These ten tips for achieving your goals are based on my experience as a teacher and full-time freelance writer — with help from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. These tips are effective and easy ways to achieve your personal and career goals, whether you want to earn more money or lose ten pounds!

Before the tips, a quip:

“What surprised me most were the ordinary methods successful people use to achieve all they achieve,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers.

You don’t need special equipment or a lot of money to achieve your goals – but you do need some basic tools. Click on the book cover for more info on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. And, read on for ten tips for achieving your goals…

10 Tips for Achieving Your Goals

1. Incorporate rewards. One of the best ways to achieve your goals is to keep persevering – and the way to keep persevering is to reward yourself along the way. For instance, every time you make a sincere effort to achieve your goal or you accomplish a small goal, reward yourself with a healthy, meaningful something.

2. Set yourself up for success. Instead of berating yourself for your weaknesses and failures, a great tip for achieving your goals is to set yourself up to succeed. For me, this means making my “to do” list at the end of each work day…and forgiving myself for not achieving everything on my list today (it’s about overcoming perfectionism).

3. Work with your strengths. I’m a big fan of “to do” lists and I love checking off each task as I accomplish it. That’s one of my strengths, and I work with it to achieve my goals. What are you good at? Use your inclinations, and be creative. For instance, if you’re good at talking to strangers, find ways to use that ability to get you a step closer to your goal.

4. Identify the obstacles to your goals. What’s stopping you from achieving your life goals? Be honest. Is it lack of discipline, physical impediments, lack of money, a weak support network, or a feeling of hopelessness? Then…

5. Ask for help in achieving your goals. What do you need to achieve your goals and overcome your obstacles? Do you need money? Time? Motivation? Support? Be specific about what you need to achieve your career or personal goals, identify who specifically can help you, and be clear about what you’d like them to do.

6. Learn to overcome obstacles to your goals. “Sometimes constraints actually create success,” Gladwell says. “Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.” So – whatever your obstacles are – don’t fight or curse them. Work with them to achieve your personal or career goals.

7. Surround yourself with likeminded folk. Who is where you see yourself in one, five, ten, or even fifteen years? To achieve your goals, stay connected to people who achieved their goals. Their attitudes, values, habits, and thoughts will rub off on you. Also, stay away from people who hold you back or aren’t supportive.

8. Put your time in. Bill Gates programmed computers at university for 10,000 hours before he started his own company. Gates is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in recent history (perhaps of all time) — but he spent 10,000 hours practicing before he took the leap. That’s 416 days of working around the clock. This tip for achieving your goals is from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and involves practicing your craft. “But they [successful people] also simply put in more hours than anyone else,” writes Gladwell.

9. Revise your goals as necessary. Last year, my goal was to earn a certain amount of money per month as a freelance writer. This year, it’s to land my first book writing contract — which means the amount of money I earn each month as a freelance writer may decrease. To achieve your goals, be open to revising as you go. Take your nose off the grindstone every so often…look around…and make sure you’re still on the right track.

10. Help people achieve their goals. When you encourage or educate or help someone achieve their goals, you renew your own dedication, determination, and self-discipline! It feels great to help people move towards their dreams, and it’s good karma!

Bonus Tip: Don’t work towards competing goals. If your goal is to earn more money or get a work promotion, don’t set additional goals of writing a bestselling novel or traveling around the world for six months. Focus on achieving one or two life goals, and make sure they’re compatible.

If you have any thoughts or questions on these tips for achieving your goals, please comment below…

~ Resources for Achieving Your Goals ~

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Are your fears about work, family, relationships, or money holding you back from achieving your goals? Try this natural way to end feelings of anxiety and panic.

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