Your Best Year Ever, Chapter 8: Seriously, Risk Is Your Friend

0:02Well, hey there. It means the world to me that you've made it this far into the book. Clearly, you've got some exciting things in your future. I can't wait to cheer you on and have it your best year ever. I bet if you've made it this far, you really do feel like it's added a lot of value to your life. I mean, you wouldn't be listening this far if it hadn't. But would you be willing to share this with someone you know, somebody you care about? If so, just take a quick second, hit the share button, and then send it to someone in your life that you want to have their best year ever. Chapter 8. Seriously, risk is your friend.

0:40People don't brag about going up a grassy slope. They brag about going up Everest. Penn Jillette. The comfort zone is a nice place, but nothing grows there. Caroline Cummings. Most of us have heard the popular story of the first marathon. After the Athenians defeated Persian invaders at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, a messenger ran 26 miles to share the exciting news. In his book, The Road to Sparta, ultramarathoner Dean Karnassus shares the real story, and it's far more compelling. The runner whose name was Pheidippides actually ran more than 150 miles all the way from Athens to Sparta and then back again before the battle.

1:20And Karnassus says the same runner might have run the final stretch after the victory at Marathon for a total of more than 325 miles. That might sound far-fetched, but Karnasas then recounts the story of a British Air Force commander named John Foden. In 1982, he led a small group who ran the distance from Athens to Sparta in under 35 hours. A year later, Foden co-founded a 153-mile race retracing his steps. It's called the Spartalathon. Karnasas ran it in 2014. As an ultramarathoner, he'd already run 350 miles nonstop. But the Spartalathon held mammoth challenges of its own, including Carnasus' determination to run the distance with only the foods Pheidippides would have eaten—olives, figs, and cured meats.

2:05Why would a person willingly go through something like that? Western culture has things a little backwards right now, Carnasus told Outside magazine. We think that if we had every comfort available to us, we'd be happy. We equate comfort with happiness. And now we're so comfortable, we're miserable. There's no struggle in our lives, no sense of adventure. That observation applies to all of life, especially our goals. When it comes to meaningful achievement, comfort equals boredom and low engagement. When I first heard about Karnesas several years ago, I was so inspired I made a commitment to run my first ever half marathon.

2:38I've run several since, though it's never easy. And that's good. You and I should embrace discomfort for at least three reasons, whether we deliberately choose to or it simply happens to us. First, comfort's overrated. It doesn't lead to happiness. It often leads to self-absorption and discontent. Second, discomfort is a catalyst for growth. It makes us yearn for something more. It forces us to change, stretch, and adapt. Third, discomfort signals progress. When you push yourself to grow, you'll experience discomfort, but there's profit in the pain. Personal engagement, satisfaction, and happiness all come when we're gunning towards significant, risky goals.

3:19Maybe it's launching a new product, going back to college, or reviving a struggling relationship. If dreaming about a goal that big makes you feel uneasy, you're on the right track. How can you confirm you're heading in the right direction? I like to find out where someone's goals relate to three specific zones. I use the same technique when evaluating my own goals. The three zones are the comfort zone, the discomfort zone, and the delusional zone. Before we tackle the three zones, I wanted to spell a myth about goals and risk. As mentioned, GM isn't the only group to get in trouble with myopic goals.

3:54The worst disaster on Mount Everest happened long after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top. In 1996, a single storm claimed the lives of eight climbers. Focusing on the myopic and fatal goal of the climbers and their guides, critics of goal setting zeroed in on the disaster as evidence that goals can do more harm than good. They can, but as we've seen, we can also overcome these problems by properly setting our goals with the seven smarter characteristics in mind. Goal setting has been studied for decades, and the results for improved performance are overwhelmingly positive. There have been more than 1 ,000 academic experiments in goal setting, of which over 90 % have produced positive results, reports The Economist, citing data from goal research pioneer Gary Latham.

