“Having goals is a pain in the neck.

If you don’t have a goal (a corporate goal, a market share goal, a personal career goal, an athletic goal…) then you can just do your best. You can take what comes. You can reprioritize on a regular basis. If you don’t have a goal, you never have to worry about missing it. If you don’t have a goal you don’t need nearly as many excuses, either.

Not having a goal lets you make a ruckus, or have more fun, or spend time doing what matters right now, which is, after all, the moment in which you are living.

The thing about goals is that living without them is a lot more fun, in the short run.

It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals.”

And I would add to that, if you don’t have a goal, you can wind up selling yourself short, leaving money on the table.

Let’s say you have a blog, a website, a brick and mortar business or a career,

Just to pluck some imaginary, hypothetical numbers out of the air, let’s say you’re making $80,000 a year. ( I know, you might be making $30,000 and I’m not feeling your pain.  Or you might be making $250,000 and I’m insulting you, not giving you enough glory and limelight. Just bear with me.  These are hypothetical numbers, ok?

I know I’ve been in situations where I was making $80,000 ( hypothetically) and vowed to make more from that particular business.  But I didn’t set a goal, so I didn’t form a detailed strategy and set out the concrete steps it would take for me to get there.  I might have made more money.  I might have gotten to 100K.  But if I didnt do the planning I would just keep on doing whatever I had been doing and not tie all my actions to specific steps to reach that goal.  Even if I reached $100K, I would never know if I could have reached $200K instead.

And wouldn’t we all have rather reached 200K instead, (or a million or whatever your hypothetical goal might be)?