Goals should be established, and goals should be written.  If no goal is set, how would you ever know when you’ve arrived?  No one ever achieved success who did not first set his sights upon a goal.  When goals are written, the goals are striven for, and are more likely to be achieved.

For example, my friend, Tracie, as a teenage girl, was given a lesson in her Young Women’s class on goals.  As an exercise, to reinforce the lesson, each girl was asked to write a letter to her 25-year-old self telling herself what she wanted to have accomplished by that age.

Tracie wrote her letter.  She stated that she wanted to graduate from high school, attend Brigham Young University, graduate from BYU, marry at the age of 22 or 23, and to marry an Oregon logger.  She saved the letter, found it one day after she’d turned 25, and was astounded to find that she had achieved every goal.  She had graduated from both high school and BYU, and had gotten married at 22 ½ to a young man from Oregon who owned a trucking business with his father which included log trucks.

Tracie is certain that she achieved those goals because they were written.

My father had some goals.  His were:

1. To raise a good family.
2. To establish a successful ranch.
3. To live to be 80.
4. To become a millionaire.

He raised a fine family.  He died at age 87 ½.  He didn’t become a millionaire in the sense that he had unlimited money to spend, but he put together a ranch which in today’s dollars would be worth several millions of dollars.  He reached his goals.

Some years ago I wrote down the goals that I would like to achieve by the time I turn 75.  Those were:

1. Be debt-free (achievable by paying $2,500 per month instead of the requisite $1,008 on our real estate loan).
2. Have read the Book of Mormon 75 times (once for each year of my life, a goal that I will actually achieve at age 72 by maintaining my current pattern of reading three chapters per day, finishing it four times per year).
3. Weigh 175 pounds.

Yesterday (29 November 2016) it occurred to me that I should perhaps exercise some faith and modify those goals.  I have selected the date of 30 June 2018 as my completion date.  I will have turned 71 years of age three months before that date.  I select that date because the one-hundredth general conference that I hope to index will have taken place the previous April.  By the end of June I will have had time enough to index that conference and to have completed the books that are dependent upon having the contents of that conference included in them.

My goals are:

1. Be debt-free (I see how this might be possible, but this is the item that requires an exercise of faith).
2. Complete my Index to 50 Years of General Conference.
3. Complete Danny’s Book, Volume VI, which set of books will include every story given in those 50 years of general conference.
4. Complete 71 readings of the Book of Mormon (one reading for each year of my life). This becomes achievable if I boost my daily reading from three chapters per day to four. This goal is just 19 months away.  I will have to finish the Book of Mormon 10 more times in those 19 months.  By reading four chapters per day, each reading will take two months.
5. Weigh 175 pounds. I currently weigh 182. The extra weight is in my belly, and I don’t like it.  By not eating sugar, and by watching my portions I have taken off a pound per week in the past.