Practical Ways to Achieve What’s Most Important— Your Desired Future Realities
Step 1: Exploit your passion
Passion is an underground spring of emotion that provides the power to achieve your dreams. Your passion gets you excited about life. It’s the mother lode of energy deep inside you.
Passion is your strongest feeling. Passion comes from everything that you’ve experienced since you existed. It’s your home base of emotional power.
It’s your underground power source. Getting what you want in life requires sustainable energy. You can get this energy by focusing on what you are passionate about — whatever makes life worthwhile to you, what gives it zest.
Step 2: Seek your dreams
Dreams are your desired future realities. They are achievable. If you don’t have dreams for the future, then it’s time you do.
Dreams are your most desirable visions for the future. They are anticipated future realities. They are what you most want. But they only have the power to motivate you if you believe they are possible.
For a dream to stay alive, it must be fed a healthy diet of thought, planning, and, most importantly, action. Dreams are vital things, yet vulnerable. If you ignore a dream by a lack of consistent thought, planning, and action it goes into hiding and can eventually die.
Dreams are your prime motivators. They give you the zest for life that transforms your daily grind into a workshop for achievement. They are your guiding stars.
“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”— Carl Sandburg
Step 3: Choose your purpose
Translate your passion and dreams into a well-defined purpose.
If passion is the emotion, then your purpose is the thinking and planning. It is your conscious choice of a direction and a pathway to your dreams. You need both passion and purpose. Your dreams become your guiding stars.
Your purpose is like a contract with yourself to achieve what you want in life. It is your self-chosen mission.
Other people may try to tell you what your purpose should be. Don’t let them. It needs to come from you.
“Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.” — Seneca the Younger
Step 4: Identify your goals
If purpose is your chosen path, then your goals are the destinations on the way to your dreams. Goals are important stepping stones to your dreams. In a sense, they are important pieces of your dreams.
Goals also serve another purpose — resuscitation. Dreams that are not acted on and pursued can eventually suffocate and die. Goals supply the oxygen and life-giving nutrients that can revive and rejuvenate a dream — bringing it back to life.
Another way to think about goals is to consider them as the building blocks or components that make your dream a reality.
When you determine your goals, you need to make sure that they are aligned with your dreams, passion, and purpose. Otherwise, you might discover that you’re working on the wrong goal. You need to know why you are pursuing a certain goal.
A goal requires various steps to complete. These steps are called tasks, which we discuss next.
“Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor.” — Brian Tracy
Step 5: Divide goals into tasks
You choose tasks to accomplish goals. Tasks are the components of goals that can be completed in short time spans. Tasks are the daily action steps that get goals done. They get you closer to achieving your dreams.
I have found that twenty minutes is the ideal time to work on tasks, especially if it involves working on a computer. No matter how tired or busy I am, I can usually summon up twenty minutes to devote to a task. Or, if I’m very busy, five minutes.
Get a timer, and simply set it for 20-minutes (or whatever increment of time is ideal for you). When the time is up, stop. Do something else. Then come back for more 20-minute tasks.
It’s like the old saying: “How do you eat an elephant?… One bite at a time.”
Tasks are how goals get accomplished, and how dreams are achieved. They are the individual, daily steps needed to execute a plan of action.
“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.” — Henry Ford
Step 6: Avoid crab buckets
Identify the crab buckets or negativity traps that can derail your plans and sap your energy. You can’t get what you want in a crab bucket. In essence, crab buckets — both internal and external — can pull you down, wasting your precious time and energy.
If you want to get what you want and achieve your dreams you’ve got to get out and stay out of crab buckets. A crab bucket situation can be any place, person, group, or state of mind that pulls you down, saps your energy and stifles your ambition.
Your job is to get what you want by focusing on the things that matter. You need your energy for finishing tasks and completing goals.
When you tolerate destructive criticism and negativity from others or from yourself, you are in danger of getting stuck in a crab bucket. When you succumb to anger that drains your productive energy, you’re in a negativity trap. Once inside, it’s hard to focus on your dreams.
Your best policy is to learn to identify and avoid crab buckets from this day forward. Your life span is limited. Why waste precious time on people or situations that sap your energy and give little or nothing back?
Here are some of the common denominators of crab buckets: fear, criticism, ridicule, negativity, pessimism, envy, hatred, and destructive anger.
Those who are content to stay in a crab bucket resent those who want to get out and achieve something in life. Those of us who have escaped from crab buckets may have leftover negativity still buried in our psyche. This takes the form of self-criticism. We need to be on guard against it.
Step 7: Achieve your dreams
Develop and follow an action plan for the achievement of your dreams. You’ll have identified your vision for the future, your power source of passion, your path of purpose, your goals along this pathway, and the tasks that will achieve these goals. You will be aware of crab bucket traps and how to avoid them.
Let’s recap the 7-steps for getting what you want in life. Recognize that your life span is limited and that it will end someday. Get out of any negativity traps or crab buckets you find yourself in. Then…
1. Exploit your passion. Passion is a renewable energy source inside you. It is your emotional assessment of what matters.
2. Seek your dreams. Your dreams are anticipated future realities. Know that you can achieve them.
3. Choose your purpose. Your purpose is the path you choose to take to achieve your dreams.
4. Identify your goals. Goals are the destinations along the path of your purpose that lead to the achievement of dreams.
Goals are the components of dreams. They are the stepping stones to your dreams.
5. Divide goals into tasks. Tasks are daily, short-term activities to achieve specific goals. Tasks are components of a goal. When tasks are aligned with your dreams, passion, purpose, and goals, they convert your “daily grind” from drudgery to achievement.
6. Avoid crab buckets. Crab buckets are negativity traps that can stifle your ambition, suck energy from you, and eat up
7. Put it all together and begin to achieve what you set out to achieve. Finally, you will begin to experience your dreams as they become real accomplishments in your life.
If you would like to learn more about how to apply these concepts, consider obtaining a copy of “Get What You Want,” a workbook designed as your personal guide for the achievement of what’s most important to you. It contains a series of powerful, probing questions that help you know exactly what you want, why you want it, and how you will achieve it.
