Why Most Goals Fail (And How to Beat the Odds)

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1:02Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz, and my guest today is John Acuff. He's a New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including his most recent, All It Takes is a Goal, the three-step plan to ditch regret and tap into your massive potential. Translated into over 20 languages, Acuff's work is both critically acclaimed and beloved by readers. He's a top leadership speaker named by Inc. And he has addressed audiences worldwide, including FedEx, Microsoft, and Chick-fil-A, known for blending humor. With insight, he once opened for Dolly Parton at the Ryman Auditorium.

1:41So, John, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, John. Looking forward to it. Should we blow a little time hearing that story? It's in your bio. The Dolly Parton story? Yeah. That happened like most of those things happened via my dentist, obviously. i go to what i say the dentist to the stars and john acuff so famous people go there and also me and he said one night uh he was like hey i've got a charity event at the rhyman would you be willing to open for dolly parton i said i guess i guess i can do that so i did 20 minutes of comedy just straight comedy the audience was dentists i had some killer mouth jokes that would not be funny if I told him to do right now.

2:21And I met Dolly. She did a 75 minute show that started on 9 PM. She's unbelievable. She's everything you hope, you know, they always say never meet your heroes, but definitely meet Dolly Parton. I would have that photo of us on my driver's license at the DMV where it's such jerk. Yeah. I can't remember what it was. It was a series of podcasts, but it was a serial where somehow the person met and ended up like doing all these interviews was with Dolly Parton. He turned it into almost a book lands podcast. And it was so good. It was so good. Yeah. I don't know any, it's like, there's only three people in America.

2:57Nobody hates. It's like Dolly, Denzel and Tom Hanks. I think like, it's hard to find somebody who's like dead Tom Hanks. I hate his stupid face. I think they're universally loved. Well, I, my like opening for joke was I actually used to talk about the fact that Bill Cosby opened for me. Now, technically he was the closing speaker at an event and I happened to be the next morning's opening speaker. Oh yeah, that counts. I've counted month distance. Totally. Same arena. That counts. However, that joke hasn't held up as well. I don't use it as much anymore. You're going to want to retire that one.

3:30That one has a different feel in this current year. Yeah, it does. So let's just start with the obvious. I'll put you on defense right off the back. Does the world need another book on goal setting? I mean, there are a few of them. What in your mind said, yeah, I've got like something that hasn't been written before? That's a great question. Well, habits had already been done. I mean, James Clear wrote Atomic Habits. If you ever write a book about habits, God bless you. That one's been done. No, for me, what I felt like was missing in a lot of goal setting books was how easy the initial goals should be.

4:09I think our culture does a really big job of going, go big or go home. And what happens is people usually go home. And so I was teaching goal setting techniques for five or six years to real folks accomplishing real things and felt like that was a big part of what was missing is, okay, how do you do that? And then the second thing I thought was missing was that a lot of goal setting books, their first step is come up with a 20-year vision for your life. And we've misinterpreted Stephen Covey's Begin With The End In Mind into if you don't know the end, you can't begin. And so I kept seeing people run into what I call is a vision wall.

4:46And so I wanted to write a goal setting book that started from the past, meaning the first thing it did was say, what are the things that have lit you up over the last five years, the last 10 years? What are the clues? Because most people go, don't look backward. You're not going that direction. And we leave all this real learning about who we really are and what really fires us up. So I wanted to redeem your past to provide clues to your present and build your future. So the word regret in the title is a tough word for some people. I mean, there's certainly people look at it as a negative, but there's a school of thought.

5:20I think Dan Pink actually had a book recently. Yeah, a whole book on it. That kind of talks about, no, you learn from that. There's like good regret or there's no regret. I don't know which there is. So how do you help people distinguish between, you know, you can learn from regret as opposed to just saying every mistake I made was regret. Yeah. I mean, I guess for me, it always comes down to, well, so what did you do with it? What was the action that came out of that? And so I think a really simple test is bad regret is something that doesn't lead to change. It just leads to more bad regret. Like you get stuck in that loop.

5:53Good regret, I think by nature leads to change. You go, I regretted the way I said that. I'm not going to say that kind of thing again. And here's what I'm going to practice to make sure I don't say that kind of thing again. Here's the, you know, I made this mistake. And so, yeah, for me, that's what I meant. I think a lot of times with regret, we go back to our past and hope there's a single thing we can find that will change the rest of our lives. And we have this kind of misinterpreted version of counseling sometimes, like maybe there's something that happened to you at six. And once you unlock that, you'll be a completely different human going forward.

