that’s a real shame because setting goals is the only reliable way to improve your life.
People who set goals have more of what they want in life. Their lives are better because of their goals.
And yours will be too, if you can learn how to make your goals stick. And if you want to make anything stick, make it easy.
That’s why I think it’s so vital to boil goal-setting down to just the basics. I teach this in my 4-4-4 Goal-Setting System by diving into the ideas of setting, planning, acting, and tracking goals.
But there’s one of these that’s even more important than all the others. One that, without it, all the others would be worthless.
Nothing Happens Without Action
The most important step when setting goals is action. Working on them is ultimately the best way to simplify your goals and make yourself stick to them.
Doing the work supersedes planning and tracking because when you start you get valuable data that lets you decide how to keep going. None of the other steps work without action.
Without action, nothing becomes reality.
There have been trillions of good ideas—good goals that people set and maybe even planned out—that never saw the light of day because the people who had those ideas didn’t act.
And everything you see, literally everything your eyeballs can look at right now, is there because someone acted on an idea or goal they thought up.
That’s why the most important thing you can do to reach your goals is to get an action-first mindset and get to work on your goals.
Act, because everything else follows it. Success and all your dreams are on the other side of action. Get out there and get at it right now!
