The Secret to Not Quitting

What’s your approach to goal setting? Most of us use the process we’ve been taught: set a goal, make a plan with specific action steps, identify needed resources and determine a timeline. Even if we follow the plan perfectly, we don’t always get the result we want in the timing we’d prefer. Seeing the absence of desired results, we assume the goal was wrong, impossible for some external reason, or it wasn’t meant to be.

Through that traditional process, we often talk ourselves out of pursuing something that’s important to us. We give up on our plan.

Confucius said, “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”

His words still ring true. Whether you’re job hunting, trying to start or grow a business, or ridding yourself of unwanted habits, don’t change the goal, change the path you take to get there.