The Reality of Goal Achievement

We all have goals in life. But still, only 8% of people manage to achieve a new year’s resolution. That means 92% of people don’t. And that’s a lot of number. Why do we don’t achieve the things that we said we would? We all know what to do. And we all know when to do it and how to do it. Still, we don’t do it. But why is that?

The Boat Analogy

Let’s take an example. Let’s consider you are in a boat and you want to reach to the nearest mountain. Well, you only have a compass and you know which direction to go to. And you have some pedals to row your boat. You just can’t stop there, right? If you don’t row it, you won’t go ahead. So you have to continuously row it no matter what. You have to make sure that you are rowing day and night in order to reach to the mountain. But you can’t see the mountain. The only thing that you can see is the vastness of the ocean.

Trusting the Process

But you have to trust the process. You have to continuously check your maps that are you going to the right direction or are you drifting away? It’s very difficult to know where you’re going when you’re in a vast sea. And there’s nothing else that you can see there. But if you continuously row it, if you continuously check your compass to make sure you are in the right direction, slowly but eventually you start seeing the tip of the mountain. The impossible starts to become possible. You start to see the ray of hope. After a few times, you will achieve the mountain. The thing that you thought would never happen now has happened.

Key Elements of Success

1. The Hard Work of Rowing

So there are a few things to consider. Number one is you have to row the boat. That’s the hard work. If you don’t put in the hard work, there’s just no chance that you reach the mountain. You just go with the life rather than actually going into the direction that you want to go to. And people underestimate how much amount of time and hard work do they actually need in order to achieve something.

• If you want to get a good body, you have to go to gym and work out for months, if not years, before seeing any results.
• It’s same like if you want to write a book, you have to spend months and years to get the book published.
• It’s like if you want to play good guitar, you have to spend hundreds of hours before you get any good at it.

Yes, you can do these things and try to do them in a shorter period of time being more efficient in it. But you can’t escape the hassle. You have to row the boat. And you have to row a boat for a long period of time before you see any meaningful results. And you have to be patient and trust in the process. That is very important aspect. A lot of people just don’t do it in the first place.

2. The Importance of Direction

But if you row, and if you row very hard, for a tremendous amount of time, but if you row in a wrong direction, you never reach your destination. It’s very important that you continuously check your compass to see if you are going into the right direction, because it’s very easy to slip up and go into the wrong direction, and convince yourself that you are in the right direction indeed. Measuring the work that we do is a crucial part of achieving our goals. Just by brute-forcing, you won’t achieve anything.

• Let’s take an example of getting a good body. You have to measure if what you are doing is actually giving you any results, and you have to improve the techniques, the posture, and the meal that you are eating.
• The same with playing guitar. You have to check if you are actually learning, or just brute-forcing into playing a song.

It’s with anything in life, whatever you do, you have to continuously check if whatever that you are doing is actually aligned with what you want to achieve, and is it actually giving any results.

The more you do it, the more you make sure you are going according to compass, the more likely you are to achieve your goals. So having a daily and a weekly schedule to check that if are you going into the right direction, it’s very, very important.

3. The Power of Environment

But if you are rowing very hard for a long period of time, and if you are going into the right direction, if the waves are too high, and they’re just too strong, it’s very difficult to go and achieve your goal, to get to the mountain. Well, you can’t change the direction of the sea, but what you can change is your environment. Your environment plays a very crucial role in what you are going to do, and how you are going to achieve your goal. If your environment is engineered towards achieving your goal, it’s much easier. If you’re sitting in a place having all kinds of distractions near you, it’s very difficult to do anything. But if you are in a place where everyone is doing what you want to do, well, that pushes you ahead, like as if the sea is going in the same direction that you want it to go. And it’s very easy to get to your destination. So making sure your environment is made in a way to make you win is very, very important.

The Paralysis of Over-Planning

But some people have a different issue. They steer a lot, trying to find the best direction, they try to improve their environment, but what they don’t do is they don’t go in the first place. There’s no point of you steering if you are at the beach. You just won’t go ahead. You won’t reach your goal just by steering, you have to row the boat. And that is very important. Lot of people just spend time in overanalyzing what they want to do, thinking they have to be perfect before they start doing the thing. But that’s just an excuse that we make in order to refuse doing the thing. It might be self-sabotaging or might just be the fear of failure. But you have to remind yourself that there is no point of steering a boat if you don’t row it. You have to start to row the boat first, then you have to steer it into the right direction.