This is my final word in this mini-course on setting and achieving goals. For me it’s the most powerful. If you’ve read my book, Pull Yourself Together: The No-Nonsense Guide to Assuming Control of Your Life, you’ll know that I pull a lot of my inspiration from who I want to be. And I recommend that you do the same.

Who of you, when growing up, wanted to be mediocre? Who had dreams about becoming someone of no note, that inspired nobody and was a role model to no-one? Who dreamed of having an entry-level job that paid minimum wage? Probably none of us. We may have allowed ourselves to become beaten down by failure so that our goals now are more mundane, but as a kid didn’t your dreams make you soar in flights of fancy?

I’ll have a big house where all my friends could live and we’d play in the tree-house all day and eat whatever we wanted. I’d be handsome and everyone would Love me and I’d marry a beautiful woman and drive a Ferrari. I’d be a pilot and wear a cool uniform and people would salute me.

Naive? Not a bit of it. There are many people who are widely loved and marry beautiful people and drive expensive cars. People salute pilots and their uniforms are incredibly cool and it’s an awesome and important job.

Those people aren’t any better than you. Their probably within the same sort of intelligence range you are and have the same physical abilities. They just did different things, made different choices, worked for different outcomes.

Who do you want to be now? Maybe, if you’re on your initial steps to self-realization your goals might be to keep your head above water, to relieve yourself of stress, to secure financial stability for your family. Work hard and work smart and those won’t be your goals for long. Once you’re in a place where you’re head and shoulders out of the water, you’ll start yearning for more. You’ll start blue-sky thinking. I love that phrase, it’s business speak and it sounds like bullshit, but it’s evocative for me.

Have you ever just lay on the grass and looked at the sky and gazed in wonder at the miracle that is life and thought of all the possibilities and what it would be to be perfect? That’s what blue-sky thinking is all about. What could I have if everything were perfect?

Why can’t it be perfect? Why can’t you get what you want? If you want to grow wings like an angel and fly, you’re doing to be disappointed at some stage, but nearly everything else is within your gift to attain. Wealth, happiness, love. And that’s why we set goals; to achieve. To shape our lives so that we can live the lives we want. To make ourselves into the person we want to be.

The person I want to be is amazing, and I love him. He is well loved by his family, he’s a proud father who works hard for his family. He never lies and never drinks too much. He only overeats on special occasions and contributes to society, etc. Whenever I’m tempted to falter in my goals I think about that. I wonder what my ideal me would do. Would he lie in bed when he could be up and at ’em? Would he do a second rate job? Would he pad out his writing with useless nonsense or get straight to the point?

You decide who you want to be and only you will know who that is.

The next time you think about giving up, think about who you want to be.

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