“Are you green and growing, or ripe and rotting?”
– Ray Kroc (Founder of McDonald’s)

What is a problem? There’s a saying, which says that obstacles are what happens when you take your eyes off your goals. I don’t agree because problems can occur even when you are focusing on your goals. However, I would certainly agree that obstacles are what happens when you take your eyes off your priorities. In fact, to the congruent person, problems are not problems but considered as growing pains.

You are always growing no matter what. Change is, in essence, the result of growing. A “Help Wanted” ad caught my eye when it said: “We embrace change by hiring people who create it.” We do create our own changes. We are always growing, always evolving, always changing. Therefore, since we can not stop that growth, the key to living a fulfilling life is to choose how to grow and to grow in the right direction.

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“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.”
– Maxwell Maltz

Realize that whatever you choose to focus on affects your quality of life, or what Zig Ziglar calls your “standard of life,” and not just your standard of living. For instance, if you focus on the future by setting goals, you may be forcing yourself to remain in your comfort-zone and probably without ever knowing how far you can really go.

Jim Rohn said, “To know how far we can go is to risk going too far.” To reach your potential therefore, you will unquestionably need to confront risks. They are inevitable. They are unavoidable. You simply have to take them if you want your successfulness to manifest, and there’s no way of tiptoeing around it.

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“We are at our very best, and we are happiest, when we are fully engaged in work we enjoy on the journey toward the goal we’ve established for ourselves. It gives meaning to our time off and comfort to our sleep. It makes everything else in life so wonderful, so worthwhile.”
–Earl Nightingale

“Success is a journey… Not a destination.”
–Ben Sweetland

Goal achievement is considered by some to be success, for it is true that success is defined by the achievement of a desired objective. But you may have noticed that I like to use words such as “potential,” “alignment,” or “successfulness” to describe this true success to which I am referring. As you can understand, goals are personal and success is relative to the individual.

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“When we think of failure, failure will be ours. If we remain undecided, nothing will ever change. All we need to do is to want to achieve something great, and then simply to do it. Never think of failure, for what we think will come about.”
–Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

What’s true success? What’s real, authentic, fulfilling success? Is it achievement? Is it made of goals, efficiency, and deadlines? Is it the kind that says, “The level of one’s success is measured by the depth of one’s wallet”? I’ve asked myself that deeply intriguing question for many years.

In fact, I used to be a go-getting, goal-setting, efficiency-minded, try-to-get-as-many-things-done-as-possible type of person; the type that never seems to have enough time for anything. And I do mean “used to be,” since one day the answer to that million-dollar question became as clear as crystal.

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In the autumn of 1996, I still remember that faithful week and a half when it all happened. My business went belly-up. They came to repossess my car. The landlord, eviction notice in hand, came knocking on my door. And my ex-wife packed up her things, saying, "I’m leaving."

But throughout this time, I had a flash of insight. One that changed the way I was thinking but didn’t realize it until later.

You see, Drop Your Goals And Manage Your Life is the result of years of writing in my journals, both prior to that event and following it. Why? Because…

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As a copywriter, one of the most important parts of my job is conducting research. And in fact, when my copy fails, aside from poor targeting or a poor offer, it’s almost always due to poor research.

As copywriters, the information we need may not be as readily available as we want it to be, particularly when we’re working with a new company or product. We have to dig. Or as my friend and top copywriter John Carlton says, “We have to put on our sales detective hats and dig deep.”

Sure, we can go through the product. We can go through the client’s collateral materials. We can conduct competitive research and perhaps even check out competitors’ products.

But the most important and salient research comes from…

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You must use your thought as directed in previous chapters and begin to do what you can do where you are, and you must do all that you can do where you are.

You can advance only by being larger than your present place, and no one is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work pertaining to that place.

The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.

If no one quite filled his present place, you can see that there must be a going backward in everything. Those who do not quite fill their present places are dead weight upon society, government, commerce, and industry. They must be carried along by others at a great expense. The progress of the world is slowed only by those who do not fill the places they are holding. They belong to a former age and their tendency is toward degeneration. No society could advance if everyone was smaller than his place; social evolution is guided by the law of physical and mental evolution.

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