Why You Haven’t Accomplished Your Goals

Let me tell you what I’m all about:

Proper Preparation

Excuse Elimination

Achievement Accumulation

These 3 things define me; what I do and what I want. Of course, I have a terrible habit of acting human, letting anything and everything else around me effect what I’m about and preventing my accomplishment of goals. Guess what? It’s all a load of bullshit. The only reason I don’t accumulate an achievement is because I prevented it from happening. The same goes for you. Yeah, you. YOU are the only reason you’re not accomplishing your goals. It’s okay. I’m not judging you. I, the thrice-great beast — a millennia-old Word Wizard, Sentence Sage, Paragraph Prophet, and Grapho-Mancer — am here to help all of us. Here are 10 reasons why you haven’t accomplished your goals, and what you should do to remove these obstacles.

1. Self Sabotage

Have you heard of the phrase “cognitive dissonance?” If not, search it real quick. … Welcome back. Basically, it’s a fancy psychological term for how humans will actively go out of their way to ruin themselves. “I want to lose weight. OH MY GOD CANDY!” “I want to save money. OH MY GOD I MUST BUY THIS!” “I want to be more productive with my life. OH MY GOD DID YOU SEE WHAT SO AND SO SAID ON SOCIAL MEDIA?” Most of the time, humans are pretty stupid. You go out of your way to sabotage yourself. I’m convinced you can never completely stop doing it, but you can damn sure try to remove yourself from your own way as often as possible, especially when you’re actively preventing the accomplishment of your goals. Stop doing it. If you need advice on ways to stop doing that, continue reading.

2. Plan Refusal

Let’s pretend you have an actual, realistic goal. You just might. How about something common? “I want to lose 5 pounds by the end of the month.” Fantastic! Now what? Just having the goal is worthless. A goal without a plan is just a dream. Goals are a destination in which there is a route to get there. Losing 5 by the end of the month by exercising 3 times a week and eating more fruits and vegetables and less cookies and potato chips is an actual plan. True story: I missed a weight goal because I slacked off going to the gym because I made an excuse and sabotaged myself. In retaliation I refused to eat anything but chicken, beans, and rice for dinner for two weeks. Someone else joined in on this because she wouldn’t have had dinner otherwise. Guess what? She inadvertently lost weight as I intentionally lost weight. My goal worked because I created a plan, and when that plan fell through I pulled out the back up plan. Make a plan. And a backup plan for when the plan fails.

3. Excuse Making

Let me guess: something came up. You forgot about your favorite show. You hung out with a friend. You just haven’t found the time. Work is draining your energy. You’re too tired. Guess what? Just give it up. It’s obviously not a goal. If you spent as much time working towards your goals as you did coming up with reasons to not do them, you’d probably have accomplished a few of them by now. It’s so much easier to fuck off than it is to do work. I get it. But, guess what you’re not getting? Your goals accomplished. Eliminate the excuses and believe Nike: just do it.

4. Completely Clueless

You think you know what you want, but you honestly have no clue. Go ahead, argue with the text. You probably want money, power, or fame right? So, you know what you want. Wrong. Two of those three are abstracts. Hell, with credit, debit cards, electronic payments, and all that, money is almost an abstract too. Maybe you have it pinned down to a certain amount. “I want a million dollars. Fuck you! I DO know what I want!” Really? You want a genie to grant you a wish with that kind of talk, which basically means you don’t know what you want. Being super vague doesn’t count. Wanting a “better” job or “more” money doesn’t count. My personal favorite: “I just want to be happy.” Well, happiness is not an object, it’s an emotional response from DOING, usually something we enjoy. Happiness comes from doing, so what could you do to be happy? Does this all sound too confusing for you? Let me help. I want to be published for the world to see. To do that, I write. Why do I write? Because writing makes me happy. How do I know writing makes me happy? Because I feel accomplished when I’ve done it, and I can lose track of time and space while I’m doing it. The difference between losing myself in my writing for 4 hours and losing myself in my phone for 4 hours is at the end of the writing I have words people can read. Actually, if I’m spending that much time on my phone, I’m probably writing notes for one of my many works in progress. Find what makes you happy, then do it.

