My Blueprint For Setting Goals | Ep 818

0:00So a lot of you guys are setting goals, you know, we're coming on the new year. And so as somebody who has set many goals in my life and achieved at least some of them, I figured I would maybe give you a different take than you might consistently hear across social media. So this will not be your mama's, you know, smart goals, you know, specific, measurable, actionable, something timely, whatever they are. Not that at all. I actually, I think I'll give you how I've thought about goals. And for some of you, maybe it'll be useful. And for those of you who it isn't useful, I apologize. So big thing number one is I think that people think about goal setting the wrong way.

0:50So the first issue I see with goal setting has to do with time. And so there's the time to begin and the time to achieve, right? And so there's, I think there's actually fallacies and misconceptions along both of those components of it. And so let's start with starting. So around beginning the goal, a lot of times people have goals. There's typically two times of year that goals occur and they typically are anniversaries. So there's anniversary for everybody, which is a new year. And then there's your personal anniversary, which is a birthday. And so most people make their biggest goals around when they turn a certain age or the world turns a certain age, right?

1:32And so what's interesting about that is that I think you become more aware of it, but I have always taken the belief, and I remember thinking about this, is that I used to set a lot of goals when I was younger and I would not get started on them. And one day I realized that if the benefit of the goal that I have is not good enough in the immediate moment today to begin working on it, then it will be the same immediate benefit in a month. It'll just be today, a month from now. And so fundamentally, I have to be able to start working on the goal or the benefit of working on the goal must exceed my action threshold today or it will never happen.

2:13And so I think even just walking through that logic for yourself, pretty much from that point going forward, if I have a goal, I begin immediately working on it the moment it becomes clear that it is a priority. And so I would like right now, if you're, if you have a new year's resolution goal, start now, right? Like actually start on the 30th, you know, starting the 31st, even just start a little ahead. And I, and I'll just say like, the more you do this, the more you'll start noticing that you're in October and you're like, man, I really want to do this next year. It's like, well, if it's going to make sense for you next year, it'll make sense today.

2:46So then just start doing it now. And so like, why would you not want to enjoy the benefits sooner? Think about it. Why would you not want to begin the process to get you closer to your benefits today so you can get those benefits that much faster? And if there is, and this is the key part, if the benefits are not good enough to begin working on them, you either need to change the dynamics of how you want to achieve the goal so that you can remove latency. So is there a way that I can pull up some element of reward from this goal that makes it beneficial for me to work on it today? Or is maybe this goal just like the equivalent of a complaint, which is it'd be nice.

3:26It'd be nice to have a six pack. But if it's not, if it's not, if the benefit of beginning that work today is not worth it for you, it's not going to be worth it in a month. And so some goals, like the reality is you're not going to be able to achieve all your goals because it takes five seconds to set a goal and sometimes five years to achieve it. And so your goal to achievement ratio is always going to be you're going to have more goals than you have achieved. And so it's normal. And so I think that what can be helpful is deciding which goals you are not going to do. What fires am I going to let burn?

4:03I have wanted to start working out. Well, I've also wanted to start doing these other things. Well, which of these goals is most important? because goals have a cost, which is the second element of time that I think goals have misconceptions around, which is that you, everybody here who's listening to this or watching this has the same time, right? We all have the same 24 hours, right? Everyone's heard that. What's interesting though, is that people will set goals, but they will not remove anything from their calendar. So you're saying, I have 24 hours. I'm going to achieve these four things. These four things will probably take me an extra four hours a day in order to accomplish.

4:44And I'm going to add that into my existing 24-hour schedule. So I will do 28 hours worth of work in 24. And then, of course, you're shocked when it doesn't end up happening. And so what I would recommend doing is not only listing out the goal, number one. Number two, listing out the approximate time you think it will take. and then number three, multiplying that by three and creating a sacrifice for that goal that is equivalent to three times the time duration of what you believe it will be. And I can't remember what razor it is, but there's some razor that's like, everything takes three times longer than you think it will.

5:22And even knowing this razor doesn't change the fact that it will take three times longer than you think it will. Elon Musk talks about it. But the reason that I say it this way is that you think that the goal will take you this long. there was somebody in uh it's a friend of mine in march and i was making fun of him for being fat um it's fine we're guys i can do it he's my friend and if he's not your friend and you don't know who he is then get over it all right anyways so i was poking him about being pudgy now he's in the fitness world so i had double reason to do that right it'd be like a dentist having bad teeth like i had to poke him a little bit i'm like hey man you're trying to help people lose weight and you look like you barely work out.

