Getting Clear on What You Want: From Vision to Reality

A friend shared this the other day… “My wife and I always said we wanted a house in the woods. We talked about it, agreed upon it, wrote it down… and then spent four years looking for it. So many times, we thought we found it, got close, and then lost it. Finally, we found a spot that we really liked, but it was just out of reach. Then, just a couple more years later, a handful of things changed… Today, we live on that piece of property.”

There are so many lessons on goal setting packed into this short story. Let’s unpack it…

1. Get clear on what you want. Too often, we lack clarity on what we actually want. The clearer we are, with specifics, the higher the odds of achieving it. Just like going on a dream vacation, we need to know first what that dream destination is. Vision is essential.
2. Write down what you want. As my friend was sharing this story, he made an interesting comment. “The things we’ve written down… we’ve achieved most of them. The ones we haven’t written down… most are still dreams.” Writing down what you want is one of the unlocks to achieving it.
3. Take action to find what you want. In the story above, they went looking for the property they had in their vision. Instead of waiting for it to come to them, they searched for it and did the work to try and find it. Napoleon Hill talks about this in Think and Grow Rich. All the individuals he interviewed had success built on a combination of a burning desire and a drive to do the work.
4. Don’t give up on what you want. It took four years of looking, then finding it, and then a couple of years of waiting. There are times when achieving what we want takes some time. In our fast-food, next-day delivery society, waiting has become a foreign concept. Sometimes, we just need to practice some patience and, most importantly, not quit.

Call-to-Action

We all have something we want. It’s why we set goals for ourselves, our businesses, and our teams. The story above reminds us that achieving those things will require us to get clear on our destination, do some work, and stay committed.