Your ability to discipline yourself to set clear goals, and then to work toward them every day, will do more to guarantee your success than any other single factor.
Interpretation
Setting clear goals and working on them daily is key to achieving success.
This quote emphasizes that personal discipline in defining specific goals and consistently pursuing them is the most crucial factor in achieving success. It suggests that rather than relying on luck or external circumstances, an individual's commitment and daily efforts toward their defined objectives are what truly lead to accomplishments.
In practice
During a motivational speech at a conference, one might use this quote to inspire the audience to pursue their ambitions.
Your ability to set goals is the master skill of success. Goals unlock your positive mind and release ideas and energy for goal attainment. Without goals, you simply drift and flow on the currents of life. With goals, you fly like an arrow, straight and true to your target.
Plan your work and work your plan. Decide in advance exactly how you are going to get from where you are to where you want to go.
Rewrite your major goals every day, in the present tense, exactly as if they already existed
Aspire greatly; anything less than a commitment to excellence becomes an acceptance of mediocrity.
Perhaps the very best question that you can memorize and repeat, over and over, is, 'what is the most valuable use of my time right now?'
Write while the heat is in you. The write who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. To achieve something you've never achieved before, you must become someone you've never been before.
As a fighter pilot I know from my own experiences how decisive surprise and luck can be for success, which in the long run comes only to the one who combines daring with cool thinking.
The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that's how long it's going to take, guys.
I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian.
If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results.
Becoming rich isn't as much about getting rich financially as about whom you become, in character and mind, to get rich.
I know it's not enjoying my success to do this, but when I see too many Polo shirts, I say to myself, 'That's the end of that.'
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.