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            Just about every human being at one time or another has asked himself/herself the question: “ What on earth am I here for?”  This universal question has baffled humanity since time began and it is even more so today where we live a complex, fast-paced, constantly changing life. Everybody seems to be in a hurry, raising against time. Despite our busy schedule, this question keeps lingering on us, especially when we have time to stop, recollect, trying to find our inner self.

Some may have an answer or answers, others may have an answer but still doubtful if they have the right one, and still many of us have unanswered questions.

            Whatever specific reason each of us have for existence, there is one universal reason: “to find happiness” and we owe it to ourselves.

Happiness comes in many forms, each is unique from the other. Happiness is embracing the Divine Providence in your life; It is having found your true love, raising a family. It is a life of fame, power, and/or wealth. It is good health. It is in serving others and countless more. Some of us may be happy for just one reason but often it is a combination of several.

However we perceive happiness to be, goal realization is a vital part of it.  Great opportunities abound in life. It is entirely up to us to hold on to these opportunities and   align  them with our goal.

We cannot overemphasize the importance of goal realization in life in pursuit of happiness. Realizing a goal brings a feeling of  fulfillment to oneself. Either way, we can choose to be one of these three: a goal achiever, a failure, or an in-between. Again, it is entirely up to us.

Personally, I think we stand to gain a lot if we choose to be an achiever (and we stand a good chance of being one), a gain most likely to exceed our expectation or imagination.

Speaking of imagination, image a person whose life is aimlessly drifted without a purpose. I figure you would say “what a waste”. Such is a life being spent without setting and attaining a goal.

Now, think of a person you know who has reached the ultimate goal in his/her life. Wouldn’t you want to know his/her pathways to success? Wouldn’t you want to follow in his/her footsteps?

Of course, you do. We all do. We all want to succeed in life and the way to do it is to set goals and attain them. There’s no other way. As mentioned earlier, goal achievers as well as you and I know that it is one of the components to happiness in life.

For most of us though, setting and attaining goals seem to be a far-fetched, difficult task. We sometimes think that it is a task reserved only for the intellectually gifted, for the lucky few, for the affluent.

Indeed it is a difficult task, but to say that it is reserved only for the gifted, lucky, or affluent people is wrong. This is an excuse to fool ourselves. Actually, we are not being mindful of our own potentials. We just keep on drifting life away like a horse with eyes covered on the sides. We keep on concentrating in our daily routines and activities and life’s short-lived pleasures that we tend to forget about, set aside, or even ignore our goals in life. However, this kind of lifestyle has something to do with our attitude and this is the attitude we need to change. We have to adopt a goal-oriented attitude. We have to get out of our comfort zone and venture into that jungle out there by leading an active life that will bring happiness not only to ourselves but to others as well. We are all apprehensive of change but this is one change for the better and it will be worth a hundred, maybe a thousand folds over.

Join me as we venture into the world of goal realization.

Now is the Best Time

 

There is no better time to focus our attention to goal realization than now.

Frankly speaking, yesterday was a better time. The day before yesterday was even better than yesterday. But the past is done. There’s no point in groping over time spent. But to delay further would be a sin to oneself.

My father used to work for a company as head of its engineering department. His department is responsible for installation of machines and upkeep of all the engineering needs of the company including its utilities such as water, electricity, and communication. He told me one time over dinner that he gets his assignments from the company’s Plant Manager. He said there were occasions (quite frequently though) wherein some jobs required urgency and that time was of the essence so they have to work on those jobs round the clock. He usually receives a `Job Order` form for each job and on the space for `Due Date` was written `yesterday` instead of urgent or ASAP or a definite date. It was the plant manager’s way of jokingly asking that the job requires urgency because each hour that passes by would mean loses for the company not to mention the commitment to its client. They even have clients that penalize delays in their production delivery and it reflects a bad image for their company.

I can’t overemphasize the importance of time when it comes to goal attainment. Each day, week, or month’s delay may mean lost opportunities and this might derail the timeframe you set to attain your goal.

Though there is no specific or particular “due date” for goal attainment, we must not treat goal attainment half-heartedly. Give it full-time attention, effort, and energy and the rewards will come to you more than you expect. There may be instances wherein delays are unavoidable. Be sure to give it a think over and exhaust all possibilities to minimize each delay. If still, delays are unavoidable, then we must patiently give way to it but under no circumstances must procrastination take its place in your pursuit.

