I have seen success in many forms: Financial, professional, familial, you name it. The common characteristics of success are based on some level of technical ability to be sure. But the real determinant of success in my travels has been attitude. What are you willing to do to get where you want to go? How hard are you willing to work? How much practice? How much effort?
While truly successful people have goals, they don’t spend a lot of time documenting them. They know what they are. They use their precious time going after them. Working to achieve them.
A lot of things happen when you put your head down and just start working hard toward a goal. One thing is that time passes very quickly. This can seem constraining, not having enough hours in a day, but if time seems to pass quickly while you are working on a goal, chances are you are super-focused and that is almost never a bad thing.
Knowing your goals is not a bad thing but I think it can be counterproductive to spend too much time thinking about them. You may find yourself spending too much time evaluating or thinking about today’s progress or this week’s progress. That might cause negativity to creep in if you are evaluating yourself so often that you become hypercritical of your progress.
Analogy – If you had to swim across a one mile lake, and you have never done anything like that before, would it potentially be problematic to be stopping often to check your progress? To look up at your goal (the opposite shore) may have the effect of impacting your will to succeed if somehow your progress doesn’t match your expectation. Before you know it, you are no longer working hard, no longer driven, possibly in trouble of not achieving.
I think that once you have your goal in mind, just start working hard toward it. Remove as many distractions as possible, have an attitude that you simply won’t allow yourself to not achieve that which you want, put your head down and get going.
In the end, you may find that you passed the goal you had in mind and achieved more of yourself than you thought possible. Boy does this video speak to that: