Is My Final Success Assured with My Current Plan
When performing a household chore like doing the laundry, it is always your goal to end up with clean and fresh-smelling clothes. The same principle can be applied in this section of chapter 4, where you will learn how to not lose sight of your main objective by heading directly towards your personal goal, no matter how many problems you experience along the way.
Our driver was involved in an unfortunate series of failures for one simple reason. He failed to constantly examine his final goals. Even though he was progressing, even succeeding at every one of his primary objectives, he never kept the big picture in mind or the final destination in sight.
Had he constantly updated his information he would have seen that the struggle, no matter how valiant it may have been, was all for nothing and doomed to failure. However, like so many people, all of the little successes just kept coming and it felt so good to succeed that there really did not seem to be any point in examining the big picture too closely.
This is one of the most dangerous and self-defeating mindsets that a person who truly wants to be successful can ever let themselves fall into. If you really want to succeed it is imperative that you are at least as flexible as the world is fluid. Life happens, events change, circumstances change and people change. No matter what your idea of success is now, even that will change over the course of time.
As goals are attained and new goals are set, the circumstances surrounding you will change. Life is a never-ending series of change that will not stop and wait for any individual. Therefore, it is important to keep changing with the times. That is not to say that you have to keep up with absolutely everything that everybody ever does for anything but being aware of what is happening around you will always make it easier to be truly successful.
It is not enough to simply set out for a single destination with a single route in mind to get there. That will only lead you to failure and frustration and will not ever help anyone to succeed. Maintaining an intense focus on your goals is always a good idea. Knowing where you are going, where you are coming from and remembering where you have been will all serve you well in the struggle to find true success and to be able to find it not only once, but repeatedly in a great many of your ventures.
Tunnel vision on the other hand, will likely interfere more than it will help. While blinders may help a horse to keep from getting distracted in a crowded race way and prevent it from being spooked and throwing the rider and ultimately, the successful victory in the race, they will not very often help people to get where they want to be in life.
Narrowing down your goals to a few select primary, secondary and even tertiary levels is a good thing. Having decided those goals though, it is important to remember that nothing is forever and circumstances are always changing around us. Goals should also be set up keeping in mind that you will never be working on only one set of goals at a time. No matter where you are trying to succeed, chances are pretty good that it is going to take you a lot more than a single task to get there.
As one set of goals changes, the effect may actually snowball and force you to reconsider all of your goals. Never lose sight of the big picture and always be ready to hit a patch of ice. If the place you are heading today will not get you any closer to where you want to be tomorrow, is it worth it or even necessary to try and implement the plan and attain that singular goal?
