A Saints Journey

From Goals To Vision: Fuel Your Ambitions

• KENDAWIZ

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Ever feel like your resolutions collapse under their own weight? We’re flipping the script with a simpler, stronger approach: pick a clear yearly motto, define your vision with specificity, and let ambition fuel consistent steps instead of chasing a perfect transformation. This is about trading pressure for direction and building a life that learns.

We unpack the difference between goals, vision, and ambition—why a goal names the destination, vision refines the kind of work you want to do, and ambition supplies the energy to keep going when motivation dips. We talk about the trap of comparison, the Tekken-style urge to switch to “easy mode” after a few losses, and how to turn failure into feedback. You’ll hear why writing your plan down matters, how mentors and rooms shape your ceiling, and what it takes to show up without the cloud of negativity that drives allies away.

By the end, you’ll have a practical path: choose a motto that fits your season, get specific about the version of success you’re after, and break the climb into visible steps you can repeat daily. We lean into gratitude, personal responsibility, and the long game—one stair at a time—while keeping an eye on legacy and the people who come after us. If you’ve been waiting for permission to start small and stay consistent, this is it.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend who’s on the climb, and leave a quick review so more people can find it. What’s your motto for the year ahead?

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for coming with me in the episode. Yeah, I'm gonna get a beast back. The drinal pumping through my veins can't read it. Welcome back, guys. Welcome back. We made it. We made it through another week. Another long trying week. I want to say that's a win in everybody's books. I always like to reiterate that it's a blessing to see a new day every day. To experience something that is new and different. We have a choice to make a difference within our lives. We have a chance to fix mistakes that we did yesterday. So if you're waking up still carrying yesterday's problems, you have to let it go. You have to let things go because what's the point of holding on to something that's literally in the past? What is done is done. And to live each day carrying burden and carrying baggage, that's exhausting. So take each day, pay attention to the moment, and understand that you have one more time to make a difference for you and the people that's around you. So that's my opening statement. I'd always like to start off with just allowing people to take some time for themselves and know who you are as a person. Know that as an individual we can make a difference if we decide to and want to. Not everybody has that uh mentality, which is fine. That's what makes us all different, and that's what makes us unique. So, guys, today I feel like with all that I've said, I think this would be a good way of starting the end of the year because now we have less than 31 days in December to finish out the year with the bang, right? We want to write down our new year's resolutions and start new trends and become a better self, and that's all good, and that works for some people, but not everybody. So instead of New Year's resolutions, let's try New Year's. Well, I'm not New Year's, New Year models. M-O-T-T-O. I've started doing this a few years back, and it has helped me not necessarily just be um a better person because that's what we all strive to be is a better person, but to not put so much stress on the things that it is hard for us to do, and usually that's habits, that's mentality, that's you know, environmental troubles, whatever that might be. So let's try out what models, a main idea, a slogan, so to say. So I'm gonna start it off. I talked in my last podcast, my last episode about purpose. So that's what I am going into 2026 with a purpose in mind, purpose-driven, purposeful ideas. Because we want to make sure that every decision that we make it has a main idea to it that has to have something of substance, and um, you know, like me and everybody else, it's really hard because we have no vision. So today's topic is going to be goals and vision, which is kind of the same thing, but not really, and if I can maybe aka the vision ambitions, right? So to have a goal means to work towards something, a common interest, uh the end result. Some people want to become a lawyer, some people want to become a doctor, some people want to become a chef. Those are the goals, those are the end goals, right? The ambitions or the vision is what type of lawyer, what type of chef, what type of doctor, right? Make sense when we try to focus on the specifics of things. Now we're really zeroing in on the aspect of who we are as a person, as a base person, like what are our skill sets and things of that such? And to be able to really identify that is a skill within itself, to be honest, because you really sat there and thought about what am I? What is Ken? What can Ken offer to somebody, and so that really just comes into the notion of you understanding, okay, well, now I have to work to say go to accomplish that. Now the ambition is the drive, it's the ability to make it happen, the energy towards that vision, right? And so let's back up. So I mean, really hone in on the not really the goal, but the vision, aka ambition, because that's I think where we all kind of lack um as a people. Um, you have, I mean, we can be racist and say, you know, a lot of Asians are built on uh ambition because somebody else already chose their goal, right? As far as uh African American community, we have goals, but we don't have the ambition, and then you got some some hybrids out there where they have both, you know, they was instilled um purpose, they seen