Analyze Your Sticking Points

Some things are going to be harder than others, right? It’s one thing to put aside a bit of money every week in the spring, but quite another to keep saving in the months before Christmas, or while you’re on vacation. It’s easy to persuade your sister to host the big family event, but persuading your divorced parents to both attend is in a whole different league. Meeting your performance targets at work should be doable, but carrying off that presentation smoothly is a far bigger challenge.

When you look through the list (that you’ve now written down so you can look through it), certain things are going to jump out at you as being much harder than others. These are the ones you need to focus on. I say this because your instinct is often to do the opposite—to ignore them and hope they’ll go away. But if you’re going to get what you want, you must focus on them. They are the key things that stand between you and what you want.

Look, if you can just overcome these difficulties, you’re almost home. So put your efforts into thinking about how you can get around these obstacles more than any others. Work out where the problem is, what it will take to resolve it, and how you can master that.

Anyone can turn up if they’re invited for an interview after responding to a job posting. But suppose your dream company isn’t advertising and you have to ask for a meeting? That’s the bit that’s going to be hard. Is there any way to do it without asking directly, if that seems just too scary? Do you have a mutual contact? Can you write instead of calling? Or turn up at an event and introduce yourself? Don’t sidestep the issue because you don’t want to address it, or you’ll never get what you want.