A while back I saw this post on Flakebook: “If you had to reach your five-year goals in 6 months, what would you need to do now?”
What a great question.Â
We assume that five-year goals will take five years to achieve and so we plan and operate accordingly. This question forces us to think outside that damn box.
Let’s give this some context:
If you knew you only had six months to live and you wanted to earn $500,000 in (additional) cash to leave your family, what would you do?
Hold on while I put on my philosopher’s hat.
If you don’t believe you could earn an extra $500k in five years, how could you possibly believe you could earn that in six months? You need a different goal, right?
“What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” Napoleon Hill said, the key word being “believe”. We need a goal we believe is possible.
Really?
Does this mean we can never have big goals? Do we have to settle for what we believe is possible?
That’s no fun.
Maybe the point of this exercise is to ask “impossible” questions, to see where it takes you.
Questions that force us to dig deep into the creative recesses of our minds to find ideas we never knew we had.
Questions that force us to become better observers and researchers, to discover what other people are doing that we never thought was possible for us.
Questions that force us to ask, What if I could?
What if you could double your referrals this year?
