If you accomplished something or anything this week, you just completed or achieved a goal successfully. What have you achieved this week? Was it good grades, something at work, acquisition of skills, experience, weight loss, graduating from college, finding a job, quit smoking or just achieving your personal best? Perhaps it was something else that you felt was important in your life!
Definition
Accomplishments come from goals. Do you need goals to accomplish something? No! There are opportunities to add to your accomplishments in your career. You boss gives you assignments, sales goals, objectives or you are just working together on a project. Everything in your career needs completion or your employer will find someone else to complete your work for you. If you do it well or successfully, you have accomplished something.
Big Goals or Wrong Decisions?
If you take a real interest in your career and set your own goals and accomplish them successfully, you may just get promoted or receive a generous raise. Is that enough of a reason to set goals at work? It should be because your career is your primary source of wealth. Is your career important to you or is it just a job to support your life? If it is just a job, you should make changes to have a career. I am not suggesting just quitting your job or starting a business, instead developing a plan for success.
So many unhappy people decide they are entrepreneurs without determining if they have the skills. Rather than finding opportunities at another company they strike out on their own and fail! They invest money and fail miserably. Lack of skills, undercapitalization (insufficient funds) or wrong product or service is just a few reasons for businesses fail! There is no reason for incompetence, however many future entrepreneurs go into business for the wrong reasons.
Careers, Marriage and other big Decisions
Why do we spend so little time thinking about some of our biggest decisions? Decisions like career, marriage, children or moving is given short shrift! I often talk to my high school students about their career, but they often spend more time thinking about what clothes or sneaker s they will buy than about their career. They want to know what career pays the most or is the most fun, but they don’t even research what skills you need to perform the career.
They tell me they want to be teachers because they like children or they see all the time off. Some of the worst reasons to pick a career! Liking children is similar to liking the food at a particular restaurant as a good reason to be a chef. I am not saying it is unnecessary, but you need skills to be a good teacher as well as a chef. Knowledge of content in teaching is important, but you need to control the class before you can teach them anything.
Do you have the Entrepreneurial Skills?
Entrepreneurs need skills beyond product or service too. You may need other people to start a company. Who are they? Do you have them identified? Can you work with them and do they have the same goals as you do? Do you have the funds or will you need financing? There is a lot to this decision and you need to spend the time to figure it out. Major decisions such as marriage, career, children and moving are big decisions! You probably dated your spouse for some length of time before you decided to marry. 50% of marriages fail!
Goals and Plans
What are your goals? Did you develop a plan to accomplish your goals? Are you monitoring your progress? If you answered “no” to these questions you should reflect on your decisions. You cannot accomplish something until you make it a priority by making it your goal. Making it a goal is not enough without a plan to accomplish it. A plan is just a plan until you monitor your progress. If you are not making progress, you may have to make changes. What have you accomplished this week?
Final Thoughts
Setting goals reminds me of budgets. Many people go through the process of putting together a budget and wonder why they are not doing better. Just putting together a budget is not enough! You have to act on it and make the necessary changes for success. Goals are the same whether it is financial or something else. You career is just as important and the best way to help you reach your financial goals. You have to act on your career goals and they change over time.
You have to monitor your progress and make changes because your career is dynamic and continually changes. Just setting a goal of being a manager is not enough! You need to acquire the skills to do the job and ready for the opportunity when it occurs. You have to prove yourself with your management which is generally accomplishing more of the goals you set out to do. Are you happy with your career? If not, you may want to assess where you are and act on it. What have you accomplished this week?
Photo by: Flickr
Carnivals:
Yakezie Carnival at Money Life and More
Fin. Carn. for Young Adults at Degrees and Debt
Carn of MoneyPros at Money Wise Pastor
What have you accomplished this week?
Hi Krantcents,
Budgeting and aggressively investing this year our net worth increase could surpass our annual income. That is a financial milestone for us made only possible by investments.
Good for you! The stock market is doing well this year, but don’t plan on this rate of growth every year.
I was thinking about my career earlier this month. While I have been happy with it up until this point, it’s time to make a move. I don’t want to be stuck in the industry I am in. I take my career very seriously because I spent so much time, money, and energy putting myself through school to obtain it!
Just put together a goal and a plan! I am in my 7th career and enjoy it most of the time.
This week we accepted an offer on our house and I got A TON of paid work done. That is an accomplishment, I think!
Sure is! What is next? You always need another goal.
