Construct Action Plans Based on Evaluating Barriers Goals are more effective when a systematic action plan guides the athlete toward reaching them (Locke & Latham 1990). Many great athletes recognize the value of planning how they will achieve their goals For Michael Johnson, the world-record holder at 200 and 400 meters, planning is a must: You must understand, I am not by nature a day dreamer. I try to control those parts of my life that can be controlled, to plan everything that I want to happen down to the most insignificant detail "traffic" in a world where fractions of a second separate success and failure, so I'd visualized the 1996 Olympics down to the millisecond. I'd crafted a decade of dreams into ambitions, refined ambitions into goals, and finally hammered goals into plans (Johnson, 1996, p. xiv)