Royane Real

By Royane Real

There are many success gurus and coaches who are ready to tell you the latest technique that will help you to gain success and achieve your goals. 

It’s important to know however, that not every piece of advice on how to achieve success is going to work for every person in every situation.

There are often many ways to get to your final destination.  Sometimes the advice that works very well in one situation, for one particular person, will not work at all for someone else, or might even lead them to disaster!

There are several reasons why this is so. 

One reason is that you may have very different talents than the person next to you.  They may get the benefits of success because they are very aggressive, but if you lack aggression, you will have to find some way to compensate. 

Another reason why a rigid plan for achieveing goals might not work is that the circumstances of the world are always changing.  Therefore the circumstances that led one person to have success might not be present in the same way for another person.

A final reason why different styles of goal setting exists is because some types of projects require very detailed, meticulous planning with no room for error.

However, other types of goals can be achieved more easily if you simply start out and keep moving, changing the plan as you go along. 

For example, if you are in charge of landing a manned rocket on the moon, you will want to use the type of goal setting that is very clear and explicit.  You have no room for error, and you will need to develop highly detailed backup plans for anything that could possibly go wrong.

You can’t say, “Let’s just get this rocket ship in the air, and we’ll decide where to go once we are up there.”

However, there are many types of goals that don’t need this highly detailed approach.  For some goals you just need to set a general direction. In fact, some types of goals can suffer from overplanning.

In fact, for some kinds of goals you can easily spend too much time on the planning stage, and not enough time on the taking action stage.

For example, if you decide you want to go to medical school, you don’t need to have a highly detailed plan, but you do need to choose a general direction and you will need to generate a lot of momentum to keep going. In this case, the action and the momentum can be more important than the plan.

So, how can you tell whether you should be planning a lot or planning a little?  How focused should you be on your goal?

You have probably heard the rousing command, “Ready!  Aim!  Fire!”

This command is used effectively both in times of war, and at times when a person wants to rouse others to action of another sort.  The hidden message of this command is that we should carefully choose a specific direction, make a careful plan, and only then should we actually take any action.

Yet there are times when it might be better for us to remember to change the order of these words. 

There might be times when we would be better off taking action first, and then carefully correct our course once we see what the result of that action has been.

Any time you have a goal you wish to accomplish, ask yourself if this is one of those goals where you would be better off using a highly detailed road map.  Is it a goal where you should say to yourself, "Ready!  Aim!  Fire!"

Or is this the type of goal where it's important just to get started? 

Should your instructions to yourself be "Ready!  Fire!  Aim!"  ?  Only you can answer this question!

The above article is by self improvement author Royane Real.  Would you like to receive my free, no obligation self improvement newsletter by email?  Just fill in your information in the box at the left of this article!

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