As a kid, I wondered what made rich and famous people different from the people I grew up with moving from town to town in Ohio. Why were some people making lots of money as actors, for example, something they actually seemed to enjoy doing? Meanwhile, the adults I knew worked jobs that most of them didn't like all that well. What was the difference?
The main difference, I found out over time, was goals. The people who set themselves apart from the crowd set bigger goals, and then worked to achieve those goals. I also learned, over many years, that there's a fine art to setting goals. Some people (like comedian/TV and radio host Steve Harvey) say you need to have HUGE dreams, and then break those dreams down into a whole bunch of small, manageable steps. Then you make each step a goal. "Inch by inch, everything's a cinch," is one of Harvey's mantras.
But in my decades as a BMX freestyler, I saw lots of riders set short term goals that they didn't even thing of as goals. For people in the action sports world, a goal is more like, "Man, I want to learn this trick." But most of them didn't set HUGE lifetime goals. By setting short term goals, usually without even realizing they were setting goals, these people opened themselves up to new possibilities. This brand of thinking carried over when some of these people started their own businesses. They made things up as they went along, breaking new ground as they went. Some of these people, like Spike Jonze and the Jackass crew, Travis Pastrana and the Nitro Circus crew, Steve Rocco with World Industries, and Pierre Andre Senizergues with Sole Technology created empires, sort of by accident.
No matter which way you do it, setting and working towards goals moves you into a different realm then the average "working Joe" (or Jane). So... do you regularly set goals for yourself? Are you working towards some goal right now?
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