Set High Targets to Achieve More Success
Now, if you do not meet your targets, don’t beat yourself up and go into depression. Many times I think, “Ah, I should have done this, I should have spoken more clearly” and so on. This is how I think constantly, but I don’t walk around with a sense of depression. The problem is that most people walk around with low self-esteem; you shouldn’t. You should be sure that God loves you and that knowledge should heal you of your low self-esteem. And you should move around with a thinking that says, “I’m pushing myself daily.” It should not be one where you beat yourself thinking, “Oh God, I’m a failure.” That’s not the kind of failure I am saying you should be.
Rather set such high targets such that when you fall short, you will still achieve so much. And in the ones you failed to achieve, you are a ‘failure’. For example, you planned to wash all the curtains in the house but you fell short and had two curtains remaining because you had to run off to a church meeting. This is the kind of failure I am talking about.
Always bite more. Don’t say, ‘I am going to wash curtains today, and I’ll wash two.’ Then you wash the two curtains. You finish by 12 noon and lay on your bed for the rest of the day. In the long term, you’re going to be a big failure. Instead, bite more than you can chew and it will keep you driven.
The outcome is that you will go through life feeling like a success. It’s a funny thing, but that’s how it works. And when you look back and see your tasks in a month, you always would have achieved more than you thought. I am telling you a secret. In my life, at the end of everyday, I am left wondering what I achieved that day because compared to my long list, I hadn’t done much. This is why I do not get angry with my assistants for the long list of tasks they write out for me. I even tell them to add more. What happens, however, is that once in a while, I walk past and see something we have done and wonder, “Did we do this? When? How did we do it?”
When you step back from the situation and think about it, you are left in awe – “do you know this is you?” You had gone to other places and heard about the big projects people do and here you are carrying out yours. You are kind of surprised that all those failures still left so much done. Sometimes, someone else passes by, sees it, and says, “You did this? This is amazing. You are doing great!” So, despite the daily and monthly failures, your work still comes out as an overall success.
