Welcome to the 7th of 7 blog entries from our book, The SAT Success System Personal Workbook.
Intention & Goal Setting
If you read the biographies of some of history’s most successful men, you will find that they all had definite intentions, or goals they wished to achieve. Yogi Berra, a fifteen-time All Star American League baseball player who holds numerous World Series records, alluded to the importance of goal-setting when he said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” Napoleon Hill, in the book Think and Grow Rich, says that to achieve your dreams you must have specific and clearly-defined goals. In fact, after studying the most successful people of his time, people like Thomas Edison, Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie, he concluded that those who set goals for themselves found it easier to prioritize their time, effort, and money and ultimately achieve their dreams. He calls this developing “Definiteness of Purpose” and definiteness of purpose is nothing more than stating your intentions and specifying the steps you will take to achieve them.
In a study at Harvard more than 40 years ago, researchers polled the graduating class of 1953 to find out how many students actually had clear, written goals for their lives after college and plans for achieving them. Because this was a class of highly intelligent people at one of the most renowned universities in the world, you’d expect that all or most would have articulated a plan to reach their goals—in fact, only 3% had taken the time to do so. Twenty years later the researchers polled the same group to see how they fared in life. It turned out that the 3% who had written their goals accumulated more wealth than the other 97% combined.
Here is a modern day story illustrating the importance of goal setting; perhaps you’ve heard it before. Before Jim Carrey was a household name and was a struggling actor who made his living largely by doing stand-up and impersonations, he wrote himself a check for 10 million dollars. He dated it Thanksgiving Day 1995, and kept the check in his wallet for a few years. When times were rough he would look at the check to remind himself of his ultimate goal. After a number of years, his luck began to change. He got recognition for his role on In Living Color and Ace Ventura and The Mask. And in November 1995, the month and year he had written on the original check, he received $10 million for Mask 2 and the following year he was paid $20 million for The Cable Guy.
Stay tuned for our next blog when we explore the powerful tool of focus.
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