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Chapter 1: The Truth about Goals

The common meaning of goal is something that any person wishes to achieve but only we ourselves can truly define our unique goals to ourselves.

Throughout the civilization of the human race, every achievement originates from the ideas and efforts of our ancestors. Since then, many individuals have gathered and aspired to achieve goals in their respective fields. In each generation, we have found meanings of our lives in our different goals when we possess the desire to achieve a certain purpose in life. By all means, we will use our best efforts to achieve these goals. Then, these achievements, in turn, inspire the next generation to improve and achieve more than our predecessors have succeeded.

As it is subjective to define a person’s goal to another, the chances for a person achieving his/her goal can depend on various factors as shown by multiple research from various fields of study. While some pursuits of success are limited by certain factors, there are others whose success grows on different factors.

Industry experts, business people, motivational speakers, entrepreneurs have all shared their knowledge, methods and skills with us to achieve our targets or emulate their success. Despite that, many have often overlooked the importance of setting their goals clear enough to utilize the information and skills they possess effectively.

So how do we perfectly set goals that will launch our work to success? Before trying to answer this question, we must first understand why so many have failed to set their goals.

10 Reasons Why People Fail at Setting Goals

1. Not Realising the Importance of Setting Goals

The most habitual mistake during the planning stage is to ignore the importance of setting goals. In fact, most who do not understand that specifying goals for both the short term and the long term cannot find purpose, meaning or even inspiration in their efforts to achieve the goals set.

Such mistake does not only affect an individual or organisation’s course of actions but also the attitude towards the goals. Without a sense of purpose or meaning of the goals, one cannot simply use passionate effort to achieve success.

Goals are not just tasks on a to-do-list which you can tick off once you’ve completed it. Goals can also be stepping stones to a bigger cause in life. Therefore, we should define our goals clear enough before we set ourselves on our journey.

2. Writing Only the Long Term Goals

Our focus on the end results have often derailed us as our progress is not constructively planned when we have only set long term goals but not the short term ones which are required to accomplish the long ones.

For instance, if you wish to start a bakery, you must not only be good in baking cakes and making a variety of confectionery and pastries, you must also know how to manage the business and employ the right people to help you operate the bakery. Those are the short term goals of getting everything prepared before realizing the long term goal of operating a bakery.

Setting short term goals in sight of the long one is to help us focus on one goal at a time and build on each success to reach further and apparently achieve our long term goals. Usually, this sort of achievement satisfies us even more in the end.

3. Pre-Belief that It Won’t Work

Those who have such belief usually have very consistent reasoning on rejecting certain ideas before reaching the final stages of setting their goals. As such, during the stages of setting goals, one should embrace the foreseeable challenges after sufficient analysis and not discouraged by them.

However, over-analysing and constantly filling ideas and efforts with doubts will definitely end the goal setting process earlier than expected. During the stages of goal setting, we also have to acknowledge that it would not be possible to answer all the questions and create substantial plans to overcome the foreseeable challenges.

4. Writing Our Goals as Negative Statements

Instead of working towards something we want, writing our goals as something we try to avoid or as obstacles we do not wish to overcome may affect our motivation to finish work. How we write our goals down can really affect how view it. In other words, nobody wants their goals to sound discouraging.

Writing “Don’t lift less than 120lbs for your bench press” definitely does not sound as inspiring as “Good job on lifting 100lbs on the bench press. Try lifting 120 lbs next week.” The way the goals are written should inspire us to be dedicated to our goals and not try to instill the fear of failure in us.

5. Generic Goals

Having goals which are often too similar to others around your age usually means the goals you have set are not specific enough. So how does this deter you from being successful?

Not having enough details of how your goals should specifically be means the effort which you will use might not be able to help you achieve whatever targets.

For instance, if you wish to buy a house, you must find out the market price of the house, its size, its design, the loan repayment, interest rates of the loan, the location of the house and many other necessary factors for you to purchase the house successfully.

Whether it’s a vacation you’re planning or increasing profits of your business, the more you specify your goals, the clearer it is in your mind that you are convinced these are the goals you really wish to achieve.

6. Measuring results

Business leaders and entrepreneurs often face this problem of utilizing the right tools to measure the progress of their businesses. Those who have no idea how to measure the progress of their work during the goal setting process are doomed to fail. Most are disillusioned by monetary profits they gained earlier on.

Measuring results is not only a good way of ensuring you are on the right track to your long term goals. Besides, it gives you the chance to improve results based on the goals you have specified during goal setting.

7. Setting irrelevant goals

Wasting time on goals which are not relevant to the aim or missions in your life will not benefit you in the long term. Besides, having too many goals at one time and not being able to produce results for each goal after so much effort will only damage your progress towards the long term goal. Stay focused on the goals and try to achieve one goal after another.

8. Setting unrealistic goals

If you set goals which you could not realistically achieve over a certain period of time, you will feel discouraged and eventually will give up on chasing after your goals. So don’t kill your chances of achieving your goals by being unrealistic.

In setting your goals, you must set short term goals or stepping stones for you to reach the bigger goals. These ‘stepping stones’ will also nurture you for face bigger challenges in your pursuit of your dreams. At the end of the day, it’s important to be ambitious but not too unrealistically excited.

9. Not having reasonable timeframe for achievement

While you can measure results with the realistic goals you have set, time is always an important factor as any delay in achieving your goals means less can be done to achieve it.

Some goals have their time limits and so, progress must be measured over certain amount of time.

For instance, you worked out that, to have your dream vacation in July 3 years from now, you must save up about 10% of your salary every month. Otherwise, you will not have enough money for the vacation by then so it’s crucial that you save as much even if the amount you save each month can be different.

