According to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, man is a teleological organism. The word “teleos” means “objective in Greek, and in fact every human action is made with achieving some kind of objective in mind. This is why we are only truly happy when we are doing something that leads us towards the fulfilment of something we want. From this perspective, life's big questions then become: what are your goals? What are you aiming for? Where do you want to be at the end of the day? The key concept you have to master if you really want to take control of your life is that everything you have built so far, for better or for worse, began as a thought, a desire, a hope. Thoughts are powerful creators, capable of forming and shaping our world and the reality in which we live.
The importance of goal setting is not an opinion, but a fact, and has been demonstrated by a great deal of research, such as was carried out at Harvard between 1979 and 1989. Graduates of the 1979 MBA program were asked whether they had established and written down their goals and how they planned to achieve them. Only 3 percent of them had done so, while 13 percent said they had goals but had not written them down. The remaining 84 percent of that year's graduates had no specific goal. Ten years later, in 1989, researchers interviewed the members of that class again, and were able to reveal some surprising data: the 13 percent of former students who had goals but had not written them down, earned, on average, double the earnings of the 84 percent of former students who left college without any particular goals, and those in the 3 percent who had clear, written goals, earned an average of ten times more than all of their classmates.