6:26and I think there is benefit to going, yeah, I had this challenge and I needed to process it. But sometimes where I see people get stuck with regret is it's like if you visited the same beach town every summer for 20 summers in a row, you'd know that beach town so well. And they visit the same story 20 years in a row and they keep giving it more power, more power, more power, more power versus going, yeah, that was a thing that happened. I can't change that. I can change tomorrow. So I'm going to give more of my time, more of my energy to that? What does that look like? And so I would say, for me, it's how fast can I turn it into action for my future versus rumination about the past?

7:07Can you, and we can talk about the individual ones. Can you just kind of quickly, what's the three-step plan? Yeah. So the three steps are essentially you build what I would call as a goal ladder. Most people have a hard time with goals because they have a 12 foot tall ladder that only has two rungs. The top rung says final step and the bottom rung says first day. And the final step could be make a million dollars, lose 50 pounds. First day says, you know, get your LLC or buy sneakers. And there's a huge gap between there and you go, I can't get to the top that way. And so the three steps are you build easy goals, you build middle goals, and you build guaranteed goals, essentially adding rungs to your entire ladder so that you have a rung every six inches so that it's a really simple ladder to climb.

7:48So those are the three steps. the fact of life is that there are people i count myself as one i had access to a lot of resources i had privilege you know growing up and there are a lot of people that don't i mean that want to take themselves out of the situation they have and don't have the some of the the things that other people have how do you talk about that person it's like and again i know people can use that as an excuse because we've all seen people that have risen from abject poverty you to achieving incredible goals. But how do you address that just when you're talking to the normal person out there, that there are definitely differences in opportunities that people have?

8:30Yeah, I try to talk it to the individual person. I can't talk to global people. I can talk to individual readers. So where I see people get stuck there is if I go, man, I think you'd feel great if you walked around your neighborhood today. And then they push back and go, well, not everybody has a safe neighborhood. Okay, well, let's pull the thread on that. So are you saying until everybody has a safe neighborhood, you can't walk in your neighborhood? How will you know? Will the government email you and say, hey, we did it. We did it. Everybody has the same exact safe neighborhood. Now you can go take a walk.

9:01I had a friend, Chip Dodd, he's a PhD, say, we suffer from global codependence. When you say not everybody had the same opportunity, you're saying I'm dependent on them having the same opportunity before I change my life. So in a situation like that, I'd say to somebody, hey, I think this could be beneficial. And if they said, well, I don't have those same opportunities, I would say, well, which ones do you have? Let's talk about you as an individual. If they said, hey, John, there's a lot of people that can't do that, I'd go, well, what are their names? And more than likely they go, well, I don't really know any.

9:33I just know that like the world and I'll go, OK, well, like, is it a friend? Let's talk about your friend doesn't have that opportunity. Let's help them fix their specific problem. I just think that, yeah, life is certainly not equal, but I think it comes down to going, what can you do with what you have versus, take for me, for instance, I was never going to be in the NBA. I'm at my height at 5 '7". There's five people in the history of the NBA that have played at my height. So I can't go like, man, it's crazy that Steph Curry gets to play in the NBA and I don't. We didn't get the same opportunity.

10:12He was like, yeah, height wasn't one of my opportunities. And in some ways, it encouraged me to develop a sense of humor because I wasn't going to be the tall, confident kid in the seventh grader because I was not tall and confident. So I thought, man, I better develop a little bit of survival skills in my middle school and maybe personality be one of them. So I always try to get it back to the individual because I think there are people, you know, everybody gets a different set of opportunities and it depends on what you do with them. So you started talking about the, one of the challenges people have is that they set these, you know, impossible goals for, or, or they think, you know, that's not big enough.

10:49How do you kind of help keep people keep a perspective on, on that tension? You know, that like what's aspirational, what would put, I mean, because a goal should push you a little bit probably. Right. But also some people, you know, set something so big that they can't take the first step. Yeah. So you do need both. You need the aspiration to get you started. You need the small goal to keep you going. So nobody gets excited. John, I know and you know, if somebody wants to write a 50 ,000 word book, the first thing they have to do is write the first 100 words and the next 200 words. But that's so boring.

11:26If you say to somebody, you're going to get to write 100 whole words, that doesn't get anybody to the desk. You want to paint for them this big picture of like the book is on a shelf, you're holding it in your hand. It's been translated into Italian. You're at a book signing. You need the aspiration to be inspired, but then you have to break it down at the daily step. So it's really a dance of both in that sense. And so for me, one of the fastest ways to do that is to deal in terms of time. I get to time so fast with people. Most people's goal is divorced from their calendar and you never accomplish a goal if that's how you're living.

