Goals

The only thing that separates any one of us from excellence is fear. The opposite of fear is faith. I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence is something I can reach for perfection is God’s business. – Michael J. Fox, from the book, Lucky Man.

Perfectionism is a hard thing for a lot of people. And it’s really surprising to because you will not believe how many people are actually perfectionist out there who don’t appear to be perfectionist. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. The book by Jon Acuff called Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. Jon Acuff writes a lot of really great books. But this one tries to tackle some main issues about why people can’t get to their end goals or their end projects. What’s really stopping them? And the first one that he calls out is perfectionism. He said, perfectionism isn’t the only roadblock to finishing. We also made things difficult by creating overly ambitious goals. And suggest that when we are making goals in the first place, to remember, goals are a marathon; they take a long time. They’re not a sprint. And so, you’re more likely to get to your goal if you have a longer time to work towards it and if you can continually build up. It’s bringing that idea of small steps towards our main goal. Again, having that pacing, that gets us to the end of the goals. When we think about trying to get to goals, and I think it’s an all sorts of different things, ‘I want to get a new job by this’ or ‘I want to lose 100 pounds by then’ we come up with these goals that are steep and hard to reach. You may never reach them. And scientists talk about this as Excessively Optimistic Thinking, we tend to think that we can achieve these giant goals in a very short period of time. When you look at statistics, according to the book, 92% of us fail to achieve our goals.

He talks about two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, they found that people bias towards optimism, and consistently underestimate how long something will take to complete. We go on one side by thinking we can get this done in a short amount of time, which makes us do two things. It gives us a deadline that we cannot meet. But it also makes us have this very ambitious goal we can do and becomes frustrating, and we become frustrated in the goal. And so, the first thing that he suggests, whenever you’re trying to come up with a goal for you to live your life, cut it in half. If you don’t have the ability to cut it in half, then double the amount of time it will take because the worst thing that will happen is you’ll finish earlier. And we talked a little bit about that when we talked about taking small steps, that it is better and better for our brains if we finish something early, or we overachieve and finish more of it, than if we constantly set ourselves up to fail. So that’s what john is really talking about, trying to cut those goals down so that we can have wins along the way and actually attain our goal. And so, the next step he talks about is the other reason why we fail at a lot of things that we do is because we believe fundamentally that we must be great at everything. Step he talks about taking is just admitting that we cannot be great at everything. But there are some things that other people are great at. And they get praised for that maybe it’s not the thing we’re great at. when it comes down to it. You have to realize what things are so important that you need to be great at, and what things you don’t. And I’ll just give you a funny example of it. I was running behind one week and this is taped right in the middle of the pandemic.  I brought my laundry up, and it was late, and I really needed to get to bed. I had important training in the morning. But I really wanted to put my laundry away and hang it up, so it wasn’t all wrinkled in the morning. And then I realized, I’m not going to see another person for a month. Who cares if I’m wrinkled! And suddenly when you start realizing there are things that you can let go. There are things you don’t have to do right at this moment or be particularly great at them. Again, most jobs require you to have some minimal form of time management skills or have some ability to write but not everybody has to be great at everything. And so, I’d say take a look at some of the things that you’re okay with not being perfect at.  That you’re okay to let other people be perfect at those things. He talks about it as being Strategic Incompetence and admit that you don’t have the time to do everything. And you don’t have the time to be perfect at everything. Give those things a minimum amount of effort because this gives us more time to be great at the things we need to be great at. Some things are just good enough.

He also talks about having a project parking lot. My friend, and I always have this joke about how whenever we’re cleaning something, we always end up in the basement. So you’re cleaning out a closet that’s just been annoying you for really long, you’re going through all these clothes and getting rid of you know, some of the clothes you don’t want and suddenly you find this box and it has to go in the basement. Suddenly you’re in the basement and you don’t know where you’re going to put this box. And so, you start cleaning the basement. Stop doing that and instead have a project parking lot. So, whenever you get sent to the basement, whatever project it is, and whatever the basement is that you write that down, and you do later. You don’t have to engulf the entire planet into your projects. So again, having a project parking lot, where you can just set this thing aside and say I’m not going to think about the basement right now. I’m going to work on that some other time.

His next point is that sometimes when we think about the word goal, it sounds painful. It means discipline and accountability, and it makes us unhappy. And the thing of it is, is if you have unhappy goals, or goals that make you dread them, you will be less likely to achieve them. And if you can actually turn your goals into something enjoyable, you will have a better chance of actually achieving them. It is always more fun when you’re successful. And it’s always more fun when your goals are fun. And so, you can’t underestimate at all, how much having fun goals are really important. I think one of the things that my trainer always works with me about is that instead of thinking your goal is doing two minutes of planks or doing this or doing that. Instead, the goals are fun. You know, one really good way of learning how to surf is to be really good at doing planks. That’s a fun way to say, ‘look, if you keep working on this, and you keep working on your core strengths, you will be able to go surfing someday’, or you’ll be able to go on that hike you always dreamed about.’ It’s about changing that goal into saying your goal is two minutes a plank and turning it into your goal is to go to Hawaii and learn how to serve. So much fun, right?

And even points out that sometimes deadlines can be motivating. I know the deadlines always kind of pile up in some people’s brains and stresses them out. But I know a lot of people who go on these fun runs. And the reason they do it is to raise money for the great cause that these fun runs help. But it’s also because it gives them this fun deadline. I want to get better at running, but I’m going to work my way into this fun run. And having these sorts of fun deadlines, not just deadlines, can make things also easier to achieve. He also cautions about making them again, too strict. He wants you to extend your deadlines. He wants to cut your goals in half. And he says “If something is easy, it can’t be worth doing. That is a classic perfectionist rule. If I can’t be successful in x many days, then it’s a failure. And these are things that we have to get away from doing instead of making these deadlines or these rules are these goals into something that is prohibitive, and ominous, and not fun and turning them into a fun thing.”

But he talks about how we sometimes secretly sabotage ourselves like these really harsh questions. Well, if I can’t pay off my bills in two years, then I’m just never going to get done. That’s not a thing. In fact, those are sabotaging your goals by having these rules that don’t make any sense that are made up and they’re not real. And so sometimes you might say why don’t have time for this. If I’m going to do this right, then I’m going to make it perfect. I can’t go to the gym every day, then this is not worth it. It’s one of those things that this negative self-talk that you tell yourself is just going to harm you reaching your goals. So, he talks about looking for these hiding places where you have these negative emotions stashed away that are hurting your overall goals. He talks about hiding these negative emotions away so that they spring up at us when we’re at a dark place.

He talks about having these secret rules that he mentioned this in an interview, where he said that there’s these secret rules that we don’t even know we have. And this is what he said “Anytime you’ve seen someone who can’t get out of their own way, and maybe it’s an employee, or somebody you manage and it’s like they’re right there at the finish line, they sink their own ship sabotage themselves.” A lot of us bring secret agreements and secret rules into the work we do in the middle of our bad times. But also, just as we’re about to get to the finish line. What this said to me, and I didn’t realize this for a long number of years is I struggled at times to get projects finished, I was really great at jumping out and getting a head start and doing this project. But somewhere almost like 70% of the way out, I would stall on the project. I wouldn’t know what to do. I get confused about it. I couldn’t understand why I was doing that. And what made me realize what I was doing is that I was creating some sort of perfectionist rule. If you finish a project, and it’s not as perfect as you thought it was. And maybe the people around you don’t appreciate it the way that you hoped that they would that’s on you. But if you never finish that project, if you find some stalling point, and find that it’s not worth doing, they can’t criticize your project, because you never finished it. And this sort of attack on your project from inside your brain is a way of preserving a perfectionism that exists somewhere deep inside, that maybe you didn’t even realize you had. If you would have asked me if I am a perfectionist? I say ‘No, I am not a perfectionist.’ I know people who are I’m not one of them. But then when I started to analyze about why I sabotage some of the very things I want to get done, it’s because I realize that I think it will never be good enough. There is a little perfection is living inside of me who’s trying to kill things off. And once you know that’s there, you will help to avoid that problem. So, one trick he talks about perfectionism is this, what if scenario, and he talks about it like, well, what if I write a book and nobody likes it? What if I write a book, and nobody wants to publish it? And you start doing these “What Ifs”, and that’s what I’m talking about. This project that is getting killed off by this. “What if”. What if I finished this project for my boss, and they hate it? What if I finished this project that I think will get me a promotion, and I don’t get it? And then you stop doing the project because it’s easier to live with the failure of never completing it than it is to live with the failure of the “What ifs”. 

