I would really like to thank mishka and Unis for their posts on this thread. It is very encouraging. I am reading a lot of Napoleon Hill right now and so much of what is jumping of the page at me is this same theme: have a definite purpose (mission statement, or begin with the end in mind, ala Stephen Covey etc).
I think one thing that helps me as I read Hill's books and this thread is the idea that something is better than nothing. I.e. Have SOME definite purpose. Just pick something, anything. Try for something that you can feel passionately. One can always change it later! It may even change on its own.
I seem to remember something I learned in a Marshall Thurber "Money & You" seminar back around 1982. He was teaching something from R. Buckminster Fuller, may his memory and teaching always be for blessing. And it was this idea of goals creating what I think he called "vector energy". I.e. having a goal create forward motion and then as the "wheel turns" as it were, the goal may change to something even better, clearer, more appropriate, whatever. But without the initital goal, there would have been no momentum to get closer to something better.
For me at least, this is very helpful and liberating, because I am one of those people having difficulty in making focused goals for all kinds of reasons. But reading this thread, the Hill books and remembering this teaching from Bucky Fuller, I realize that goals are also tools, just as means are! There is nothing written in stone, nor need there be. But the more definite the purpose, the more that momentum begins and the "magnetic power" of the Law of Attraction, will begin to put the "wind at our backs". Now there's a mixed metaphor for you!
