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.
I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian.
I plunged into the job of creating something from nothing.... Though I hadn't a penny left, I considered cash money as the smallest part of my resources. I had faith in a living God, faith in myself, and a desire to serve.
The best asset is your own self. You can become to an enormous degree the person you want to be
Trust me, if you're working on a $70 million movie and you're the last guy, you feel all that weight on your shoulders.
Athletes are always talking about money at a time when everyone else is struggling so badly to make it. We all make way more than our fair share. And I just think it reflects poorly on myself and my teammates. I really do just want to win, and that has and will continue to be the reason that motivates me and is the biggest factor in my decision-making process.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
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