Maybe you’ve heard before that writing down the goals you want to achieve makes it more likely that you’ll achieve them. If you’ve never even heard that, then you are without a doubt on the right website.

Lets say that you meet a morbidly obese senior citizen. This person might have stories to tell about how they’ve tried to lose weight in the past, and now they’re not trying anymore because they don’t have many years left. Little do they realize as they sip down their Pepsis (diet or not) that there still is hope, and there is no excuse to guzzle down a substance which was designed to addict (so big companies can profit at your expense.) People make excuses not to do good things time and again. If this fact of life weren’t true, we could be socially and technologically ahead by the equivalent of hundreds of years. That could be a bad thing though; we might destroy ourselves with technology someday so I think I’ll continue procrastinating whenever something overwhelms me.

Not only should you write your goals down, they should be realistic and reasonably challenging. They can’t be too easy or too hard. If you’re really fat and you have a goal to lose 15 pounds within one year, this is too easy. If your goal is to lose 40 pounds in one month, this is could happen but the issue would be that its too dangerous, more than it is too hard. So you’ve got to be honest with yourself when asking if its a good challenge or not.

The goal needs to be measurable. If your goal is to have “a beach body that girls will love” by the start of next summer, its a good start but its way too vague. You need to quantify the goals with something like “I want to bench press 225 pounds by next summer and I’ll get a free session with a personal trainer at the YMCA to start this.” In case you didn’t know, being able to bench press more weight means you’ll need to also be able to arm curl more in addition; you can’t work one set of muscles but not the other.

Whatever it is you want to accomplish in life, find a way to quantify these goals. If your goal is to get a four year degree in chemistry, this is pretty specific but not quite enough. It would be better if you wrote down what career you planned on getting into instead. Time and money spent in college should be for purely practical reasons, rather than for any ego at all.

You should write in a journal about your progress, steps you’ve taken, things you plan on doing next, set backs, as well as different thoughts / feelings you get on your journey. Something important to know is you’ve got to positively set goals. Although its “positive” to not yell at coworkers, this isn’t whats meant by that. You need to take out words like “don’t”, “no”, “stop”, etc and replace them with Yes/Do statements… ex.- speak in a neutral tone to coworkers.


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