6:02Right. And so, of course, you know, we were we were joking around, but he took it seriously. And so he said, my goal is to get a six pack by the end of this year. And I said, you're not going to do it. And he was like, what do you mean? Why don't you believe me? I was like, no, no. It's just like you're too far away. Like you're not going to do it. You can't do it. Like it's it's it's super unlikely. And so as the months kept going forward, I was like, where's my six pack? Where's my six pack? Where's my six? But yeah, I'm a great friend. um and uh i will say being real he said i always appreciate the fact that you're real with me and that actually ended up helping him change i define good friends as people who make us better all right not as people who are nice to us anyways so here we are december 30th he does not have a six-pack but he's way closer but the big thing is that it took him significantly longer than he expected and he's a professional in the space and so i say this again to say that you probably your goal that you have will probably take three times longer than you think it will like really now you have how long you want it to take how long you think it's going to take and then how long it will actually take right and they actually take because like on some level you know that what you hope happens versus what you think will happen are two different things right well the think will happen is still one third less than will actually happen all right and so i say this to set expectations properly in terms of the time commitment required to achieve almost any goal worth achieving and so uh there's a third component which i'll get into but i'm gonna I'm going to hammer the second one because I think it's important.

7:24I love the thought that achieving goals is like doing or practicing magic. Now, I don't believe in magic, but if you watch any magic movie, almost all of them have a price to magic, right? There's like magic isn't free. You have to sacrifice some life. You have to crumple a flower in your hand so that you can do the thing, whatever it is, right? And if you don't, it like takes it out of your flesh or some crazy stuff. But the point is that I see goal achievement much the same way. You can't practice magic and just get magic for free. You can't just get goals for free. All goals have price tags.

8:02And so this is the big thing that I think everyone misses is that they look at value completely disassociated from price. And so price to value is a relationship between both variables. And I think this, honestly, this perspective is the reason that many people stay poor, the reason many business owners stay small, and the reason, I don't have a third one there for the rhetorical device, but I don't have one. But those two, right? The point is, is that you have to analyze them together. Because fundamentally, you have a risk-adjusted return on your time and effort and energy. There's 100 million things you could do with your life.

8:43you have very finite resources and the people who get the furthest in life or the furthest towards their goals are the ones who allocate that time and effort and energy towards the things that get them the highest returns right and so it's not just value there's a million things that you'd like it's like i will i want to spend all my time on marriage i also want a six-pack i also want to be a gazillionaire i also want to be a monk right like there's all these things that you want to do but there's huge price tags that we're just saying like yeah yeah you know what i'll have i'll take them all.

9:13I'll take them all. But you can't take them all without running up the bill. And so a lot of you guys are putting things on your platter, but when you're getting to the checkout line, you're like, oh, I don't have enough money for this. And so the first kind of realization that I think is worth having is what's your budget? What's your goal budget? How much time and money do you actually have available to dedicate to achieving the goal you have. Things super real. And like the goal, like I also don't think it's, it's likely that you'll conquer multiple domains in the same year, right? Like my, I remember the first year I wanted to get a six pack.

9:53I got a six pack. That was like my whole year. And I got a six pack. And then like, and then maintaining is a lot easier. Maintaining that, I've maintained a six pack for the rest of my life, but maintaining it is, is the, is much easier than achieving it. Getting, learning how to do business and making your first dollar and making sales and marketing and scale, all of those things, really tough. Once you know how to advertise and learn how to sell and learn how to deliver something, it's easier to maintain your business level and you're maintaining your current level of income versus growing it.

10:21And that's why a lot of people also stay there, to be fair. But right now, I think if you're real with yourself, and this would be the exercise, like probably the first tactical exercise that I would give you as you're going into the new year is, what are the goals? How long do I want it to take? How long do I think it'll take? Multiply that by three. These are the value. These are the things I want on the shelf, things at the buffet. And then the other side has to be our budget, which is you look at everything you spend your time on, right? There's two big investments that you can make that are usually pretty well documented.