examples, uh, they understood what it took to get to that say job or you know um freedom of such. So always I like to put myself in this situation because it's an easier way for me to explain things. So for me, I've always had the goal of something to accomplish whatever I felt like I wanted to accomplish, and the realm of goals changes through time. Because I mean, let's face it, what we felt when we were young kids, you know, our mentality, our mind, it's not the same now as an adult, because now we allow real life situations to embark in our mind, and I'm talking about make rounds and rounds of just really not really fully grasping, you know, the normality of just following along in life and knowing that it's okay to change and it's okay to you know allow yourself to grow, whatever that might mean at that point in time, because you know, we lose and we win. And to some people don't even know that they even won a battle because they're still zeroing on the negativity of whatever is happening in their life, and so they haven't really moved past the fact that okay, um, can I can I really heal from this situation to focus on me and to focus on my vision to get to my say go? That's a hard thing to do, you know. Because, you know, we have deaths, we have relationship issues, we have personal issues that we haven't let go, we have regret, misery. I mean, it's it's a slew of things on that list that can stop us from really accomplishing what we need to do. But look, I mean, we can't beat ourselves up, guys. We really can't allow ourselves to succumb to whatever the negativity is that's going on in our lives at that time. But easier said than done, right? So I would like to say to you, if you're listening to the sound of my voice, understand that there's always something better for you. And that ambition, that vision that you are striving for, that specific thing that you want to accomplish. No, it is very much possible, but you gotta get out your way. Because sometimes it isn't the problem that's the problem, it's the individual that's allowing that problem to be a problem. Really just comes down to choices. Can we finally understand that vision and ambition comes with positive choices? Focusing on one thing and not worrying about outside distractions, and and then it's fine for your goals to change. Don't say that you have failed yourself, don't demean yourself to thinking that I have failed to accomplish something that I've been wanting to do all my life. Because I don't know if this ever happened to you, but it has happened to me multiple times where you strive for something, right? Let's just say for me, I was playing a game and I want to learn this one, you know. I'm playing like Tekken, right? And I want to learn one specific player's moves, right? But that specific player's moves is so complex because of the fighting style that they have, and so you give up because you see somebody else mastered that person, so you go to another person who's easier to use, and their moves is you know very basic. But guess what? When you saw that person use the person that you wanted to use, and you saw how complex that person is, you decided to give up because they beat you numerous times, and you felt that you wasn't, you know, smart enough, or you didn't want to put the time in to really learn that say person, and you decided to not even try again, and so you take the easy role out. That's what we do in life. We decide, you know, our vision and our goal becomes too much that we feel or we tell ourselves internally to give up, and there and there's not a way for you to strive to become that. Now, the goal hasn't changed, the goal is still the same, but your vision and your ambition about yourself has become weaker. Now it was strong in the beginning because you were excited, you was feeding it, you was fueling it, and you was just like, yo, you know, I don't I don't think this is for me anymore because I see somebody else that's doing it way better than me. Yo, why do we do that to ourselves? Why do we feel that we aren't worthy of something because we see somebody else doing the same thing that you're doing? Understand that you are different than that person, so what your take and what your vision can be, you know, the same, yeah. But you could be something different for another person to see because you can actually came from you know a similar background, or you know, been in a in a similar social, you know, gathering that you see a lot of these people that have achieved the same thing. There's so many doctors, there's so many lawyers, there's so many chefs. If that was the case, right, why are these people so successful? It's the same job, it's the same occupation. So, why do you feel that you aren't worthy of accomplishing that goal? That's crazy, that's ludicrous. Because I mean, if if everybody has a different interpretation, there's there's no one right or one wrong answer. You know, making bad decisions is part of life. Making irrational decisions is a choice. Because sometimes you you know that you're about to make a rash decision. I mean, it's about to be so radical that it can shape the definition of who you are as a person, it can really tarnish your outlook on things, and this has nothing to do with you know, status or race or um whatever. This is a root thing, and I talk about all the time when it comes down to your environment, you know, your social gathering, the people that you hang around with. It's it's not it's not bad to associate yourself with different types of people because within different types of people come different types of ideas and innovation, but never try something once and expect it to work out the first time. Bad decisions come with life, bad experiences come with life. But when you make a choice to say, oh, you know what? My name's Ken, and I don't think I deserve that. I don't I don't think I deserved