Finding your goals, part 1

To find your most important goals – the ones that lead to your success – you need not ask the obvious questions, like: what are your biggest concerns? Because they only lead to what is foremost on your mind and not necessarily to your key success factors.

Instead, ask yourself: at a specific time in the future (say 31 December 2009), what should have happened by then to make you feel you’ve been successful?

My friend – for example – wanted to be rich. So, obviously, one year from now he should have spent less money than he has earned over the course of that year. Same thing for the years afterwards. In time, he’ll become rich.

Turns out he hates the idea of a frugal life, or working harder or be more ambitious to make more money. He abandoned his goal to be rich because he doesn’t like what should happen to become successful.

The best way to find your goals is to understand – or even investigate – what should happen to realize each and every idea you have. Here’s a list of some of my ideas that I could set as goals:

• Live on an isolated island with a beautiful house and many beautiful girls wearing bikinis (or nothing at all).
• Fly helicopters.
• Live with my wife somewhere in Central Asia.
• Live in the United States.
• Travel through the United States.
• Travel along the entire coastline of the UK.
• Do a fast lap on the Nurburgring in the ring taxi (warning: video).
• Get a bachelor degree in psychology.

Notice that none of them are work related. I probably will never accomplish any of these things on my list. But I could achieve maybe one or two of them. If I set them as a goal.

Once I consider setting a specific goal I would need to understand what should happen to become successful. These are called success factors to the goal planning template.