Goal
Last week, we covered how courage, magnanimity, and zeal helps you create a life goal. This week, we’ll be covering how patience, fortitude, and discipline enables you to create the structure you need to achieve your life goal.
Setting A Plan – Patience, Fortitude, Discipline
To achieve greatness, you need to cultivate patience, fortitude, and discipline.
All large and significant undertakings need a plan. If you’re blessed, you’ll at least live to your 70s. This means you have anywhere from five to two decades’ worth of time, energy, and effort which needs to be aimed at accomplishing your life goal.
Without proper structures in place, you’re more likely to poorly spend your time. I’m not saying you will do this on purpose, but without a plan in place, you’ll easily waste minutes pursuing dead ends or retracing past mistakes.
Additionally, a structured life offers an antidote to the heavy burden of a life’s task. A life task may be easy to define and set. However, the execution will be harder to implement. For example, I want to be the best husband and father. A noble aim but how do I accomplish this? What are the perimeters? How do I know I’m on the right track? How do I know when I’ve failed? What are the bare expectations I need? etc., etc.
Therefore, we need a plan and the patience and discipline to believe in our plan. The structuring of our life starts with setting expectations, creating long-term goals, then executing daily activities which will help us accomplish our life’s task.
Patience helps individuals remain realistic and level-headed with the time, energy, and effort it takes to accomplish our goals. Fortitude enables us to withstand the temptations of the world which seek to take us away from our plans. Lastly, discipline is required to create a plan and stick to it, so we can accomplish the life tasks we set.
Patience – Accept That Achieving Greatness Takes Time, Energy, And Effort
No matter how bored or annoyed you are, you need to have patience.
Your life’s task will take an entire lifetime to complete. Thus, you need to master your patience. Usually, we want things to happen quickly: we want our food our faster, our car fixed sooner, and our bank account full from get-quick-rich schemes. However, the mature and realistic mind realizes everything worth doing requires time.
It’s hard to wait. We can give 110% toward our life goals and still be years if not decades from accomplishing our task. Therefore, we need to develop the patience necessary to weather the storm. When you are patient with your efforts, then you can accept how much time, energy, and effort is required to make meaningful progress. Those who are impatient will try to find shortcuts and quick fixes which ensures their failure.
Don’t look for quick fixes. If your life goals are magnanimous, then you can’t find any shortcuts. For example, I want to be the best husband and father. There are no shortcuts to these goals. I have to wake up, every day, and be the best. I can’t outsource my duties nor ignore them. If I wish to be a loyal, grateful man, then I have to be patient with any shortcomings and honestly seek to improve and grow.
So develop your patience. Reward yourself for your efforts and always mark your progress. Never rest on your accomplishments but don’t ignore them either. Your accomplishments are signs that you are growing and improving.
Fortitude – Strengthen Your Ability To Resist Temptation And Distractions
You must be a brick wall and resist temptations and distractions.
Fortitude is all about resisting distractions. From checking your phone to game addiction or lewd behavior, humans have a multitude of objects which can distract us from our life’s purpose. We have to direct our time, energy, and effort towards productive, meaningful action.
Checking our phones, social media, and the internet are classic time sinks which even the best amongst us are not immune. However, we must also be wary of other pitfalls or moral failings. Addictions to things such as porn, drugs, alcohol and other substances can spell doom for our time, mental health, and moral character. Additionally, we have to stand firm against ideas and people who are destructive, abusive, and manipulative. For example, don’t become obsessed with politics and politicians. Such activities require minimal surveillance, the occasion vote, and a little investment. However, once you’ve dedicated your time, you should move on and focus on the things you can change such as your behavior or progress.
Your plans won’t succeed if you don’t have the focus to create them and the dedication to work on them. Avoid distractions at all costs and do everything within your power to push past the people and objects that wish to distract you.
Discipline – Set Clear Monthly, Weekly, And Daily Goals And Stick To Them
You must be disciplined and focused, so you can create a plan and get after it.
If you want to achieve greatness, then you have to be disciplined. Discipline is about being able to focus on the end goal while creating the structures necessary to ensure your success.
It’s hard to conceptualize a life goal and even harder to go about fulfilling it. A life goal is a lifetime commitment. However, stating, “I want to tell stories which empower individuals,” says nothing about the means. What is my day to day? What type of stories do I want to tell and what skills do I need to tell them? When should I have these goals fulfilled? etc., etc.
We need to create systems to help ourselves accomplish the goals we set. Having clearly defined, daily systems and goals along with monthly expectations and yearly checks ins can help with focus. For example, I write 4,000 words a day and read for an hour to improve my writing skills. Furthermore, regular maintenance of this blog plays into my monthly goals and helps improve my overall writing.
By practicing discipline, you can set clear benchmarks and expectations which help you thrive as you march towards greatness.
Produce A Stable Environment
In order to accomplish something big, you need to start planning.
If you want to succeed, then you need to control your expectations while creating the plans necessary to excel. Your patience will help you mentally settle into your new role as a purpose-filled individual. Your fortitude will protect you from the forces which will rip you from your path. Your discipline is crucial to creating goals you’ll have to stick to every single day.
You’ll never get there overnight. A life goal is meant to last a lifetime and give you a continuous sense of purpose and wonder. Never feel discouraged if you’re not moving forward as fast as you think you have to.
Keep the course. Challenge yourself. Believe that you can make it to the end.
Actionables
- What are your life goals? What appeals to you most about these goals?
- What is required to accomplish these goals? Do you need money? Do you need to learn a set of skills? Do you need unique resources such as farmland or a degree?
- Now, take the list in item 2 and think over how you’re going to get these things. For example, if you need to learn a set of skills, then take note of what you need to do to learn these skills. What education you need, how much time you need to study each day, etc.
- Take a day to rest on the list you’ve made. Return to it periodically, refining it and shaping it. Through this reflection and refinement process, you’ll get a better understanding of your goals.
Please remember that it’s important to do the actionables. You’re not on this earth to simply read but to do. To become an individual, you must act more than you consume.
*Image credit to Unsplash