10:56The first is your money. Look at your credit card statement. What you vote with your dollars is what you care about. Like you can say you care about these things. how you spend your money is how you actually care. And a lot of you might be surprised. You care about being healthy, but you spend a huge percentage of your income on cheap food, fast food, whatever else, right? You care about your personal development, but you spend a huge amount of your time and energy on junk consumption, on Netflix, on social media. You're just consuming junk, right? care about this brain, but you're feeding the junk all day.

11:36And so you're going to have all of the things you currently spend your money, you currently spend your time on. Now, the well documented part has two components to it. Documented in terms of your devices, almost all the devices we have nowadays have screen recordings. They tell you how your time will split up. If you don't have them, they're free apps that you can get online for computers, but your phone tracks it. And then if you are a little bit more organized, then if you live on a calendar, your calendar will tell you what your priorities are in terms of your time. And so between your screens and your calendar and your wallet, your credit card statement, if I just saw that about somebody, I could probably tell you what their life is like.

12:15So really fun fact. They did a research study where they had men and women pick their mates by going into their rooms, not meeting the person. There's no pictures removed and they just got to pick them off of the rooms and their living situation. Interestingly, they had better matches and predictive power about the people by just looking at their environment and not meeting them, then meeting them. We think like we're very good at deceiving people. But these things are the facts, right? Like what you spend your time, what you spend your money on, how you consume your attention. That's what you really, that's your budget, right?

13:01And so we have our goals. That's what we want. And we have our budget. And so when you look at all of your expenses, right, now we have to look at which ones of these am I willing to give up, number one. And secondly, and this is the one that's ugly, which ones of these am I likely to give up? Now, I would recommend it's easier to swap things. So for example, if you're like, you know, I watch a lot of Netflix and I wish I didn't. Well, I'll tell you something that worked really well for me. I just listen to audiobooks before I go to bed rather than watching TV. It's a very easy swap in terms of habit, but I sleep better.

13:36I'm not looking at a screen. I could use my imagination. I can read nonfiction if I want to. I can read fiction. And so just a very small, little small tweak, little tweak. And so it's much harder to stop something than it is to replace something. All right. And so if you think about this in terms of human behavior, right, you have a reinforcing stimulus. You have something that rewards you for doing it. That's why you keep doing it, right? That's why, for example, like in a relationship, and people may disagree with me, and that's amazing. Isn't it cool to be in a free country where we can disagree?

14:05All right. I have the belief that if you're in a relationship, doesn't matter how long it is, if you get out of that relationship, you're going to have a reinforcing stimulus that's going to be gone, whether you broke up them or they broke up you. Either way, there's going to be some positive aspect of your life that's gone, right? And so people are like, well, you need to spend time to heal and trauma, whatever. You have to get over that person. What that translates into behavior is you need to find an alternative reinforcing stimulus. And so there's basically two ways to think about it. One is that you can find something in your environment.

14:33So you can start gardening. You can start working out more. You find something else that is a positive reinforcement that takes up the place of this person. Now, if you spend a very long time being single after that, you find hobbies, you find friends, you find other things that fill that gap. right? The alternative is that you just find another person. Now, people don't like that, but also the same people who don't like that, this happens all the time. You're like, why is that not good? What czar of how to live decrees that this is not good? To get over one person, you just date somebody else afterwards, right?

15:09Now, some people are like, well, there's rebounders. Well, I just think that that's just the likelihood of regression to the mean. You think the likelihood that you just the next person you date is going to be the one is probably the same likelihood of you dating anybody after that person that's going to be the one and so there's this misconception around rebounding when in reality it's like now rebounding maybe you low your bar for getting some reinforcement right if you want to get really technical on it but in terms of the likelihood that this person's going to be the one i mean i got out of a really long relationship met layla and was like hey i'm not into anything serious and here we are right and And so I bring this up to say, like, I just don't think a lot of these things are planned.

15:44Now, zooming back out to goals. We have the stuff we want. We have what it's going to cost. We have what we're willing to give up and what we're likely to give up. So I would start with the things that you are likely to give up. That you're like, I think I want to get rid of these things. And I believe I can get rid of these things. Now, then you have to look at that value list, that goal list and think, okay, of these, which is the most important? which of these will bring me closest or furthest along on my path closest to the ideal version of me that i want now some of you may have the question of like well should i prioritize a health goal or should i prioritize a relationship goal should i prioritize a monetary goal i think that's honest like some choices in life you just have to make like i i'll say differently if you prioritize your monetary goal and let's say you achieve it right well prioritizing the monetary goal might help you with your relationship goal because you can go on better dates.

