In the last chapter, you learned the importance of defining your goals by determining what really matters to you and what you want to be remembered for. In this chapter, you will learn the importance of prioritizing your goals.
Prioritizing your goals is important for many reasons. For one reason, we all have a finite lifespan; none of us live forever. Therefore, we only have a limited time to accomplish everything we want to achieve. Additionally, if a sudden, incurable illness or condition afflicts us at some point in our lives, we may not be able to accomplish the goals we want to achieve after that point. Therefore, it is vital that we prioritize our goals so that we achieve the goals we most want to achieve as early as possible, since we are not guaranteed the opportunity to achieve them later in our lives.
Another reason to prioritize our goals relates back to the idea of short-term goals and long-term goals. With most long-term goals, there are many short- term goals we can and need to reach before we can accomplish the long-term goal. As a result, we need to prioritize the short-term goals first because we will need to reach them first in order to obtain our long-term goals. We want the long-term goals the most, but they are virtually unattainable if we don’t accomplish the short-term goals first. If we want to lose 100 pounds, it will be harder to impossible to just focus on that goal without recognizing and achieving the short-term goal of losing 5 pounds first, then losing 5 more pounds, and so on.
Similarly, we can’t attain a college degree if we don’t pass a college entrance exam first; we have to pass the exam first before we have the chance to earn a college degree. Therefore, you have to prioritize the goals you want to achieve. You may and probably want the long-term goal most of all, but without achieving the short-term goals first, you have virtually no chance of attaining the long-term goal.
Therefore, it is important to prioritize the goals you want to achieve. First, you only have a limited amount of time to achieve the goals you want to achieve; second, to attain the long-term goals we most want to achieve, we have to achieve many short-term goals first. This will take time and committed effort to achieve; therefore, it’s important we prioritize the goals we want to achieve so that every action we take brings us closer to the short-term goals and long-term goals we want to achieve. This is how we will achieve the most goals we want to achieve while we are able to achieve them.
In the next chapter, you will learn why setting specific goal deadlines is vital to achieving the most goals you can in your lifetime.