Goals / Purpose - What’s Your Purpose? (Part 1) - News: JFD Performance Solutions

"Hi, my name's Kevin. So...what's your purpose?", I ask. "What? Wow, Kevin, where did that come from?", you respond. I know, I know. There are so many things to do. You're so busy it seems that you barely have enough time to breath, let alone think about something as seemingly abstract and elusive as what you want to do with your life. Plus, there's plenty of time for that later, right? Well, not really.

In this book, the author takes a contrarian view about how people attain high levels of success. He contends that certainly, although skills, knowledge and a lot of hard work are required, success is also greatly influenced by one's "ecology". Essentially, that we must look beyond individual merit, to areas such as one's friends and family, what a person's parents did for a living, one's upbringing, community, even birthplace and cultural legacies.

I have always felt that one of the most important skill-sets that a person can have is the ability to set goals and achieve them. Goals are essential for establishing direction, defining actions, and measuring progress. Similarly, it is critical that businesses be able to plan and execute.

Humans respond to pain. Of course there's physical pain, such as a headache or a stubbed toe or a broken arm, but that's not what I'm referring to. I mean the pain that comes from not being satisfied with how things are going in your life: personally, professionally, or both.

The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get. When Andrew Carnegie died, they discovered a sheet of paper upon which he had written one of the major goals of his life: to spend the first half of his life accumulating money and to spend the last half of his life giving it all away. And he did!