all the time and effort and mental brain power that I put in into this situation or into my goal to really give up. That vision is your vision, that ambition is your energy to fuel it. You can't have one without the other. Again, you're trying to meet that goal and understand. Hey, look, once you hit that goal, man, you better make another one. Because I mean, it's it's it's gonna be a very lonely road out here of you just you know not wanting to become better. Because as you as human beings, we are selfish and we are greedy, right? You have you have individuals who somehow mastered that and are good at balancing, all right. You know, I'm a man to say that I'm not good at that that part yet, but I mean I'm getting there. I I am good at identifying the problems, I'm not good at the initiation process of it, right? Because we feel that if we do something, failure is what keeps us away, and and and honestly, that's a really bad situation to be in. Failure teaches us so much, and I myself have struggled with that as well, you know, just really understanding what you can learn and how failure can be your best teacher. I I would like to, you know, illustrate one thing. Like when it comes down to failure on your vision, not the Goal because see the goal is a completely separate entity from this, but when you have failure on your vision, it really haunts you sometimes because now you're looking at yourself as a failure and you're embarrassed, and the lack of ambition becomes stunting. It's like a it's like an overlooming shadow that just never leaves you alone, and you know that really derives from your inability to push through that adversity, your way of looking at it, your your outlook on things. You can't beat yourself up because you had that one, two, three, four, five, six times of failure. Some of the most brilliant people in this world, in our history, had more failures than we can all count. Was the bit the biggest person, I guess we all would know as a global icon would be Michael Jordan. That man failed so many times, but he became one of the pivotal pillars in basketball history, and still today tries to tell the younger generation sometimes you have to work hard, fail, fall in your butt a lot of times, not just a little bit, a lot of times to become the brand name, to become the person that you want to be, because without that failure, what is the lesson that we taught ourselves? Because there's always lessons in everything that we all do, and that ambition is fueled by those failures, believe it or not, because you don't want to continue to be something that you feel that you would be embarrassed for, and talking to myself on that one, that's a hard pill to swallow, and it's it's not one to be taken lightly. Because if you allow that that shadow, that that cloud to overtake you, it will literally cloud your vision, and you will forget your goal, and then you will turn into a person that is always looking at other people's success and other people's visions and other people's goals that they have have accomplished themselves. And you start to hate on them, you start to demean them, you start to talk about them, you start to look at them as like, oh, you think you're better than me. And all the while, you're not talking to them, you're talking to the lack of ambition and the vision that you allow somebody else to take. Because that same goal that you had, somebody else is gonna step into that light, believe it or not. You can't allow yourself to be weak-minded when it comes to that. If you have something in your heart, you have to accomplish it. And the selfishness that comes with that stems from the inability to push forward. Now, the understanding, too, that we all have to really kind of come to terms with we are our own critic, we will beat ourselves up before somebody else will. We see our failures first before somebody else will, and guess what? How can a person see your failure? How can a person on the outside of your mind see your failure? See what you lacked, see what you messed up on, see what the vision that you set out wasn't accomplished. How can they see that from you? They see it on your face, they see it via body language, they see it through your your complaining, they see it through your inconsistency, they see it through your embass your embarrassment, your your lack of of drive to your goal, and now you're teaching other people to treat you, how to treat you, because we can only mirror what we think. What goes on in our mind every single day is a testament to how we feel about ourselves, and it's not an easy thing to do to keep on the reps. This is where mentors and you know, like-minded individuals that surround you, you know, your spirituality comes into focus. Because we can't do it by ourselves, guys. We can't. The only thing we can do by ourselves is is is make a goal, understand our ambition, understand our our vision. I'm sorry, understand our vision and write down our goals. You have to find the information, you have to outsource that information because this information obviously is not inside you, right? Because this is a goal that we're working towards, so that means it's it's a lack of knowledge towards something that we haven't gotten yet. So you have to seek out this knowledge. So when you're seeking out this knowledge, you are you know um putting yourself into environments that you wasn't at before. So when you're meeting different individuals who have who's already in it and who has already accomplished that, these individuals are not going to hang around you when you have in this doom and gloom cloud over you, when you're negative about every single thing. They're gonna look at you as a person that is hindering their growth now. You don't want to be a hindrance to somebody else's blessing because you hate them. And you best believe they're gonna boot you out that club, too, by the