Students ! Be Ambitious and have Focus

Copyright 2006 Lisabeth Protherough
To be ambitious, you need to develop a vision. What are your goals? I don’t mean short-term tasks such as doing your e-mails or cooking your dinner, but rather your visions of the future. When you let yourself dream, who and what are you? Do you want to be known as the person who's always dependable and fair to others? Or would you prefer to be viewed as someone who makes an important, unique contribution to the world?
Whatever your life or career goal, it's hard to achieve it if you do not have vision and focus. You may even allow yourself to become so busy that you forget what you're working for. Deadlines can sometimes take on such a strong sense of urgency that they sabotage your higher aspirations.
Highly ambitious people envision a long-term goal that guides their daily work. They see a connection between what they're doing right now and where they want to be in the future. How do you spend your time? Are you consciously focused on moving your dreams ahead? If you don't have anything you're working towards, you'll have a difficult time expanding yourself beyond your current state.
To become ambitious, first you need goals you wish to achieve. These goals should not be vague desires such as making lots of money or acquiring material possessions. After all, who doesn't want those things? The problem with that sort of focus is that the goal "making lots of money" tells you nothing about how to get there. Although many highly successful people have made lots of money, this outcome was usually not their sole motivation when pursuing their careers. Most often, researchers have found that successful people became that way by doing something they loved and being the best at it. Money wasn't their primary motivation. It was simply the result of their vision and hard work.
Take some time to relax and allow yourself to dream a bit. If you could do anything in the world, what would you love to do? Write down your dream and then write as many steps as you can think of toward attaining it. This part is very important, writing it down makes it much more likely to happen. Now re-word this dream into something you can do. Know that there will probably be obstacles in the path that you've designed. But don't let the gaps in your knowledge hold you back. Every question will have an answer. You simply have to get out there and start asking the right questions. This process can be the first step to realising your dreams.
Remember you need to start off with clearly defined goals. Or in the words of the song from the very old film South Pacific, “You’ve got to have a dream…. If you don’t have a dream… How you gonna have a dream come true.”
Once you have developed your dream, vision or goal, you absolutely must stay focussed. When you are feeling unfocused and scattered, you've taken your eyes off your goal.
To act with focus, take a break, be calm and do some visualisation. Visualize in great detail exactly what you want and imagine having it right now.
When you have in mind the purpose and end result you want, you will resume your activities with amazing focus!
It's not even a matter of how many tasks you do, but of your focus and effectiveness while acting. Most often you don't really need to slow down, but rather just calm down and act in a focused, powerful manner.