16:37You can attract better people, whatever, right? You can dress nicer. You can, if you're a girl, you can inject your face with all this stuff, whatever, you know, like whatever it is. Okay. You have more resources. That's not a bad thing. If you prioritize relationships and love, maybe at the end of the year, you don't have the monetary thing yet and you don't have the health thing yet, but you actually found somebody who's really improved your subjective wellbeing. And right now, by the way, if you didn't know this, the strongest correlation by a mile for subjective well-being, how happy you are, how content you are with your life, has to do with the strength of your relationship with your significant other.

17:10It's a 0.7-1 correlation. Nothing else is even close, like not even close. And so you might get to the end of the year, but like, this was a W, right? Now let's say the third path. Let's say that you get to the end of the year and you have your six pack. You're in way better shape. You look good. You feel good. You have way more energy. Well, what do you think that's going to do? It's probably going to attract better mates. it's going to help you do better in business. And so we have this either or perspective on goals, but almost all goals help achieve one another. The problem is that most people start on none of them in the attempt to achieve all of them.

17:39And so if you just think about it as like, I'm just going to chip away and attack one and know that by just focusing on this one, I'm still going to get a half step up on the other two, but I want to actually achieve it. And so I think a lot of people are very unskilled in making trade-offs and life is about trade-offs, right yeah as i say me as my as my very young man himself but it's about making bets like we have to make trades like nothing's free everything costs time that costs money it costs opportunity it costs the paths not taken everything has a price and so i think the people who do much better understand the price that they're paying for the thing that they want more so much so that they actually pick more appropriately and are more selective because when you really i think when you really appropriately see or assess how expensive a goal really is, all of a sudden you realize that you can achieve far fewer than you think.

18:39And so when you set your goal, think about this big sacrifice like the magic. What are you going to put on the altar? What are you going to sacrifice on the altar to achieve it? And I remember when I was, I had six locations and I wanted to scale to 10, but I have my gyms. And I made this live, I'll see if I can find it, where I was beat. I was beat. I was doing 20 plus consults a day. I'm launching my sixth gym at that time. And I had spotted out my like seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th locations. I knew where I wanted to open them. And I remember looking at my calendar and being like, I don't know, I'm going to do this.

19:15Like I spend all my time. And so that was when I made a live and I was like, I'm giving up Netflix and football and fantasy football. That's what I'm giving up, which was a lot of stuff. And I liked a lot of it. But when I was honest with myself at the end of the year, I can't really remember anything meaningful about the Netflix shows that I watched. And I couldn't really remember anything. Like, do I really care about the fantasy league that I'm in? Now, some people, if that's like your biggest thing of joy, then do it. All right. I'm not talking to you, but for everyone else who just does it as a pastime, just recreationally, if if the outcome of that a year from now versus the outcome of the goal a year from now if that goal means more to you looking back then then do that right and be willing to pay that price and i think there's a lot of like but what about smelling the flowers what about enjoying life i think that the more you work towards your goals the more you start enjoying working towards your goals and so you end up smelling the flowers along the way regardless and so that's just been my personal experience um that that that i share around that and i work a lot i work a lot i work more now than i did when i had less money which is hard to imagine because i just work all the time and i'm just better at working i remember in college uh a 20 page paper was like a semester long project and now i can bang on 20 pages in a day you know what i mean and so it's like you just get better like your output just goes up so i said there was three components of time with relation to goals.

20:46So the first was the start, right? Is that people delay the start for some arbitrary reason, when in the reality is we have to figure out whatever way to make the benefits beneficial enough today, right now, to begin now. Because otherwise, if they don't work in the future, they're not going to work now, right? When the future is new. The second is that we have to understand the difference between the price of our goals and the value of our goals. And we have to appropriately judge those so that we can actually make a trade-off and say, I cannot achieve all of these goals. But one of these goals is more important than the others.

