The following excerpt is from my free ebook–Full Throttle: High Octane Insights to Achieving Your Dreams Get your copy here.
We are awash in too many people with too small visions who never really get off pause in order to accomplish anything. Along the way, they find themselves in settings like I did, wondering if their life mattered at all. For me, the clear evidence is that I have already accomplished great things. Oh sure, I’ll probably never end up in any history textbook, but I know how many lives I have impacted for the better. For all of my adult life, I have helped shape the lives and beliefs of many. I have counseled people through the worst times, and in anticipation of the best times. I can’t count the number of times people have said “you’ve changed my life for the better.” And with those things, I am honored.
I actually think my problem comes not from having no goals or doing nothing, but from having visions that are massive! You may have heard of Jim Collins’ concept of the “BHAG”—big hairy audacious goals. I think often that my dreams and goals are even bigger than that. Once, in a conversation with a friend, someone who is every bit as motivated and smart as I am, he countered one of my musings with “how do you really believe that you can change the world; I mean, that’s pretty big for a dream isn’t it?” I responded with “I can’t help but try; to not fight for what I deem important—the future of my descendents and this country—is to live a small life.”
So, perhaps my discontent in my 40s isn’t the same as yours, or maybe you too wish to be a world-changer. Well, here you are. You are reading this book now. You have the same next minutes and hours as I do. What will you do with it? Where will you go? What can you change? What will you begin?
For my own journey, I am constantly in motion. My wife tells me I have no concept of how to rest and relax; she is probably right about that. Still, to not live every day to the fullest is a waste of our souls. By being constantly on the move, I know how to organize and prioritize and accomplish. With that knowledge and determination, I knew what I had to do to get my motorcycle. I had to start with a clear plan based on clearly defined goals. I wrote about goal-setting in my book, Success for Life: Answers to the 77 Hardest Questions College Students Ask.
One of the many jobs I have held was as a Swimming Coach for two different United States Swimming clubs. I have worked with Olympic athletes and former Olympic coaches. One summer I served as a visiting faculty member for Olympian Mary T. Meagher’s swim camp. We constantly stressed and taught goal setting and I routinely incorporated the Olympic level of goal setting for my younger age group swimmers. You are never too young to set goals in life.
For our purposes, here are some key ideas that must be part of your plan.
- Goals must be something you write down.
- Goals must be something very specific.
- Goals should be in line with your deeper dream and purpose
- Goals should be realistic based on your current situation, challenging but not impossible. This is where you may take a much longer goal (say a goal to be the CEO of a major corporation) and break it down into more realistic shorter-term goals (graduate in business, get hired by a Fortune 500 company, get MBA, get promoted to Management, and so forth till your ultimate goal of CEO).
- Goals should be track-able—these measurements are like mile-markers on the Interstate highway.
- Goals should be personal, something you have some degree of control over.
So, as I decided in the fall of 2005 to get a motorcycle, I knew I needed to establish clear goals. Now I already hear some of you laughing at me. You are thinking I could have just gone down to any bike shop, slapped down the credit card and been riding away in 24 hours. I suppose, but I didn’t want to just own a bike; I wanted to live a successful life while enjoying my bike. That meant more than just tangibly having a bike in my possession.
For me, I knew that there were at least three major areas that had to be researched and planned in order to get to my dream. First, I knew that I’d need the money to buy the bike. My wife and I have lived our years of marriage with a clear principle of owing nothing on credit. While we’ve not always been perfect with this, and do use a credit card for many things, we have lived our married life this way quite happily. Sure, we haven’t owned all the various things our peers do and we don’t take as many trips as some around us. Our kids know that the majority of things they wish for at birthday time or Christmas are not coming. Yet, buying with cash and refusing to get into debt has worked for us, so I wasn’t going to change that now to buy a motorcycle.
To get to the right price, I also knew I needed a goal of finding out more information about motorcycles. That would involve some Internet work, but I like working with people and I already knew that I had a great resource at the College where I work. Gar Vance, the Assistant to the Provost on the East Campus of Valencia Community College when I was in this hunting process, has been riding motorcycles since the 1960s, so he would become my #1 resource in pricing bikes.
Another goal tied to price would be determining what kind of bike to ride. This one was easy since Fonzie was my inspiration. In the early episodes, Fonzie rode a Harley-Davidson; later the production team switched him to a Triumph. In either case, he rode a traditional “cruiser.” Now, if you’ve looked around in the past 20 years, you know the more popular style of bike is the Japanese racing style, often called a “crotch rocket” for their speed and handling. Many of my friends have urged me to go this way, but with Fonzie as my mentor, there was no way I wouldn’t get a cruiser.
Once this was determined, Gar helped me see that I would need to find about $2000 to get a nice used, small motorcycle. I knew generally I could do that; now, with a clear, discernable goal, over the next months, every time I found any extra money, did overtime work, sold anything on eBay, that cash would be put into my “Bike Collection.” Having done this previously for other purchases, most recently our one and only flat screen TV, I was confident.
The concept of risk led me to the last major goal—finding a good safety course. I know, you are laughing again, thinking is silly to find a safety course. Well, for me, safety needed to be front and center. My wife was very supportive of this dream for me, she couldn’t wait to ride behind me (I think secretly she wants to drive herself), but she also wanted me to be alive in the decades to come. Certainly we have no promises of life, and I would more likely be killed in a car accident than one on a motorcycle, but one doesn’t need to “tempt fate” by doing something dangerous with no training.
Setting clear and consistent goals is a must if you really want to succeed at achieving your dream. You must not allow yourself to merely dream and then sit around hoping. I’ve read a lot, and seen others talk about, having positive mental energy in relationship to your dreams. While the merits of this “positive thinking” can be debated at some other time, I’ll concede that keeping positive is important. However, in no way, and under no circumstances (that I have ever seen) does mere positive thinking replace taking concrete, goal-centered action.