He talks about, the best way to get over this type of perfectionism that is lying deep inside of you is through data. He brings up this example of this person who wanted to stop working so much at night and spending more time with their kids. Every time they would actually crack open their laptop and start working at home, ‘I’m a failure’. ‘I’m not doing this right’ ‘It’s not working well for me’. Once they started keeping track, they realized that they were able to increase the time with their child a lot. And these times when you’re working at home, we’re actually just a few short hours here and there. And so, while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty darn good. And so, data sometimes can help drive you out of that process. I know when I was struggling to lose weight, and I’m working out and doing all this exercises. I’m lifting weights, but the scale wasn’t reflecting it. You know, what was? The weightlifting! My ability to be able to lift heavy things in my house and clean my house without just getting tired was a success. There were other measures out there, like the size of the clothes I was wearing, that suddenly were able to break through. What I thought was a giant failure because one statistic was not reflective of it, but these other statistics were. Perfectionism can sometimes be defeated, just by keeping track.

The end of the book talks about just having some real honesty with yourself. If you can’t tackle why you’re not able to finish some of the projects you want to finish, then you might not really get to it. So, you have to be brutally honest about really what’s going on with you. You can have self-pity, and you can feel bad about not getting your goals and you can feel bad about certain things. But once you start digging in, just like I did when I realized I was not finishing projects, because I was afraid to finish projects. And I could really dig into what was I actually afraid of. And I had this fantastic boss at the time, where I admitted to him, I said, you know, sometimes I get involved in these projects, and I stall because I don’t know how to get this to be fantastic. Bring it up to the next level. It’s just easier for me to stop than it is to finish. And the fantastic thing he said to me was just come to me. We’ll work on that together. But if you don’t ever dig out exactly what’s going wrong with you, you can ever get to that point where maybe someone else can help you or that you can fix the problem that’s going on. When you think about criticism or you think about this lack of perfection you’re going to have in your project, that internal joy and satisfaction that you get will be so much better than maybe even the reviews will be he gets through those answers and finding those internal joys and satisfaction will help carry you through. And then getting to the real reason why you’re not finishing will help you break through those barriers and maybe, like my boss, get you some help

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2017/10/03/how-to-finish-what-you-started-according-to-jon-acuff/

Summary

1. Get away from perfection. Stop this, everything must be perfect, I must be perfect at everything and find the things that you must be very good at and get rid of those things. Or at least bring them down and saying, you know what, it’s okay, if I’m not perfect, or not very good at these other things,
2. Cut your goals in half or give yourself twice the amount of time to get them done.
3. Motivate yourself to have fun Make the goals fun. Make the end results fun and try to make the deadlines fun.
4. Remove any sorts of self-made nasty talk out of your head. And these destructive rules that you’ve made for yourself and secret and use data to help prove these ideas wrong. That you’re not failing and that you are actually doing this. Overcome these obstacles, these hidden rules through data, and then finish strong. Because when you finish strong and you crush a goal, that’s really hard for you to do. It’s going to be so encouraging to you. It’ll be enlightening to you; you will have so much self-satisfaction from just doing it. But not only that, it will make everything you do from that point on easier.

Challenge.

Look for a few ways in your life that you are demanding perfection from yourself and figure out how you can decide it’s okay to be imperfect, or potentially drop it all together. Try to get rid of some of this excess baggage in your life and become perfect at the things that matter and imperfect and almost everything else.

Now it’s time for our fun advice of the week. This comes from the movie Only Time from 2013.

“We’re all traveling through time together every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.”

“Every artist was first an amateur. “Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Today we’re going to talk a little bit about passion versus talent and finding the things that you will be great at. And I think that even though the book that we’re going to talk about today talks primarily about career, I would challenge you to think about it when it comes to how you invest your fun time even.

Today, we’re going to talk about Cal Newport’s book. So Good They Can’t Ignore You; Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. This book was written in 2012. Cal Newport has strong opinions when it comes to work and what makes you successful in work. He talks about the example of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, loves Zen Buddhism, that was his passion in life. And Steve talked about doing what your passion was. But that’s not really what Steve did. Steve actually didn’t follow his passion. He followed what he was good at. That’s what really earned him his fame. Cal Newport finds that passion is not something that you follow. This phrase that “Do what you love. and the money follows” is not something that you should really believe in. And over the last I would say, feels like 20 years, people have been really pressed like you have follow your passions you have, find what you love and do that. If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. And while it’s true, in the end, it’s not exactly how you get to either finding passions in your hobbies, or passions in your career, it just doesn’t happen that way. Or at least it doesn’t happen very often. So, his first part is passion is rare and often times, passion comes by getting good at something. That a lot of us don’t really have a passion for anything until we become masters of what it is we’re good at and then we fall in love with it. The quote is, “Don’t do what you love. Learn to love what you do” by acquiring mastery, autonomy, and relatedness. And when you’ve mastered something, you will be more likely to be passionate about it.

Self-Determination Theory

He talks about a scientific theory called Self Determination Theory which has three basic factors in intrinsic or internal motivations, which will bring job satisfaction. And the three feelings are Autonomy, the feeling that you have control over what you do day-to-day. Competence, the feeling that you’re really good at what you do. And the third one is Relatedness being connected to other people. And those three things are intrinsic values, when it comes to job satisfaction. And really the idea that self-determination just means in psychological terms, that each person has the ability to make choices and manage their lives. That’s important to people. There was a quote, when it came to research about Self Determination Theory, which Dan Pink said, “It argues that we have three innate psychological needs, competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied. We’re motivated, productive and happy. When they are thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet. If there’s anything fundamental about our nature, it’s the capacity for interest, and some things facilitate it. And some things undermined it.”

Jobs, Careers and Callings

 A researcher named Amy Wrzesniewski, did a study of college administrative assistance, and found that there were three types of categories when discussing A job. Job a job pays the bills. Career, it’s a pathway to increasingly better jobs and fulfillment. And then there’s Calling which means that your work has now become part of your life and part of your identity and is really built into you. And those are sort of the three levels of jobs. And when she was doing this and investigating it, she actually found that time and mastery was more related to whether a person called what they did for a living a job, a career or calling.

And the book goes on later to talk about this passion mindset. And it revolves around what do I want. And that’s what we have been telling people for many years, you have to do what you want. You have to go seek your dreams. You have to go find your passion. And he talks another bit about this courage industry that is built around and if you just had enough courage to quit what you’re doing and reach out and go find the thing you love, you’ll be satisfied. And that’s what Cal Newport says is not true. That passion is not something that will actually bring you happiness in the end.

The Craftsman Mindset

But by contrast, he talks about the Craftsman mindset what value You can I bring to my job. And being a craftsman means that you’re always crafting your skills and you’re crafting your career. And he uses this quote from the comedian Steve Martin, “Be so good, they can’t ignore you.” And by focusing on being that good, that’s what’s going to bring you success and happiness. It’s not an either-or thing. It’s about being good at it and crafting it that will make you happy in the end. And when he talks about this idea of becoming a master at certain aspects of our job and crafting them, this is where it starts talking a little bit about the 10,000 hours of practice. But it’s not just practice, practice, practice, or taking classes or becoming better at the thing that you think will make you a master in your career. It’s about the right kind of challenge. Think about weightlifting, if you were to be someone who started out with no fitness at all, and you got yourself a five-pound weight. You worked out all the time with your five-pound weight eventually it becomes too light. And something my dad always told me doing when I became interested in chess, he said, “Always play with people who are better than you that will make you better” I think that’s really what Cal is getting at. And not just about practicing anything but is really going after those skills that are rare skills, that will make you just a notch above the rest. That’s the Craftsman mindset is focusing on becoming so good, they can’t ignore you with rare and valuable skills.