21:17And if you can't make that decision, guess what your number one goal is? Learning how to pick. I'm being super real. If you can't pick and commit to one of your goals, then your number one goal is to learn how to pick and commit. And I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives. It's like when you're married, you make the ultimate commitment. And so you eliminate all other people than the spouse that you have, as long as you have what I would consider a traditional marriage. I don't know what these new age kids are doing. All right. But that's how it normally works. Right. And so if you think about you getting married to your goal, like you're getting married to the goal and you're eliminating any alternatives to that goal.

21:54And I can promise you, if you eliminate everything but something, you tend to do it. So Jerry Seinfeld had a writing process that I really liked. And this is actually really common with writers. I study a lot of writers, obviously because I write a lot. And many of them have these dedicated periods at the end of the day where they say, I'm going to start a clock. I don't have to write, but I can't do anything else. And so it's like an empty room and a keyboard or a yellow pad, like Jerry Seinfeld uses yellow scratch pads. And he just has to sit there. And he's like, and you know what, when nothing else to do is like, I get bored enough that I'm like, hell, why not?

22:31I'll just start writing. And so I think a lot of us and myself included, in the beginning, I thought a lot about focus was like, like gritting my teeth and like just trying to zone everything out. I don't think that way at all about it anymore. It's just, I would eliminate all potentialities of things that could disrupt the one thing. Like focus, if said differently, focus is the quality and quantity of things that you say no to. And so the more things you say no to, the better the things you say no to, the more focused you are. And so take it to, again, the natural extreme. If you said nothing, said no to literally everything except for one thing, then you would be 100 % focused.

23:11And so again, it's not, are you focused or you're not focused? It's how focused are you? And so for many of you, I think you're like 5 % focused on your goal. And then you're surprised that you don't really get that far. So if you were 100 % focused, you didn't sleep, you didn't eat. Now, of course you start adding some of those things in because you're like, oh, long-term, I do need to sleep. I knew you need to eat. Okay, cool. But I would start at zero. Be as extreme as that. I mean, do whatever you want. I'm trying to lean a little bit away from telling people what to do. I will just share, that's what's worked for me.

23:38If that's extreme for you, then do whatever you want. All right. Third part of goals. Time. The time to achieve. So there's the time to start, what we're willing to pay, or the sacrifice and how long we expect. And so really it's the expectations of the goal achievement that I see as the third big bucket of goal problems. And so what's crazy about this is that almost everyone on here, whatever goal you put in the chat, I would bet you is achievable, just not on your timeline.

24:18and so like you might have amazing goals but a really shitty timeline and so what happens is is that you expect a 10-year outcome in 12 months and then every 12 months you keep restarting and 10 years from now you're still at ground zero and that's what i want to help you avoid and so the like the more big things that i've set out to accomplish that ended up working out, the more I've just realized it takes years, plural, to do big stuff. Like years. I started building this, my personal brand in 2019, content-wise. You guys now see my stuff. 2019 is nothing. I mean, we're 2025. Six years. I still see all the road ahead of where I want to go.

25:05And same thing with acquisition.com and the portfolio companies in school. All of these things are... If you were to ask Sam or I, like well you know where's school gonna be in a year i said i don't think i don't think either of us are even thinking like a year we're like we know where we want to go and it's more like you set where you want to go and then you just start walking and it takes what it takes right like you see some of these big companies like you want to see here's something crazy facebook is like 25 years old like it's a new hot dude it's old it's not new at all i think it's 20 years but like you look at Amazon, 35 years old.

25:44Old, right? These businesses take time. Microsoft is like a thousand years old, right? It's older than Gandalf. I bring this up because we have these big aspirations. We have these heroes. We have Elon Musk, right? Elon's like 55 and also the smartest person on the fucking planet. But besides that, this is his third season. Think about that. This is his third entrepreneurial season. His first season, he sold Zip2, which was like a little website thing. Then he did PayPal, and that was many years. And then from PayPal, he started his next season, which is the season he's in now. And I'll look it up right now.

26:25Let's see. Tesla. No, let's do SpaceX. SpaceX found it. 2002, 23 years old. So again, it's like, I just, I say this because like everyone's so green and there's always going to be more people who are green. There's always going to be more people behind the starting line that haven't stepped up to the plate yet. And it's because they, because they're like, how am I going to run this marathon in 26 minutes? It's like, no bro, it's 26 miles, not minutes. It's like, oh, but can I just run in 26 minutes? It's like, no. No. You can't. And so I think the vast majority of goals are not achieved because of an incorrect expectation.