i'm jordan belfort and this is sales school i want to talk to you today about the relationship of goals and vision this is really important because i got to tell you um i'm in the midst of reviewing some really old footage that i shot for the certification program and there was some point that i came up with that was it was so profound and really i can't believe i haven't spoken about this with you guys ever and it really you know has to do of what happened to goals like what went wrong like you know
just you understand that before 1960 no one ever spoke about goals it was not even like the vernacular you know maybe it was a very small pocket of people who would read thinking were rich but it was no in no way the mainstream that people would say i'm a goal-oriented person it was far outside of the mainstream right it wasn't part of the vernacular what happened was in in nineteen at 60 there was a record an actual vinyl record released by a guy named earl nightingale called the greatest secret and it was this incredibly profound
um recording he made and it's basically this booming voice and it actually paved the way for the company nightingale conan which makes all these self-help tapes but what it was basically was that you know he talked about like that you are what you think about and he took some of the polling hills teachings and he just was very charismatic it was just a great way of explaining stuff that you all want to think about and and then the cornerstone point he made was that there was a study in yale university that in 1940 of the
entire graduating class for only five percent of the graduating class of yale had set goals and those five percent had outperformed all the rest of 95 combined and that was the thesis that started us the greatest secret that you know you're becoming a goal-oriented person to you all what you think about and it was like people like wow i mean the five percent outperformed the rest well as it turned out it was [ __ ] it wasn't true it was like folklore it never actually happened there was no study it was just it wasn't true
right but the interesting thing was is that it started this whole you know trend towards goal setting and and you know empowered thinking and hurrah it was a great thing and through the 60s and 70s it became this big explosion of a new way of thinking it led to the self-development movement in the 80s and so forth with dr bamlin nlp right but here's what happened like anything else you know like the power of something an idea is in the language like you know goal it was just [ __ ] i'm a goal setter i'm
a goal-oriented person well what happened was is over the years that has lost its power entirely everyone's a [ __ ] goal setter everyone they say [ __ ] goals on you know if you look at any resume goal oriented succeeder it's [ __ ] nonsense it basically became a buzzword for mediocrity people set goals they don't take them seriously they hardly ever try to enforce them they don't set goals the right way and the whole idea of being a goal-oriented person is like a passport to nothing it doesn't mean it's not it's a matter
anymore right the modern way the effective way of really understanding the importance of goals because goals are [ __ ] crucial you have to have goals but the only way your goals have power is if there's a vision for your future that sits atop the goals in other words you're back in the day when someone set a goal it was like there's an emotional investment it was almost like your goal was almost like your vision back in the days of early early earl nightingale was almost like a goal was almost like your vision for the
future it wasn't like the way we think of goals now as a beginning date and end date there's weekly goals monthly goals the annual right it was very different it was a big deal and had this emotional visceral connection to go out and achieve what we wanted our goal was to live a certain type of life and that's really more of a vision nowadays we talk about empowered thinking it's really about vision to have a vision for your future that truly makes you jump out of bed in the morning and seize every day and then
what happens is that that vision is far off it's like three to five years out in the future and what happens is if you try to just focus on something so distant it's very difficult to sort of make it real in your life every day so what we do and the way this starts to really make sense is we connect ourselves to our vision the big v up here we connect ourselves to a series of goals so imagine watch this is where you are this is where you are today your vision represents where you want
to be at three years or five three to five years now right that's your vision so what your goals are all these little signposts stopping off points along the way they're almost like directional mechanisms that tell you am i headed in the right direction or am i headed in the wrong direction in terms of my future you
