If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. 

The conventional wisdom is that if you don’t set a goal, you won’t get where you want to go. You might be a receptionist who has the goal of one day becoming a novelist or a construction worker who wants to own your own company. You dream about it and have confidence that you can do it.

Yet day after day you go to your job and the book you mean to write never gets written; the company you mean to run never gets started. It’s a common problem: We think we set our goals, but then don’t know how to get from here to there.  It’s as if we dream it and go sit on the front porch and wait for it to show up.  It won’t.

Studies show that if you write your goals down, review them regularly, check off the things that you’ve completed, that you’ll achieve more than others.  Only 3% of those surveyed actually write them down.  50% make some lists and forget them.  47% forget to make lists, but love their big screen HDTV.

Even artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci was fully aware of this tendency in himself and in others who were learning to paint. Here’s what he had to say to those who aspired to greatness:

“[We] can only comprehend one thing at a time. Let us suppose that you . . . were to glance over the whole of this written page: You would instantly judge it to be full of various letters but you would not in that time recognize what the letters were, nor what they might mean. And so you have to proceed word by word, and line by line if you wish to gather information from these letters. Again if you wish to climb to the top of a building you will have to go up step by step, otherwise it will be impossible to arrive at the top.”

There is no ceiling to your goals unless you create it.  Get out there and explore – set some goals and achieve!