How I achieve any goal

Everyone has goals in life. They can be huge goals like ending poverty or reducing climate change. But there's also small goals like cleaning your room, or finishing that paper, or finally writing a first post for a new website you just started. Regardless of how big, a goal is a goal. And I strongly believe that most people can achieve most goals. Ending poverty might not be a goal that anyone could ever achieve, but reducing climate change is definitely something we could all do, despite it seeming like such a large goal.

In this post I'm not gonna get into ways to establish good, achievable goals, so don't expect the S.M.A.R.T.-acronym anywhere here. However, I might do a seperate article on that whole concept in the future, since I definitely have an opinion on it. But for now, I'm just gonna carefully assume you've already picked your goal. And thus, we can move to the first step in my personal three-step-guide.

1. Inform yourself

Firstly it is important that you get to know your goal as much as you can. You don't have to become an expert about it of course. If your goal is to speak Spanish, I don't expect you to suddenly become an expert at the Spanish language and its cultural history before you've even started taking lessons. However, it would come in handy for you to know how difficult it might be, or to research the most efficient ways to learn Spanish. To succeed at this goal as fast and effectively as possible, knowing more about learning languages than the average person is key.

But what if your goal is more complicated and risky than learning a language? What if you wanna start a business or go to law school to become a lawyer. A fear that I often experience with goals is fear of wasting time or money, argueably two of the most important things in life. Because what if I decide to go to law school and I decide I don't like it? Or if I invest all of my savings into a company that ends up bankrupt? I'll have invested so much time and effort and money into this one thing and ultimately it turned out to be useless. In short, we're scared of failing. If you find yourself getting stuck because of this, I'd advice you to head over to a different post that I wrote, all about failing and how to embrace it instead of fear it.

Knowing a lot about the goal beforehand doesn't always reduce the amount of risk we're taking. However, it does eliviate a lot of pressure from your decisions. If you wanna invest all your savings into some business, you'd first do your research about it. This way, when things end up failing miserably, it won't be on you. Sure, you made a bad call and it still sucks, but at least you've done all you can do. You can't ever really do more than just try your best.

I always research, at least, how much I need to know to at least get started and keep going for a bit. I can sort of figure out what the best way to get to my goal is. And then I can move on to my favorite step: Start planning.

2. Create an action plan and stick to it

When I was 14 one of my teachers went through this phase of saying that all of the students should start making "action plans." I loved that teacher so much, but despite that, I've always hated that term. "Action plan." It sounds even worse in Dutch. However, I love the concept of making a plan like this. There's no deeper meaning to that, I just love making plans and outlining and puzzling with these things. You don't necessarily need to make a whole outline or whatever, but I highly recommend it. You can do it on the computer in word or excel, or in a notebook or bullet journal, the sky's the limit when it comes to making an outline. And you can really do it in your own way, in whatever style or order you want, as long as you don't spend too much time on how it looks.

Here are some questions you might wanna ask yourself whilst making your plan:

• What's the end goal?
• If the goal's big: Is there a way I could divide it up into smaller subgoals?
• What resources do I need?
• Is it smart to create some form of timeline for my steps? (Like: If I want to start saving money, I could put aside some at the start of every month).
• How does this step bring me closer to my goal?
• How realistic are these steps? Are they not too big or too small? Are they easy to maintain for as long as I need to?

An action plan is essentially just a step-by-step guide. In a way this article is also an action plan, just not focused on one specific goal. The point is to plan ahead so you'll know what you're doing (which saves time, because it reduces amount of the trial-and-error situations), but also to make you feel safe/confident enough in the decision you're making. As soon as we feel that way, we can start. Because the hardest part of the action plan is not the 'plan'-part, but it's the actually taking action that's tough. At first, don't focus on being as good as possible, just start actually doing the thing and perfect it later. And by 'later', I mean step three.

3. Evaluate plan

My action plans always seem really great when I've finished them. I've done the research, made a whole plan, and ended up doing the thing I wanted to do! I'm so proud of myself, I must be done now! Well, no actually. Again, it depends on your goal, but at least with most long term goals this only means you're halfway. Of course you can still be proud of yourself (you should actually, small wins are still wins worth celebrating). But there's still work to be done. As I'm executing my amazing plan, I'll probably run into some hiccups. I might've planned to read 100 pages a day in my original plan, but as I executed it, I realized it wasn't working.

That's why it's important to continuesly go back to the plan and look at it with very criticising eye. Perfectionists, please rise up, because this is your moment to thrive. You can go back and change things up at any time. This is your time to trial-and-error as much as you want. I can dial those 100 pages back to 10 if I want, or I can read 100 pages a day on weekends, and one chapter a day on weekdays. Achieving a goal is rarely ever easy, so there's no shame if things don't go the way you expected them to. In a way it spices things up, forces us to be creative, and we come out of it with more experience.

So, to summarize: The way I achieve goals is by obtaining as much information as I can, using that information to create an action plan (and commit myself to actually sticking to the plan). And after I've done all that, I need to get started on doing whatever's first on my action plan, whilst continuously going back to reevaluate if the plan I'm following is still the best one. So that's how I achieve my goals. I hope that this helps anyone who reads this, and I wish you all the best of luck.

Congrats, you've made it to the end

So, this concludes my first post on this website. Thank you so much for reading all the way through if you did. I'm so excited about this whole site, just having all of my thoughts, ideas, insights etc. all in one place. I have so much more I wanna write about, and I can't wait to share it all with you (even though it lowkey terrifies me). If you'd like to stay updated whenever I post a new article, you can make sure of that by hitting the "subscribe"-button on the right, filling in your name and email, confirming your email, and then you're all set!