Minimum, Target, and Outrageous Goals

Raymond Aaron in his book “Double Your Income Doing What You Love” breaks life down into six pathways, and then sets out a simple but highly effective system for you to set goals in all six categories every month. Using his MTO system, he teaches you how to set each goal at three levels—Minimum, Target, and Outrageous—so that you can always have some level of success (and often it is the Outrageous success of your dreams). As you follow his powerful system, you will find yourself beginning to achieve measurable successes, month by month. When you track your successes, you will see yourself begin to move ever closer to fully creating, and then living, the life you want—the life of your dreams.

1. Set goals and record them. By setting goals you are already ahead of the game. Most people don’t know where they’re heading and so they can’t get there. Writing goals is a powerful signal to yourself that you intend to achieve them. The feelings invoked by this process call into motion the law of attraction, which starts to operate to get things done with and for you.

2. Do what you love. Why do you love certain things and not others? Do we, in fact, have a `life mission,’ as many writers suggest, or do we actually choose our experience from a smorgasbord of possibilities? Aaron assumes the former (I don’t entirely agree, but this is a topic for another time) and suggests that you should focus your energies doing only what you love since this is where your passion is and when you pour your passion out, the law of attraction starts to work with you and things start happening.

3. Delegate what you don’t love. The reason people procrastinate is because they don’t want to do the things they’re putting off. Although we’ve been taught that procrastination is a bad thing, in fact it is a signal that our energies are being focused in the wrong place. To get around this problem, Aaron suggests that we need to delegate tasks we don’t like to others (who may well like them). Like a lot of good ideas, our modern puritanical work ethic gets in the way and we start worrying about laziness and `passing the buck.’ These are not, in fact, terrible sins, but delegation doesn’t imply laziness anyway, it implies using our energies more effectively. Why do something you hate when you can get someone else (who doesn’t hate it and may even love it – yes, it takes all sorts to make a world) to do it for you? For me, this was the most important lesson to be gleaned from the book.

4. Develop in a holistic way. Aaron divides his areas for goal setting into six `pathways,’ which he abbreviates by using the acronym MAINLY. They are:

(a) Cleaning up a Mess
(b) Acknowledging something (showing gratitude)
(c) Increasing wealth
(d) Trying something New
(e) Learning something
(f) Doing something for Yourself

Aaron suggests that you cover these areas every month. These are good suggestions in that they are specific areas for setting goals and taking action, though other ways of dividing things up might work as well. I use a four-fold way of thinking about things – money, success, relationships and happiness.

5. Celebrate success. One of Aaron’s points seems to be that if you `lower the bar,’ you can enjoy success much more easily, and this makes you feel good, spurring you on to greater things. He suggests using an `MTO’ approach – set a minimum target (which you are almost certain you will achieve, something you’ll probably do anyway), a medium target (more of a stretch) and an outrageous target. Achieving lots of little goals over a long period will all add up to make a big difference and will also probably lead to the bigger being achieved, at least now and again.

Aaron also suggests writing goals as if they have already been achieved. He invites his reader to imagine themselves at the end of the year, writing a letter of congratulations to their past self for having achieved the goals that were set. This `annual backwards goals’ process has the benefit of making you feel as if you have already achieved the goals and hence invoking the law of attraction in a more powerful way.

6. Record goals in the right way. We’ve heard of SMART targets – Aaron takes this idea and slightly changes it as a result of his `groundbreaking research’ (something of an exaggeration – what he describes is neither groundbreaking nor research in any real sense), suggesting that goals should have specific characteristics. Goals should

(a) have a deadline
(b) be measurable (e.g. go to the gym ten times this month)
(c) be brief
(d) state the intended result and not the means of getting there
(e) be stated in a positive way, not as something you are going to negate
(f) state the total number of times, not stated as (e.g.) x times per month

That goals should be well written is a point well taken, but it is down to the reader to decide whether or not to adopt this system.

Aaron goes into great detail about setting and recording goals and seems to over complicate things with a stack of forms which have to be completed in just the right way and a scoring system for assigning numbers to the completion of various goals. For people who love making lists, this might be a very motivating thing, but it will not appeal to others, whom I suspect may just find the whole process a chore. When goal setting becomes a chore, of course, that’s when you’re not going to get anywhere.

The book is worth a read and I certainly got something out of it.

Source: Double Your Income Doing What You Love: Raymond Aaron’s Guide to Power Mentoring

MTO method to achieve goals (scales: minimum, target, outrageous)
How to stop procrastination? delegating to others what you don’t like.
How to increase your incomes? each mess is a lock to be rich and increase your finances goals.
what is more effective to learn from: yourself, friends or mentors?