Wondering how to achieve a goal successfully? Do you know the difference between goals and strategies? Most people have a list of goals that are actually strategies (guilty!). Take making more money, for example, this is not a goal, but a strategy. The feeling you get out of making more money, having more security, and living to a better standard, is more often than not the actual goal people want to achieve.
Why most goals fail
All of us set goals, and all of us struggle to achieve them. It’s not a straight path to success, is it? The problem lies when we set a general goal for ourselves and never tighten it up. You can’t expect to smash a goal that you haven’t made specific if you don’t actually know how you’re going to achieve it. For example, you want to write a book. That’s great, but what’s the action that’s going to propel that goal forward? Writing every day. If you’re wondering how to achieve a goal successfully, you need to think beyond the goal and make it deeper.
Rewrite your goals
So what are your goals in life? And what are you doing in order to achieve them? The road to achieving your goals determines whether you will reach your goals or not. Knowing the difference between a goal and a strategy is the first step in this process. You may need to rewrite your list of goals in order to find out what feeling it is that you want to achieve.
If we break it down even further and take the whole process into consideration, the G.O.S.T. model is a very useful tool:
The G.O.S.T. method
So before reading this far, your original “goal” was simply to make more money. Now, using the G.O.S.T model as mentioned above, you will see that it is possible to achieve everything that you want, but the reason you could have failed up to this point is simply down to your current perspective. Structuring things differently, it could look a little like this;
Goal: Experience the comfort and security of being financially stable
Objective: Becoming a millionaire
Strategy: Starting your own company
Tactics: Doing a relevant study, read books about being a successful entrepreneur, etc.
You can see that everything is linked to each other and at the same time has its own function. Like we discussed before, the goal is the feeling you want to evoke, the objective states what is needed to be done to achieve that goal. The strategy explains the approach you take to reach your objective and the tactics are the actual steps you take in order to successfully achieve all the above.
