5 steps to get what you want

3. Create an achievable goal
Achievable means being realistic about what's possible. Despite what magazine tabloids promise, you're not going to lose twenty-five pounds in a week. Don't set yourself up for failure by trying something that's not possible. Look at your life and decide what you can reasonably do. That's what Alice did so well. She knows that in her work circumstances, she's not about to become a concert-level player. So she set a more achievable goal -- to learn the guitar well enough to enjoy herself.

4. Make your goal relevant
Relevant means something that matters to you. If you don't really have a good reason for doing this thing, it's too easy to drop it. You've got to know why it's important to you.

5. Give your goal a time limit
Time-bound refers to creating a time in the future when you will be "done." Alice is going to take lessons for six months. Having an end-point puts a structure around what you're doing. It allows you to have something to aim for. Even if this is something you're planning on doing forever, it often helps to put a time boundary around it so that it doesn't feel too overwhelming. Then when you get to the "end," you can sign on again if need be.

When you create a smart goal, you know when you've arrived, which is crucial to creating a sense of satisfaction and completion. Without that sense of completion, it's easy to stay in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction with yourself. This is dangerous because it not only obliterates your actual success but discourages your emotional brain from ever trying to learn anything else. Conversely, when you set a smart goal and achieve it, you not only experience the joy of a job well done, you reinforce your ability to tackle something else.

For practice, look at the difference between two genuine New Year's resolutions I recently heard. Jeff's is "to lose 1-1/2 pounds each month by the year's end." Mort's is "to spend more quality time with my wife, without the kids." Whose is smart? Jeff's. He is specific, measured by a scale, achievable (experts say you can lose one to two pounds per week, so within a month it is certainly doable), relevant (he's refereeing his daughter's soccer matches and wants to be able to run around easily), and time-bound. Conversely, if Mort truly want to enact his resolution, he needs to do some work around getting more specific and measurable.

Stanford professor Carol Dweck discovered something similar when she looked at the difference between those with a growth versus a fixed orientation. When "growth" folks made plans, they included what, where, how, and when in their thinking. "Fixed" orientation planners went on willpower, saying, "I'm just going to do it." Guess which group was more successful?

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Excerpted from This Year I Will... by M.J. Ryan. Copyright 2006 by M.J. Ryan. Excerpted by permission of Broadway. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.