4:40The goal critics raise important caveats, and we should factor in their insights to proceed wisely. But we should also proceed confidently as we rise to the challenge of our ambitious goals. The Comfort Zone We all have dreams for a better future. We set goals for improving our health, our family, and friendships, our finances, our work lives, and more. When we start dreaming about the future, however, our aspirations can feel too fragile and too far away. We jump ahead of ourselves and start worrying about how we're going to achieve those goals. Then, because we let the how overshadow the what, we downgrade our aspiration.

5:18We don't see how we can accomplish more, so we throttle back our vision, convinced our goals must be reasonable or realistic. We aim low. We settle for less. And what we expect becomes our new reality. But the old adage is true. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Chicago architect Daniel Burnham said it this way in 1907, Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope, and work. The science backs him up. As we've discussed before, the goal researchers have documented a strong, direct relationship between the difficulty of our goals and the likelihood we'll achieve them, not to mention greater motivation, creativity, and satisfaction.

6:07For a goal to matter, it has to stretch us. That means it has to stand somewhere outside our comfort zone. If you know exactly how to attain the goal, it's probably not far enough. I once watched a documentary about amateur ultramarathoners who were running more than 600 miles across four different deserts. One of the runners had done only a few small races before, but decided to sign up. What's instructive is why. He'd never done anything like that before, he said, but he knew he'd figure it out once he committed. I'm not saying you need to sign up to run hundreds of miles in four of the world's most inhospitable places, but if you have what you need at this very moment to achieve your goal, in other words, if you can easily imagine completing the challenge, it's probably not challenging enough to be compelling.

6:52I quoted magician and TV personality Penn Jillette at the top of the chapter. People don't brag about going up a grassy slope. They brag about going up Everest. He said that when discussing his noticeable weight loss, making more than 100 pounds vanish from his 330-pound frame in just three months. How'd he do it? By switching to a vegan diet with little processed food, no sugar, and extreme intermittent fasting. Before you sign up for his regimen, note his own caveat. My first tip is this. If you take health advice from a Las Vegas magician, you are an idiot. But specifics aside, what stuck with me when reading Gillette's explanation was that he struggled to control his weight using easier means.

7:35I realized that the only way that I can accomplish anything is if it's hard, he said. Things that are easy to do, I don't do. There's just no sort of psychological desire to do that. I just don't enjoy that. It might sound surprising, but the research is on his side. We know from the science of goal achievement that rising to the inherent risk of a goal creates huge emotional gains for us. When goals are set too low, people often achieve them, but subsequent motivation and energy levels typically flag, and the goals are usually not exceeded by very much, according to Steve Kerr and Douglas LaPelly of Chancellor University.

8:12But they say, difficult goals are far more likely to generate sustained enthusiasm and higher levels of performance. In other words, we get more out if we put more in. Let's say you're the sales manager of a small manufacturing plant. You've been growing at 5 % a year, and this year you're going to set your growth goal at 6%. Is that going to heighten performance, engage your creativity, or up your enthusiasm? No way. Small goals just aren't very compelling. If we want to win, we need to get beyond our natural urge to play it safe. We need to jump outside our comfort zones and set some risky goals.

8:51Now imagine if that goal was more like 20%. Delivering that result will require more from you than you currently know how to manage. That's when growth happens. Or take a personal instead of a professional example. If you've done a weekly newsletter for a whole year with subscribers who count on you delivering your message on time, why not push yourself to add a major extra weekly feature on top of your regular issue? The idea with a risky goal is to leap out of your comfort zone and into your discomfort zone. Playing it safe won't reap the same kind of rewards. The Discomfort Zone You've probably already experienced discomfort zone benefits to some extent before.

9:30Maybe it was learning a new skill, meeting a new person, or taking on a challenge you'd never done before. We don't often enjoy these things when they're happening, but looking back, we have to admit, the really important stuff of life happens outside our comfort zone. This is where the growth happens, where the solutions are, where fulfillment resides. But instead of encountering this retrospectively, we can engineer these experiences by intentionally embracing goals with greater levels of risk baked in. In her book, The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal shares the story of Stanford University professor Aaliyah Crum.

