The Next 365 Days of Your Life
“Tomorrow, is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one.” ― Brad Paisley
In order to be successful in life, you need an unstoppable strategy, and a plan to implement that strategy through purposeful and focused ACTION.
Strategy can be a complicated word; it can even seem fru-fru when you think of it in the context of your own life. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it shouldn’t be.
Great strategy is the efficient organization of resources. Your resources. Your most precious resources, such as your time, your money, your conscious attention, and, most importantly, the inner monologue of your mind.
When you think of strategy in simple terms like that, all of a sudden it sounds absolutely crazy that so many of us go through life without having thought through a strategy (an efficient organization of our resources) that we can tether ourselves to and improve over time as we learn.
For all of us, regardless of how much money we have in the bank, the most scarce resource we have is time. How you spend your time, what you burn your calories on in a given 24-hour period, is the most critical strategic decision you have to make in your life. And, yet, we spend our days working at jobs we don’t love; we spend our evenings cruising Netflix to de-stress from the perils of the day; and we spend our weekends getting drunk with people who won’t help us grow, but who will help us pass our time so we can go back to Monday and count down to the next weekend -- only to do it all over again. I call this the Hamster Wheel of Life.
As you start to move into the discipline of practicing Unstoppable Sundays, as you start to hone in on “Where am I” and “What do I do next” -- something magical will happen. You’ll stop reacting to every day of your life and you’ll start to be proactive about how you take on each day. And as you shift your consciousness from being reactive to being proactive, from having a fixed mindset to having a growth mindset, you’ll naturally start to ask yourself some seriously strategic questions about your life: What’s the big plan? What do I want to accomplish over the next 12 months of my life? Where do I want to be five years from now?
Now that I’ve shown you how to become proactive about the next seven days of your life, it's time to start zooming out a bit and thinking about the next 365 days of your life and time to start laying out a strategy and plan: Think of this as if you were plotting a bank heist.
Before I show you the Unstoppable way of planning the next 356 days of your life, let’s just talk through the BEFORE of how I used to try to plan life, and how most people still do that today.
BEFORE I developed this system, I didn’t think of yearly planning as an active sport. It was a passive activity that happened unofficially between Christmas and New Year’s. Nothing was written down; there was no reviewing of last year’s goal; it was all in my head during brief moments of time.
BEFORE I developed this system, my goals really consisted of a wish list of common New Year’s Resolutions around losing weight, making more money, and finally quitting my job to start that dream business. I also really wanted to learn another language… Yeah, that’d be great, too.
BEFORE I developed this system, even if I set some resolutions or goals, I’d pretty quickly forget about them -- or, even worse, become uninspired by them and kind of just go back to the grind by the time February rolled around. In fact, 80 percent of people break their New Year’s Resolutions by the time the second week of February arrives. Sound familiar?
Truth is, you can go to the most prestigious schools and universities, yet never will you actually find a class on how to create a strategy and plan for your life.