Table of Contents
You will understand the value of writing down your goals by hand after reading this article. When you write down a goal, you’ll start to notice details about it all around. What causes this to occur?
Have you ever noticed that when you read a newspaper or magazine, you see some articles but not others? You may feel that you’ve read everything in that paper until someone asks if you read a particular article and you can’t recall seeing it. You then re-read the paper and discover that the article fills an entire page! But you didn’t see it. This is because your RAS (reticular activating system) is a target-seeking mechanism that only lets you see things related to the thoughts and ideas you’ve put into it. For example, if you constantly think about sports but never about flower arrangements, you’ll constantly see articles about sports and sportspeople in newspapers or magazines but you won’t see anything about flower arrangements, even though these articles were also there.
Your RAS only seeks out things relative to what has been programmed into it and ignores the rest. If, for example, you decide to think only about tigers, everywhere you look you’ll see stories, movies, and information about tigers. You’ll see tigers on the television, on the Internet, in magazines, on cereal packets, and on advertising billboards, and you’ll hear people talking about tigers. Yet prior to deciding to think about tigers, you probably never saw anything about them.
The same thing happens when you buy a car. If, for example, you decided to buy a white, four-door Toyota, you’d begin to see them everywhere – on the motorways, in car parks, on TV, in sales yards, and in people’s garages. But before you decided to buy the white Toyota, you probably never noticed them.
Whatever car you drive, you see others driving it everywhere you go. You can’t stop seeing your car. It’s all around you. That’s why whenever you write a goal, the information and answers about it begin to appear in front of you. In other words, your RAS makes it materialize.
The Spaghetti Principle
Basically, This principle suggests that even though the overall system may seem complicated, it can often be understood by breaking it down into its simpler components and analyzing their interactions.
Your thoughts and ideas are like a ball of spaghetti in your head. One thought is intertwined with many others, so it becomes difficult to separate a single idea and focus on it. Writing your ideas on paper is important because writing crystallizes each thought so that it can be considered in isolation to the others. Then, as you read your written list and think about the items on it, some items that may have seemed important at the start might lose their lustre, while others that might have originally seemed minor can begin to stand out as more exciting.
“If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.” ~ Andrew Carnegie
Power of Handwriting
Psychology professor Dr. Gail Matthews, at Dominican University in California, ran a study on goal-setting with 267 participants. She found that you are 42 percent more likely to achieve your goals just by handwriting them. When you use a keyboard to type, it only involves eight different movements of your fingers and this uses only a small number of neural connections in your brain. Handwriting can involve a range of up to 10,000 movements and creates thousands of neural paths in your brain. This explains why handwriting has a much greater impact on your emotional attachment to your goals and on your commitment to them.
Using a computer to record your goals is certainly helpful, but this is like reading a text about how exciting it is to own a sports car. Handwriting your goals is like your brain taking the sports car on a test drive through the Alps. You become more emotionally involved and it dramatically heightens your motivation to achieve that goal. Writing your goals activates your RAS and instructs your subconscious to work on them, whether you are thinking about them or not.
When you decide precisely what you want to do, have or become, your RAS will begin to seek out the ways to do it. Once you put the thought into your mind, you’ll begin to see, read and hear things about it. It’s that simple. And this is what very few people ever do.
Constantly re-reading your written list of goals will soon clarify how important or unimportant each item really is to you. Keep adding to your list, modifying it, and subtracting from it. After a while, some of the things will keep re-appearing on it because these are the ones that have the most meaning for you. Put your list on your bedroom or bathroom wall, put another copy on your refrigerator, or use it as a screensaver on your computer or mobile device. Put a copy in any location where you can always see it. As you think of new things, add them to the list.
The Difference Between Millionaires and Billionaires
A study of wealthy people in the 1970s was conducted to determine the main differences between millionaires and billionaires. While both groups were wealthy, the researchers wanted to know why one group was so dramatically wealthier than the other. After three years of research, the one point that was the most similar between the two was that both groups knew exactly what they wanted. But the billionaires had clearly written lists of their ideas, goals, and objectives. Surprisingly for the researchers, the existence of a written list of intentions was the most striking difference. While the millionaires were equally passionate about their goals and knew exactly what they wanted, they had a significantly lower incidence of written plans than did the billionaires. In another USA study of goal-setting, Paul J. Meyer reported that:
- 3 percent of people in the USA had definite, written goals and plans
- 10 percent had a good idea about their life goals
- 60 percent had considered their goals but only related to their finances
- 27 percent had given little thought to goal-setting or their future
Of the people in this study, Meyer reported:
- 3 percent were highly successful
- 10 percent were moderately well off
- 60 percent were described as of ‘modest means’
- 27 percent were barely getting by with help or charity.
The message here is clear. Make a list of your goals – in handwriting. (Excerpt is from “The Answer” by Allan And Barbara Pease.)
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