Getting Yourself Ready By Setting Goals

This blog is about wealth, but we are going to broaden the scope for a while and talk about what you want out of life generally. Do you have goals for your family? Social or charitable goals? Do you have personal, non-financial objectives? Do you daydream about becoming an actor, athlete, or magician? Would you like to work with children in your spare time? Or help the disabled?

If you have no goals other than becoming wealthy, your chances of success will be great - but the likelihood that you'll be dissatisfied will be great too. There is no greater financial cliche than the poor man who builds a fortune only to discover that he lost everything that was important to him.

I am not going to let that happen to you. You are going to become wealthy and wise and happy and healthy, too!

You begin the process by determining your core values.

What Do You Hope People Will Say About You At Your Funeral?

Imagine being at your funeral. You are hiding up in the balcony. You can see your coffin. Standing behind the coffin are four people:

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  Someone from your family or a close friend
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  Someone you work with
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  Someone whom you admire
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  Someone who didn't know you

What do you hope each one of them would say about you? Go ahead. Write it down. Your wish list might include statements like these:

• "He always made me feel important, even when I felt like I had nothing to give."
• "He was the best father I could have ever hoped for. He taught me to be strong and independent and he showed me that I could be brave and loving at the same time."
• "She was a brilliant writer. For someone who spent so much of her life in the business world, I was astonished at how well written her stories were."
• "I would still be working as a security guard if it were not for him. To think of what I've become. I know how much of that I owe to his help and care."

These are the things that are really important to you - your personal core values. (And I'm guessing that "He was really rich" is not something that you'd put on this list.)

Now, let's apply what you just learned about yourself to your next task...

Translate Your Core Values Into Four Lifetime Goals

If you invited all the right people to your imaginary funeral, you can now figure out what your core values are in every important aspect of your life.

Your core values might look like this:

• "As a worker, I want to be considered creative and helpful."
• "As a parent, I want to be thought of as supportive and kind."
• "As an individual, I want to be thought of as smart and interesting."

You are now going to publish this list. The point of making it is to help you know yourself in a way that matters. Which brings us to your next task: converting your core values to life goals. If you've done your work well so far - if you truly do know yourself - this will be surprisingly easy.

How many life goals should you have? Four is a good, achievable number. One of them, of course, will be to build wealth - not to accumulate money but because of what money can help you accomplish in terms of your core values. As I said in Step 1, it gives you the ability to help other people, provide for your family, pursue your intellectual and artistic interests, and become an inspiration to members of your community.

What about your other three life goals? That's up to you. But I would recommend coming up with one that has something to do with your health, one that is concerned with your personal relationships, and one that targets your growth and development.

Do that now - and put it in writing. Your list of four goals might look something like this:

1. My long-term wealth-building goal: To be financially independent. To be able to do whatever I want without worrying about money.
2. My long-term health goal: To be active, fully functioning, and pain free till age 90.
3. My long-term personal-relationship goal: To be remembered as a great dad, loving spouse, loyal friend, and charitable soul.
4. My long-term personal growth and develop0ment goal: To be a successful novelist, filmmaker, and linguist.

Lifetime goals have the advantage of being long term and thus far away. Being so distant, it's possible to imagine yourself accomplishing practically anything. That's why, if you really want to achieve your goals, you need to work with a very specific medium-term time frame. I've defined medium term as 7 to 15 years. But you should narrow it down to an exact number.

There are no absolute rules when it comes to this type of goal setting. You want your goals to be ambitious, but you also want them to be achievable. Spend some time now studying your list of lifetime goals, and figure out (and write down) specific medium-term goals for each one.$