Episode 72:Skip Steps 1 & 3
What are our quarterly goals? Why are goals important? What shape should they take?
Summary
Recorded May 11, 2017, this Q2 planning episode has Nick and Kai laying out their 90-day goals, then diverging sharply on whether five-year plans have any value, before landing on habit formation and measurement as the practical ground beneath any goal. Nick is writing a book, Kai is rebuilding WR Audience as a live case study and writing a book on freelancer email. The back half is effectively a practical discussion about willpower, environmental design, and tracking the one metric that precedes the outcome you want.
Highlights
- Kai surveyed his email list before drafting his email-writing book. One respondent asked for a printable cheat sheet for writing you-focused emails, which Kai hadn’t considered, and it directly shaped the book’s structure.
- Nick argues against plans longer than six months: his field moves too fast to skate to a puck that far out, and he says that looking back on a five-year plan from age 29 would make him ‘break down crying’ about everything he thought he’d be.
- Kai’s five-year plan for ages 31–35 is a single word, ‘building’, with loose intentions: hire people, build products, travel, diversify income, shift from one-on-one consulting to group offerings.
- Kai’s habit research concluded that willpower alone fails. His practical moves: gave his vaporizer to a friend with instructions not to return it for three months, and swapped his dinner plates for smaller salad plates. Eating less followed without deciding to eat less.
- Nick recommends B.J. Fogg’s free five-day Tiny Habits course, calling it ‘actually interesting’ despite being a self-described critic of that kind of material.
- Kai tells every Freelancer Marketing Accelerator student to block two one-hour slots per week to work on the business, then send him a screenshot. No blocked time means it fills with client work or Reddit.
- Eric Davis’s advice to Kai on building a cycling habit: set a 10-minute goal, not a mileage goal. At 10 minutes you decide whether to stop or keep going. The habit forms either way.
- Kai’s personal trainer told him it doesn’t matter what anyone else lifts. What matters is whether you’re lifting more this month than last. Kai applies the same frame to consulting: track your own numbers against your own goals, not someone else’s revenue.
Read the transcript
So, what are you doing in the next three months? Because it’s okay, so just to be clear here for those who are listening. We record these a couple weeks in advance. It is May 11th in the year of our Lord 2017, and we’re already like a fourth of the way through the year. And that’s crazy, right? Like we’ve already done the first quarter. And my first quarter went okay. Like good, not great. Like I It would have been great if I had retained a couple clients, but like overall, good, not great. And I had like a chill, relaxing time and snuggled my dog. And it was great. So I’m thinking about the next quarter. And what are you doing?
What are you up to? Q1 was good. Q1 was a bit of resting and launching the Freelancer Marketing Accelerator program, which went really, really well. We have a wonderful, wonderful group of students in there, and I’m excited to work with them. Q2, I’m working on serving my paying customers, working with the students of the Freelancer Marketing Accelerator program, which I’m very, very excited about. And I’m going to do. A sort of work in public, there’s two sort of major business projects I see occurring in Q2: a work-in-public rebuild and sort of a teardown and restructuring of WR Audience as an outreach consulting firm. Taking it through the process and the methodology I advocate for students in my program and using it as a live case study and giving it some TLC, where it’s been a little bit of an abandoned property in some ways for the last year. And so I’m excited to. Get that fired up. The other major project is working on another book. It’s about 50% through the outlining and rough draft stage. It’s going to be about writing better emails as a freelancer. And so I’m excited to get that moving and moving forward. But a lot of the other work is improving the background business systems for Kai Davis at large, getting my marketing automation on point, getting my analytics on point. I’m starting to discover expensive questions within my business that I don’t know the answers to. For the number of people who have opted in through Facebook ads to my email course, what percentage have purchased the book I’m promoting to them within 30 days? And I don’t currently have an answer to that question. And that’s a very valuable question to have an answer to. So As I identify these different areas to focus in on, I’m figuring out: well, how do I effectively answer this? And how could I answer it in a simple way that I could iterate on? Yeah, those are two of the major, major focuses for me.
Yeah, so I’m hearing kind of like system building and Continuing to write, which I think are, you know, they’re core precepts of any business, right? Like, you should be, it’s all part of stacking the bricks, right? And I I’ll tell you about my goals and then I’ll turn a question around to you. So, my goals: I have a book about 50% done that I accidentally wrote over the course of a bunch of revised weekly lessons and drafts, letters, and stuff like that. So the goal is to at least get pre-orders up for that. And then the next thing, I’ve been running a retainer with one of my clients, old draft revised client, that’s been going really well. And it’s been Kind of around gathering data and acting on analytics in a way that is actually helpful for your business. Because I find that especially in my optimization efforts, a lot of businesses think that they can just install Google Analytics or KISS or MixPanel if they’re particularly sophisticated. And I guess it’s a form of throwing money at the problem or throwing resources at the problem. They get the data and then they never do anything with it, right? Or they don’t know what to do with it. Or they do the wrong thing, which is even worse. And so I have many years of experience in looking at data and trying to synthesize customer behavior and make design hunches out of it. And those design hunches tend to make people money. So launch a consulting retainer engagement around that. And I have a lot of like inbuilt resources that are natural fit for this. So, I think I can get a leg up on it. And so, those are two examples of things that I’m doing that. I mean, they’re launches, right? They’re new products. But it also speaks to a certain type of brick stacking in the form of the work itself, right? So, I’m taking some of my work and reusing it, or I’m trialing things in other ways. Is that Is it fair to say that’s kind of what’s happening with your book? Or are you doing like work brick stacking in other ways?
