Setting Goals -- Reach for the Stars

The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting goals and achieving them. Even the most tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through each day convinced that every task, no matter how menial or boring, brings you closer to fulfilling your dreams. ~ Og Mandino (1923 - 1996)

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. ~ Arnold Toynbee (1889 - 1975)

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity. ~ Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895)

To will is to select a goal, determine a course of action that will bring one to that goal, and then hold to that action till the goal is reached. The key is action.
~ Michael Hanson

The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them. ~ Denis Watley

Reach high, for the stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal. ~ Pamela Vaull Starr


Debbie Macomber, keynote speaker at the 2009 American Christian Fiction Writers Conference and author with more than 100 million copies of books in print, shared her story as a dyslexic child who barely graduated from high school and later as the mother of four young children who wrote her stories on a rented typewriter. Though she struggled for five years to get published, she never lost sight of her dream.

Today, demand for her books have exceeded her wildest dreams . . . but not her wildest goals. 74 SEASIDE AVENUE, the latest in her Cedar Cove series, scored #1 on the NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and Publishers Weekly, and her books are translated into twenty-three languages.

Through the years, Debbie has recorded her goals in her many journals. As she achieved each goal, she quickly penned another one. At the ACFW conference, she challenged the writers to list their wildest goals imaginable. Isn't it time you made your own list?

A goal without a plan is just a wish. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

~ Roxanne Sherwood