10:05As a grad student pulling an all-nighter in a basement room of the psychology department at Yale, Crum startled from a knock at the door. As it opened, a tech peered in, sized up the situation, and said, just another cold, dark night on the side of Everest. Crumb had no time to acknowledge him or reply. He shut the door and shuffled on. A couple weeks later, Crumb found herself returning to the man's words. When climbing Everest, there are going to be some miserable times, she realized, just like she felt when working all night alone toward her degree. Crumb chided herself. But what did you expect?

10:37You're climbing Everest. Everyone has an Everest that daunts them, dares them even, to reach the peak. At the time, Crumb's Everest was her dissertation. But we all have our own version. There are times we are convinced we won't succeed. But what, asked McGonagall, is a worthwhile goal if it's not important enough to spend weathering a few cold, dark nights on the side of Everest? What's fascinating is that by choosing daunting, difficult goals, we rise to the challenge with all the ingenuity and resourcefulness required. General Electric CEO Jack Welch calls this bullet train thinking. He took the name from a revolution in Japanese transit.

11:17Traveling by rail from Tokyo to Osaka once took more than six hours. This slowed down business, and executives wanted the time cut. But they didn't establish realistic reductions in time, say, bringing the trip under six hours. Instead, they wanted to cut it in half. To meet the goal, engineers scrapped conventional solutions, rethought the entire problem, and revolutionized Japanese transit in the process. Importantly, the engineers didn't quite half the time. But they got close, and certainly closer than if they had set a less ambitious goal. By reaching for what appears to be impossible, says Welch, about the experience of pursuing difficult goals at GE, we often actually do the impossible.

11:58And even when we don't quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done. These stretch goals at GE weren't make or break. Executives used them to drive creative thinking and problem-solving. For a goal to be meaningful, its attainment should lie in the discomfort zone. You'll know you're there when you start feeling emotions we normally consider negative—fear, uncertainty, and doubt. When rightly understood, these supposedly negative emotions work like indicator lights telling us we've arrived. When we don't see the path or we're unsure about having what it takes to reach the goal, then we're closing in on a goal worth trying for.

12:36That looks different for everyone, of course. A friend of one of my team members is a foster parent, but the journey there was far from comfortable. Lena and her husband were unprepared for their first placement, a very traumatized 10-year-old. Armed with many therapeutic theories and parenting books, Lena thought they could handle the presenting behaviors of their foster child. But the child's outbursts grew more and more intense, which was not helped by limitations to telehealth, therapy waiting lists, social distancing, virtual school, and other external factors. After one particular crisis, the child's foster care team decided the child could benefit from intensive medical help.

13:14This meant the child would have to move out of Lena's home. She felt like a failure. She loved her foster child deeply and felt so defeated in her desire to foster and help every child that would come into her home. Smaller setbacks began to creep up as Elena processed her first parenting experience. She and her husband couldn't agree on when they could welcome another child into their home. They argued about small details of their home, ones never an issue before becoming parents. Elena felt fear every time she thought about having to parent another similarly aged child. She lost focus at work and isolated from friends to hide from sharing her failure.

13:51Eventually, Elena began therapy and realized her limiting beliefs around fostering. She created liberating truths and started setting goals around parenting growth, while her therapist helped her process her traumas and the ongoing big life changes of each new foster child. Lena and her husband have since, at the time of this recording, had eight other children walk through their front door following their first child's traumatic departure. They've had children whose ages range from 1 to 17. Lena now welcomes the discomfort this journey puts her in. It counters all the normal responses most of us have of wanting an easy life, let alone an easy parenting life.

14:27I'm driven by the desire to make a difference one child at a time, one family at a time, Lena shared. Her fear of being enough at the right time tells her she's making progress in becoming a stronger parent for children of a variety of ages. Now she leans into discomfort knowing it guides her toward new capabilities. Most people shrink back when they feel negative emotions. Don't. They might just be markers that you're on the right path. After all, the path from the comfort zone to the discomfort zone is where growth occurs. But how do you know if your goal is challenging or just crazy? When are the risks too great?

15:03After all, there's a difference between discomfort and delusion.

