What motivates you? Do you have a goal in mind? What does success means to you? Indeed, living through life with a goal in mind can be moving. Not only do the ins and outs of your action plans consume you, it will also hammer into the true grit you have been holding to make it happen, to matter, or to succeed. There is no better satisfaction than this—achieving long cherished goals and becoming a success out of your own hard work.

Regardless of what you have in mind, it is known fact that your life’s strongest pursuit is that of the realization of your dreams. Your focus is to ensure that you land that dream job or get a promotion, or be successful with your startup business, or simply have a happy family, raise equally successful kids, or be a model citizen in the community. Each one of you is beholden to such challenges. The part when you start to work on the achievement of such goals, however, must start somewhere.

While motivation, personal goals and success are directly correlated, it is imperative to draw out your personal goals before everything. These goals will become your focus to motivate yourself to succeed. Setting personal goals is like turning on a car’s ignition. Motivation, on the other hand, is your way of driving continually and to go through every bump and puddle to ultimately arrive at success, your destination. By correlating these three aspects, you can guarantee facing life’s many challenges without flinching or backtracking.

Personal goals can come in many forms.  It could be academic, career, monetary, physical, creative, or ethical. These goals collectively point to your own domestic goals or how you wish to live life in the future. These personal goals come with two important perspectives—motivation and continuing direction.

To be useful however, experts suggested making your goal-setting SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timed. You need to know exactly what you want to be able to find ways to achieve them. To make sure that you can assess your progress, you need to set certain metrics. Of course, it must be realistic, relevant, and attainable—and to be more effective, a timeline must be set for the achievement of such goals.

But just because you create SMART goals then, that should be enough is a totally erroneous mindset. The world is also moving as you trudge in the realization of those goals. With this, you need to assess and re-assess your personal goals every step of the way. You need to check if such goals are still relevant or if you are still on the right track. In some cases, what you felt was of utmost importance before could no longer be as relevant due to sudden shifts in your life, job or business. If there is a need to rehash, improve or completely change them, then do so.

Goals must be solid enough to be able to move you, stimulate you to carry on, excite you. When these three concepts – goals, motivation and success—are properly aligned, you are definitely on the way for greatness.