The real secret to achievement lies in a question.

“How much do you want it?”

Don’t dismiss this.  In fact, read the question again.

I haven’t achieved every goal I’ve aimed for.  When I look back and ask myself why I didn’t achieve the goals I missed, there is always one answer.  I wanted something else more than I wanted the goal.

Sometimes it’s very justifiable.  I didn’t go to graduate school, because I got pregnant.  True, many graduate students are pregnant and many have small children.  But as a late-in-life first-time parent, I wanted to focus on my pregnancy and my new baby.  I wanted that more than I wanted graduate school.  After that, I was no longer interested in graduate school.   Fifteen years later, I still believe I made the right decision.

Sometimes we have to give ourselves tough love.  I spent many years trying to lose weight.  I desperately wanted to lose weight – – this was no lukewarm desire.  Yet when my blood sugar was a little low and I had the opportunity to plow through a pizza, I wanted the pizza more than I wanted to lose weight.

I eventually had to decide that even when the struggle in the moment was immense, my long-term goal of losing weight was what I wanted more.

They’re just reasons.

The reasons aren’t wrong or right.  They’re just reasons.  We make decisions based on those reasons.

But sometimes we have to probe to understand our real reasons.  I know of a very talented dancer who was told by the “greats” that if she were willing to relocate to a major city, she would probably be very successful.  It was her life-long dream to do just this.

But she was a single mother of two, and believed that she couldn’t uproot her children, and she couldn’t be the parent that she wanted to be if she pursued this dream.

She spent the next several years . . . no, make that decades . . . feeling bitter and unfulfilled.  To this day, she makes sure everyone she meets is aware of the fact that she could have been a world-class famous dancer.

I’m not saying she made the wrong decision.  I wasn’t in her shoes.  After all, didn’t I choose motherhood over another goal at one point in my life?

But the question remains:  how much did she want it?  Obviously she wanted something else more than she wanted the career she had dreamed of.

And if we explore this more deeply, we could even ask if it was actually her children’s welfare she chose over her career aspirations.  Maybe that was part of it.  But maybe something else she really wanted more than she wanted a fabulous dancing career was the safety of staying in her own small town.  She may have wanted the safety of not failing.  As long as she never took the risk, she could always feel in her heart that she “could have been.”  If she tried and failed, she would no longer have that.

What are the real reasons?

So, we’re back to the question:  How much do you want it?

If there’s something preventing you from reaching your goal, what is it, and why is it holding you back?

If you launch into “Well, I can’t because I’d have to relocate/spend a lot of money/quit my job/put my family at risk/blahblahblahblah . . . ”  that’s fine.  Acknowledge that you want whatever is behind those reasons more than you want the goal you speak of, and then move on.

But if you can’t let go of that goal, and if you’re still feeling tormented by it, then maybe it’s time to ask yourself for the real reasons you’re unable to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve your goal.

Seriously.  How much do you want it?