Pay the price...

Posted on 11th Jan 2018 at 2:20 PM from Warwick, UK

At this time of year quite a few people are still thinking about goals for 2018. Most months I go to a meeting in a hotel which has a popular gymnasium. Every January the car park is overflowing, February it is packed and by March it is back to normal because everybody has got fit!

There are lots of ideas available to help you decide what goals you really want. Plenty of information about how to break those goals down into achievable stages and there is the great advice that you should always celebrate goal achievement. But to my mind there is one important part that is missing - the price of the goal...

Every goal will have a price. Sometimes the price is easy to work out whereas others are more tricky. If your goal is to own a Ferrari then it will have a price tag along with a maintenance cost and probably a not insignificant fuel bill! But ultimately all these costs can be expressed in terms of the amount of money needed to purchase the item and the amount needed to keep the item. All relatively straightforward.

With some goals the price is less tangible. Let's suppose that your goal was to play trombone in a jazz band. Google tells me that the price tag of a trombone is between £155 and £2500. An affordable amount for anyone who really wanted to achieve this goal. However, that is only a small part of the price of the goal. In order to be able to play the instrument that has been purchased requires practice - lots of practice. And lots of practice means lots of time...day after day after day after day... Nobody has time just laying around so making the required time means giving up something else. Perhaps television time, maybe Facebook time or it could be time reading my blog posts (I hope you don't give that one up!). Or it could be family time or time playing a sport.

One of my biggest goals is to have a place to live in Istanbul and a place to live in England. To be able to spend 4 months at a time in each and, during the remaining 4 months of the year, to travel to and live in some of the other exciting places that the world has to offer. Sounds great doesn't it. But it comes with a huge price. Dogs have been a big part of my life since I first left home and this dream lifestyle of my goal means not having a dog in my life. That's a big price but one that, after much thought, I decided was worth paying.

Is it worth what you have to give up or pay to achieve your goal?
That is something only you can decide. But knowing the price before you strive towards the goal saves you time, energy and disappointment. So work out the price and be prepared to pay the price or change the goal.

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The Magic of 3 Weeks. Most people have a few bad habits that don't always serve them or help them achieve and everyone knows how difficult it is to change. Ian has outlined a simple and effective way to replace bad habits with good success habits which will help those that follow it achieve their goals. - Chris Williams

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