Like any other endeavor, it is human nature that delays do happen. Nobody’s perfect. Every time it does, we must pick up a lesson or two from each experience. As the saying goes: charge it to experience.

Talking of experience, it reminds me of the importance of history lessons. There is an adage: “Learn from the mistakes of others; you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself”. This is one of the reasons why we have history subjects in school.

You may wonder how history is related to goal realization. I also used to wonder why we have to study history lessons, what good it will do to the present and future generations. I used to think that we can’t turn back the hands of time to correct mistakes and studying history is a waste of time and energy.

But then I realized that through history, we can learn from the achievements and failures of other people. We can imitate and analyze the traits and characters of great achievers and at the same time avoid the pitfalls of failures done in olden times. History will give us an insight where we can draw countless lessons that will greatly help us to make better decisions on certain aspects of life particularly those related to goal realization.

We all know that time is gold. Spending time to pursue our goal is time well invested. Even if after spending most of the time to goal attainment and we haven’t cultivated it, we can become history ourselves. We can pass on to our next generation our experiences (be they good or not so good) that will serve as lessons for them. In effect, this will save time for our successors to continue our pursuit.

One way or the other, we can say to ourselves that we have contributed or done our part, no matter how menial it is, as long as it is intended wholeheartedly to goal realization.

Now is the Best Time

Goals Know No Borderlines

At one time or another, we’ve come across articles that touch on issues like racial, age, and gender discrimination, suppression of beliefs or convictions, those sort of things. Those issues do not affect your pursuit to goal realization. Your target goal does not look at your color or race. You may be black or white, yellow, brown, red, or any color in-between or combination thereof. It does not discourage you just because you’re not so young, or that you are a woman and your roll is only to do housework. We are not saying though that housework is unimportant. I do a lot of housework myself.

In short, goal realization has no limitations to race, age, sex, belief or conviction, religion, economic condition in life, educational attainment, experience, fame and influence in society; you name it. The only thing that might limit its potential is yourself, if you don’t work on it.

I used to have a childhood friend whose father was a doctor who owned a modest community hospital. We used to play together, go roller-skating, biking (bikes were rented those days when we cannot afford to buy one), play with marbles, rubber bands, and cards.

Economic conditions in rural areas can be very tough. Many people cannot afford to pay hospital bills, so my neighbor’s father must settle for payments in kind; whatever patients can afford. Because of this condition, the hospital including the lot on which it is located has to be mortgaged to a bank to keep it operational. It reached a point wherein the property was forfeited by the bank due to delayed or non-payment of mortgage. Because of the doctor’s desire to serve the community, he was forced to rent a place which was used as a clinic instead. My friend, whose ambition to become a doctor to help other people like his father was derailed due to economic conditions. Came the time when he has to begin his collegiate career. Since his father cannot support him financially, he has to do it by himself.

He tried to find work and luckily found one but it will take up most of his time leaving no time to study. He decided to quit school temporarily, hoping to study again someday when conditions improve.

His work led him to learn another trade which enabled him to set up his own business but leaving behind his original ambition to become a doctor. With winds blowing in his favor, he was able to scoop enough cash to build his own non-profit clinic which was managed by his father.

Let’s see now what we have learned from this experience. My friend’s original goal to become a doctor did not materialize but he was able to establish his own clinic through other means. His original intention to help other people came true. He need not be a doctor to help other people; he did it in an indirect way. You see, there is an added advantage to goal realization when it is doused with the intention to help other people. We will touch on this topic later. My friend’s economic condition did not deter him to reach his goal (his ultimate goal to help other people). He hardly finished college (only gaining a couple of years of it), but he is satisfied anyway with the way things turned out to be.

Sometimes, it looks as if the potential to reach our goal is not enough. We must take a second look or even a third because we may not have exhausted every means or possibility.

When an opportunity is lost, another is usually born to those who persevere.

Goals Know No Borderlines

It All Starts With A Dream

 

We all know what dreaming or dreams are all about. Some dreams are shady images of what seems to be part of what’s happening in our life. These are dreams that occur while we are asleep. However, the dreams we are referring to, are dreams about what we perceive, or what we want to happen to us, or what we want or intend to be in the future.

