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Unfortunately, discovering your life’s purpose and generating a plan to achieve it won’t necessarily lead you to success. Sorry, but you have to actually take positive action steps in order to get to where you want to go with your life.
In Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich!, he provides a list of six definite, practical actions that need to be performed in order to start you on the road to success. These actions aren’t difficult. In fact, they are very easy to do (well, most of them are) and provide you with an excellent vision of what you want to achieve, when you want to achieve it by, and how you plan on getting there.
The six actions that Napoleon Hill lists in his book are focused on achieving financial success, but they could be used to achieve any definable goal, like painting your first picture, taking your first solo vacation overseas, selling your first article or e-book, etc.
The six actions are:
- define the exact amount of money (or the exact goal) that you desire;
- determine exactly what you intend to give or sacrifice in order to achieve your desired goal (a sacrifice could be anything from money required to pay for lessons, or spending time researching and writing an article rather than watching tv or spending time with friends);
- pick a specific date that you want to achieve the goal you defined in step 1. Don’t just state that you want to achieve your goal within one year — pick a specific day, month and year that you want to achieve your goal by;
- develop an exact plan that outlines how you will achieve your goal. No step is too small to be included in this plan, for example, if you need to find a phone number include “Locate XXX’s phone number” as one of the steps. The steps in this plan should begin from ‘NOW’, even if you aren’t ready to begin. Include all the steps you need to take in order to become ready to work towards your goal;
- write steps 1 through 4 out in a clear, concise statement. This statement will include your exact goal, the exact date you want to achieve your goal by, exactly what you plan to sacrifice in order to achieve your goal, how you plan to achieve your goal, and will be written in the present tense, as if you have already achieved your goal. Use emotional and descriptive language in this statement. Draw on all of your senses to see, hear, feel, taste, and feel the touch of your goal. The more emotional, the more descriptive your statement it, the more powerful it becomes;
- read this written statement out loud twice every day. Read with emotion, as if you have already achieved your goal.
Believe it or not, step six is the hardest of all of these steps to do, this is where most people begin to have difficulties, yet this step is the most important of all these six steps. Without reading this statement out loud twice each day, your desire, persistence and motivation lose power, making it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve your goal.
To increase the power of this written statement, try combining the statement with a vision board or vision journal. This combination provides extra focus so that your mind is constantly identifying the things (situations, articles, people, etc) that move through you life as having the potential to help you achieve your goal. Even though your mind constantly recognizes these things moving through you life, without this focus these things would simply slip by. Their potential to help you achieve your goal would remain unidentified.
However, once your mind is focused on your goal, it begins to notice specific, relevant ‘things’. For example, have you ever noticed that while you are thinking about buying a car, it’s hard to identify a specific make and model of cars driving past you on the highway. However, once you decide on a specific make and model car, there are a surprising number of that specific car on the road. Once the mind has something specific to focus on, like a specific goal, it begins working on helping you achieve that goal.
