Success with goals is a funny thing – the source of many books and much discussion. Much tends to focus on the fear of failure – people not setting goals – or not moving toward them for fear of failing. Today’s quotation, from the 1st century BC, points in a different direction – towards a potential fear of success. (If you like this quotation and post, try our new feature at the end)
Questions to Ponder
– Do I set goals?
– How often do I achieve them?
– Have I ever stopped short of achieving a goal?
– If so, why?
Action Steps
1. Consider your past goal setting behavior. Determine if it matches with what you wish it to be.
2. If not, spend time setting some goals.
3. Look at your goals, whether already existing , or just set, and consider the advice below, then recommit to your success.
My Thoughts
If you are like me, you identified with today’s quotation; I suppose that is why I selected it. I spent some time thinking about why I connected to this thought, and why it made me melancholy. The short answer is easy – I’ve done this more than once in my life. The more important question for me (and you) isn’t if I have stopped short, but why I stopped short. I believe it is, at some level, because I was afraid of the success achieving that goal would bring, or perhaps more accurately, afraid of the unknown changes that success might mean to my life.
But there is more to consider.
Why would I be afraid? After all, I set the goal to start with.
I believe it is because we lose sight of the purpose or why for the goal.
In my personal inventory of goals achieved and not, some, when achieved, brought the same unknowns as those I stopped short on. The difference was that for those I pressed on towards, I had a clear and compelling purpose. It wasn’t really about the goal, it was about why the goal mattered.
If you don’t want to fall short of your goals; if you want to avoid the fate we are discussing today, focus less on the goal, and more on the why.
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Do not turn back when you are just at the goal. – Publilius Syrus Tweet This
Why do you stop just short of your goals? Tweet This
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Thank you for helping me connect to the meaning of having a WHY. I have heard the statement and encouraged many others to search for their “why”, but your blog today helped me understand that having a why and tapping into it regularly is critical to achievement of goals.
Thanks, Kevin, for good tips on achievement. Prolific self-development author Jack Ensign Addington wrote a great reference book on this subject — ‘All About Goals and How to Achieve Them.”