Reaching Higher Than Your Goals

Let’s face it, we don’t always attain our goals, no matter how good we are. We might be the best in our field, yet we still fail occasionally. Now failing isn’t that big of a deal when you are a pro since you proved yourself you can already achieve a decent level of success, and you are probably successful anyways. But when you are a beginner and you set goals, you have a high chance of failure since, well, you’re a beginner. But that’s not the problem when you are beginner, the real problem when you’re a beginner is that when you fail, you give up.

The real reason you give up
So why do beginners give up so easily? It’s because it’s a chain reaction. It goes like this, you are a beginner, so you don’t know much. Since you know you don’t know much, you give yourself low expectations. Low expectations give low results, but being new, you won’t attain your expectations, even if low. This in turn give you really low results, and you give up thinking it’s all not worth it. And in fact you might be right; for the results you received, that project maybe needs to be dropped. But when you start something else, the same thing happens again. Somehow, for some reason, everything seems so hard and the results are not satisfying. You start a business because you want more money and more free time, not to waste all your precious time to make just a few extra dollars.

Playing the game
This is how you have to play the game; you have to know that it’s all mental. You see, if you reach for $50 a day, you will think all you can do is that. You will think that your efforts are just enough to make $50. You are mentally limiting yourself. So then, when you work, you are not giving 100% of yourself. You are not impatient or in a hurry, you’re taking everything in a laid back and normal manner. The point is, you can not know in advance how everything will turn out. When you set $50, you might end up making $30/day.

You need to challenge yourself not physically, like in terms of things to do in a day or how much to accomplish, but mentally. If you want that $50 a day, you have to repeat to yourself that what you really want is $250. This will make your objective look so far away that it will actually stress you as you have no idea how you’re going to do it. This stress will activate the sense of impatience I was talking earlier. You are now working at 200% of your capacity. You might end up making something like 50% of what you had envisioned. But even then, it is much higher than your original $50/day.

The technique of reaching higher than your original goals is used by many successful entrepreneurs, but also many sportsmen. A common technique in boxing is to hit as if your opponent is further from you, therefore making the impact much stronger, or in baseball you need to picture the home run limit further than what you see. Reaching higher than your goals works beautifully with any goal that is measurable.