Several years ago, Nike ran a great commercial with the slogan, “Just Do It”. I can’t stress the importance of taking action. Discipline is the key. There’s no better way to describe what you must do next, so I’ll let Nike’s slogan do the work: Just do it.

Go out and take action on the goals you’ve set. There will be days when you don’t feel like it, and there will be many days when it won’t be convenient. Those are the days that you have to decide. You are either going to live with purpose and meaning, or you’re going to be a slave to your feelings and live in mediocrity. Jim Rohn once said, “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons”.

Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza, described the power of action, “A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.” You do not have to be an entrepreneur to be a doer and a person of action. This principle rings true regardless of your profession. So just do it.

As you work through the powerful seven steps outlined in these last several blogs, you will reap numerous benefits. Goal setting will provide a focus on what’s really important in your life, and it will allow you to perform at a higher level.

Zig Ziglar refers to one advantage of goal setting as the ability to free your right brain. In Zig’s book Over the Top, he talks about freeing your right brain. “The best analogy I can give you is the superbly conditioned and gifted athlete who is so disciplined and committed to the fundamentals of the game that he or she is free to be at the creative best. When unique situations arise where the athlete must improvise to make the big play, coaches of gifted athletes will typically say, “You can’t coach that.” Michael Jordan, for example, was confronted a number of times in every game he played with a new situation. It might have been the number of opponents around him, the number of players supporting him close by, the exact distance of the ball from the hoop, or a number of other little things that would make the situations uniquely – even if minutely – different from previously encountered situations. Because Michael was so drilled in the fundamentals of dribbling, passing, shooting, faking, pumping, and looking off, he, with his superb athletic skills, could be creative in the way he handled the truly unique situations that arose.”

Whenever you have the big questions answered in your life, and you are living in discipline, you are allowing your mind the creative freedom it needs to do great things. You are putting yourself in the position to win and win big.