And just to give you an example of something that happened to me, I thought that there was someone at my work who was doing great. And she was she’s doing great at her job in my company. And I thought honestly, that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for more of her and I dedicated almost a year of my life to becoming her. But you realize that what happens is you just become a second rate her, instead of becoming a first rate you I worked, you know, hard to sort of emulate the skills that she was good at. And I tried to take on the mannerisms she was good at. And she was very different than me. And so, I don’t think that it really actually ever helped me. And then by some weird chance, we ended up traveling together. And we were at a situation that reached this critical point. And I had what I called my “Oprah Moment”, where I was able to pick up a microphone and challenge the team in front of me by pointing out all the things that they were good at, and all the skills that they had. And then the fact that that all they had to do was pull things together. And this would be just one of the most fantastic teams on the planet. And it was this chance for me to bring people together through public speaking. And after I got done, she said, “Wow, I could not have done that.” And it struck me that in all this time I was trying to be her and failing to take out the things that made me, me and honing those skills. And at that point, it really changed my career. Because that I started doing things to try to home the things that’s different about me and the things that I’m better at. And I think my career improved greatly, just by the fact that I started looking at what makes the best job possible. He also warns against scattershot. Trying to do everything and being good at all of them. Because he said that if you do not focus on a few key skills, you’ll just become scattered and your interests will be scattered, and you will develop only superficial skills. You’ll never reach the cutting edge of what’s possible.

Talent Supply and Demand

He talks later the book about supply and demand. We always think about supply and demand when it comes to goods. If you have a product at the grocery store and everybody wants that product, that price will go up. Or if you have something that nobody’s really interested in, that price comes down. Being in supply and demand means that skill that you should have, that just makes you so good. And if you get successful in something that everyone is really good at, it’s not going to provide you that standout career that you’re looking for. The way that you feel great about you and the way that will really launch your career or launch your hobby is to be great at something that not everyone is good at. And so really picking those valuable skills. Those things that you look around you and you say ‘I’m good at this. I don’t see a lot of people out there that are good at this.’ And when I think about how I’ve applied this to my personal life, I think about this podcast. I happen to think that podcasting came right in at me because I’m a public speaker. I read a ton of productivity books and listen to a ton of productivity podcasts. And I love explaining things to people. And so, for me it felt like this podcast was this convergence of all the things that I’m good at, but also the things that I’ve learned to become passionate about all built into the same thing. Podcasting is this convergence of being a geek and a ham.

Take the Promotion?

And he talks a little bit later about gaining self-determination in your job gaining that independence. And what’s interesting about it, he says, it’s this conundrum. That if you take a promotion, that moves you out of your competency, you may go into something you’re not good at. And you have to admit, you see that type of thing every day. Someone who was a great this, and suddenly, they became promoted to a manager. And they’re not that good. So, he talks about being a little bit wary about being promoted into something that isn’t hitting that key set of talents that you have crafted in your career.

Little Bets

And then the last point is that careers require us to take little bets, which is a little bit like having that experimental life, we talked about in previous podcasts. Using small, achievable tiny projects, to explore if it’s possible, that this next skill set is exactly what we’re looking for. And if we do that, that gives us a competitive edge, that allows us to become great at something and turn our skills and hone them through practice, challenges, stretching goals, and we become great at what we do. And he talks about taking these tiny steps in your career, these little bets and being a craftsman at our lives, will take us in unexpected turns, and will provide us options to bend our lives in a way that we are good at. But that we also eventually develop a passion for. It may not be what you expect it to be. But these little bets, these talent gathering methods all converge in a rare skill activity that we have passion for, we find fulfillment in and hopefully provides us with a great career, or a great activity outside of our jobs.

Let’s say a person wanted to be a programmer. So maybe they studied programming a little bit, and they get their first job inside of a company. And they found out they don’t really like being a programmer. It was not something maybe they’re particularly good at, no matter how hard they practice, they never seem to really get that much better at it. It just wasn’t the thing that they dreamed it was. However, as they start working in this company, they realize there’s technical documentation. There are business analysts who are great when they know technical things about software programming, but also the human needs of the product. Maybe once you get into this job, and once you start trying to gain your mastery, the job takes you in a different path than you expected. That’s why you’re really supposed to take these little bets. And as these little bet’s payoff, they start diverting you one direction or another. And maybe it’s not what you thought it was going to be, this whole path of mastery guides you into something unexpected. But it’s also about having skills and value in the things you do outside your work too. So, don’t just look at it as a work thing. Think about it as a life thing.

I do agree that passion comes from becoming great at something. I remember one of my bosses telling me, she goes, “Can you feel it right now? Can you feel that this is really what you’re meant to do? That you’ve really hit that thing that you’re great at.” But she felt it. I felt it. And that felt fantastic

Summary

1. Take a look at the self-determination rules, and figure out if you have motivation in your job or your hobbies, that make you feel like you have autonomy, make you feel like you’re competent and make you feel like you have a connection to other people try also to determine Do you have a job, a career or a calling? 

2. Try to figure out those key aspects of a job that would just make you that much better little tiny skill sets that would make you one of these special people that hold something inside of your job inside or your industry that would make you fantastic. Start to figure out time and a study process to hone those skills.

3. Develop the Craftsman mindset where you’re going to take your career or your hobby life and you’re going to finely hone it with specified stretch goals that are going to help you become so good they can’t ignore you.

4. Take little bets try to come up with little plans that can help you prove that not only are you good at this thing, but that it’s a skill that would be valuable to your career, or to your personal life.

Challenge

Try to list out three skills that would accelerate you to the next level, either in your career or your home life. That would just make you exceptional. And start coming up with a plan that will help you take yourself to the next step in at least one of those skills. What’s that one key thing that would just make you fantastic at what you do?

Fun Advice

You can be anything you want to be. Remember, the saddest thing in life is wasted talent. You could have a world of talent the world but if you don’t do the right thing, then nothing happens. But when you do, right, guess what? Good things happen.

This comes from the movie A Bronx Tale starring Robert De Niro. And he has to agree with them. That one of the saddest things in life is wasted talent but having that talent and putting it in the right place to do the right thing. And that’s amazing. That’s really where the magic happens. So, try to find where you can bring all of that together.

“You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be a whole lot more of who you already are.” – Tom Rath.

In our lives, we tend to fall into things, or luck into things or desperately cling onto things. And many times, we don’t design the life that we’re looking for. Even though we see the results of what planning and design does for other things, we don’t take that on ourselves. And not only that, when we design our lives, we tend to design based on the goal, and not based on the realities of who we are. We’re going to talk a little bit about talent and designing your life. After reading a number of articles and books about this particular topic, it seems all of them fall into this line, where your happiness is an intersection of your values, and your talents. You’ve always seen those talent shows where people aren’t very talented at the thing they’re supposed to be talented at. Boy, they love what they’re doing! Or someone has a job in what they’re talented at, but it makes them miserable. I think we’ve all met people who are really good at their jobs, they hate it. What we’re trying to do is find that intersection of value and talent.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2373876/three-steps-happiness

Strength Finder 2.0

The first book we’ll talk about today is Strength Finders 2.0 from 2007 by Tom Rath. He worked for the Gallup company for 13 years and is author of this book that focuses on what you’re good at. It’s not one of these personality tests. But instead, it’s a list of talents. And then rank orders your talents are from best to worst. And they’re not even just things that you would find in a personality test. Like I’m an introvert or I’m an extrovert. It’s things like lifetime Learner, and Ideation, Connectedness, and Relators. There are all kinds of personalities that are built into this test. He also talks about what a waste of time it is, to really work on your weaknesses, I would that is partially true. You have to be at least minimally good at time management or minimally good at other things, even if you’re not particularly good at them. Because modern day life and work requires you to be at least okay in those things. But really, where you have to focus in your life are what your talents and strengths are. This book is called Strength Finders, 2.0. And you can find it everywhere you find books. The interesting thing is that if you buy the book, you get a code. And so, make sure that the book, either digital or physical, has the code to go online and take the test. The test will give you the top results, you can actually just buy the test from the website itself and it is five dollars cheaper, but you don’t have the book.

