One of the annual exercises that I go through each year is goal setting. I hate it. It is closely akin to chewing tin foil. I would rather milk a cobra, but I go through the exercise just the same.

There are four reasons why we do not reach our goals that we set for ourselves in life.

The first reason is that we have been told about goals but not sold about goals. The "selling" part has to do with the payoff. There is an old axiom that says shoot for the stars.

Goal setting is about dreaming. It is about seeing yourself in victory lane. You have to sell yourself on the payoff for the struggle to be worth the investment of time and effort.

There is a line in the bible I like: "If the eye be single, the body is full of life. If the eye be evil, the body is full of darkness." What that tells me is if you know where you are going in life, it is a lot easier to get there.

The great Italian philosopher, Yogi Berra, once observed: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Part of the problem some of us have in life is we take any road before deciding the best path to our dreams.

The second reason we do not accomplish our goals in life is we have not been shown how to set a goal. My late mother, Alice Aun, used to tell me "if you want to be great, you must walk hand in hand and side by side and in the shadows of people who are great and greatness will come unto you."

My mother's father, Elias S. Mack, Sr. once told me, "Find out what the poor people are doing… and then don't do it!" Put another way, find out what successful people are up to and emulate their good habits.

The best way to set a goal is to simply answer these six questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Half the battle is won when you have meticulously defined your goal. Who do you need to help you? What do you want to accomplish? When do you want to get there? Where do you need to turn for help? Why do you want to bother with the goal? How do you plan to reach it?

The third reason we do not accomplish our goals in life is we are afraid we are going to fail. Nobody likes failing, but failure is clearly the process by which we succeed in life. Mistakes are necessary stepping stones to success. I tell my salespeople if you're selling them all you ain't seeing them all. Nobody bats a thousand in baseball, and they don't bat a thousand in life. If surgeons only operated on people they can save, they'd never operate.

Here is an interesting observation. If you put numbers one, two and three in one stack, number four outweighs the rest combined: WE ARE AFRAID WE ARE GOING TO SUCCEED! That's right, people are more afraid of success than they are failure.

Wendy's Restaurants are clients of mine. I love the Wendy's ad that ran years ago. No, not the "where's the beef?" ad. The other ad… "which would you rather have, this big juicy Wendy's hamburger or this frozen piece of beef?" The guy responds, "I'll take the frozen beef because I don't deserve the big juicy Wendy's hamburger." Many of us don't feel we deserve success.

John F. Kennedy was posed a rhetorical question when he ran for President. "Senator Kennedy, would you accept the Vice Presidency today if it were guaranteed as opposed to running for President and possibly losing?" I'll never forget Kennedy's response: "Why should I accept number two when number one is available."

I submit to you that most of us accept second best because we don't feel we deserve to be number one.

Don't sell yourself or your dreams short. God doesn't make junk! As the ad for the US Army used to say: "Be the best that you can be."