5. Talking Instead

You actually made a plan. You have an idea of what you want done, and maybe even a rough idea of when you’d be able to accomplish it. Then, instead of actually doing the work towards those goals, you tell anyone and everyone who is unwilling to listen how you’ve got this plan and you’re going to achieve said goals. Then a couple years go by, and you still haven’t done shit. But, you keep talking about it because it’s on the list. Talk is cheap. Talking about what you’re doing doesn’t do anything. Telling people I was going to start this blog didn’t get this blog started. Opening the word document and typing did. People LOVE this. It’s an illusion of progress without any of the work. Don’t tell anyone about anything unless you’re DOING it.

6. Phone Fiddling

I’m not even going to bother being clever or witty in this section. Get the fuck off your phone. The amount of time people spend staring mindlessly at their screen to scroll through stupidity on social media platforms is astounding. It’s highly unlikely staring at your phone contributes anything towards accomplishing any goal you’d have, unless those goals are to get fat and waste time. Put it on silent and move it away from you when working towards your goals. No one is more important than you.

7. Blaming Others

Your kids consume too much of your time and money. Your significant other is demanding. Your friends always need you. Work is always expecting more from you. Because an ex did something seven years ago, you’re currently unable to actually do anything productive today. This is all bullshit. You’re searching for the easy way out to not be responsible or held accountable to yourself. That’s fine. What’s not fine is believing that anyone else in this existence is responsible for your lack of success. The only person responsible for your success and failures is you. People are needy. So are goals. It’s no one’s responsibility but yours, so take the blame…and the credit.

8. Expecting Handout

Some college teachers believe that if you’re a white male everything great in life will be handed to you and you won’t have to work for anything. One day they’ll leave the confines of school and enter the real world. The reality is this: you have to work for it regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, intelligence, or whatever belief about anything you have. I’m not ignorant to think that different people won’t have to work harder or longer than others, but that’s not what this blog is about. Chances are, any tangible goal you come up with will not just be given to you. Being the smartest in class doesn’t amount to anything if you don’t apply it to your goals. This blog wasn’t handed to me written, edited, and posted by anyone other than me. If you want something, you’re going to have to work for it. Expecting a goal to be completed for you is a wish, and wishes don’t come true.

9. Infinite Time

Why work to get done today when you can probably do it tomorrow? Or the next day. Eh, sometime this week. Maybe even next week. Crazy eschatological theories aside, time is indeed an infinite resource, mainly because it’s an abstract and doesn’t really exist. However, YOUR time isn’t an infinite resource. Spoiler alert: you’re going to die. It’s on your list. It’s the end of your list. You might not die tomorrow (hopefully), or even this year. But things do tend to come up unexpected. If you have a goal you want to accomplish and have the time to work towards it, why not do it? The only reason is because it’s not a goal. Goals require effort dedicated to them to get accomplished. This blog entry didn’t write itself. I had to sit here and type it. In fact, 75% of the rough draft of this piece took 30 minutes. Most people wouldn’t bother trying to do much of anything within a 30 minute window because it’s “not enough time.” Of course, my superhero identity is Captain Get-Shit-Done. Try it sometime. You might surprise yourself. Hell, you might even accomplish something, like a goal.

10. Fear Failure

This may be the biggest one, hence it’s last. What happens if you try for your goal and fail? Will life be worth living anymore? Of course it will. The world will not end if you don’t lose 5 pounds by a certain deadline, get a short story published this year, or whatever else. End of the world scenarios for failed goals are works of fiction. If you try and fail, GREAT! You can then figure out why you failed, and try again, this time avoiding the pitfalls you found along the way. Consider it a Xanatos Gambit. (Go ahead; look it up. Welcome back.) A loss is only truly a loss if you let it defeat you. Take the bad with the good. Adapt. Evolve. Overcome. What’s worse is the fear of success. Many might think such an idea absurd, and they’re probably right. However, someone pointed out to me once that this might be part of my problem. If being a struggling artist is part of your identity, what happens when the struggle is removed because you finally achieved the goal? Of course this is bullshit. There will always be struggles as long as we live. There’s probably struggles after we die too. Humans are damn good at sabotaging themselves and struggling. It’s the struggles which define people. What if I become a best selling multi-novelist, and so famous that I can no longer buy Captain Morgan on a Wednesday afternoon without being mobbed by seas of fans? Shit, that sounds terrible. Seriously. How dare anyone try to come between me and my spiced rum! Want to fail. Want to succeed. Or don’t bother with goals at all.