Should you really be setting ambitious goals for yourself?
Absolutely.
Goals should challenge you.
A lot of people are afraid to set goals because they’re afraid to highlight the areas where they’re afraid of failure.
When we write down goals that are specific, and then fail to meet those goals, we see direct evidence of failing to meet the mark—and a lot of people don’t like to face this.
A lot of people prefer to keep their goals vague and nonspecific so that they don’t have to feel like they’re not doing all that they could be doing to achieve success for themselves.
And hey, this is understandable!
But at the same time, in this blog post, I’d like to encourage you to go just a little bit deeper with this.
Listen:
The whole point of setting goals is to help you achieve your dreams in life.
I’m a huge believer in the process of turning your dreams into goals, writing down those goals, and then making a plan to create a roadmap to success.
However, it’s important to set goals that are actually a little bit ambitious, even though ambitious goals are more difficult.
Why?
Because one of the main principles of goal setting is that goals should challenge you.
Goals Should Challenge You, But They Must Also Be Achievable
Of course, if a goal is too big, you may not be able to accomplish it all at once.
It’s better to break large, difficult, and complex goals down into smaller, more manageable steps.
But when you look out over the course of the future of your life, you should be thinking to yourself—what kind of ambitious goals could I be setting?
You also want to ask yourself questions like:
- What kind of things could I be achieving if I really applied myself?
- What kind of a difference could I be making in the world if I really put effort and energy into my journey every single day?
And finally, we should all be asking ourselves these very difficult questions on a daily basis as well:
- Are you truly living up to your full potential today?
- Right now, are you living and striving forward toward your goals to the very best of your ability in all of the crucial domains that matter?
These domains could include many different areas of life. They could represent:
- Business
- Family
- Friendships
- Your career
- How responsible you are
- Your service to other people
- Setting your life up for a better future
- Inspiring others
- Challenging yourself to be all that you can be
- Taking care of yourself
- Investing in your own health and wellness
- Nurturing yourself on a spiritual level
- Etc.
All of these things are crucial. And we should be setting goals in all of these vital areas.
And yet, all too often, people don’t put the effort into becoming the very best that they can be.
Why?
Because ambition is actually pretty scary.
So in this blog post, you’re going to learn not only how to set ambitious goals, but why they matter.
Let’s talk about it.
Why Do Ambitious Goals Matter?
To get right down to the specifics of it, ambitious goals matter because they directly deal with one of the primary principles of goal setting.
Your goals should challenge you.
If you’re not setting challenging goals in your life that are requiring you to push yourself in order to achieve them, then it’s highly likely that you’re not living up to your full potential.
Now, each one of us gets to make a choice in this matter, every single day.
We all get to choose how we’re going to live, and we all get to choose how much effort we’re going to put into our life.
Nobody is going to come along and force you to:
- Do more push-ups.
- Work harder to make more money.
- Focus harder on your business.
- Invest in your family more.
- Build assets or savings for yourself.
- Take better care of your mind, body, and spirit.
Instead, every day when you wake up, these are choices that you get to make.
You get to decide how much these things matter to you, and whether or not you wish to invest in them.
This blog post wasn’t written with the intent to judge anyone for choosing a specific path in their life.
This blog post was created with the intent to help you understand the value of setting truly ambitious goals, and how that value can translate to making your life better and empowering you to pursue your authentic life purpose to a much greater and more successful degree.
You Get One Life To Live…
And you get to choose what you do with it.
There are some things in life that you won’t be able to control.
In fact, most things will be out of your control.
However, every single day, you will get the chance to take intentional, purposeful action to create the life you want.
In other words, you do have the power to control the things you do and the actions you take.
And this gives you an incredible amount of power over how your life is going to turn out.
And it really just comes down to this.
If you push yourself in life, and you set ambitious goals that’ll actually challenge you to do more and be more than you’ve ever been before, then you’re going to get more out of your life than you’ve ever gotten before.
- You’re going to create better results than you’ve ever created before.
- You’re going to create more value and experience more success than you’ve ever experienced before.
You Can Also Choose NOT To Set Ambitious Goals…
Instead, you can choose to just continue to coast through life without really challenging yourself.
Now, once again, this choice is up to you.
But I’d like to challenge you by saying this.
You have an incredible amount of potential; and your life is worth the effort.
I’ve never yet met a human who didn’t have amazing potential.
