Anyone who says achieving goals is easy, especially large ones like finishing college or having a successful business, becoming rich, or even becoming the best athlete in your chosen sport, is full of baloney. Those are not easy goals to achieve. It takes a lot of hard work and effort to achieve those goals, even surpass them.

What is easy, is accomplishing tasks. Tasks are the smallest unit of a goal (you can call them steps as well). I’ll use steps and tasks interchangeably when I talk about achieving goals. Each task is a goal itself. Many tasks make up a larger goal.

For example, you want to be able to walk 10,000 steps every day, but currently you only walk 1,000 steps. The reason behind so few steps is because you sit down all day in a job you hate some days and other days it’s just good enough.  Then you get home and immediately sit down in your comfy chair because it feels so good. Then you spend the rest of your time eating whatever and watching the latest show or playing a game you enjoy. Basically, you don’t move at all for the whole day and your body is showing it.

When you think about walking 10,000 steps (over 5 miles) a day, you feel fear. This fear makes you doubt your ability to achieve this big goal of 10,000 steps. So that is all you do, think about it and not take purposeful action towards your goal. This is what I’m talking about how larger goals are hard to achieve.

However, just by taking 2,000 steps a day (1,000 more than a normal day) will lead you to want to do more steps because 2,000 steps won’t be enough. You’ll want to do more steps until you reach your 10,000 step goal.

Another way to think about the 2,000 steps is to think of each step as one task complete. You would be literally accomplishing a task-oriented goal every time you take a step. Think about that for a moment.

Now, let’s look at it from a tasks’ point of view. A task is one thing you do. Set a task for walking just 10 minutes every day. Make this the first thing you do when you wake and after you have prepared yourself for the day or do it when you come home or when you finish your dinner. Just do this one task every day. Soon you will want to walk more because every day you are making progress towards your goal.

If you have a large goal and it keeps you in fear from achieving it, break it down into small easy tasks you can do every day. Then make that one task a top priority for the day. Once that task is completed, then you can relax a bit knowing you are one more step closer to achieving your larger goal.

The Goals Adventurer,

Scott Larson
Elephant 1

– Design your life like a game and level up to the level you want to be at!