https://store.gallup.com/c/en-us/assessments

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

The next book we’ll talk about is a book from 2016 called Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. We’ve talked about very small motions when it comes to habits and goals. I hear a lot of people right now talking about this exploration of where their life is at or where their life could be at. There’s a lot of time for introspection right now. While there are small steps, in terms of experiment, and research, and looking at what makes you happy, it still is about major life changes. Which means the work is a little bit bigger than a lot of the different plans that we’ve talked about in the past. That doesn’t mean that you couldn’t take some of these ideas and try some of them. You don’t have to plan your entire life; you can just plan aspects of it. For example, if you think you might be interested in volunteering for a nonprofit organization and maybe you’d like to be on the board someday. Give it a shot. Try it. These are experiments. While the book itself talks about big life changes, they don’t have to be big. You can run very minor experiments in your own life. It’s time to really step out and really see what’s possible for us to do. Don’t be intimidated by the message of the big changes. If you are considering doing major life changes, such as living in a different place, or getting a different kind of job, I do suggest reading this book. It’s a very detailed book with lots of ideas and exercises. The exercises will help you in designing a full-blown life. I found the book really enjoyable and really enlightening. This book is about going after the things you really want to have in your life and not just falling into them or accidentally backing into them. This is a really great perspective to have through any aspect of your life. The book is a little bit focused on jobs. But this is important for all of your life, not just your work. He says that life is about, “playing the infinite game of becoming more and more yourself each day,” I’d say it’s never too late to start, and you should start right now.]

What Problem Are you Trying to Solve?

That’s what I think this book is really about, designing life where our talents meet our values. The first step in doing that is trying to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve. You’re here in your life for a particular reason. Maybe because you fell into it, or it’s a life that you tried to design. Maybe you’re happy with it, or maybe you’re not happy with it. But you decide that there’s some problems that you want to solve. And when you start identifying these problems. Sometimes we just give up, we get what is called “learned helplessness”, which is when we won’t even solve our problems anymore. Because we just determined that it’s just not worth it. ’I’m never going get what I want.’ He talks about two types of Gravity Problems. Gravity is not a problem and if you said that gravity is your problem, it wouldn’t work. Because gravity just is. You can’t stop gravity. The two types of gravity problems are Functionally Inactionable. Which means you could maybe change it. But there’s a high risk, high effort, and it probably won’t change. Best thing you can do at that point is to alter your goals into something that you can win. Then there is Totally Inactionable. And that means you can’t change it, no matter how hard you try. He gives us an example of maybe a poet who wants to earn a lot of money. But you know what, poetry doesn’t earn a lot of money, and he’s never going to make poetry earn a lot of money. That is a Gravity Problem. This is where he talks about changing your focus. Could that person who writes poetry, become a songwriter? Or get together with a graphic artist and start making posters? There might be something that this person could do that incorporates what they love to do, but actually earn them money. Get out of that gravity well and look at something that you could actually change!

Lifeview and Workview

The first part of his plan talks about reflecting on your life with two 250-word paragraphs and to spend no more than 30 minutes on them. The first paragraph is your “workview” philosophy. What is good work? What is satisfying work? Is it money? Is it impact? The second paragraph is the “lifeview”, which involves personal values. How a good life is lived, Is it religion? Morality? Justice? Society? what are those things that makes your life valuable? Now, the goal is to balance those two things. If you compromise one of those in favor of the other one, you will become unhappy. Find out where those two paragraphs intersect.

Good Time Journal and the AEIOU Method

He asked everyone to do what he calls a “Good Time Journal.” You’ve heard people probably talk about “joy” or “flow” or “peak experiences”. It’s those times when you’re having so much fun. Time just disappears. You don’t know where the day went.  That’s what you have to start documenting. He talks about also then documenting the things that drain you he talks about using a method that he calls the AIEOU method

• A – What were you actually doing?
• E – Environment? Where were you? What was the mood of the area?
• I – Interaction? Was it people that you were working with machines devices? Was it a formal setting? Was it a casual setting?
• O – Objects What were you actually working with? Were they devices? Or tools? Or things?
• U – Users who were you there with? Were they adding or subtracting to your flow? Why?

He also talks about running this kind of analysis with memories of our peak experiences or memories of our bad experiences. Memories stick with us for a reason. He asked us to do the good time journal daily or at least every few days for at least three weeks.

Then once you have a few ideas about what really gives you those flow moments or what really detracts from those flow moments, he asked people to generate lots of ideas about what would make our lives happier. He says don’t fall in love with that first idea. Our brains are lazy and it’s just going to fall for whatever we say the first thing is, or it’ll fall for the thing that seems like the least amount of work, come up with lots of things that will potentially make your life happier. Once we have those ideas, he asked us to look at creating prototypes of solutions to those ideas Test out the things that we think are going to be great ideas, or solutions for the problems we’re trying to solve. Ask questions, do research, collaborate with other people.

Feasible Other Lives

His next step is to create possible other lives. He wants you to look at creating three possible, five-year versions of yourself. Where could you be in five years, if things were just radically different based on what you documented are your values and what you documented are your problems that you’re trying to solve? And there’s no right answer to this. A few of them will be feasible, some of them will make you happy. Make sure they’re just not different versions of the same thing, or different versions of what you’re doing now. Present your plans to other people who know you and can give you good feedback. You then move on to having hands-on experiences. What could I do in exploring these feasible five-year plans? But the important thing is that these aren’t full-scale models. They’re just tiny examples of what your future feasible life could be. Try to get other people involved in your experience. Start conversations with others who are doing what you’re thinking about doing. Try to turn those into opportunities of learning. He calls it “sneaking up on the future”. You’re going towards the life you want, but not fully. So, one example he gave was of a woman who wanted to be in charge of a restaurant. She thought she just loved everything about restaurants. She quit everything, used your savings, and bought a restaurant. And as it turned out, she did not like owning a restaurant. She liked designing restaurants. She liked planning them out. But the actual day-to-day work was not something she enjoyed. She could have found that out by doing some minor experiments, like working in a restaurant, or interviewing people who work in restaurants. But because she jumped in without these experiments, it became hard for her to analyze this before it happened. And she just jumped right in.

Interview Key People

My friend’s father who I’ve mentioned before, always had this great idea where he talked about interviewing people. One of the exciting things about interviewing people is they love talking, particularly when it has to do with themselves. So, it’s very easy to ask someone for 30 minutes for a cup of coffee, or maybe a Zoom meeting just to talk over what their lives are like, or what their thoughts are about this kind of industry. People love to talk about themselves. Give it a shot! It sounds a little scary, but I can tell you it’s a valuable effort. I had this opportunity to do something very similar to that. I came in second place on a scholarship for actuarial science. And while I didn’t get the scholarship, the person who was in charge of the scholarship, liked my application. He invited me to come out to his company and spend half a day there and really learn about what it takes to be an actuarial scientist in an insurance company. So, I got two hours of his time, which was amazing.  I got to interview him about what he thought the job was like, what he thought the company was like working for. I had a lot of reason to believe I would love this job, because I’m a math girl. And I love anything that involves math. Except when I walked away from this interview period, I figured out that while I like math, I don’t like statistics about death and accidents. And I would become very depressed about a job like that. So, this interview process led me into a different path, and allowed me to see that this job potential wasn’t really for me. Think of an example where a person decides that they think they would enjoy owning a restaurant, but they’re not entirely sure. Or maybe they would give up their high-pressure job and work in a library. These experiments can happen by taking small part time jobs, or volunteer jobs and giving it a little experiment to see if it’s true. Would you like working in those scenarios? That’s what he means when he talks about running experiments. Test out aspects of these feasible lives.

