A highly successful and very rich man happened to see a fellow sitting under a tree and doing nothing. "Don't you want to work?" asked the rich man.
"What for?" asked the lazy fellow.
"To earn lots and lots of money." explained the rich guy.
"Then what?" asked the lazy bum.
"When you have tons of money you don't have to work at all for the rest of your life" exclaimed the rich guy.
"What do you think I'm doing now?" asked the lazy chap with a grin.
The point of the story is each one has to set his own goal and success is one way of measuring how near you are in reaching the goal. Setting goal is the first step.
Goals are of two kinds: Short term goals are those you can achieve in a short time; long term goals take longer to realise.
Taranath Shenoy is a good swimmer. He set a goal to to cross the English Channel. When he reached England to swim across the Channel he was stopped by the officials who found him underweight. To attempt the Channel swim, the swimmer must have a minimum weight. So Taranath returned home and started eating lots of boiled eggs and drinking milk as never before. Soon he had put on the necessary weight. He went back to England and swam the Channel.
Of course, in case of girls who want to compete in a beauty contest losing weight may be more important.
Gaining weight or losing weight is a short term goal. To Taranath swimming the Channel was the main goal. To Aishwarya Rai, taking part in the Miss World Contest was the main goal. A still higher goal was to win the title which she did. To reach this finishing point she set for herself a number of goals like maintaining a low body weight, developing conversation skills, improving her general knowledge so that she could answer questions and so on.