Why You Must Have Goals

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder. I think that you would agree that if you got inside of a motor boat with no guiding rudder in a harbor, revved it up and let it go where-ever, once it took off into the open waters the chances of crashing into the rocks, capsizing or smashing into another boat would be the very likely fate of such a foolish launch. But isn’t this exactly what we do with our lives when we go along day-by-day hoping that something better will happened to us or at least nothing worse in life will befall us. This is called living by default. Living by default assumes that there is nothing that you can do to make your life better. And if you know what you can do and don’t do it, you life is no better than a person who doesn’t know.

Goals work as does the magnifying glass. Place a piece of paper on the sidewalk in the bright sun on a clear summer day. Stand there for about an hour or two and see what happens. Assuming that you secured the paper to the ground with a weight on the edge of it, it will still be there, little warmer perhaps, but unchanged. Now take out a magnifying glass and point it onto the center of the paper and pull the magnifying back, a little and just a little more until the light spot that is beamed onto the paper begins to sizzle within seconds and thus burns a hole through it. The magnifying glass takes the rays of the sun and concentrates it onto the paper such that now those same warm sun rays can do things that it could not until it was concentrated. Thus is the power of goals. Goals are the magnifying glass which take the infinite powers of your mind and concentrate them with such power that they can burn and cut through any obstacle set before it. There is nothing more powerful than a made up mind with a goal at the forefront.

I first heard the following example by the great motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, and I want to give you my synopsis of it. Let us take the world’s greatest archer, someone who say could hit a bulls eye 10 out of 10 times from a hundred yards away with a bow and arrow. I can show you a way to out shoot this professional archer even though you have never picked up a bow and arrow. How? you say. Easy. Just blindfold this archer, spin him around a few times, and ask him to shoot. Sounds silly doesn’t it. You are surely asking yourself right now. “How can he hit a target he can’t even see?” Well, I have an even better question for you. “How can you hit a target that you don’t even have?” You must have your goals.

Now there is another trap that you can fall into. Some people confuse activity with accomplishment. Some load up there lives with all sorts of insignificant time wasting activities that they literally crowd out the days of their lives making it impossible to achieve anything significant. You must first know and define what is important to you. Then you must start about with plans and steps to its accomplishment. (More on this a little later in this chapter.) Do you know what a processional caterpillar is? It is a furry little caterpillar which follows unquestionably the caterpillar in front of it. The assumption is that the first caterpillar in the line (and sometimes there may be dozens of caterpillars following each other) knows where the food is or is at least the one on alert and looking for it. A scientist, tried an experiment. He found a row of processional caterpillars traveling along a woods trail. He directed the first caterpillar to follow the back of the last caterpillar until all of the caterpillars formed a perfect circle, following each other round and round and round. He put some pine needles, food for caterpillars, in the middle of the circle.

The caterpillars followed each other in circles for hours, days, until they all literally dropped dead from exhaustion when the goal, the food, the pine needles was right in their midst. When you do not set your own agenda, that is, set and follow your own goal, you become swept away by the agenda and thinking of the masses. Without a goal, you become just like the processional caterpillar, doing what others do, going where others go and having what others have. If I stopped you right now and ask you what is you primary goal in life, could you tell me without hesitation? In order to not become the human processional caterpillar, you must discover your life purpose and set your life goal.