Wow, can you believe it, the year is almost over and the clock will turn once again with or without being ready?

In some of my presentations this year I shared the story about Conrad Hilton, the billionaire hotel mogul who spent over a decade dreaming about owning the Waldorf Astoria, at the time the most beautiful and famous hotel in the world. Like with us, Conrad didn’t have much when he decided that one day he was going to own that and many other hotels.  Also like us Conrad set some goals, including owning that splendid hotel.  Unlike a lot of us however, he didn’t let our common attitude about goals, “why are they needed” or “I’ve gotten this far without them” stop him.

Successful people like Conrad Hilton, Jeff Bezos and Darren Hardy understand the benefits of goal setting, which includes:

• Goals help you to discover your own personal uniqueness.
• Goals help you to overcome negative conditioning by forcing you to concentrate on positive, achievement-oriented areas.
• Goals add to the excitement of life.
• Goals help you to make better decisions.
• Goals help you to live your life the way you want (if you don’t set your goals, someone else will set them for you).
• Goals help you to bring out the “best” in you.
• Goals can help you reinvent yourself.

Goal setting is the most important of all personal improvement ideas. If you are falling short of what you want and where you want to be at the end of every year, instead of the same old tired new year’s resolutions that don’t work, try a real goal setting process.

I heard it said the difference between successful people and non-successful people isn’t that successful people like the grind any more than the non-successful people.  In fact, they don’t. They just decide to do something, and that something involves creating a plan or a process to achieve what they want.