So it’s very unfortunate that so many people don’t choose to be all that they can be every single day.
Therefore, my encouragement to you is simply this…
To start setting ambitious goals for yourself—because it matters, because you’re capable, and because you have the potential to create an amazing destiny for yourself.
This is why I believe in the power of ambitious goals.
5 Steps To Set Ambitious Goals
Alright.
Now that I’ve talked about why I believe ambitious goals are important, I’m going to share my five-step process for setting truly ambitious goals that aren’t so ambitious that they’ll overwhelm and defeat you.
Let’s jump into it.
1. Identify The Outcome
What would you like to achieve?
What is the purpose behind the plan?
Is there a specific objective that you’d like to achieve by taking action?
If so, focus on it and visualize it.
Identifying the outcome is really the first step.
2. Break It Down Into Manageable Steps
If the goal you’re visualizing is too complex to bite off all at once, it’s always a better idea to break it down into smaller, more manageable steps.
This literally empowers you to create a roadmap to success filled with common sense, achievable steps that you can start taking today.
All you need to do is take the steps, and you’ll achieve the goal.
3. Get Started
Sometimes, ambitious goals require a little bit of testing.
You’ll need to see if this goal is actually too much for you, or if maybe you’re setting the bar too low.
The only way to know for sure is to test it out for a few days, for a couple of weeks, or even for a few months.
If you realize that the goal is truly impossible or too overwhelming as-is, you may need to further break it down into a series of smaller, more manageable steps.
If it turns out that it’s going to be super easy to achieve, and that it’s not going to challenge you, then it’s probably time to go back to the drawing board and create a goal that’s just a little bit more ambitious.
But in any case, the key is to get started.
You’ll never gather any data or make any progress until you begin the journey.
4. Revise, Review, And Go
Once you take stock of whether or not this goal is actually going to be able to push you without being unachievable, you’ll be ready to slightly revise and adjust as you go.
If your goal has been set with the appropriate level of ambition, it should be difficult to achieve at first.
However, over time, as you get practice, it should start to get a little bit more normal.
It’ll get easier as you level up and grow into the goal.
An Example Of Ambitious Goal-Setting
I had a goal-setting student who started a particularly difficult workout regimen that really challenged him at first.
In fact, about two weeks into it, he almost gave up.
That’s how difficult it was!
However, after sticking with this daily workout routine for about two months, he started to realize that it wasn’t nearly as difficult as it used to be.
See, he pushed himself to accept this new, higher standard for himself as ‘normal.’
This helped him to grow as a person, and to literally level up as a result of the ambitious level of the goal.
This is really the balance you’re looking for.
The goal should be achievable, but also push you to become better—and as you become better, your goal will probably feel a bit easier and more achievable over time, allowing you to revise, adapt, and set a new even more ambitious goal that will challenge you once again.
5. Don’t Give Up
Once again, we come back to what is perhaps the most fundamental principle of goal setting and achieving goals.
Don’t give up.
If this goal really matters to you, and if it’s something that you actually want to achieve for yourself, then it’s in your best interest to stick with it and to not give up on it.
Ambitious goals will often feel very difficult.
They might make you tired. They might cause you to doubt whether or not you’re capable. And they’ll probably push you to be tougher and to do things that you never would have imagined doing before.
But therein lies the beauty of an ambitious goal.
It literally pushes you to become a better version of yourself.
And that’s really the whole point.
If we want to get the best possible results in life, it’s really important that we try to perform as close to the peak of our potential as possible.
And the best way to know for sure that we’re doing this is to set ambitious goals that really challenge us and force us to adapt and grow.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this post has shown you the importance of setting ambitious goals for yourself.
Of course, at the end of the day, this entire process starts with one simple concept.
Turn your dreams into goals, and write those goals down to create a roadmap for success in your life.
Have you started setting your own life goals yet?
There are many different goal setting and goal achievement systems to use—and we’ve written about some of our favorite ones on our resources page.
But of course, at the end of the day, the system that you choose is never as important as just deciding to get started.
This is how you begin your journey to success and crush it.
Need some help? Download my weekly goal-setting sheet, print out a few, and give it a try.
You can also sign up for my email list to get my free Goal-Setting Essentials Starter Kit.
You’ve got this. I believe in you.
Now it’s time to get to work.
Best wishes…
Jay O’Donnell