5 Reasons Why You’re Not Achieving Success and How to Change That

Falling into the trap of believing you’re not achieving success is more frequent than you think. The good news is that you probably are. The problem is that very often we don’t know ourselves what does success look like.  

Just like travelling, success needs to have a destination. If you set a goal you want to achieve, you will be able to outline the steps you need to take, and therefore you will find yourself in a position you can track the success easily. 

Determining the goal is not just a long term solution – it also addresses many short-term challenges you face.  

There are basically 5 reasons why you’re not achieving success, even if you work towards a goal you set. Not achieving it is what discourages you the most, makes you burn out and stop working over other goals that carry as much weight. It is important not to give up, however. Sit back and reflect on your failure instead, analyze what didn’t work and improve on that. 

To help you determine what went wrong, we have listed the said reasons of not achieving success for you. 

1. The goals you’ve set are too vague 

Setting broad goals is not a way to go about things. Coming up with something like “I want to be a Fortune 500 business” when you start a company will never let you build a clear action plan. To reach your goals you need to outline them a whole lot more specifically.  

Having specific goals is what makes your life easy as they already have an answer within. The goal itself tells you the course of action to take. So, instead of saying “I want to be a Fortune 500 business’, set a goal to ‘I want to become known locally by getting 3 local customers in weekly”. 

Not only is this goal more realistic, but with specific information in mind you ave a start point for your actions. 

 2. You don’t measure your goals

 You will never know if you’re achieving success unless you’re tracking it. And to do that you need to make your goal measurable. If you can’t do it, that goes back to the first point – it is not specific enough. 

For example, a goal of “I want to make money” won’t be easy to track. Your business may bring you money, but it will also eat a chunk of it, if not all of it. And, at the end of the day, you haven’t made money although you’ve convinced yourself you have.  

However, if you set a goal to “make £5000 a month after having paid bills”, your success will be an easy one to track. 

Also, seeing your progress and how you’re slowly closing in to achieving the goal will surely fill you up with the motivation of moving forward. 

3. Your goals are not realistic. 

It’s not wrong to dream or be ambitious. Ambition is why people start business. However, aiming too high in a saturated space will end up bringing more harm than good. From burn outs to dissatisfaction with yourself, unrealistic goals set you up for a failure. 

Achieving success is based around real goals. The ones you can achieve.  

For example, an unrealistic goal would be “I want to be featured in Forbes within next month”. The bar is too high, especially if you’re a local business that struggles to stay afloat. This is an ambitious goal that is great to have in a very, very long run, but it should become your focus. 

Instead, a more realistic goal would be “I want to be featured in a local newspaper next month”. It again dictates a simple course of action – pick up the phone and get in touch with your local paper. Chances are, they are dying to write about you. 

4. Your goals are irrelevant  

Sometimes we confused dreams and wishes with goals. For example, you may decide your goal is to move your business to Spain, because you love Spain. Sure, you would be much happier in Spain as it is your favorite country. But would business benefit from that? 

When you are setting a goal, always ask yourself how would that contribute towards achieving success.  What is the purpose of the goal and does it move you further down to road on the overall plan for the business? If you can’t answer that, don’t waste your time on the said goal.  

Instead of moving to Spain because you love it, you should base the goal on moving to a location that will have more opportunities to your business, even if you may not like it as much. 

5. You did not give your goal a timeframe

You need to give your goal a deadline. Being pressured by one will make you work harder towards achieving it and keep you motivated in a long run. Our brain works in such way it rewards us when we reach something in a certain timeframe, even if you set the said timeframe yourself. 

Instead of saying “I want to have more visitors” try saying “I want 50% more visitors within three months”. Now you have the number you want to achieve and how much time you’re giving yourself to do that. Once again, it is all about being specific. 

It’s also important to remain realistic. You’re not likely to get 50% more visitors within a week per say, no matter how motivated you are.