Your goals in 2017 may have been too small. You may have lowballed your goals to ensure you reached them, underestimating what you are capable of and not stretching yourself. Your goals may also have been too big, requiring more than you estimated, but still moving you way beyond where you were a year earlier.
It doesn’t matter what your goal is, whether it is too large or too small (I would err on the size of too large), the single thing that will produce the result you want is execution. If you have failed to reach a goal in the past, the root cause of that failure was almost certainly execution.
Your intentions will not deliver your goal. Intending to do something and not doing it is the same as not intending to do it. The result is exactly the same. Intentionality is different. It is to do something with purpose. The key difference here is the execution, the “doing something” part.
Your plans, while very helpful in providing direction, will also not afford you your goals. Writing down what you need to do is an excellent exercise if you take action on what you have written, and a waste of time, energy, paper, and ink if you do nothing. If given the choice between well-designed plans and limited action taken on those plays or no plans and simple execution, you are better off with simple execution.
Execution is self-discipline, the first chapter in The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, and the one the first potential publisher hated upon reading it. He didn’t understand why I would include such a chapter in a book, let alone put it first. Execution reigns supreme in the world of attributes and character-traits and beliefs and behaviors.
Execution is visible in the actions you take day after day, week after week, month after month, and quarter after quarter. Execution is your willingness to do what you need to do when you don’t want to do it. It is also the willingness to not do what you really want to do because it doesn’t serve you, and when it doesn’t move you closer to your goal (or dream, or future vision of yourself.
If you were to look at two people who appear to be equal in every way, one of them who has reached their goals and one who has not the difference will be found in their willingness to execute. Which of these two people will you be?
