Every successful person sets goals and works hard to achieve them. For each of them, it might mean something different. Some might want to buy a house or take care of their loved ones. As time wears on and new dreams and priorities accumulate, it becomes harder to hold to your long-term vision. Here are some principles that I have used to create and achieve goals and contribute to my Gross Personal Happiness.

1. The 10 Principles To Achieve Your Goals
 Life is a discovery; A journey, discovering principles that work
Every successful person sets goals and works hard to achieve them. For each of them it might
mean something different. Some might want to buy a house, or take care of their loved ones. As
time wears on and new dreams and priorities accumulate, it becomes harder to hold to your
long-term vision. Here are some principles that I have used to create and achieve goals and
contribute to my Gross Personal Happiness.
Principle of Visualisation
What you see is what you get. You need clarity to achieve what you want. Such clarity can be
achieved through visualisation. While there are many tools available, the tool that I use is a
vision board. Once you can visualise what you want to achieve, you can go about visualising
long term goals of say 20 years down the line or life-long goals.
COSO framework
I often explore ways to effectively apply risk management principles in our daily life. I tend to
use the underlying principles of an enterprise risk management framework called the COSO
framework for personal prioritization.
While I use the principle of visualization in looking at the possibilities and life dreams, I use the
risk management framework to look at probability of any unforeseen event happening and the
potential impact of the same that would require me to have any course corrections.
Based on the probability and potential impact, you take effective measures to act upon and
prioritize it. An example would be exploring the possibility of a road accident in your living area,
and the precautions you can take such as driving safely and buying insurance to protect
yourself from an unforeseen event.
It is useful in a time of change as well. An example would be explore the arrival of artificial
intelligence in your industry, how soon it could impact your life, and how to prioritise acquiring
the skills to prosper in the short term.
SMART goal setting
Once you are at this stage, you can use the SMART principle to refine your goal setting. The
acronym SMART can be broken down to - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and
Time-based. After setting your SMART goals, the challenge you face is in prioritising what you
would like to do.
Pareto’s Principle
It is useful to use Pareto’s Principle to prioritize your goals. You can look at the people around
you and find the 20% of stakeholders who can impact 80% of your results. Similarly, find the

2. right executors and build a circle of the 20% of people who can bring about positive change.
Think beyond the simple rule that 20% of the activities you perform will give 80% of the results
and apply it to different practices and combinations to find out which will bring in the best
results.
Parkinson's Law
The next principal I follow is Parkinson's Law which states that “The task at hand magnifies itself
to occupy the amount of time available”.
If you have a year to prepare for an exam, it will take a year to cover your syllabus. If you have a
week until the exam, you will cover your syllabus within the week. Using this principle, you can
crunch the amount of time you give to complete a task thereby achieving maximum productivity
in the shortest possible time.
Mentorship
There are times when things are very straightforward and the way is clear and sometimes, we
may lose our way. Times like these are when you need strong mentors to steady yourself.
These mentors could be people you know, characters from books or even a fictional character.
They play a significant role in helping you draw conclusions and inferences or motivation.
Meditation
It is a strong possibility that you will face moments that can overwhelm you. Here, the principles
of Pranayama, breath control or meditation come into play. After all, no matter how bright the
dream, it does not necessarily mean that we will enjoy every moment spent achieving them.
Play, Pay and Purpose
The origin of this principle comes from Neel Doshi’s book, ‘Primed to Perform’. The principal
from the book that made a lot of sense to me was Play, Pay and Purpose. When a combination
of these three occur, then your work will not feel like work. I have applied this principle to my
own life, my family’s and at work.
Learning is now fun for my children who learn from apps, crossing levels and gaining rewards.
For us as adults too, it is easier to help a person develop error proofing skills if they play a
informative crossword puzzle as it keeps them engrossed and engaged while not being too
difficult.
Stay Curious
This principle might seem like a small exercise but can reap big dividends. We are always
curious as kids, but become reticent about asking questions as we get older. Nearly every
problem that we face today has happened to someone else already. Instead of reinventing the
wheel, it is simpler and more effective for us to ask others who have faced the situation and
found a solution.

3. Principle of Leverage
As Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.”
Examine yourself and the things you can leverage. It might be potential, connections, resources
or anything on the outside. Much of this principle and how to use it is mentioned in the book
‘The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth’ by Mark Victor Hansen, and
Robert G. Allen. It details a simple concept called Dream, Theme and Team that helps you
apply the principle of leverage. Think of your dream, set a theme and create a team with similar
passions.
Combining various principles together
Though there are multiple principles as above, we can combine principles to produce a simple
yet surprisingly effective reminder to stay on course.
By now, we would have created a life vision using “Vision Board”, created SMART goals,
identified our mentors, found people and situations to leverage as mentioned earlier.
The principle of Repetition states that performing an action repeatedly allows your brain to
follow patterns and focus easier. By setting your goal as the password, it combines the need for
digital security with the repetition principle to create a strong password that reminds us of our
future goals. For example, ‘HavE2000f0lLowEr$q12019?’ ( Have 2000 followers Q1 2019)
could be a reminder of a goal of our objective while logging into a social media site.
Revisit your goals for each segment of your life on a quarterly basis and change your
passwords accordingly for the greatest impact and security benefits.
Each of these principles has been applied to my own life and experiences. Along the way, much
has happened to pull me off course to achieving my goals. For me, it has often been about
getting rid of distractions and finding ways to make the right choices. Once that was taken care
of , it was necessary to know what to do next. A simple reminder at this stage is to create your
goals, break them into smaller goals and keep to these principles and make them a reality.