You know, your ability to set long-term goals and constantly be thinking about your future has a high impact on your success. All top executives are long-term thinkers. They project forward five years and they think about where they want to be and what they will have to be doing at that time in order to achieve their long-term goals.
They are constantly asking themselves how to set goals and foster a strategic planning process to further their business success. The key to a successful long-term goal is for you to identify the core competencies you will require and then begin immediately to develop or acquire those core competencies. This ability to think long-term has never been more important or more valuable than it is today. It is a real key to profitability. When you have determined where you want your life to be in one year five years or even twenty years, it will have an impact on what you do today. Once you defined your goals, write them down.
A written goal represents a real commitment. Commitment is what separates our dreams from our goals. Keep a copy of your goal plan inside and refer to it as often as possible. The secret behind the effort is the development of habits and strategies, which support the achievement of clear goals. Successful people form habits to do things that less successful people don’t like to do. Many long-term goals will have short-term goals that lead to them. Not only does this make practical sense, for example, getting accepted to university is a short-term goal than becoming a partner in a law firm, for example, or a management consultant, but it also helps you from becoming overwhelmed.
Differentiating between the two will help you to not become discouraged, and you will also assist in always keeping the long-term perspective in mind when day-to-day life threatens you to make you lose sight of it. You know, long-term goals are excellent motivators. They help you see beyond today’s work and remind you that there is a greater purpose for the time you are spending today. Setting your long-term goal with the assumption that you are moving in the right direction is not enough.
So how do you make sure that you are headed in the right direction and that your energy is channeled toward achieving your long-term goal? Short-term goals put you on the right track, but they don’t appear automatically. Your short-term goals will relate to your long-term goals. A short-term goal is any goal that you set for yourself that can be accomplished within 12 months, and may even be accomplished the day you set a goal. Usually, these short-term goals are smaller parts of bigger, longer-term goals that you break down into more manageable parts.
As a long-term goal, let’s say you want to read 50 books this year, in 12 months. In this case, your short-term goals might be to read a specific number of books each month, to dedicate a specific number of hours each day, 5 days per week, to do 15 minutes per day of speed-reading exercises, and so on. All these short-term goals have the purpose of moving you to the long-term goal. These short-term goals will help you measure your progress toward your long-term goal. They will shape how you plan your time and clarify the value of your time. Make your goals specific and give them a date to be completed. Large goals can be overwhelming. This causes people to lose confidence and motivation. They feel less overwhelmed when they break up, but on the other hand, they feel less overwhelmed when they break up a large goal into a series of smaller steps, each with specific actionable tasks. Instead of focusing on the larger goal, you focus on the smaller tasks that you need to complete. It will be less daunting and with each small task completed, you will receive a confidence boost as you realize that you are one step closer to your goal. This makes reaching your ultimate goal much easier.
In the end, here are some examples of long-term and short-term goals. For example, as long-term goals, your strategy might be to improve the profitability of your company. As long-term goals, you might add to increase the web traffic to your business site by 35% within six months, reach the 1,000-follower mark on Twitter, or add 500 new names to the email subscriber list for your company’s newsletter. Here are some examples of short-term goals supporting the above long-term goals. To improve search rankings for five keyword terms within two months, to research target audience and applicable industry keywords, to assign someone to manage social media feeds and establish a schedule for updates, to improve the newsletter content, and to establish a system to track the performance of the existing campaign. My exercise for you, choose one long-term goal break it down into a list of tasks and steps, and designate an appropriate timeframe for each so that you never get discouraged. The goal might be related to learning, concentration, business, fitness, or any important goal that you want. Thank you very much.