Burn The Ships!

One of the keys to reaching your goals is to eliminate any escape routes. It can be tempting to retreat to safety and comfort when challenges and difficulties arise. To help you avoid turning around and abandoning your goals, you must make going forward more compelling than going back.

When striving towards a goal, you must focus on what you want to achieve and avoid the impulse to go back to what you know and to what is comfortable. When Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico, one of his first orders to his men was to burn their ships. Cortés was committed to his mission and didn’t want to allow himself or his men the option of going back to Spain. By removing this option, Cortés and his men were forced to focus on how they could make the mission successful.

Eliminating an escape route creates a compelling reason to focus on your goal and to keep moving forward. However, it’s important to keep in mind that although Cortés had his men burn the ships, he did not have them burn the food and supplies. Cutting off an escape route to increase motivation and create the desire to press on where you might otherwise give up is totally different to throwing caution to the wind and taking unnecessary risks. Reaching your goals still requires prudent planning and management. All goals contain a certain level of risk, but you don’t need to create unnecessary risk and stress by not planning properly, and lacking the necessary tools and supplies to achieve your goal. It’s important to take risks if you want to grow and achieve things that you haven’t before, but don't be careless or foolish and simply hope that everything will be okay.

Before you decide to burn your ships, make sure you have the supplies and tools necessary to achieve your goal. Something like quitting your job might sound like a good way to close the escape route, but it might also put you in significant financial struggle if you don't have resources to carry you through the tough times. Building up a good level of savings or having a ‘journey job’ (a job that is a stepping stone to what you really want) allows you to take the risk of leaving your current job without creating unnecessary risk.

If your goals are important to you and you really want to achieve them, close off the escape routes and make sure that you have a compelling reason to move forward. But, at the same time, make sure that you plan for the risk and have the tools, supplies and resources you need to achieve your goals. You can't eliminate risk but you can plan for it. Don't just jump in without thinking through the process and having a solid plan for moving forward.