Most boys, say aged three to six, would respond to the question of what they want or would like to be when they grow up with answers like: “I want to be a pilot or I want to be an astronaut or I want to be like ‘Superman’”. Girls of about the same age would probably respond to the same question with: “I want to be a doctor or I want to be a teacher”.

Surely, these answers are part of young boys’ and girls’ dreams or ambitions of what they want to be when they grow up. Some answers may be too exaggerated. However, there are answers that are as realistic today as they will be when these children grow up to be adults that they stick to their wants or desires.

Did you notice though that every time these questions are raised to young boys and girls, the answer starts with an “I want to be….”? Wanting to be somebody or to do something is the start of creative or desired dreaming. Wanting is associated with dreaming that it somewhat starts to evolve on the goals we intend to set and attain. Wanting something can be so powerful that we start making plans to make things happen the way we want it to be. It even gets more powerful when that want will produce good deeds for the benefit of many. Somehow, a spark is ignited that it will start to kindle and glow in the dark, take its shape, and mold into something beneficial and worthwhile.

Though dreams that occur while we are asleep are different from dreams of what we perceive to be in the future, there is some degree of inter-relation between the two. When we persistently concentrate on our wants and desires, these wants and desires sometimes manifest themselves in our dreams while we are asleep and gives us a vivid vision of how we can make our ambition turn into reality. So much so that when we wake up, we have developed a direction or a plan on how to execute our ambition even when it previously seems to be vague or far-fetched from reality.

But even if our dreams are vague or seems impossible, we must keep them alive in our minds. By keeping them on our minds, we are somewhat injecting fuel that keeps the fire in our dreams aflame. What used to be a vague vision of our dreams will slowly but gradually turn vivid as we commit it to memory. What seems to be impossible is starting to look possible. And when we have reached this stage of possibility, we cannot resist the urge that will come to us to mold it into reality. We can’t wait to start the wheels of development turning. Somehow this urge will propel these wheels to move, no matter how small the movements are, so long as it moves because we want to see how it develops. We want to see progress. We want to see improvements. Without even noticing it, the moves may start to pick up speed. And to think of it, it just started as dreams in our minds.

Creative dreaming is a burning desire that keeps our ambitions going and holding on to it, will turn it into reality. There is no stopping to goal realization for as long as there is creative dreaming.

It All Starts With A Dream

Act On It

 

A dream is a vision in our mind. Creative dreaming without action is a far-fetched realization to goal attainment.

Typical examples are the great wonders of the world, those landmarks that typify or define the greatness of nations. Landmarks like the Statue of Liberty of the United States of America, the Big Ben of England, the Taj Mahal of India, the Great Wall of China, and numerous more. Imagine if these great ideas, these dreams were not acted upon, will we ever have them to be enjoyed by people from every nation on earth? What kind of achievement will each nation have if great thinkers just sit on their ideas and never acted on it. Absolutely nothing. We would probably be facing each other blankly wondering why and what went wrong?

Probably you’d say: “Oh… well… we still have the natural wonders like Niagara Falls, Mt. Fuji, beautiful coral reefs everywhere on earth.”. Yes… but these are God’s creations. God did not create man in His own image if He thinks we won’t be using our creativity and put it into action. He might as well take it away from us. He expects us to act on it.

So what’s keeping us from acting on our ideas?  We can name a few. Fear of failure is our biggest deterrent. Fear of being ridiculed, fear of sinking further to a depressed state than we presently are, fear of totally losing all we’ve got if we don’t succeed, fear of taking risk.

We all have to take risk at one time or another. Risk may come to us in a variety of reasons, big or small. There are risks we can do without, but there are risks that leave us no option but to take and act on it.

As you can see, risks come in many forms. For comparison purposes, let us consider two: risk similar to winning or losing when we gamble and risk in pursuit of a goal.

The risk involved in gambling is for non-thinkers. This is tantamount to luck risk, not good judgment risk. Risk of this kind has no room in goal realization. It is like ignoring safety on the road, just for kicks, come what may, short-lived, to satisfy a craving.