12:02And so one of the things I do, which is not necessarily fun right out of the gate, is if somebody's serious about a goal, I go, all right, let's do a quick time gap analysis. Let's add up the hours that your new goal is going to take. And most people that read my types of books and listen to your podcast have more goals than they need. The average person I did a study had 22.8 goals. Your listeners feel overwhelmed because they should feel overwhelmed. They're juggling 22 balls at a time. So I'll go, let's put an hour with it. And they'll usually go, okay, it's 22 hours of goals. I go, okay, how many hours of free time do you have in your week this week?

12:34And I go, free time? What? I'm very busy. I have zero. Okay, you have a new goal system that costs 22 hours. You have a calendar that accepts zero hours. You're just going to get into a fight constantly. So I always try to get them to make friends with reality. The problem is with goals is you dream and then you plan. And dreaming is based on optimism and planning is based on realism. And a lot of people have a hard time making that transition. And so I try to help them ease that transition. from I've got a big, crazy, amazing goal. I dreamed with unfettered limitations. And now I want to actually bring it into the real world.

13:10How do I do that in a way that is still encouraging, but it also does stretch me. And so that's always, you know, it's a, it's definitely a dance and it's not something it's why most goals fail. 92 % of all new year's resolutions, according to the university of Scranton fail. Like Strava did a study of 800 million athletic activities. Biggest fitness tracking up in the world. The biggest drop-off day they saw was the second Friday in January. So let's not sugarcoat that like, if you have a goal, it magically happens. It doesn't, but man, is it worth it? Like man, is it worth it? Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere from self-driving cars to molecular medicine, to business efficiency.

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14:33Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. For new U.S. customers with minimum financial commitment, offer ends$12-31-24. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com slash duct tape. That's oracle.com slash duct tape. You know, one of the things that I suspect most people, most listeners can think back in their life and have seen is that like, I know that if I make something a priority, it's going to happen. Yeah. If I wish that something happens, it's probably not, I'll fill up my calendar with other stuff. The one that everybody always relates to is, you know, on April 14th, if I haven't filed my taxes, all of a sudden I got time to figure that out.

15:22Right. I'm motivated. I'm motivated. Right. And, and I think that that's true. Probably that, that idea of getting the right, like making something a real priority is the only way you're going to make it happen. Yeah. I mean, and you have to figure out what that means to you. Some people are people motivated. So some people are really helped when they have another person who's holding their feet to the fire. Yeah. And you go, okay, great. Some people are, you know, visually motivated. They need to do that exercise where they cut out the pictures from the magazine and they can envision it. Some of them are, you know, audio motivated where they, they need the Eminem song kicking them off at the gym and they're going to lose themselves.

16:02So it's really about figuring out what are the tools you need to get it done? Like what is your kind of set of tools? And for me, I throw thousands of tools at my goals. I've now written 10 books. This year, I will have run 650 miles and walked 450 miles. I read 100 books a year. And there's people that'll go, well, man, that's a lot. That feels like a lot. And I always think, yeah, I want a lot out of life. It is a lot. I want to make a lot of money and help a lot of people and run a lot of miles. But I just use a lot of tools that make that easy and fun. And I'm always figuring that out. And I'm always dialing that in.

16:40And you've seen the same thing. If you spend time with successful people, they're never accidental. Nothing in life gets awesome accidentally. I've never met somebody who accidentally got in shape, who said, yeah, I was just binge watching Netflix. Next thing you knew, I was doing burpees in the living room. I don't even remember getting off the couch. I've never met somebody who had an awesome marriage accidentally or had an awesome business accidentally. They're always intentional and they're very intentional about how they stay motivated to actually commit to the goal. Yeah. And I think another thing is when you see that person that you think, oh, look at the level of success.

17:16You should go back and listen to my first podcast. Go back and listen to my first speech. Go back and read my first article. Brutal. Brutal. So I've been public speaking for probably 15, 16 years now. My wife still doesn't really enjoy to go to my events because she still has PTSD from my first couple of events. She would come and sit there and just watch me. It was a suffer fest for me and the audience. And that's part of it. And so that's the other thing is that we often don't get to see that process. And I think that's what people relate to with you is that you share the process. Entrepreneurs that share the process are honest and vulnerable and go, yeah, this thing blew it.

17:58I wrote a book once and this was a literary magazine that reviewed it. And their last sentence was, essentially, you can tell John's passionate, but ultimately, this reads like a pamphlet that got stretched into a book. That's every writer's nightmare that somebody goes, this could have been a pamphlet. But at the same time, I'm like, what's the trade-off that I wouldn't have done that? And I didn't get a book out? And then think about, okay, if your first episode stinks, what's the trade-off? You want the episodes to get worse? Of course not. You want to look back and go, wow, I've gotten better.

