Setting your goal will serve as a measure of your success in working the plan overtime and will also be a journal of your achievements and accomplishments. You should plan to do a review of your goals each year just to see where you fit and what has taken place with your
goals. Even if you haven’t achieved anything towards your goal due to circumstances beyond your control, that’s okay. As long as you’ve
written your goal down and done something towards achieving your goal; this is the most important thing that you can take out of this
chapter.
The critical piece in goal setting lies in the execution of meeting the goal. If your overall dream and goal is to make it to a four-year
college or university when no one else in your family has, you must make the plan achievable and do something every day to achieve your
goal. Even if that something is really small, you must ACT and do something, anything towards the achievement of your goal. No matter how small it is; if it’s contacting one person to discuss your plan or making a contact outside of your family, do something. But you must keep your expectations in check during the goal setting phase so that you do not get overwhelmed and hit burn out.
I speak to a lot of people who say that they had a lofty goal but because it was so high, it scared them so they stopped working towards it. I have also met folks who set a goal and because it
didn’t happen in 3 weeks or 2 months, they considered themselves a failure and stopped working at the goal. This person said that they
didn’t have the time necessary to wait on their goal to happen and needed it to happen overnight, similar to what the television stories
will show us.
This is nonsense and is not real. No matter what these rap videos show and what these entertainment shows tell you, no one achieved
the success without setting a goal and without executing certain steps over time to achieve their goal and dream. It did not happen
immediately and in most cases took ten years to really achieve. After ten years, they started flossing and making it seem like it took them
real fast because they consider themselves a whiz kid or something like that.


















