Escaping The Flawed System of Goal Setting
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.
First, we completely overestimate how much we can actually accomplish in the 365 days of the year. First, 365 days, or a year, feels like a long time. But when you really break it down, out of the 365 days, there are only 261 working days, and after you take away vacation days, you’re down to 247 working days, and after you subtract sick days, down time, and family commitments, you’re left with a mere 220 days, or roughly seven-and-a-half months out of every year to really take action on your goals.
Second, we don’t set up a system to be proactive about our yearly goals as we work through the year. So, we become uninspired about our goals, we forget them, and we return to just reacting to the day-to-day. Finally, the next year rolls around, and we ask ourselves: “Where did the time go?!” only to adopt the same defunct goals all over again -- sound familiar?
Last, while we may fail at achieving the goals that we overestimated our ability to accomplish, we also, at the same time, fail to acknowledge and give gratitude for whatever DID go well during the past 365 days, whatever DID work out, that DID move us maybe 20 percent closer to meeting a greater challenge, even if we’re not 100 percent there, as we had hoped or anticipated.
Now, let’s talk about the AFTER. The Unstoppable Proactive Life Planning system didn’t come together all at once for me. It is based on all sorts of different tools that I learned from friends, read about, and developed over the course of a decade. These all came together to unlock a period of unparalleled productivity for me. This system is all rooted in the idea of proactively planning for my life instead of just reacting to it.
AFTER I started to treat my planning process as an active sport, I started to take my goals a lot more seriously.
AFTER I started to check in on my goals on a regular basis, and to pause and reflect on a weekly basis on how I’m doing, I started to execute on my goals a lot more aggressively.
AFTER I started to express gratitude for even the small wins, I started to accomplish greater challenges that took multiple years to execute on -- but I didn’t give up along the way.
So for this next step in developing your Unstoppable Proactive Life Plan, we’re going to walk you through creating the first version of your strategy and plan for the next 365 days. Why the first version? Because, remember: Kaizen, combining the collective resources at your disposal (your time, your energy, your intellect, your mentors, your friends) to create a powerful engine for improvement in your own life.
This yearly planning process is similar to Unstoppable Sundays, where you answer two questions in a Word document; you’ll do the same for this part of the process in a Word document, except that there will be a few more questions.
These very simple questions, to which you will write the answers, will help you pause and reflect about the past 365 days, and then to start to organize around the next 365 days. By taking an hour (or more) to do this, you will accomplish the following:
Instead of haphazardly setting the same New Year's Resolutions over and over, you will have actively thought through what you want to accomplish over the coming year.
By answering a couple of simple questions about how your past year went, you will have an opportunity to learn from what went well and what didn’t go well over the past year.
By writing down your goals in a structured way, you will make it easier for yourself to refer back to these goals throughout the course of the year, and then, most importantly, to see, a year from now, how they turned out.
You know what’s the best feeling? My favorite, most absolutely, BEST feeling is when I’m at the end of the year, and I’m looking at the list of goals I wrote down at the beginning of the year, and I am able to cross them off one at a time -- because I crushed them! I want you to enjoy that feeling. I want you to experience that feeling of success, of triumph, of winning. So let’s get started...