How To Make Things Happen by Serge Kahili King

How To Make Things Happen by Serge Kahili King

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In order to understand how to manifest goals, you have to understand what a goal is.

It’s helpful to look at sports for an answer to that. Football is a good example. The goal at the end of the field is something to aim at. That’s all it is. Reaching the goal isn’t the purpose of the game. Playing football is the purpose. The goal is just a marker that tells you how well you are playing, and by the rules of football, the team that wins the most markers wins the game. But winning isn’t the purpose, either. It’s only another kind of marker, because there are more games to play after that one.

It’s good to have markers to help guide us through life, because they give us something to aim at. Markers–or goals–are not the same thing as resolutions, although many people confuse them. A resolution is a decision to do or not do something, like “I resolve to exercise more in 2013.” A goal is something you aim at, like saying, “My goal is to take two inches off my waist.”

To make it more simple, a resolution is a decision, and a goal is a target. However, decisions don’t make things happen, and neither do goals. In order to make something happen you have to take action of some kind. Action on a decision moves you forward away from the decision. Action on a goal moves you toward the goal.

In order to reach a goal, you have to have a plan. It doesn’t have to be a fancy plan, but you have to have some idea of how you are going to reach the goal. A plan simply consists of the steps you are going to take that bring you closer and closer to the goal.

The upside of plans is that sometimes they work. The downside of plans is that sometimes they don’t work. This confuses a lot of people who identify with a plan. In other words, they think that if a plan fails, then they have failed. That’s nonsense. People don’t fail. People give up using a plan or aiming for a goal, but they don’t fail.

Baseball players can have a goal to hit a ball, and their plan consists of practicing to do that. Unfortunately, most of the time the plan doesn’t work. We say that very good baseball players bat “three hundred.” Actually, that means .300, or about one-third. Two thirds of the time their plan fails and they miss the ball, and yet they are still considered very good. If they thought of themselves as failures when their plan didn’t work, they’d quit after the first game.

After the goal and the plan there is a third factor important for success, and that’s a purpose. Again, we have an area of confusion, because a lot of people think a purpose is the same as a goal, and it isn’t at all. A purpose is the reason why you make a plan and set a goal.

No one does anything without a purpose. A purpose is what motivates you to want to achieve a goal in the first place. It isn’t an intellectual reason for doing it. It’s an emotional reason based on some BENEFIT of achieving the goal. And in order to even move toward the goal, that benefit has to be more important to you than any benefit from NOT moving toward the goal. The more you love or desire something, the more likely you are to keep on moving and the more likely you are to succeed.

Finally, here’s something that may surprise you. What I call GOALING is more important than goal achievement. In a story I told, two brothers had set a goal of locating a couple of magical trees. They searched for years, but they never did achieve the main goal they had set. However, their desire to do so drove them on to achieve a great many other things along the way. Life isn’t about achieving goals, it’s about living. But setting goals and moving toward them is a wonderful way to live life more fully. Even though some goals will be achieved and some won’t, “goaling” itself will provide more benefits than you can now imagine.