You’ve come up with some ideas. You created this feasible life. You’ve interviewed and done some research about what these feasible lives will be. Now to look at the options, narrow down the list, really understand things. And deep dive into what you learned in this whole process of looking at your designed life. You can even start to live part of your reality if it’s possible. Again, you could volunteer at a library, work part time at a restaurant, and play out some of these scenarios.

Failure

And then he says, if we do get stuck in learned helplessness, don’t consider yourself what he says “screwed”. Instead, acknowledge that you’re stuck, and then reduce the risk and do a smaller prototype. But just remember, it can sometimes feel like a failure if things didn’t really work out the way you thought they were. But if you’re living a life of curiosity, and experiments, there is no such thing as failure. There is learning something and amending your plans. Or experiment passed and you have more things that you’ve learned and more experiments to run. But something didn’t go the way you thought it was going to go. Write it down, categorize it, and then look for insights. Sometimes there are screw ups where you just messed something up. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and it has no bearing on the future. Or there’s weaknesses. That’s where you have to go in and look at it and say, ‘Maybe I could hire a business manager, or a third-party company that could take care of those things for me. So, I can focus on the part I love.’ Again, that analysis has to take place when you live that life of a curious person. Keep trying stuff and don’t postpone it. But we’re doing little experiments. There’s no reason why you couldn’t volunteer at a library next week or work part time at a restaurant after your day job right now. So, don’t put off these experiments. Just keep experimenting and looking at those things. And if you run into a problem, again, re-frame it a little bit, don’t just say, ‘Oh, well, I failed. This is over.’ But instead look at where you were coming from. What would be some other perspectives that other people might have about what went wrong? Maybe talk to someone who knows you very well to help identify what actually went wrong and what could be done to change it. But all of this is a real process, and an awareness for us to really understand what we wanted, and what went right what went wrong.

Once you design something, it will change your future, it is possible to change things just by designing it.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2373876/three-steps-happiness

Summary

1. Take an assessment of your strengths. Get feedback from other people about your strengths, you might be surprised!  But get really focused on what you’re good at where your talents are and then start strengthening those talents.
2. Know what problems you’re trying to solve in your life. Make sure that they are solvable, and that you’re taking a framework of it, that makes it possible to solve it. Make sure that you don’t have learned helplessness and just get defeated right away. Make sure you take a new look at what’s going on and coming up with the right problem to solve.
3. Identify those flow moments and peak moments and also really bad moments and analyze them with the AEIOU method.
4. List your values of work and home life. Are you getting the right money? Impact? Expression? Value? Where is it that your life values and your work values intersect?
5. Create three, five-year possible lives. Research them determine what would be the best life for you. Ask questions of experts or people in that field. interview people in that life and try out small experiments to see if you can prove that these would actually be good ideas for you.
6. Remember, you can’t fail when you live a life of curiosity and experiments. There’s always lessons to be learned whether they fail or succeed.

Challenge

Write two 250-word paragraphs about what your work view is and your life view. What are your values, your requirements, your satisfactions? What makes you happy? So, you know where your first options to design your life will come from?

Fun Advice Quote

Our fun advice is from Buckaroo Banzai “Don’t be mean. We don’t have to be mean. Cuz remember, no matter where you go there you are.”

And he’s right about that. You are where you are. And now’s the time to design where you’re going to be next.

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” That was a quote by Benjamin Franklin.

The other day I went grocery shopping. And right now, with the pandemic going on, I tried to go grocery shopping the least amount of time I possibly can, just to keep safe. So, I get to the grocery store, and I didn’t have a list and I didn’t really look at what I was missing or what I had in my house. And I never bought the things that I really needed to buy on that grocery shopping trip. Sure, I got about 80% of the things that I wanted, but not much more. And when I got home, I realized I didn’t have the things I really wanted. Was that a bad grocery shopping. Or was that a bad night before grocery shopping, when I didn’t even look in my fridge to see what I needed? It was definitely my failure to prepare. We see errors in our lives all the time. But we want to try to reduce them so that we can attain the goals we’re looking to get. And when I didn’t prepare to grocery shop properly, I had to go back a second time, it cost me an extra hour of time and all it would have taken was just a few minutes with my head in the refrigerator to see what I needed.

Pre-mortem

This is where we get into the conversation about a pre-mortem. You’ve heard the word post-mortem, where you look at something and say “wow, what happened?” But a pre-mortem is when you look at something ahead and try to prevent the mistake in the first place. According to the Harvard Business Review, in an article from 2007 “On like a typical critiquing session in which a project team member are asked what might go wrong. The pre mortem operates on the assumption that the patient has died. So, what did go wrong? The pre-mortem seeks to identify five the threats and weaknesses via hypothetical presumption of near future failure.” It used to be Murphy’s law that said, “if anything can possibly go wrong, it does.”

Poka-Yoke

This is where the concept of Poka-Yoke comes in. It’s a Japanese term, which means to basically prevent mistakes. You look at it in terms of trying to determine what will go wrong, not what has gone wrong. Some examples you can see of Poka-Yoke in our lives are things like airbags or spell checkers, fire extinguishers, nightlights, remember those Mac books that had the magnetic plugs? You can imagine that someone tripped on it just one too many times. And they wanted a way to prevent dropping your laptop on the floor and breaking it. There are two kinds of mistakes that happen. something stupid just happened. It was random and you could not have prevented it. If you want to. You were driving to work. You had every intention of getting there on time but traffic was backed up because of an accident. Can’t prepare for that. Maybe you can leave a little bit early in case it does happen. But for the most part, it happens so infrequently, that you can’t really prepare. Or mistakes that are part of the process. For example, I do laundry on Sunday night, I take my gym clothes out of my car and Friday, I wash them Sunday night, it gets late, sometimes the laundry isn’t done very early. And then I forget to put them back in the gym bag and put my gym bag back in the car. Or maybe I just forget to take the gym bag again. That’s a process mistake. Something in my process is causing things to go wrong. I made a deal with myself that I didn’t have to exercise every day after work. But if I didn’t exercise, the one thing I had to do was write down in this specific notepad, all the reasons why I didn’t exercise. The items I got from that; I forgot my gym clothes, I was too tired, I really was pretty hungry, I wanted to go home didn’t have time at the end of the day because something came up. Once I knew what was going wrong, I was able then to prevent it from happening again. I did it in a reactionary way. I reacted to a mistake I was making Poka-Yoke is about preventing the mistakes from the first place. So, whenever you start going in and start thinking about your plans, that’s where you want to try to prevent mistakes.

https://kanbanize.com/lean-management/improvement/what-is-poka-yoke

Upstream by Dan Heath

Dan Heath in his book upstream talks about how we can go from solving problems, but instead think ahead to preventing problems. We have to figure out what the problems are going to be. We have to figure out who the person might be that causes the process. But we also have to look at costs and benefits. You can’t have big Prevention’s for things that have little costs little problems if you don’t address them can eventually lead to big problems. Think if you never exercise because you’re always forgetting something, or always too tired it can lead to big health consequences later. By not making shopping harder, we might overspend, little things add up to big problems. His first condition is called “Tunneling”. That’s when no one sees or cares to look at the big picture, they only see their aspects of the issue, or they don’t have the resources to fix it. They suggest that you get people to stop, see the big picture, talk to other people outside their teams, then you try to work on fixing it. In software, we try to get people in complimentary teams together, all in one room, so that you can see what’s happening step by step, and then you can see the big aspects of the problem. The second issue is “Lack of Ownership”. “It’s not my problem” “I don’t benefit from the problem being solved”. Maybe in fact, “I even benefit from having the problem”. And “to be honest, I don’t really care.” When I started to exercise, I would constantly forget to put my gym clothes in the car. For a long time. I didn’t really care to solve my problem with the gym bag, because it was nice, because then I could just go home and not worry about exercising. How do you deal with that you really look at the issues and try to determine what’s going wrong, make people care about the issue and prove that it’s solvable? Maybe suggest some ideas where other people have solved similar issues that will get people excited about trying to tackle this issue or build in a reward system for overcoming apathy. You make people your helpers, if you are working with a child who keeps forgetting their backpack at home, and then you have to drive it in after they get to school, make them part of the team and have a blame free discussion. How can we get that backpack in the right spot, make them part owner of the issue, not just someone who benefits from having a problem? And then the third issue is called ‘Problem Blindness”. “Well, nothing can be done.” “It’s just how it is.” Or maybe people just don’t even think it is a problem. That’s just like, how you get people to invest in solving a problem is by showing the harm the problem causes, showing them the downstream, get them on your side by showing them why we need to solve this problem. Dan, he says “Downstream is reacting responding to symptoms, it’s easier to think about what you know, and what you’re comfortable with, than it is to think about those other things that we could do to solve a problem. Meanwhile, upstream thinking is preventative. It understands the problem and the results of the problem.

