Bucks: You Probably Don’t Care Enough About Your Goals

Carl Richards

Carl Richards is a financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at the BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

How badly do you want it?

I’ll ask this question when someone tells me about a goal they have in mind and their struggles to reach it. It’s usually an important goal, connected to their career, their families or some sort of personal achievement.

And when I ask this question, the responses tend to fall into two categories:

1) I want it badly, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get there.
2) I want it badly, but I don’t think it’s possible.

Think about those two answers for minute.

If you answered the first way, that you’ll do whatever it takes, you’ve made a choice. You’ve decided that this goal means enough to you that you’ll pursue it until you achieve. I don’t worry too much about these people.

But if you answered the second way, that you don’t think it’s possible, then I have to wonder if you really want it. I most often get the second response when people are talking about money goals. And when I ask a few more questions, like what they have tried already, the answers astonish me. A majority of the time, people have put these goals aside aside because they seem impossible, not because they actually tried to reach the goal and failed.

Here’s a classic example. A few months ago, I had a conversation with an acquaintance who earns a super-high income. He tells me that he wants to make big changes in his life, like cutting back on work, maybe even changing jobs completely. He really wants these changes, he tells me.

So when I ask him why it hasn’t happened, he explains that he doesn’t have enough savings to make the change. But you have excellent cash flow, I reply. Well yes, he says, but I don’t really want to change my lifestyle.

And right there we see the problem. How badly does he want it? Apparently not badly enough to change his spending and increase his savings.

We can all be guilty of similar thinking. We walk around with big goals and talk about how important those goals are to us, but what are we really doing about those goals? How badly do we want them?

It’s a rare goal that doesn’t require sacrifice of some sort. So what are you prepared to sacrifice to achieve your big goal? Do you want to pay off your debt? Buy a home? Travel more?

You owe it to yourself to explore all the possibilities before you concede defeat and say that it’s impossible. Don’t be like all of the people who walk away from what they want because they aren’t willing to answer the question and say out loud just how badly they actually want it.

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/you-probably-dont-care-enough-about-your-goals/?partner=rss&emc=rss