GOALS

At some point in everyone’s life they’ll hear the word goals. Goals take on many forms and are tied to a variety of effort related achievements. A few ground rules to establish on this topic before we begin. First, goals require work to achieve. I know, I know, sounds ridiculous to say, but it’s true. However, it’s important to mention because, without the effort, your goals never become a reality. That’s the easy one, now lets get a little more real. Second, your goals should push you to work hard. This is a little more of a personal motivation element that puts a lot of folks outside their comfort zone. Let’s dive in to this one a bit.If my goal is to lose 2 lbs. over the course of the year, that isn’t exactly pushing you out of your comfort zone. To achieve that goal you could just starve yourself for a day, weigh in and magically be done. A real goal crafted by your own self-motivation would be to lose 40 lbs over the course of a year. That will require diligent lifestyle changes and putting in the work over time to make it a reality. By the same logic, losing 200 lbs. over the course of a year is unrealistic and no matter how much work you put in, you’ll never get there. Good goals mean it’s going to be a photo finish at the end of the year as to whether you achieve them or not.Third, is the work. If you can’t self-motivate to do the work one of two things will happen. First, you’ll start setting softball type goals that you can achieve with little to no effort and call it a win. This aligns more with the “everyone gets a trophy” mindset. Unfortunately, everyone may get a trophy in T-Ball when you are 5 years old, Life, doesn’t care. If Life cared about everyone winning, we’d all be incredibly successful just for waking up in the morning. The other phenomenon that happens is, the Eeyore mentality. For those unfamiliar with Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore is a pessimistic, gloomy, “the world is out to get me” character who doesn’t give the effort because he/she fears failure. The old “I can’t win so why try” thought process. Guaranteed you’ll never reach your goals with that mentality.High achievers have goals. Shocker right. Daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, yearly goals. Here’s where they gap low achievers. High achievers chase those goals down with reckless abandon. If they want to go to the moon they will leave it all on the field to get there. No amount of “you can’t do that” will stop them. They’ll create solutions as problems arise, network with all the right people to help them get there and will believe every day at some point in their lifetime, they’ll be standing on the moon flipping the middle finger to those who told them no.This topic is interesting to me when i think about our business. I put goals in front of our business that others in our industry never achieve in 30 years of business. I challenged our team to achieve those goals in two years, not a lifetime. We assembled a team of tireless, like-minded individuals to achieve greatness every day. Usually I can be found behind the scenes using every ounce of time, resources and energy chasing our goals every day, but today was different. Today I came up for some air, did some back of the napkin math on where we could end up for the year and realized my insane, crazy, never going to get there goal for 2018 was in sight. Almost 10 months worth of long nights, raised voices, resistance, laughing, struggling, fighting, we never took our eyes off of our goal. As captain off the ship it’s my job to ensure each decision, win, loss, meeting, message, and post all move us toward  achieving long term goals.Along the way, we’ve passed others in our industry like they were standing still. In those moments one of two responses have happened. First, hatred. “They’re not playing by the rules.” “They’re cheating somehow.” “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, that’s not how this industry works.” The other response is those wanting to jump on board with that success and ride the wave to the top. Those who are able to humble themselves, recognize someone has built a better mousetrap and share in the success. We’ve seen both in a very short amount of time. When we talk about continued success with those who want to share in what we are building it’s always very humbling and casual. We’re not out to beat our chest and have people “kiss the ring.” I look at resources and combinations of those resources to grow exponentially. Building a foundation that is constantly ready for expansion allows for quick and seamless integration.While we will never run to our social media accounts and shout from the rooftops how awesome we are, our customer base and the community as a whole recognize it. We know that they know good things are happening, and that is reflected in the projects we are working on. My team and business are working on multiple projects most in this industry could only dream of. It’s exciting to see what the future holds, but if we continue to set our goals high, put in the work and execute, I’m guessing it’ll be very bright.