Friday, October 29, 2010

SET GOALS FOR YOUR BUSINESS

The Entrepreneur Article: Set Goals for Your Business
Courtesy of Entrepreneurship Article



If people set goals the way they set New Year’s resolutions, nothing would ever get done. When people set their resolutions for the New Year they usually list out everything they don’t like about their life and write down what they’d rather have. The problem is that they rarely put very much thought in how they are going to make it happen.

Resolutions rarely come to fruition because people don’t put enough thought into the game plan, and their ideas about their “dream” life stay dreams. It’s important to keep the dream alive in order to stay motivated, but to achieve your goals, you must turn your dreams into physical tasks that are easy to measure and track.

Writing down a goal like “become a famous author” or “build a company that can run itself” is a good place to start, but if that’s all you wrote, you’d probably never achieve it. Think about the steps you need to take to become a famous author, for example: polish your writing style, choose a genre, outline stories, and find a great publisher.

From there, break down the steps into easily measured tasks with tangible deadlines. If you want to choose your writing genre, make a list of the genres that most interest you and spend a few hours researching which genres experience the best sales to make your decision. Making lists and researching for a fixed period of time are both easily measured tasks that can be checked off of a list before you move onto the next step.

It’s a good idea to share your goals with people you trust to hold you accountable. It’s easy to get discouraged doing the grunt work necessary to achieve your goals, but having someone that believes in you and supports your decision to follow your dreams will make it easier for you to stay motivated when the going gets tough. It’s also important to acknowledge each victory and accomplishment along the way.

You may not feel like you’re any closer to achieving your goals when you focus on the long road ahead, so take some time to look back at how far you’ve come and congratulate yourself on your progress. Many goals take years to achieve, but you will get there if you can keep yourself going.

Before you embark on your journey, it’s important that you take some time to think about what you value as a person and what things you are willing to do and, more importantly, not willing to do to achieve what you set out to achieve. You will likely come across opportunities to bend rules in your favor as you come closer and closer to your goals, so make sure you decide how you will act if those situations arise.

The only reason that more people in the world aren’t living the life of their dreams is that they don’t know how to begin! If you can come up with a solid plan with measurable, specific, deadline-oriented tasks that eventually lead you to your goal, you will achieve it. It may take months or even years, but if you stay motivated you will make it happen…

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