One thing to always remember when you’re creating goals, and grabbing your vision, is to set them high. Not so high that you can’t believe in your ability to reach them, but high enough so they challenge you on your journey toward them.

Hey, if you shoot for the moon, and miss – you can still grab a star!

You can’t find your limits unless you try to reach beyond them.

A good way to do all this goal setting stuff is to get a notebook of some kind and name it something like “GOALS”. Put the name on the front cover. Don’t use it for anything else. A spiral-bound notebook is excellent because you can carry it with you, and always have it handy.

In the future you can look back on that list of goals. You might find it amusing to see how far you traveled. It will show you how much you’ve grown.

Jim Rohn says that you shouldn’t set a goal because of what you have when you reach it. You need to set your goals for what you become by achieving them. Remember: it’s not the destination – it’s the trip.

In the steps to creating goals up to this point you took a separate piece of paper for each of your life areas. Those areas are different for each of us. But the common ones are Physical, Professional, Mental Education, Financial, Spiritual, Personal, and Family. On each sheet you listed the main three goals for that area of life. And each list includes the things you want to happen in your life within the next five years.

If you follow this plan you’ll probably accomplish those list items before five years are gone. Just remember the old saying: “Be careful what you wish for. It might just happen."

The statement has a lot of merit.

Look at each of your three main goals on each piece of paper. You want to turn them each into a sentence that describes your goal in a way you can measure it. When you can measure something you are working toward, you have a way of tracking how close you are getting to that thing.

I know that’s a little tough to understand, but here’s an example from one of my goal areas.

One of the biggest goals I have right now is to start living in my motor home and travel around the country during the summer months. And live someplace warm in the winter.

Part of the incentive for that goal is: My home is on wheels because I don’t like snow.

Think that’s a pretty good goal?

So I have to be able to measure my success toward actually move out of my house, and into the motor home.

I started remodeling an old motor home I had. But life has a way of changing your plans. Sometimes that’s good. I came across a newer motor home in very good shape, and for a very good price. I couldn’t pass it up.

Last summer I disassembled the old motor home for parts, and scrapped what I can’t use.

Before that purchase I measured of my progress toward that goal of a mobile lifestyle by the progress of rebuilding the closet, dining area, and kitchen. Each area was a different measurement on my progress chart.

See what I mean? Each time I get one of those things done, I accomplish a measured step toward my main goal of living in the motor home. Of course with the newer motor home I made all those measurements at one time.

I put the goal in written terms like this: “I live in my 27-foot Dodge motor home during the summer. I travel wherever I want to go – whenever I want to go.”

If you don’t write your goals you’ll have a lot of trouble reaching them. Putting them on paper helps you focus.

A goal statement must be precise. You must state it in the present tense (that means you write it like it’s already happening in your life) (you don’t write, “I will be doing this”; you write, “I am doing this”). That helps to convince your subconscious mind that you really want that goal to become real.

When the subconscious mind believes that you really want something, it starts working automatically to make that something come true for you.

It’s not magic – but it’s close.

So go ahead and write a “goal statement” for each of your three main goals in each life area.

But never lose sight of the fact that creating goals, and designing your life success path, is wasted effort if you don’t have a burning desire to reach the goals you create. If you don’t truly want something, you won’t be persistent enough to work until you get it.