10. Opinions of others

The opinion of others may have considerable weightage in our goal setting process especially if these people are close to us like our family, colleagues and friends. It is therefore understandable that we may have set our goals based on most of their opinions.

The risk of setting the ‘goals of others’ under the illusion that you share those goals might actually be similar to the risks of setting irrelevant goals as you have read in mistake no. 7. If those goals are solely based on the opinions of others, you will not be able to feel the satisfaction of achieving them especially if they are not truly your goals.

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Introduction

These days, too many of us feel as though we don’t have everything we want or need. It is all too common to feel as though we are going without and to feel that painful sense of longing, wishing that we had more possessions, or flicking through magazines and living vicariously through others.

Programs like MTV ‘Cribs’, magazines about interior décor and even YouTube ‘room tours’ seem designed to encourage this envy and desire and leave us feeling increasingly dissatisfied with the things that we own. This is no accident, as we will see.

When life is tough and we feel bogged down, we often find ourselves thinking that if only we had more, we would be happier.

The irony though is that this idea couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that you actually need less to be happier.

By adopting a more minimal lifestyle, you can create more space for yourself, own more attractive items and get more enjoyment out of the things you already have. Believe it or not, you already have the means to create the kind of home set-up that will make your friends and family green with envy. You can own a home just like the ones you have been fawning over but you do it by getting rid of things – not by adding more in!

And what’s more, is that when you start to realize this mentality is the way forward – when you start to remove clutter and appreciate the items you own – you’ll find that you actually become much happier as well.

This book is going to show you how to make it happen. You’re going to see how to create an amazing home that looks like it belongs in a lifestyle magazine while saving time and money. You’ll see how to make this into a home that supports the lifestyle that you want and makes your life much easier and more enjoyable. And you’ll see how to transform your mindset into one that allows you to be much happier with the things you own.

In this book, you will learn:

How to create a ‘zen space’ that you can use to unwind and relax
How to take the things you own and start making the most of them
How to sort clutter and create an organized, minimal space
How to change your mindset to remove envy and learn to truly appreciate the things you own
How to automate and systemize your life so you spend less time on menial tasks
How to massively reduce stress
How to turn a small home into a luxury pad
How to save money and protect the environment with smart, minimal tips
Top tips for creating a beautiful minimal décor
The true meaning of minimalism and how to adopt the ethos into your life

Chapter 1: You Don’t have to Be Bogged Down with “Stuff”

So just what is a minimalist lifestyle? Why is this so much more than an approach to décor? What does it really mean?

“Get everything you want, by discovering you already have it…”

Essentially, a minimalist lifestyle simply means reducing the clutter, scaling back your possessions and aiming to say and do more with less. It means appreciating a few things instead of having a huge amount of clutter that you don’t really need or want.

We often see minimalism as an approach to UI design for devices from companies like Apple and on an increasing number of websites. Here, the all-important maxim to follow is ‘communicate, don’t decorate’. That means that unless something is serving an actual purpose, it doesn’t belong in the design. A website doesn’t need a patterned background, it doesn’t need unnecessary menus and it doesn’t flourishes filling up every bit of white space. Every single element should serve a purpose, whether that is to guide the viewers’ eyes in a certain direction, to communicate some key information, or to facilitate an important interaction.

If a button doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t need to be there!

Applying Minimal Design to Your Home

This same ethos can then be applied to décor. Of course, you don’t need to communicate anything as such when it comes to your home’s decoration but you can accomplish something similar when looking at items of furniture etc.

Minimalist items of furniture are items that are utilitarian in as much as they don’t have lines or decoration that doesn’t need to be there. That means that they will be made up of straight lines and they won’t feature things like swirly handles, or unnecessarily elaborate feet. Everything serves a purpose.

With that serving as the basis for your décor, you can then continue with that basic concept by adding just a few items that you need while staying away from the temptation to add extra decoration that will serve no real purpose (of course we’ll be covering how to do all this in later articles).

In UI and design, this minimalist concept has come to the fore because it allows for better interactions. By having fewer distracting elements, this approach is able to more effectively direct users to the right points on the screen and encourage the right interactions. It also allows a website design to more effectively scale to different screen sizes when users change devices and it creates more ‘space’ which makes the experience more calming and enjoyable.

But while your home is not a UI, all these same concepts apply just the same. When you start removing unnecessary decorations and clutter, you start to make interacting with your home much simpler. When there are fewer items on your desk, you’ll find that you can find what you want that much more quickly and easily.

Likewise, when there is less clutter generally in your interior design, you’ll have less clutter in your visual field. This will make your space that much more calming and relaxing and also make it much easier to keep clean and tidy.

And that in turn means you’re now spending less time cleaning and less time digging around for things. Your home will be clean and attractive more often and you’ll have more time and energy to do the things that you enjoy doing and actually use your space!

Just like a UI, your home serves a function. That function is to support the lifestyle that you want to live. So, if an item in your home is not serving that role, then the simple solution is to remove it!
And then you can breathe more easily…

Minimalism as a Reaction to Materialism

More and more people are starting to realize the benefits of actually having less clutter and fewer items and this is resulting in a situation where they are happier with just a few beautiful objects rather than feeling the need to go out and buy everything they see advertised on TV.

And what does that lead to as a result? Greater satisfaction and happiness with fewer items! This makes a massive difference because it means that you’re now going to be happier and spend less time thinking about the things that you don’t have.

And you’ll have more money to spend on those select few items and on the things that really make you happy.