by Elder M. Russell Ballard

“I believe you can train yourself to become a positive thinker, but you must cultivate a desire to develop the skill of setting personal worthy and realistic goals. I suppose that at about every seminar or fireside you go to at your age someone talks to you about goal setting. Maybe some of you get weary of listening to the principle of setting goals. But let me tell you something about goal setting. I am so thoroughly convinced that if we don’t set goals in our life and learn how to master the technique of living to reach our goals, we can reach a ripe old age and look back on our life only to see that we reached but a small part of our full potential. When one learns to master the principle of setting a goal, he will then be able to make a great difference in the results he attains in this life.

“I would suggest to you that setting goals is a simple process, but there are two or three things about it you have to learn. I learned in my business career that I could get all excited about a principle, or that I could get all excited about trying to do something, but if I did not write it down and if I did not place it in front of me where I looked at it over and over and over again until it really became part of me, I did not accomplish that goal. I would suggest that if you want to have success in the goal setting process, you learn to write your goals down. I would even put them in a very prominent place–on your mirror or on the refrigerator door. Keep your goals in front of you, in writing. Then, with the desire to reach your written goals, you will be more willing to pay the price that successful goal-oriented people must pay.”

(M. Russell Ballard, “Do Things That Make a Difference,” Ensign, June 1983, 68)