15:10Well, hey there. First of all, thank you. You're nearing the end of your best year ever on this podcast, and I'm thrilled to have been with you on this journey. And I truly hope you found immense value in what you've heard. And remember, while listening provides insights, having the book in hand lets you constantly refer back to it, ensuring that the lessons stay with you throughout the year. There are detailed exercises in the physical book designed for you to take a deep dive into the content. It's a tool that you can use repeatedly to recalibrate, refocus, and get your best year ever, every year.

15:47And here's something exciting. For those of you who buy the book before December the 31st, 2023, there's a special bonus I want to tell you about. So head over to yourbestyeureverbook.com, input your order number, and in return, I'm going to give you a free ticket to our biggest virtual event of the year. It's called Your Best Year Ever Live. Now, this isn't just another event. It's a chance for you to delve deeper into the book's content and expand on it and make sure that you actually apply it to your life. So imagine leaving that event with a full set of goals for the upcoming year, plus a solid plan on how to achieve them.

16:25Normally the tickets for that event, they go for$197. But with your book purchase, you get in for free. That's right. Absolutely free. It's my way of saying thank you and ensuring that you have everything you need for an incredible year. So if you're eager to make the most of the insights and you don't want to wait for the remaining podcast episodes, grab your copy from Amazon or Audible. Don't miss out. Secure your book and your free ticket to your best year ever live at yourbestyeareverbook.com. Hope to see you there. The Delusional Zone. Let's go back to GM's mistake. When GM blew its 29 % goal and damaged its viability as a company, critics used it as a warning about the danger of goal setting.

17:10They said goal setting doesn't work or that it causes more problems than it solves. But GM didn't fail because it set a challenging goal. It failed because it wandered into the delusional zone. The goal encouraged tunnel vision and reckless strategies. GM was so focused on hitting 29%, it lost track of the rest of its business and tried hitting the goal using strategies that ultimately undercut its financial health. Relevancy, as we discussed in the Smarter Framework, can prevent this kind of self-destructive goal-seeking. Some goals are simply impossible and fail to align with the rest of our priorities.

17:44They don't inspire. They ensure failure. We can all step into the delusional zone if we're not careful. Me thinking I could play on the PGA Senior Tour, for instance, that's delusional. Ask anyone who's ever played golf with me. What about the guy who decided to run across four deserts? Well, that sounds delusional, right? It doesn't tell you consider the fact that he'd always been fairly athletic, was highly determined, and was running with a close-knit group of supportive fellow travelers. What about you? How can you tell you're veering into crazy town? Sometimes, it's just mass. I once heard Dave Ramsey mention challenging a salesperson on his staff.

18:20The guy had set a goal of calling a certain number of leads each day. Dave told him he wasn't thinking clearly. Yes, the goal was ambitious, but there simply wasn't enough time in the day to accomplish it. The salesman had lunged right over the discomfort zone into the delusional zone. He eventually scaled it back. It's easy to think of parallel cases where money or other metrics are unattainable based on bandwidth and so on. We have to believe in the possibility, step one, but some constraints are real. Other times, talking with a spouse or someone close to you can help. We're rarely as good as others at identifying our blind spots.

18:56Other people can sometimes see how a goal is missing the relevancy we think it has. Here's a warning. You don't need one crazy leap to land in the delusional zone. Sometimes we can drift there with the accumulated demands of multiple goals. I see this when people plan major deadlines simultaneously or stack up projects one after another without enough margin. You know what happens next. It's a train wreck just waiting to happen. Goals in the discomfort zone challenge us and summon our best performance. Goals in the delusional zone invite defeat and merely leave us frustrated and discouraged. What I like to do is set a goal that's almost delusional and then dial it back a few clicks.

19:37Then I land somewhere in my discomfort zone. preparing for the journey. I'd like to return to the story of your Best Year Ever alum, Natalie. Before moving with her family to a new city, she launched an online branding and marketing consultancy. She had started another business once before and was ready to do it again. Natalie was able to turn a previous professional relationship into her first client, but getting traction was hard at first. I knew I wanted to continue to grow my business, and I wanted to do something entrepreneurial, she said, but it wasn't easy with the move and young kids. Despite the challenges and uncertainty, she ventured out and set a goal to grow her business.

