The Art of Writing Goals are Useless, unless.... by Les Gee

This was bumped up from the RichDad forums. Good read!

(warning long post)
(*) this denotes one of my more important post

I felt that I studied the art of success with the numerous audiotapes and books and seminars, which I won't bore the reader with, but total over 100 titles. What I am about to write was only discovered after taking a 100 hours of a 200 hour experiential seminar designed with one purpose in mind. To learn about me. What makes me tick? What drives me?

For example, a simple first day first hour process would be to look at a fellow student in the class without any talking for 1 minute. Then for the next 30 minutes the class would share their thoughts. This was quite interesting what people think and how one feels about themselves.

During the middle of the seminar (it gets harder), my individual task was to break bread with a total stranger that was extremely difficult for me to ask. First I ask a homeless man, who turned me down. Then I ask a beautiful lady and she turned me down. Well with the time limit running out, I ended up talking with an elderly father and we had a good chat. Unfortunately, it was not a stretch to do that. But, we learned you can pick up a conversations with anyone in a foreign land and have a good time.

If you are interested in this sort of seminar, the one I took went bankrupt even thought it cost about $2000. I believe lifesprings or EST is the same sort of seminar and they are national. In Salt Lake City Utah, it is called mindsprings? I would say that seminar was tied for the best seminar, I’ve ever taken. The other seminar is iahp.org on child brain development a completely different subject. I have taken a bunch of seminars from “how to flirt” to “how to protect your assets.”

Well back to our story of goals.
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Many books are written on goals. They are vital to a successful person, yet I learned goals are generally useless to the masses. Unfortunately most people write goals miss the point because they don’t understand how to make a good goal. Yeah, yeah, it must be concrete, it must be in writing, yadda yadda yadda. If you don’t do that, which is in almost all the financial books, your goals are doomed to fail. You don’t write I’m going to be a billionaire in 1 month and you only have $5 dollars to your name. I’m assuming the reader of this post is beyond the basics.

Analogy: Take a look at how many books are written on dieting. How many people can actually lose 50 pounds and keep it off? But if I wrote a goal to lose 1 pound a week and in 50 weeks I'll be 50 pounds lighter wouldn't that work? Isn't that an attainable goal? Only 1 pound a week! If I look at that day and night, won't it work? Well as a statistician that I am, I would say your probability of losing 50 pounds definitely increased versus someone who did not write it down and look at that written goal daily.
I can even make a case for all those that did write it down and those that didn’t and say incorrectly see this is all you have to do, to lose 50 pounds. But if I were a betting man, I’d vote against you achieving this goal if that were all you did. So the next question would be how could I lose 50 pounds in a year, if this is my ultimate goal? What must I do?

Precious formula which I finally discovered after hundreds of hours in seminars and books:

PURPOSE => VISION => GOALS align them all and goals are easy as 1,2,3.

It is like a pyramid. At the bottom is the most important, purpose statement. Next comes vision and at the top goals.

VISION: is closing you eyes. How do you see yourself one yr. from now? If you still see yourself overweight, then your subconscious mind is working against you. You are not aligned and you goal of losing weight is doomed to fail. Vision is more important than goals. If however you see yourself a thin person then you have a chance. It is funny that most people spend their time on goals, yet more time should be spent on your vision. In the seminar we practice closing our eyes and seeing what we would like. How did it feel to us? What were we doing? What is the setting in our quiet place. For me it is myself in my office overlooking the town lights below.

I really fun thing we did was the instructor, showed us the folly of goals. Okay your goal is to get across the room, but you can not get across like anyone prior. Yeah, you can sit and think about all the ways and boy is that a trivial pursuit. The whole purpose of this lesson. We just did it. One would walk, then hop, then crawl, then skip, then cartwheel, and 30 minutes later we were still going across, in twos, with chairs, would it never end. Goals are simple and little time should the reader spend on it. We need more things to do.

PURPOSE: Ah, the most important element in the whole thing. So you see yourself thin and you have a goal to lose 50 pounds, but may I ask, what for? What is your purpose in life? If it has nothing to do with being thin, come on! no way are you going to do all this? Maybe your purpose it to raise your son to be a fine young man and you are an obese 60 yr. widower and have an infant child. Your doctor tells you, you have to lose some weight, and your cholesterol is seriously high. Now, you got a strong burning passion or purpose in life. Now you have an even stronger vision of a healthy you raising your child and playing with him at 10 yrs and 20 yrs old. Now you can set goals and look at them everyday with a vision and purpose. Now you got a fighting chance to lose the weight and keep it off. Give me PASSION. Align your GOALS with your VISION and PURPOSE. Purpose is the key. Find yours and vision and goals are a walk in the park.

So how does this look in terms of real estate or financial success. Why is it you want to be successful? What burning desire do you have to call 100 houses? Is it an empty goal to be rich, and for what? So you can say to your friends look at me? Come on get a life! Work on your purpose, pray about it, think about it, spend more than 50% of your time discovering it. Once you have it you have the war won. If it helps to see yourself before the creator, talking about your life then so be it. If it’s the lifeboat exercise, were we had to explain to our fellow students why we should be allowed to live with only 1 seat remaining in our sinking titanic, then use it. By the way in that exercise, we were allowed 2 minute to talk. Note that no one had any convincing reason to live. Quite interesting, no one had any passion or direction. You mean to say not one of us, can talk for two minute on why we should be allowed to live with any passion. Oh, and this was not a fun experience as they had us stand there with dead time until the time was up. A shocking example of lack of passion and direction in ones life.

Now that you have a burning, driving passion in life, now that you can see, taste, touch, and feel the darn thing, work on your VISION. It should be easy from here.

Heck, now Goals are very easy. That must be align with your vision and purpose. It’s like an afterthought and goals WILL BE done next time this year. It’s truly is easy and startling to see those new years resolutions getting done because you have a purpose which drives you and a vision of what that looks and feels like.

Hope this helps. Since the 10 yrs that I discovered this, I personally have been a more Powerful individual. Powerful in the sense of the ability to help others, having more of an impact to those that I contact. And for you die-hard, thick-headed, money-hungry, greedy readers, oh and yes, my financial net worth skyrocketed beyond what I even imagined. It was not about the money, but as one great book wrote, “You can’t but help be rich, if you help enough people get to where they want to get.” Okay, I paraphrased it to death, and of course to those pessimistic folks, what about Mother Teresa?, she’s not rich!. My reply to those folks are she is rich, in another sort of way (:

Les.

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Disclaimer: These are the opinions of Les Gee and utilizing these teachings are solely at your discretion and risk.