Introduction

It’s Monday, the first day of a new month, your birthday, and Mars closes an optimal orbit with Mercury, so you’ve decided this is the perfect time to get the perfect body.

You’ve procrastinated on this matter for a long time, coming up with excuses like the fact that it’s holiday season, you have a hectic job schedule, or your dog is sick to delay the moment of starting a diet. But now you’ve seen or heard something groundbreaking, and besides, it’s Monday, the first day of the month…

So the time has come to become that flawless, lean, Lulu-pants-wearing or muscle-tank-wearing person you always dreamed of being. You’re excited. In a little while the street will become your catwalk, heads will turn after your graceful or bulky march, and Karl Lagerfeld will reach out to you on social media to beg you to promote his humble creations. Okay, time to get back to earth. This all sounds cool, but how do you want to achieve all these grandiose goals?

If you’re like most people, you already have your diet carefully planned in your head from today to the day you’re supposed to reach your goal. You’ve selected a diet plan, the strictest of them all, and are starting it right away because you "ain’t like other losers who give it up after two weeks of painful fasting." You were born a fighter, so you’ll fight. The Mission: Impossible soundtrack is echoing in your head as you start your badass diet. Day one, tick. Day two, tick. Whoa, two pounds gone! Mostly water, but who cares? Day nine, seven pounds gone. If you continue at this speed, you’ll reach your target weight quicker than expected!

Day twenty, nine pounds gone. Life feels miserable, weight loss slows down, and you miss your dandy candies and soda at the end of each hard day. You’re hungry and irritable. If only you could have a piece of chocolate. Just one. Just a little…

No! You remind yourself of your goal, your strength, and turning heads on the street. The Mission: Impossible theme is silent in your head. Queen meekly hums The Show Must Go On instead.

Some long months have passed and you’ve made it halfway through your weight loss endeavors. You feel like you’ve been drained of life essence. You look somewhat better now. Not catwalk good, but thirty pounds less than before. If you invest more time and at least the same effort, within a year you could — maybe, possibly but not surely — get your dream body. You go to work, trying to make peace with this thought. Later that day, your boss fires you and you feel that life sucks in a superlative sense, and as you hysterically run out of your office, you spot a new KFC at the corner. Don’t Stop Me Now powerfully resounds in your head as you approach the wicked fast food chain.

Your proverbial angels try to stop you, but you eat them as appetizers. Without being very conscious about your actions, you order two large meals, a diet Coke, and since it doesn’t really make a difference, a cookie too.

There were weeks when you didn’t eat as many calories as with this one meal. Your stomach happily growls as it expands to accept all the long-desired sins you just shoveled down your throat. As the meal disappears, so do your dreams about having that beach body. You find comfort in the thirty pounds lost, but since you stop caring, the nasty weight sneaks back to your body before you know it.

There are not too many success stories in excessive weight loss. Maybe for a good reason. Most people approach diet as the necessary evil that helps them lose pounds within a certain timeframe. The sooner, the better. They starve themselves, become unpredictable and fickle, and any type of tragedy can deter them from their goal.

The other type of people, those few who actually reach their target, have a different mindset. They know that absolute denial of daily pleasures will drive them crazy at some point. They also know that they need a lifelong lifestyle change instead of a short-term diet to preserve their good results.

Many goals we set in our lives are just like trying to lose weight. We want our reward quickly, and in the moment of setting the goal, we don’t really care how difficult it will be on day seventy-three. YOLO! Then we find ourselves choking on a Big Mac on day forty-nine. Or we find ourselves not willing to work out for a year. Or that nothing remained in our active-passive memory from that boring management course.

Why? Because we approached improvement the wrong way. We often do. There is, however, an alternative way to approach your goals. This book will tell you about it in detail.

One

The Real Purpose Of Goal Setting

I f I were rich, I’d buy this car, travel to that island, buy nicer clothes…

Do you hear this often? Do you say it often? And when you ask yourself or the person you’re talking to, Why not now? does the answer sound something like this:

I can’t afford it now. Or, My current job doesn’t pay me enough. Or, The circumstances are not ideal right now for me to make a change.

The time isn’t right to become wealthier? To do something you really like? When is the ideal time then? I saw a picture of a circle divided into three parts — health, time, and money. Then the advice next to it is: pick two.

Why? Why couldn’t you have them all? Indeed, with a pick two mentality, you’ll never have all the three. Now, you may think, I am already sixty-five. I am old. You are as old as you believe yourself to be. A young reader might think, I’m only seventeen. How can I become successful so early?

You can’t have it all. But you can have more health, wealth, and time than you do now. But how badly do you want it? Why do people fail to reach their goals?

Sometimes the cause is simply that people