When he talks about shifting to upstream thinking compared to downstream thinking.” First of all, surround the problem. Bring in all the people who are directly involved in the problem. If it’s a child who forgets their backpack, bring the child in, maybe have a family discussion about how backpacks get to school. They can talk to the other children who maybe have succeeded in being able to bring their backpacks and come up with good ideas. Get everyone together so they can talk about the problem. The second thing is immersing yourself the problem. Dan tells us very interesting and funny story. He says “You and your friends are having a picnic by the side of the river. And suddenly you hear a shout in the direction of the water. A child is drowning, without thinking you both dive in and grab the child and swim to shore before you can recover. You hear another child cry for help you and your friend jump back into the water and rescue her as well. Then another struggling child drifts into sight. And another and another. The two of you can barely keep up. Suddenly you see your friend waiting out of the water and seemingly leaving you alone. ‘Where are you going you demand?’ your friend answers. ‘I’m going upstream to tackle the guy who’s throwing all these kids in the water’.” Just an analogy to say you can spend all of your time firefighting and solving problems. But instead, what you can do is prevent the problem from happening.

What you really want to do, he suggests is creating what you call a feedback loop. That means you can just check and see how everything is going. But try to create the system so that you can check to see if things are working. And if they’re not working find out early. He mentions that part of the problem that we have for downstream thinking is that we only reward people for solving problems. You’ll see this at workplaces all the time. People get awards for solving a really horrible problem. Maybe they fix a horrible technical issue a customer was having. Maybe the salespeople recover an angry customer who is about to cancel their contract. Rarely, the people who solve the problems ahead of time and keep the customer from getting angry, get rewarded. They’re usually forgotten. I always said when I was a server admin, the best recognition you can hope for is that everyone ignores you.

https://heathbrothers.com/books/upstream/

https://www.entreleadership.com/blog/podcasts/dan-heath-upstream

Moral Hazards

So when we think about our families do we always exclaim over the kid who finally remembers to do their homework or brings their backpack to school, and not the kid who never forgets, you don’t want to set up a situation, where people are rewarded to fail, because they’ll do it later. And they’ll start getting better at failing and start failing more and more. People learn how to game the systems, whether they’re meaning to do it or not. This is called a “moral hazard”. When you create a situation where people are rewarded for the wrong behaviors. Think of the situation when you have a workplace that gets technical support calls, and the person who answers the most number of calls gets highest rewards. We’ve created a situation where they’re getting rewarded for the most calls, not the happiest customer. So what are they going to start doing, they’re going to start answering questions quicker, and cutting the customer off. Which leads to angry customers. So really don’t set up that situation where staying in the old system is rewarded. For me, I was forgetting my gym bag. And it was a reward for me because I didn’t have to go to gym the next day.

Problem Prevention

Here’s some thoughts about how you can set up a system that really helps you figure out what the problems are and start thinking about preventative matters. First of all, don’t set up a situation where people are rewarded to fail. When having discussions with your family members or whoever is having the issue that’s causing the problem? Make sure it’s a blame free discussion. Everyone feels free to answer questions about what went wrong in the process, and how they might solve it. You can try to make it impossible to error.  Could I set my gym bag in my car on Sunday nights so that I don’t forget it on Monday? Or make the mistake harder to make. Maybe my car keys sit on top of my gym bag and so I can’t drive the car until I grab the bag with it. Maybe make an early warning system, something that warns you things are not going the way you thought would. You want to do is make it very hard to make a mistake. The last thing you can try to do is to build a process that tolerates errors. That means if you make a mistake, it’s not so bad. In the end, make it simple, duplicate it, leave a note or set a reminder on one of your smart devices. Try to make it impossible to fail.

Over Preparation

Don’t get into a situation where you over prepare. It’s sometimes a form of procrastination. Prepare for the proper errors and take care of things that are likely going to happen and try your best to not overdo it. You don’t want to turn your life into such a chaotic situation where you’re preparing for every eventuality that you stop doing the important things you need to get done. Is at the end of the world if I forget my gym bag? Nope, not really. Can just put some easy things in place? Is it a hardship if your child forgets their backpack at home and you have to come home from work, get the backpack and then drive it to school? Yeah, that can be quite time consuming and leave your kid without their resources and leave you having to exit work for a couple of hours. That checklist might be bigger, because of the cost involved with having that child forget the backpack. Don’t try to prevent every mistake, try to prevent the likely ones. Otherwise, you’ll just have a headache in life, and you’ll be dealing with too many fake problems.

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/how-stop-over-preparing-actually-get-things-done-ncna810126

Summary

1. Do a pre-mortem look into what things that you really want to have happen and try to figure out ahead of time, what might go wrong.
2. Make sure that you don’t have tunnel vision. Make sure that you’re not just looking at your own little world but you’re looking at the bigger picture when trying to solve a problem.
3. Make sure that the people who are involved in the problem are involved in the discussion of the solutions. Make sure that they feel comfortable in telling you what went wrong
4. Be preventative, think upstream. Try to think of the problems and the solutions before they happen.
5. Try to make the solutions not worse than the problem themselves.

Challenge

Find one thing that seems to be consistently going wrong in your life and try to think ahead about how you can avoid those mistakes. Try to make it hard to fail. Let me know how it worked.

Fun Advice

Here’s our fun quote of the day. It comes from The Office and Dwight Schrute

“Do something ‘I think would an idiot do that?’ And if they would, I do not do that thing.”

So do you think you can prevent mistakes like that? Maybe that’s a good idea, at least is kind of a fun to think about.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. Let me know what you think of it or tell a friend. I’m happy to hear any feedback that you may have. Or if you want me to cover a particular issue for something that you’re struggling with that you’re trying to get done. You can find me and all the ways to contact me at smallstepspod.com.

In this podcast episode, I dive into the topic of eliminating noise in life and the significance of focusing on what truly matters. The episode stresses the need to prioritize tasks that have the most impact and eliminate low-value distractions that consume a lot of time and energy. To achieve this, the episode introduces the Pareto principle, which helps identify the 20% of tasks that cause 80% of problems. By concentrating on these high-impact tasks, individuals can make the most of their time and effort.

In addition, the podcast suggests reading Essentialism by Greg McKeown, which is an excellent resource for anyone looking to eliminate noise and focus on what’s essential. McKeown’s book emphasizes channeling energy and resources toward the most significant tasks while eliminating low-value distractions. It also urges readers to prioritize their goals and make space for what matters most. This podcast episode also offers practical tips for prioritizing and eliminating tasks, including writing down goals and ranking them in order of importance, identifying the tasks that contribute most to problems, and removing tasks that don’t help overall progress. By adopting these strategies, individuals can focus on the tasks that matter most and progress toward their goals.

Overall, this podcast episode is packed with valuable insights into the significance of eliminating noise and prioritizing what really matters in life. Individuals can optimize their efforts and make the most of their time by focusing on high-impact tasks and eliminating low-value distractions.

Transcripts

[MUSIC] Hello! This week, I’d like to thank my friends who helped me with this podcast. They saw every version of the recordings, every graphic, every website style, every color choice to make this podcast great. “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything,” as David Allen, the creator of Getting Things Done, said. We all have the same number of hours in a day, but some people are better at planning, producing, and knocking out a schedule. We must eat and care for our loved ones, have fun, have hobbies, chill out, spend time doing nothing, and sleep. We will break if we don’t do these things. We get burned out, feel like our tasks are bossing us around, and eventually feel like we’re victims of our schedules, not leading our lives.