20:17The journey had its bumps and turns, but she figured it out along the way and took her business from one client to six. I love that I'm being an entrepreneur, she said. It's so liberating to do something I've always dreamed of doing. I'm very proud of the fact that I've gone out and I've done that. I've created value in the world. Running her own business began as a dream. Then it became a daunting goal. After that, it was her day job. One year, she set the goal of creating$10 ,000 in revenue from her business in one month. It was a stretch, and she admitted she thought it was close to the delusional zone.

20:51I thought for sure it would take me till December, she said, but no. She actually managed it by March the 30th. I literally am blown away, she said. Limiting belief, crushed. Natalie directly benefited from the performance boosts of challenging, risky goals. And you can too. Your best year ever lives somewhere beyond your comfort zone. If that's true, and I believe it is, how can you prepare for the negative emotions that are sure to hit you during the journey? Let me suggest four ways. First, acknowledge the value. We move toward what we esteem. The first step is simply to confess that getting out of your comfort zone is a good thing.

21:29This is about trading your limiting belief for liberating truth. Say it out loud if you need to. Getting out of my comfort zone is good for me. Remember, unless you do, you won't experience the growth you want, the solution you need, or the fulfillment you desire. Playing it safe is not that safe. Second, lean into the experience. So many people shrink back whenever they experience pain. The problem is that this can become a habit, or worse, a way of life. Instead, embrace the discomfort. Move toward it. What I've found is that I'm never more alive than when I'm pushing, and I'm in pain, and I'm struggling for high achievement, says Carnesas.

22:08In that struggle, I think there's a magic. This is an important step in accomplishing anything significant. You have to go through the realm of discomfort to get what you want in life. Third, notice your fear. If you feel anxiety, trepidation, or uncertainty, that's normal. But you don't have to be controlled by it. Yes, fear can signal danger, but it can also indicate you're on your way to a breakthrough. I once met a base jumper in Switzerland. He told me he feels almost unbearable fear every time he jumps. He's consumed with it the moment his feet leave them out until his chute opens several seconds later.

22:44Why? Maybe today's the day my chute won't open, he thinks. Despite his fear, however, the prize is greater than the worry. When the negative emotions well up, which they invariably do, he separates himself from them. minimizes them to focus on his jump, and then goes. Often the ability to push through fear is the only thing that separates those who succeed from those who fail. Fourth, don't overthink it. This is my biggest temptation. I want to know the entire path. I want to map to the destination. Alas, I rarely get one. But that's okay. All you really need is clarity for the next step. When you get it, take the next step in faith, believing you will be given the light you need to take the next one.

23:28Growth in the Journey If you are out to accomplish significant things in your life, you're going to be spending a lot of time outside your comfort zone. You might as well get the most out of it. Either you can be comfortable and stagnate, or you can stretch yourself, become uncomfortable, and grow. You may think that comfort leads to happiness. It doesn't. Happiness comes from growth and feeling like you're making progress. As we try to set risky goals, it's important to remember what goals are for in the first place. They're about getting things done, yes, but it's more than that. A goal is not just about what you accomplish.

24:04It's about what you become. Goals are about growing. A good goal causes us to grow and mature. That's because every goal is about the journey as much as, even more than, the destination. And that's exactly why setting goals outside the comfort zone is so important.

24:24Hey, hope you enjoyed this chapter from your best year ever. My hope is that it's added a ton of value to you and that it's inspired you to go out and accomplish your dreams. But before you go, I'd so appreciate it if you would take just a couple of minutes and go review the book. That would really, really help us. You can do that on Amazon or Audible. And if you're anything like me, you probably always look at the reviews before you buy something. That's why they're so important. So leaving a review helps other people just like you know whether they should buy the book or not. So just go to Amazon or Audible, search for your best year ever, and leave your, hopefully, five-star review.