GOALS: Reason #2 - You Were Too Ambitious (Part 2/4)

The second reason your last goal flopped was because you were too ambitious.

You bit off more than you could chew.

Five years ago I decided to write a book. I wrote a few thousand words but then I got busy and stopped. I was too ambitious.

I hadn’t done very much writing at that point in my life, and even though I had a good idea and a lot of motivation, my goal faded away.

This bummed me out.

I wanted to crack the code to my own creative consistency—so I decided to start small. I set out to write and publish one article every day for 30 days.

It worked!

The next year, I decided to write and publish daily for 60 days.

The year after that, I did 100. And finally, the next year, I published 365 articles in 365 days.

The reason I was able to achieve such a large goal is because I started small.

Certainly, writing a book is easier than writing 365 articles in as many days. But when I set out to write a book at first, I was too ambitious. The slow progression of daily writing for increasing segments of time slowly trained me to be able to accomplish the big goal.

It goes against our nature as ambitious people, but you need to start small.

Next time you set a goal, make it realistic.

Make it smaller than you’d like it to be.

You can always make your goal bigger as time goes on.

Are you an overachiever?

Continue to next part: GOALS (Part 3)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4