Reading 2 - Get What You Want Out Of Life

By  Robert McGarvey

Years before rising to prominence as coach of the University of Notre Dame’s prestigious football team in America, Lou Holtz made a list of 107 things “to do before I die”.  It covered the gamut from attending a dinner at the White House to sky diving.

So far, Holtz has made it to goal 91.  “Set goals and follow through on them,” he says.  “You transform yourself from one of life’s spectators into a real participant.”

We all have dreams and desires, but relatively few people have goals.  Strongly held wishes – “I want to be rich”  or  “I wish I were thinner” – do not qualify.  Though they begin as dreams, goals are specific objectives, attained only through concrete action.  “If you can’t measure it, rate it or describe it, it is probably not a goal,” says Michael LeBoeuf, a business consultant.

Coach Holtz sees this first hand.  Nearly every first year player dreams of professional football.  He explains to them the distinction between goals and fantasies.  “I tell them lots of little goals lie between training camp and playing with a professional team.  First they have to make the Notre Dame team.  Then, one by one, they have to clear the hurdles, and that’s true of every goal we set.”

As Holtz suggests, high achievers know exactly where they want to go.  Here are the steps he and others have followed to fulfil their dreams.

Define your objective
From the time he was eight years old, Dave Thomas wanted to own a restaurant.  “That way,” he says, “I’d never be hungry.”  Orphaned at birth, Thomas never had a stable home life.  Nor did he excel at studies.  But he clung to his goal.

When he was 12, Thomas got a job cleaning tables in a restaurant.  Later, he worked his way up to become a restaurant manager.  He turned around four failing fried chicken restaurants and became an executive with a national chain. 

Finally, after putting together the necessary capital, he opened his own place and named it after his daughter Wendy.  Today he has over 3,800 restaurants.

“I didn’t set my sights on owning a thousand restaurants or even ten,” he says.  “I just concentrated on making one profitable, then another, one step at a time.  Too often people set a difficult task, then give up.  Goals should be focussed on what is achievable.”

Put it on paper 
Once you’ve defined your goal, write it down.  High achievers trace their accomplishments to the time they committed their goals to paper.

When Curtis Carlson was 24, he founded the Gold Bond Stamp Company in Minneapolis and set a goal of earning 100 dollars per week – a princely sum in the Depression.  He wrote down that objective and carried it in his pocket until the paper was frayed.  Today, Carlson Companies ranks among America’s largest privately held corporations, with annual revenues topping 9,000 million dollars.

“Writing out a goal crystallizes it in my mind,” says Carslon.  “I can quickly evaluate whether decisions will take me towards that objective or away from it.”

Map your strategy 
Breaking a goal down into bite sized pieces makes achieving it seem less intimidating.  A technique called backward planning consists of setting an objective and then retracing the steps needed to achieve it.

When Jeff Jackson lost his job as manager of a car dealership, the 36 year old could have landed another sales position.  But he had dreamt of being an independent filmmaker.

It’s now or never, he thought.  Expenses for the project he had in mind would come to 250,000 dollars.  It seemed far fetched, but he had an idea.

The property where Jackson lived was for sale, and he sketched out a series of goals to buy it.  These included finding partners and identifying a potential buyer to make a quick resale.

By pooling resources, Jackson and his team bought the building and promptly resold it for a profit.  With this cash, Jackson bought land, and by selling off small parcels he’s been able to finance his film.  “As I made the individual steps happen,” he says, “I became increasingly sure I could do it.”

Set a deadline 
“A goal is a dream with a deadline,” says motivational expert Zig Ziglar.  “Deadliness provide a time frame for action and get us moving in pursuit of our dreams.”

When Jan McBarron, a nurse, was 25, she acted on her dream of becoming a doctor.  “At first, I thought it was beyond my grasp,” she says.  Then she saw each step towards medical school had a built in deadline.

“Rather than dread deadlines, I used them,” she says.  “Applications had to be in by a certain date, assignments completed at a certain time.  Once I saw what deadlines could do, I began setting my own.”

Twelve years later, Dr McBarron enjoys a thriving medical practice.

Commit yourself
Sales trainer Dave Grant offers this example.  Say your goal is to go to Tahiti a year from now.  What steps can you take ?  How about giving a travel agent a non-refundable deposit ?  If you are really committed, you will make that goal a reality.

That sort of gamble can be used in professional life as well.  Set an ambitious target and commit to it with your boss.  You’ll find you can rally resources you never thought you had.

Don’t fear failure 
Sixteen years ago, Pam Lontos was unemployed and 18 kilograms over weight.  “I was afraid of everything,” she says.  “Nothing was going my way.”

One day in 1976, on impulse, the 31 year old joined a health club, began listening to motivational tapes, and things started clicking.

As her appearance improved, so did her confidence.  “I was still plagued by fear of failure,” she says, “but I decided I had to take steps towards a career goal.”

Lontos asked the club’s owner for a job selling memberships, and within a few months she was the club’s top salesperson.  After two years, she found a bigger challenge in advertising sales with a radio station.  Sales zoomed.

Lontos’s impressive record prompted the station’s owners to promote her to top management.  “In three and a half years, I’d gone from a frightened, overweight housewife to an executive with a major entertaining company,” she says.  “I did it by taking small steps.  That’s the only way I could overcome my fears of failing.”

Usually, it’s the anticipation of failure that paralyzes, not failure itself, according to management consultant Allan Cox.  “We survive our failures,” he says.  “We pick ourselves up and try again.  We have to.”

Persist, Persist 
Along the way to any goal, you will be confronted with obstacles.  Belief in yourself can act as an anaesthetic against these setbacks.

After he was expelled from university, Duke Rudman drifted into jobs in the Texas oilfields.  As he gathered experience, he dreamt of trying his hand at independent oil exploration.

Whenever he could scrape together a few thousand dollars, Rudman leased drilling equipment and sank a well.  He drilled 29 wells over two years, each time coming up dry.  “That,” he says, “was failure.”

Nearing 40, Rudman still hadn’t hit oil.  To improve his chances, he studied land formations, shale types and other aspects of geology.  Then he leased his thirtieth tract.  This time a huge oil reservoir was discovered under his land.

Three of every four holes Rudman drills, turn up dry.  Over 60 years he believes he has failed more frequently than anybody in the business.  But he has struck oil often enough to accumulate a fortune.

“There were days when I wanted to give up,” says Rudman.  “But I’d just push the thought away and get back to work.”

It’s Never Too Late 
Age is not a barrier to achievement.  As we grow older and learn more, we gain the confidence to take on new challenges.

Ask Kirk Fordice.  Fordice prospered as a contractor in Mississippi, but as he entered his fifties he wanted more.  With a friend’s encouragement, Fordice decided to run for governor.  The idea seemed ludicrous to some, but not to Fordice, even though he was nearly unknown.

Fordice became convinced that the politicians weren’t listening to what the voters were saying, so he drew up a plan to mount a challenge.  Then, at 57, he announced his candidacy.

Rather than play down his age and relative lack of experience, Fordice put them to work for himself as assets.  “I honestly felt it would take someone like me from the real world to make a difference,” he says.

On election day, to everyone’s surprise, he won.  “Nobody ever told me I was too old to try this,” says Governor Fordice today.  “When I entered the race, I set the goal of going all the way.  Now I’ve set goals for the next four years and am committed to seeing them through.”

This then is the power of goals: they can give us new energy, new direction, a purpose we might have lacked.  And as Coach Lou Holtz has demonstrated they can help us get the most out of life.