We won’t get anywhere if we plan a vacation like many of us plan our lives, with no ambition or direction. If we were to go to the center of the U.S. and decide to drive to Los Angeles, no wait, New York, no, let’s go to Fargo, we would go nowhere. We would speed across Interstate 80, and then in a few hours, do a U-turn and go back. If anyone saw us doing this, they would wonder what’s wrong with us. Well, that’s how we live. It’s not our fault. The world demands a lot from us. Then we get frustrated that few of our plans succeed. We’re frustrated that we can’t make traction on what needs to happen or what we dream of happening. We start to blame the very people and activities we love.

We suffer from sunk cost bias, where we feel we must stick to something because we’ve already put so much effort into it. But this is where it becomes hard. Are we just at a tough part of our adventure, and sticking to it would help us win and love our goal? Or are we just doing something that is not worth our effort? This is hard to tell and takes a lot of deep soul-searching to figure out what is true. Work harder and get to the goal over the plateau or just quit and confess this wasn’t for us.

When eliminating the types of tasks that we have in our lives, what we’re really looking for is what gives us the most bang for our buck, the most win for the least amount of effort. Especially if we’re starting new habits, once we start seeing payoffs with good habits, they will gain momentum. Right away when we start doing them, it’s hard to creak out those habits and behaviors. So start small, get the most impact for the least amount of effort, and keep the effort level down.

This is where the term “essentialism” comes in. Greg McKeon, in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less from 2014, advocates for the main point of the book: focus your energy, resources, and prioritize. He talks about getting down to what it really means to move from a person who says, “I have to or I must,” and insists instead on saying, “I choose to,” and only a few things really matter. You move on from saying yes to everything to deciding what matters. You go from being out of control in your life to feeling like the right things are getting done. You go from thinking that most everything is important to thinking that only a few things are important. You go from big goals and desires and big shiny wins to small steps and big actions over time.

He then discusses eliminate, the ongoing process of eliminating any and all things that are low-value distractions and take away from our effectiveness. For eliminating, he suggests that we write everything down as a candidate and start crossing them off. While many people ask us to imagine future success and our happy selves, he says to stick to what’s important now. He suggests adding 50% time to what we think something will take. We are terrible at estimating time. We usually think that something will take a very little amount of time, and it ends up taking a lot longer. With buffer, we could reduce that stress and get those things done on time. This ensures that the important things will get done.

According to this book, we must prioritize, and some things just won’t drop off the list. But we realize that they are so far down that we won’t even have time to worry about them. We have to realize that not everything is an A1 in our task list or our life. We should look for the right time, the right thing, the right reason, and also have the right resources in place. Greg also warns that his book is not about going back to a simpler time. It’s not about lamenting emails or disconnecting from the web and living like a hermit. That would be backward. It’s about applying a principle that less is better to how we live our lives now and in the future. That’s innovation. Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. The way of essentialism means living by design, not by default, and figuring out what the minimal viable progress is. We use this concept in software. What fields must you fill out for the product to work?

He reminds us to reward progress. Then he says, “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” He mentions one of my favorite quotes by Stephen Covey, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” He talks a little bit about backpacking as an analogy to essentialism, and that the number one goal is getting to the campsite. There are pretty things to look at on the trail. There are trails that go off in every direction. But do we want to set up our tents in the dark? Do we want to go to bed without a cooked meal? The first thing is getting to the campsite in daylight, building a fire, setting up our tent. It isn’t about denying us the pretty things along the way. It’s about the tradeoff between the pretty things and the main goal.

So, in conclusion, essentialism is about identifying what matters most in our lives and focusing our time and energy on those things. It’s about saying “no” to distractions and low-value activities, and saying “yes” to the activities that will move us closer to our goals. By prioritizing and eliminating the non-essential, we can live a more fulfilling and purposeful life.

Thank you for listening, and have a wonderful week! [MUSIC]

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do. —Elbert Hubbard

I struggled in my 20s. I saw my entire life in front of me along with every opportunity or direction. Where should I live? What should I do for a living? Do I get more school? Do I get married or have children? There were so many paths and so many directions. I couldn’t think about what to do next because I couldn’t figure out which direction to go. I didn’t even know how to decide. It was like the worse Choose Your Own Adventure book ever.

When we don’t pick goals or directions, decisions are made for us. At some points, some decisions are made, and other paths are closed off. But other doors open too.  It’s just how life is. So how do you decide now which goals and dreams you want to take on and make a reality?

One thing I learned over the years, is that the impossible really is possible. I know when I was in my 20s I didn’t think anything was possible. That I would be as happy as I am today. That I would have a job I would like as much as I do. It just seemed so far away. When I was in my 20s I had three jobs and the job market was bad and I was extremely poor. I could see my way to do anything I wanted to do in my life. I resigned myself to being poor and alone and not really have much going for me. I really needed to think how to change my life. So even when you are stuck in a place when you don’t have advantages in life, you still must go through small steps. You might have to go through more steps because you are starting in a place where you are disadvantaged. But the process is still the same. You just must go through and figure out what is the next thing you must do to do better and keep going through the process until you see yourself clear of it. As you start to achieve these things you start realizing that dreams are possible.

If I were to ask if you were to pick the one thing you could do to change your life what would that be.  What if a fairy godmother came down with a single wish, what would that be?

We can only do so much change at the same time. While we are talking about small changes, also think about limited changes. Some of the planners and books talk about having a few tasks for areas of life family, work, spiritual, physical. To make changes we must have enough time to do them and enough resources either financial or time.

So how do you decide what things you want to take on and make it a reality? We can only do so much at the same time. And when we are talking about small changes we are also thinking of limited changes. So, when we are deciding we have to think about the time and the resources, either financial or material. Do we have the umph to carry them out?

A good place to start is to decide on an area in your life that you want to work on. There are a few areas to consider. Where you live in terms of your location or your home, health, faith, purpose, fitness, financials, work, happiness or grit, community, friendships, hobbies, charity, learning something new, relationships, hobbies. There are quite a few areas we can tackle in our lives. The problem is they are not all equal and there are some areas that just demand our attention all the time. We can’t give up on our family because this isn’t the year we aren’t involved with our family. We can give up on our job because we are not focused on this aspect this year. They all come at us and we must make them a part of our lives. Truthfully even if we pick areas to work on, we cannot always guarantee we can follow that plan. Maybe when we thought our job was stable and needed no immediate care or your family was quite stable but then suddenly someone needs some more focused attention. Sometimes we must go after something else because it became more important. Sometimes we even make bad decisions when it comes to our lives. We dated bad people and had bad jobs. But despite the fact we are bad at picking our priorities, we are still the biggest experts in the world on what is good for us.

Questions to Ask Ourselves

If we step outside and treat ourselves like we are own friend, it helps us look at the big picture. If we pretended we were watching our lives as a movie, what would you scream at the screen? “Just go do______ already!!!” I spent a summer abroad in college and came back with an entirely new perspective. It really changed my life! Travel can help too. But to get at the core of what is most important for us to tackle starts with asking yourself great questions. Dig deep and listen to your answers.

• If I were to ask you what would make your life amazing, astounding, and happy what would it be?
• When you pray at night what do you pray for? Do you even pray for yourself?
• What do you want your life to look like in 5 or 10 years?
• What areas of your life would benefit most with attention?
• What area of your life scares you the most when you think about your future?
• If you asked those closest to you were to tell you the thing that would best improve your life, what would they say?
• What do you love?
• What did you dream of as a child?
• If you acted as your own best friend, what advice would you give yourself.
• What is the most important problem do you need to solve right now?
• If you gave a thank you speech in 20 years what would you be thankful for?
• If you could have all the money and time you needed, what would you do?
• What would make you happier if you could achieve it?
• What could stop your happiness if it happened?
• What makes you cry?
• What makes you angry?