way. They're not gonna have you just hanging around there, negative Nancy, negative Nick. They're not gonna do that. They're gonna boot you out, man, because they don't need that type of energy around them. It's already hard enough that they're fighting against their own self. To have somebody else outsource their negativity, and man, no, that's not gonna work. So you have to you have to understand that if you're going to put yourself in these situations, if you're going to strive for something, you're also opening yourself up to be vulnerable, and other people is gonna look straight through you because guess what? They went through the exact same thing that you're going through right now. So you cannot say that what you're going through is only you. Everybody has setbacks, but it's what you do and strive for that can push through that wall, and you can see the sunshine on the other side, and you will have to keep doing that over and over and over and over again until you die. That will literally be the time when you stop. So you have to take your vision, aka ambition, and you have to fuel it by studying, by like-minded individuals. You have to seek it out, you have to outsource everything, and then what you do, you call you compartmentalize that, you organize it, you have to write it down. Me, it took me so long to know how to write stuff down, like oh Ken, you know, why don't you write anything down, bro? Why everything is abstract? Because I felt like you know, if I have everything in my head, I can I I can, you know, I could organize it better. And no, you know what that was? That was me saying, I don't want other people to know what I'm thinking. I don't want anybody else to to judge me or to say that what I want to do is wrong. Right? To come out at to come out as a different person, you have to get out your own comfort zone. That that that vision is what allows you to open up that door to uncomfortableness. To be uncomfortable means you're learning now, you're in the realm of the unknown. So now you're about to have a whole new experience that you've never had before. So you can't really say that at the end of the day, oh I know it. Pistosh McIntyre. A load of baloney. Because you can't, you don't know everything. We're born with hardly no knowledge. The only knowledge that we have is who we see when we first come into this world, and that is our parents, and based off of our parents, we learn what they know, but once we leave that house, guess who it is up to to figure it out for the rest of the way? Ding ding ding. Yes, you. So there's no excuse to say, oh, I don't know. Oh, what? You mean to tell me that was like that the whole time? Come on now. What type of excuse is that to yourself? Why would you fail yourself like that? That is a selfish mentality towards you and others. So, what we try to do every single day is strive to be better. And and and and don't overload yourself either. That's the other key thing. You do not overload yourself, you don't have you you will okay, you can have multiple goals, but don't look at the whole goal tree, don't do that to yourself. Why? Because if you're looking at the whole goal tree, you are not focused on nothing. You will live in abstract, you will live in procrastination, and you will also live in the cell in the sense of accomplishments, unaccomplished goals. Because it's it's it's it's a brawl thing, you know. It's so it's so big, so you're you're not zeroing in, you're not focused on anything. You if we're going into a building and there were no elevators, right, and you're looking at all the stairs in that building, and you just look at it and you're just like, yo, that that that joint is high, yo. Like, I can't get up there. But the but the stairs are in front of you. How can we get to the top floor, guys? One step at a time, and that's how you have to look on life. Why do I start out each podcast with giving thanks that we made it through the other through another week? Because Monday to Saturday, and even to Sunday, that's a step. That's a day that we made through to understand that we can get to the next day and give thanks because you yourself have not gotten yourself up. We don't give ourselves the breath of life. There's a higher power that does that. So you have to give thanks to that higher power because without him, we are not alive. So it is within your ability and within your best interest to make the most out of each day, and when you're looking at the whole gold tree, you break things up into pieces and you strive for that goal. Once that goal has accomplished, you take that goal and you go to the next exert. Because, see, now you are building momentum, and that momentum will propel you into avenues and into places into a mental high that you have never experienced before. I can guarantee you that. Goals are important, but the steps to get to that goal is even more. Enjoy the moment, enjoy the process, and understand your ambition for success, and that could be for yourself, that could be towards your family, that could be towards your future generations. Never leave the last generation the same. You left your parents, your parents already accomplished what they feel like they need to accomplish, or they have it, and they're still striving to be better. Our peoples, our close-knit family, our close-knit friends can be a curse and a blessing. And guess what? However, you look at it, can both of them can also be good. A curse can be a lesson taught of what not to do, and then the blessing can be what you already know, and you're using that momentum to propel you to the next stage in your life. So, I will end it on this. If you fail, that's on you. If you win, that's also on you. You cannot allow failures to dictate you saying you're worthless. You use failures as the fuel to become a better you. All right, so it's your boy, Ken Dewiz, and I'm signing out. Peace.