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This is Karan Bajaj!
Today let me ask you a question.
What do you think is the one thing that separates uber-successful people from average people? Is it education, is it income? Is it background, is it genetics?
Actually no, none of them. The one thing that separates successful people is that they set clear goals. Yes, it’s simple enough and yet research shows that only 5% of people actually set goals for themselves every year. 95% of people set no goals at all. So for the 95% of people they live the average lives that we know of. They go to college, they get married, they have kids. They go work in a job and they do reasonably well at the job. They do what their bosses tell them to do and sometimes they do well at it, sometimes they don’t do well at it. But that’s the average person’s life which in itself is solid. It is still a success, in the context that they manage to live a life. But is it a life of energy and passion and enthusiasm at every moment? Perhaps no, and to get to that kind of a life to be that 5% of people who are living those passionate, energetic, enthusiastic lives you need to set clear goals for yourself. And what is the characteristic of a good goal?
A good goal is specific, it is measurable. It is realistic and yet it stretches you quite a lot. Examples of a good goal, running a marathon next year. Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, next year. Writing a novel. Making 200,000 dollars of salary. All goals that can be achieved if you set your mind to it and create plans against it. I know that because I have done all of these without starting with any particular advantage in any of these areas. So why does that help so much? Setting goals helps a lot because it sets a bar.
Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro would not perhaps make you a successful person but once you’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, you’ll set a new goal for yourself. And then you achieve that new goal and then you will keep raising the bar until you achieve excellence in whatever dream you’ve set out to achieve excellence in. To give you an example, when I started writing in 2008 my only goal was to finish a novel. I’d never written a book before. I’d never even written a short story before. I’d done some basic research on how to write a novel and all I wanted my success was to just manage to complete the book.
By the second book I wanted it to be published and although the first book also got published the second book got published in a bigger way. And now if I fast forward five years later in 2012 and ’13, when I started writing The Seeker’, my goal had changed completely. Now I wanted to write a book which would be an international bestseller and would touch the lives of peoples all over the world. Now the jury’s out whether I’ll achieve that when the book comes out next year. But the point is that the goal kept changing. The bar kept rising aa a result I kept transforming as a person to kind of reach higher and higher goals and the journey is just starting. So what I want you to do today is to set a realistic but stretching goal and then go all out to achieve it. Now there’s a question that many people ask.
What if I don’t know what my purpose is? What if I don’t know what my goal is?
Let me ask you a question back. Are you putting yourself in a position to challenge yourself every day? Are are you reading books that have beyond the comfort zone of fiction bestsellers and stuff that everybody reads? But books that actually make you think differently about things. Instead of watching things like ‘The Avengers‘ or some movie that everybody is watching, are you going to a theater and watching a play that makes you think differently about things or challenges you in some form or the other? Are you doing artistic projects that are challenging? Are you traveling to places outside your comfort zone? If the answer to all of this is yes. Then I’d say just be patient and a goal will emerge out of your constantly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. And if the answer to that is no, I would say start doing these things. Start being outside your routine and the moment you’ll start outside your routine, you’ll start thinking of different things. And see and being exposed to many more things out of which a more concrete goal will emerge. I hope this was helpful and as always I’ll see you next week.
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