My best friend and I have a lot of things we are opposite on and this area is one of them. She thrives when she aspires to a goal or a vision of future gain. I thrive better out of fear of a bad alternative. I often say to myself “So you want to go into retirement without a penny? And so overweight you can’t have adventures?? Well you better go do something about that!” It might be the voice of people in our lives when we were younger but either way you must find out which question means the most to you.

When considering your future goals, you must consider current circumstances. What kind of goal do you have time to tackle? Do you have the money to do this thing now? Maybe circumstances require a particular focus right now. Maybe something has your attention and energy right now. There is nothing like having focus and joy and attention to a goal to help you make it happen.

I wanted to do a podcast for a while as I said before. Because of current circumstances I have the time now. I have the interest now after being invited to create segments on another podcast and found I loved it. But all things came together to create a podcast that I have now. If I had goals to travel the world, perhaps now would not be the best times.

Now that you picked a focus, you must figure out how many goals to choose. We will look at a few ideas on picking goals now that maybe you have a general topic.

Somethings to keep in mind is we all have 24 hours in a day and 365 days. We have obligations and hobbies. But what will happen while walking towards your goal you might change your mind. If you are new at goal setting start small.  Build trust in yourself and as you get some goals done you will see what you are capable of. Then you might be able to take slightly bigger steps. But in general, keep it small. IT is hard when you are new at goals and you aren’t sure if you will succeed at that you dream of doing.

Focus Planner

The focus planner is part of Michael Hyatt’s planning tools. It is really geared towards high performance checklists and goals with plenty of reflecting on what went right and wrong in that time period. They split goals into two kind: achievement goals and habits goals. Achievement goals are something that has a set goal like to pay off house or go on a big vacation. Habit goals would be more like daily like have two servings of vegetables or take a walk after work. Then they have people pick 7-10 annual goals. They think anymore might get overwhelming. 

They mention that according to one study by Dr. Gail Matthews at the Dominican University indicates that there is a 40% bigger likelihood of achieving a goal if you write it down. Their planner is built around gathering and measuring these goals with records of the reasons and the goals and sub-goals and habit tracking. Planners like this are great for some people. They love the plans and the check-boxes. Some people love the paper format and others digital. Some others, like me, can’t deal with planners in their personal lives while do fine with them at work. https://fullfocusplanner.com and https://focusonthispodcast.com to see more.

The ONE Thing

Then there is The ONE Thing and it’s a planner and a system which starts from a book and podcast by Gary Keller. His ONE Thing is to get the reader and listener to pick ONE THING.  Really focus on that by planning it out, blocking off time and doing it. He gives us data that a habit takes 66 days to form or a plan to stick. Stickiness is what we want because we don’t want to fall easily back to our old ways or fall away from our goals.

“What’s the ONE thing I can do right now, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” He suggests doing this every day.

He has a plan called the 4-1-1 plan. The first step is to set a long-term goal, maybe look five years into the future too. Then set year goals based on this look at the future you. Then break those goals into monthly goals and then derive weekly goals from there. From here you block off time for work on your new goals and start writing specific actionable tasks. In that sense it is very much like the Focus Planner. On a podcast I heard him talk about seeking those items that would make the biggest impact on the year, month, or week. Then it comes to today “if I were to achieve this action, my life, my goal would be so much better.”

He more recently developed the 66-day plan. The goal is to pick one thing and work on it for 66 days until you nailed it. Maybe you repeat this 66-day plan until it takes you to where it is effortless. He takes these small steps and really does the heck out of them until they are set. For me who is not that into planners, at least not in my personal life, this seems much more appealing. He warns not to make this a to do list. The activities must fit int the ultimate goals and not just be something to check off. To find out more about this kind of plan https://www.the1thing.com/blog/the-one-thing/66-day-challenge-tip-1-set-bigger-goals-focus-on-smaller-habits/

In his book, he frames for the plan is a Someday Goal > a One-Year Goal > Monthly Goal > Weekly Goal-Daily Goal and the Right Now Goal. They all work together and are sub-groups of the Someday Goal. This sets up what he considers to be dominoes that fall right into success. As the small tasks and goals are accomplished, the bigger dominoes fall. He insists that you block time for this ONE THING.  Once it is done, the rest of life can continue as well as other goals and tasks you have. He says you should live with purpose and visualize your goals. You should never compromise on the ONE THING even in the face of work. He says we must pursue these dominoes “ruthlessly?

I have not used his plans for my personal life. I have used it for customer projects at work. I do go into work and every Month ask myself what the one thing is I need to do to make this a good month. I do the same for the week. Every day I ask myself what the one thing is I must do today to make it a great day and help my customer succeed. It isn’t the intent of the planning system, but it really helps me focus.

He has a nice goal planning guide here which you can find in my show notes on my website: https://www.the1thing.com/thank-you/?resource=3917. It’s long but it fully lays out his plan.

So, you can see the idea is to pick a goal or a few goals but not too many. Make tasks that directly fall in line with your main goals. As the small steps come together they are pointing towards a successful end of a goal. But what is too much? When do we know we are planning too many things? In my opinion one is too few. It’s a luxury most of us can’t afford. But the Focus Planner suggests too many. To win at achieving our goals we need enough energy, money and time and resources. This will vary based on what is going on in your life already. Each of us will have to decide what our bandwidth on fully dedicated goals without excuse.

Alice in Wonderland

 “Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don’t much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.

Alice: …So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”

Alice in wonderland looks to be tale of a girl growing up. She daydreams and cannot pay attention. She even falls into the hole and not goes in with intent. She has no direction and no aim. She admits she believes anything. She is curious about everything and has no direction or goal. She is confused by the weird world around her and investigates everything she sees. She meets an elderly caterpillar who has some good advice but is comfortable where he is and not going anywhere. He is perfectly happy smoking and relaxing. A Cheshire Cat who is confusing and only aims to confuse others. He is comforting but his advice is useless. When the cat asks her who she is she says, “I hardly know”. The White Rabbits busy all the time and perpetually late. He is frustrating and frustrated. The Mad Hatter was insane. He is stuck in a party that never ends. The Queen of Heart was bossing everyone making her priorities everyone else’s problems. She doesn’t care at all about what other people need or must do. By the end she grows up in size and determination and returns home. You can look at story as a girl growing from a child to an adult.

According to editors Charles Frey and John Griffin, “Alice is engaged in a romance quest for her own identity and growth, for some understanding of logic, rules, the games people play, authority, time, and death.” When you approach the book with this idea in mind, it offers interesting and meaningful interpretations of the events and characters in the story.

This is what we must do. Throw away the confusion and uselessness. Get rid of being stuck in contentment. Throw off our priorities driving us mad and burning us out and all the priorities everyone is putting on us. Lastly throwing off the bossy other people who make lives more important than you own.

Summary

1. Dream big about your life. Look at main areas in your life and figure out where you would like to see change or need some work or have big goals.
2. Ask some hard questions of yourself so you know what you are really looking for in life. Reset your frame in terms of a tv show or you talking to yourself as your best friend. What advice would you give yourself?  As those though questions and get the good answers.
3. Look at a few big goals you would like to achieve in life or in the next five years. Start to create a list of the things you want to tackle.
4. Determine how many goals you would like to have.

Challenge

1. Dream big about your life. Look at areas in your life you would like to see progress or attained goals.
2. Look at a few big goals you would like to achieve in life or in the next five years.
3. Pick a good number of goals that you are think are attainable with the resources you have right now.
4. Ask yourself every day “What’s the ONE thing I can do right now, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Fun Advice

Ferris Bueller says “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. “

So, what do you think of this advice? I think it sums up a lot of this podcast. Life does come at us pretty fast and gets even faster as we go. Stop! Look around! Then ruthlessly prioritize. Not sure that is what Ferris meant but let’s go with it.

Please let me know what you thought of this episode and your looking carefully at your life and goals and paring them down. Check out the Slack channel and the website at smallstepspod.com. Please subscribe, leave a review, and tell a friend. SFR Subscribe! Review! Friend! Thank you and have a great week!