18:35Like, that's what you want. And so if you remember that, you're willing to do the work of being like, yeah, dude, that one was rough. Or like, wow, the crowd didn't connect on that. Or like, I wrote that book and it just did not. I've written books that didn't sell and it's a public failure. And that's not fun, but that's part of writing a book that does sell. I've read research on, and this isn't everybody, but there's certainly people out there that are actually afraid of success. Oh, yeah. It's like, what's going to happen to me? What's going to happen to my family if I succeed? I mean, how do you get people kind of past that barrier if it exists?

19:10Well, it depends on the cause of theirs. So it seems like when it comes to a fear of success, there's a couple versions of it. There's, I can't be more successful than what I grew up with is an acceptable amount of success. So I can't make more money than my dad. I can't make more money than the town I grew up in. There's also, if I get successful, life will get harder and more complicated. So that is what I call Mo Money, Mo Problem Syndrome. The idea that if I make more money, life's going to get harder and more stressful. But I'll tell you, I've had no money before and it didn't make life easier.

19:43It didn't make the problems simpler. So, or it's, you know, okay, if I get successful, people expect me to be successful every time. Some people like to surprise people. They're afraid to have expectations. So they'd rather you have no expectations and they show up and then they exceed them. So it depends on which variety of that you have. But for me, it's you go, you're going to have to raise your level of what's an acceptable amount of success. And one of the ways you do that is in community. So you and I, where we connected was a community of very successful authors. And I can't speak for your level of success.

20:15I was not the most successful person in that room by a long shot. But being around them, I go, oh, wow, this person, that's how they did it. They seem like they really love their family. They seem like their life is really fun. And they have a level of success that I thought came with a lot of complications or maybe like I have this broken soundtrack that says, if you get that successful, you never see your kids and you end up, you don't really even know your wife. And this guy seems to love his wife and he seems to love his kids. And wow, that breaks my framework. And so now just being around those people challenges me to go, I'm going to raise my own personal definition of what's an okay amount of success and see what that looks like.

20:55But the other thing for me with that is I'm really deliberate about studying and working with people who have sustainable long-term success. So I'm no longer impressed by the person that has a YouTube channel that's hot for a year or one book that did well. I'm curious about the guy who's 40 years into his career, the woman who's 30 years into her career, who has a family that loves her, has a spouse that loves them, has a business that's healthy. They're in moderate health shape. And I go, how do they do that? How have they not blown it up? How have they not? Because there's plenty of examples of leaders who have.

21:29And so I treat it pretty serious about how do you enjoy success and how do you make success not change you? I'm guessing. I could be wrong. that it'd be hard to write a book like this, or at least shape the ideas in a book with this, like this, that you hadn't experienced a significant goal that you failed to achieve. So do you share maybe how some of that shaped this book? Yeah. So, I mean, you could say, I mean, think about this. Like I spent three years working with Dave Ramsey and that was a really amazing experience. And then I ended up starting my own company, which was not successful for a period of time.

22:05So there were a lot of people, friends who would say, wow, what you blew it. You were on the radio with 10 million radio listeners. And then the next day you had zero radio listeners. My wife said to me, she said, Hey, I think it's going to be hard for you to handle that your next book won't sell like your last book because you don't have 10 million radio listeners to talk to about it. And that was a reality. So for me, you know, that was a big, a big moment to go, wow, I have to start over. I started at the bottom of a lot of ladders in that moment. So that was definitely one that I would say, okay, I had to start over in that moment, starting my own business in that moment.

22:48It's going to speak to 80 people in a Ramada in January in Effingham, Illinois, when I had been on stage to 10 ,000 people three months before. I don't know anybody in the world that would go, this is working. I'm doing it. This is the trajectory. So that's definitely one of them. And then there's been too many books. There's books I've written that just didn't find the sales market. Like one of my books, Do Over, which is about career transition, it just had the wrong title. And I came up with the title. That's no, like, I'm not pointing a single finger. I came up with that title. Seth Godin said it was the greatest career book ever written.

23:27That was his endorsement. It's the best endorsement I've ever received. And it didn't sell well. and the reason why in my opinion is the phrase do-over was so negative to so many people i saw it as positive i saw it as a phoenix rising from the ashes but nobody wanted to give anyone that book because you would never say to a husband hey it's a book about failures it's called do-overs made me think of you here you go but like no one would give that book and dude we changed the subtitle from the hardcover to the paperback like we did everything and it just didn't work and I worked as hard as I could on that.

24:03I wrote the best book I could. I got great feedback from other writers like Seth Godin, but the titling, the way I positioned it. And again, it was me. I would love to blame somebody else. It was a guy named John Acuff that did that. And so yeah, that was definitely a humbling one. Well, John, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you, find out more about your work and your books? Sure. If you like podcasts, I have a podcast called All It Takes is a Goal where I interview folks about the goals they're working on.