This year: We paid off a $12k student loan, reducing our monthly payments by $89.
This month: I launched a blog I had been thinking about for a long time.
This week: Our preschooler started Sunday school and loved it.
Today: I found street parking downtown for $2.50 and didn’t have to pay $22 to park!
Success can be a lot of of small things that add up! Congratulations.
I accomplished turning my notice into my job. Self-employment here I come!
This is the beginning of the adventure! Congratulations and good luck. Do you have a plan?
I set a goal of saving 50% of my net income this year and I’m on track to meet that goal. Last week I started a hike of about 480 miles and I’m still working on finishing that, but I feel confident that I will.
All you need is a goal and a plan! Congrats.
I launched my first guide this week, which is something that I have wanted to do for a while. Now I got the bug, and I’m going to make another one later this year!
Success actually encourages more success! Congrats.
I finally started my blog this year and actually stuck with it for the past 6 month. Learned a ton about blogging and definitely a milestone year of passing a threshold. Still lot more to learn.
Congratulations! Accomplishing goals seems to get easier with the I accomplished.
This post is a great reminder that I need to get better at setting goals. I tend to float along with nothing concrete.
Start with something small and you can increase your sights. Writing it down makes it real!
Krant, till now this year I’ve accomplished two big goals: finished paying off our consuler debt (all $160,000 of it) and go a personal chair at one of the top 50 universities in the world. I am ‘goaled out’; I am sitting here thinking ‘what next’. Hope to find something soon because I am not enjoying the state in which I find myself.
I thought you were on track to financial independence in 5 years? Aren’t you working on that?
Yep; still the roads to lead there are varied. One is to become an academic legent and increase impossibly the cost of my labour (earn from reputation).
I suppose you could pursue both or the one you love! I tend to focus on the desired outcome and woul dpick the one which gets me there.
This year I accomplished challenging myself physically in a different way: running a 6k mud obstacle course. This month I decided to put more effort into my blog than I have in the past year. This week I worked overtime for more than an hour everyday at work to boost my paycheque.
To be honest, I didn’t really think I accomplished that much, but when you actually write/type them out, they add up! 🙂
It is one of the reasons, you need to monitor your efforts. If you pay attention to your goals, you will accomplish much more!
I finally got my blog redesign done, which has been a goal all year. One of my long term goals is to specialize in low vision services for partially sighted individuals and not do so as much primary care. I have a long way to go, but I made the first step this weekend in making the right contacts and finding out what equipment I need to get started. I hope to be doing that a few days a month by the end of next year.
I just ran into a situation with a student who could use glasses, but cannot afford them in one of my classes.
My big accomplishment this year was getting my scuba diving certification. It was scary and exciting at the same time. I’ve already gone on multiple amazing dives since and can’t wait to go again. The underwater world is breathtaking!
Congratulations! I like that it was scary and exciting because anything new is a little scary. The best part was you went ahead anyway.
I’ve had a really busy and productive few weeks at work. I help run an after-school program at the school where I teach. We interviewed about 12 individuals for various positions, held a training meeting, and did about a hundred other tasks in order to get the program up and running. It was a big success, however we are continuing to focus our energies on growing the program!
That is a huge project! CONGRATULATIONS. Now for the hard part, maintain it.
Even the smallest accomplishments in your career can lead to the big milestones you are looking for eventually. What I have learned to do is set smaller goals that lead to a bigger goal. That way I can see my goals adding up to the milestone I am looking to make. When you can do that you will see that you are making steps, and it is a lot harder to get discouraged!
Absolutely! When I breakdown a large goal, it always has smaller goals or objectives. Monitoring your progress is also an important part of this process.
This week I negotiated a new lease and got $100 extra dollars in our pocket each month!
Nice increase! Th at always feels good.
This year, I doubled my 401k contributions, threw an extra $3k at my student loans, and have increased my income through side hustles. Financially, it’s been a good year so far. Now I just set a goal on my blog today to increase my post-tax investing from 0% to 5%!
Financial goals are my favorite because they are always quantifiable.
Your long-term career goals help you to know how involved and serious you are, about building your career. A person with a clear vision of the future will not find it difficult to answer this question. But many freshers, who have ventured into a new field, usually get stuck when asked, “Where do you see yourself 5 years down the line?”. The long-term goals are actually based on the short ones only, but are things we need to keep in mind, and work towards in respect of our career in the long run.
I agree! You would never get on a bus or plane without knowing the destination, yet we do it all the time with a long term goal.