However, risk in pursuit of a goal has a definite lasting purpose, a purpose that will bring untold benefits once you achieve your goals. It is a risk worth taking for thinkers, not for happy-go-lucky non-thinkers. Risk in pursuit of a goal will bring stability and security in life, ultimately leading to happiness.

Whenever fear grips us, think positively. Look at it this way. Will we ever get anywhere if we don’t take the risk to act on our dreams? Will we be satisfied with our inaction, five, ten, or twenty years from now?

If you notice, there is one common denominator that is holding us back from acting on our dreams, that thing called fear. Fear is the biggest stumbling block to acting on a creative dream that it practically holds everything still. So it is imperative that we eliminate fear in our feelings to clear the way to our goal.

To overcome this fear, we have to face fear on the face, eye to eye, mano y mano. Let us take a typical example, say you have a fear of speaking in public. I guess a majority of us do. Worst scenario that could happen is you will get tongue-tied and spoil your entire speech in spite of having committed the entire speech into memory. You become the laughing stock of the audience. Don’t let it prevent you from speaking in public the next time around because if you do, fear have won over you and you will be cowering in this kind of fear for the rest of your life. To win over fear, draw lessons from your failure and capitalize on it the next time around. Don’t stop till you have successfully made a good speech. Once you do, you have actually turned the table around. This time, it is fear that fears you.

Another example with a somewhat different twist, say you are a lifeguard and you failed to save a drowning person who apparently should have been saved. Now this is a big failure because a life was at stake here. In spite of  this, don’t give up being a lifeguard just because of one mistake. Think about the other lives you have saved before and will be saving if you continue to do so. Say you were able to save a person in an otherwise hopeless situation, doesn’t this offset or overcome the previous failure that happened?

The idea here is to give your best. Once you give your best, it just doesn’t get any better because it is already the best.

When you act on your dreams, think of your actions in a positive way. What you think is what will happen. What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve. Believe that the likely outcome of a thing that we do depends mostly on how we set our mind on it. Our actions originate from our thoughts and the ultimate result is dictated by our mind as well. If we think it will fail, it will. If we think it will succeed, it will. Mental thinking or attitude is the master of the actions we undertake.

Where your mental attitude is directed for a longer period of time, the more difficult it is to change to the opposite direction. If your mind is set on negative thoughts, the more difficult it will be to change to positive thoughts if you do not act on it immediately. However, if your mind is already set on positive thoughts for a long time, it will remain firm on this attitude as time goes by.

Defeat is imminent if your thoughts are in this direction. You may say: “I told you so” that an action has failed because you think it will, just to satisfy yourself when in fact, you are just looking for an excuse or easy way out. The end result is still a failure and what does that make you, a failure. You are just fooling yourself.

On the other hand, success is imminent when your thoughts say it will. Even if it fails the first time, you will learn from your failure and when you try again, you will ultimately succeed as you gain more experience. Keep on trying and persevering. There should be no let up and when success is at hand, you would have defeated defeat.

On a family setting, it is extremely important that positive thoughts prevail over the entire household. With this attitude, every member of the family will experience this blessing and it will grow stronger in time.  Therefore from childhood till adulthood, every member will carry with him or her this positive attitude for the rest of their lives, ultimately resulting into a successful and happy life. And unknowingly, we are bonding the family more closely to each other for a lasting relationship.

The same thing is true outside your household. We are all familiar with the phrases, “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you the kind of person you are” and “Birds of a feather, flock together”. We are what we keep as company. We are what we think we are.

A person, in time, can shift totally from one personality to another especially if that person is the type that follows a leader. If you have the qualities of leadership, you are in effect, the one who persuades the follower to change to your kind of attitude. The stronger personality has the stronger attitude to persuade. It is a good thing if the leader is the optimistic type, all followers will follow suit. The other way around is disaster.

So if you have children, make sure they are in good company. And you can do so by making yourself as an example. It is easy to turn bad, it is difficult to be good and stay good.

That is why turning bad doesn’t need persuasion. It’s like baking a cake; it takes a lot of time to bake one. Destroy the cake and it’s done in no time.

Remember, think positive, act positive, and stay that way. You can do it because what you think is what’s going to happen. This is a must in goal realization.

Act On It