100 Rules to succeed in life..............Rule #4: Focus on your goals and make your life goal-oriented.

Being goal-driven or goal-oriented means setting targets and objectives that will make progress throughout your life much smoother. A goal-driven person will work much harder whenever there are deadlines to be met. To be successful in life; there must be the desire to set goals and work towards achieving them. Success is what everybody desires in one form or another, and many do not realize that they possess all of the tools necessary to achieve that which they strive for. 

Writing out your goals is also the first step in the SMART goal setting method. If you want to stay focused on your goals, then you need to ensure you are tackling them in the right way. This is also called an active goal setting, which is the direct opposite of the passive goal setting that most people engage in. 

So, if you have decided to be an active goal setter and you are serious about your goals, you need a mission statement. Companies create mission statements all the time, so why are you not creating one for yourself? The mission statement should help direct your time and energy toward the things that matter most to you and help you stay focused on those all-important goals. Since it is virtually impossible to stay focused on your goals if you are not able to wholly manage your time, use your energy to become an effective time manager for yourself. Pick a time management system that you have found to be sustainable and motivating and use your system to advance your mission statement.

By creating a set of milestones within your time management system, you will find it easier to move toward your goal(s) without losing focus. As an example, you can set a monthly milestone or even a weekly milestone to help you stay on track as you reach for that long-term goal. However, as much willpower as we put into staying focused, we are human and bound to fail. In order to see our failures as a potential for learning and to stay focused on our goals, we need a plan. A plan is what helps remove us from the 22 status quo, the path of least resistance that we are often tempted to follow. Without a plan, we can often become dissuaded from pursuing our goals with the same purpose and focused intent.

Staying focused on our goals will often mean putting aside time and energy that we might have rather funnelled into other things. Without allocating this time, it will become all the easier to find ourselves trapped in the ways of procrastination. One crucial way to help keep yourself focused on your goals is to track and analyze your progress. How else would you know just how far you have come toward achieving your goal? Every quantifiable goal should be tracked and analyzed on a daily basis. Whether it's a financial goal, a weight-loss goal, or some other goal, track the numbers that matter and the information that will keep you focused. This way, if you see that something is not working, you can find another method of reaching that milestone. Tracking your progress will not only show you the tasks you have ahead of you but also serve as motivation to look back on as you admire your achievements and the hard work you put into every single step.