Setting Goals

A plan gives your wish form; action gives it life. Step 1 is to choose a wish, Step 2 is to create a plan for making your wish come true, and Step 3 is to take the action called for in your plan.

When you act, you set causes in motion. When you set causes in motion, you are rewarded with effects. When you take action, you make a giant leap from thinking your wish to living your wish. You change yourself from a dreamer to a doer. To make that leap, you need to overcome one of the greatest forces in nature: inertia.

When Janie was in college, she decided that she wanted to become a writer. When she got out of college, she got a job as a nurse. For years, she raised her family and did everything she was supposed to do, except write. As she got older, she realized that she was going to have to start writing or give up her dream of becoming a writer. She decided to stick with her dream, but that still left her with the same problem: How was she going to get herself to write?

Then she remembered something she learned in high school physics: the law of inertia. A body in motion tends to remain in motion; a body at rest tends to remain at rest. She began to wonder if inertia applied to human behavior the way it applied to the behavior of comets streaking past the sun. What if her problem was simply inertia? What if all she had to do was to turn herself from a body at rest to a body in motion?

She decided to find out. She made a commitment to herself to write something every day. It didn’t matter how little she wrote. It could be a sentence or two if she wanted, or even a single word if that’s all she could muster. But no matter how busy she was, or how distracted, or how tired, she had to write something every day. She promised herself she would try this for thirty days and see what happened.

It worked, and she learned one of the greatest lessons of her life. Inertia is the single greatest barrier to success. It’s also the easiest to overcome. All you have to do is to act. Any action you take, no matter how trivial, will do the trick.

The easier you make it on yourself to act, the easier it is to overcome inertia. Janie made it so easy on herself to write that she no longer had any reason not to write. Instead of making a big production out of it, she made it as small a production as she could. She gave herself permission to do nothing more than type out a few keystrokes on the computer at a time.

The simple act of typing was all she needed to overcome inertia. With her first keystroke, she turned herself from a body at rest into a body in motion. Once in motion, the most natural thing for her to do was to continue in motion and keep writing. She would sit to write a single sentence and then stand up after having completed an entire page.

You can overcome your inertia the same way. Think small. Instead of trying to complete your wish in a single day, focus on a single step, the smallest step you can think of. The moment you take action - any action - you will conquer inertia. You will become a body in motion and will tend to stay in motion. The most natural thing in the world will be for you to take the next step, and then the next, until you’ve completed your wish.