I think it’s fair to say that’s what’s happening with my book. A lot of it is Pre-existing content that I’ve written through daily emails, through projects, through other products I’ve created, through workshopping emails with friends and Slack over the last three or four years. And so I have a lot of these assets already created. And so I just recently ran a survey on my email list just to understand the pains and problems people have around writing emails. And a lot of and thank you everyone who’s a listener who filled that out. Thank you so much. Asking these questions, doing the survey, gave me a framework to write to, since I was able to say, okay, these are the specific questions. Like one lovely person specifically said, I really wish you had a cheat sheet. That I could just print out and have next to me. So when I write an email, I can make sure it’s you-focused. And I was like, oh my gosh, I never thought about that. But one of the So, I think of it as like a premier piece of content that I always reference: my piece on writing you-focused emails at kaidatus. com forward slash you. It’s resonated very well with people. It’s something that I cite very often. And for somebody to raise their hand and say, I really wish there was a cheat sheet or a resource around this. It really, really helped identify, oh, this is part of what the content should be. So I’m a very big advocate of. Writing a book or creating a product to directly solve the pains and problems of the audience. Coming out of Amy Hoy’s 30 by 500, that’s very much a worldview that I’ve adopted. And so. Running a survey like that helps me understand: okay, what are the actual pains and problems people have? And I’m going to do more research by the 30 by 500 methodology to discover. Okay, what are the other pains and problems? What language are people using to describe it? And that will help me create an even better book that addresses pains in the marketplace. And I’m taking a new view of products where Before, I always felt when I launched it’s version one, and version one is complete until I start work on version two. Now I’m taking a mental approach of I want to launch and get it in the hands of people as early as possible, even if I’m selling it at a discounted early buyer. This is the beta version price. So, I could start to collect that feedback from people. Hey, this chapter on X, could you explain this better? Oh, reading this gave me another question. And it becomes an iterative process where I mean, every two weeks, every month, have an updated version that better fulfills the mission of the book, teaching people how to solve this problem. And I’m excited to sort of have a virtuous cycle of a feedback loop where I’m collecting additional pains and problems and questions from readers. And then updating the book to address those questions, improving the product overall for everyone.
It’s so funny to me. listening to you talking about this because it seems so much to me like these are the things that we recommend like one oh one level consultants do. You know? And it’s, I think that it speaks to the fact that you’re never done doing it. Like, it’s never a situation where you can be like, oh, I found the problem. We’re done here. I feel like every time I do hear that from somebody, they um they tend to coast. They tend to get comfortable. And if you’re constantly doing this process of exploration, it’s almost a way of like ditching your ego, right? Like you’re saying, okay, well I solved these problems, but is that enough? Have I figured out in a more nuanced way what people actually want? And the answer might be yes, but even then, you might have just Seen a very particularly large wave, right? So I look at a I’ll talk about one company that I used to work with, and they’re a board game company, and they started off with one big hit, right? And that big hit was enough to like buy their house and give them a comfortable life in a perpetuity. And then they struggled to make another hit. Right because they kept I think they kept going at the same problem like it was with their like original hammer, right? But the goal is not to hit every nail with the same hammer, it’s to question whether or not you needed the hammer in the first place and then invent a drill. Right, and so that’s kind of what I’m hearing out of you with this book is like you’re still You’re listening to your audience and you haven’t gotten so far gone that you are ignoring them and losing sight of what matters in a business. Does that make sense?
Very much so. And I think that’s a very, very great summation of my philosophy when it comes to products at large, be it service offerings or books or courses. I want it to solve the actual pains that people are experiencing. And the only way to discover those pains is to engage with community members, talk with list members, survey people. Read what people are writing around this issue, read the struggles they have with other products on the market, and figure out: okay, so what’s the simplest form of a solution I can make available to Validate that this is something that people want. My writing about how to write better email has converted into clients, into buyers of the outreach blueprint and podcast outreach. And so I feel like I have, let’s say, 5,000-foot validation that, okay, this is a problem people are experiencing in this market. And now I want to get more granular. Specifically, what are the issues you have? How could this help? How would How would this improve your life? If you could wave a magic wand, what would it change? And based on that data, that gives me an idea of the specific questions people are asking. And even more importantly, when we get into marketing pages and the sales process. The specific language that people use to describe those problems. I could never imagine the phrases and words that people use to describe this, but when I specifically ask and people are generous enough to respond, It informs me. Oh, I need to orient it this way. This is the painful problem that they’re experiencing. Let me make sure I’m addressing that in the marketing copy and in the product itself.
Yeah, nobody starts out being of a scene, right? And that’s something that we tell all of the beginners listening to this podcast. But one thing that is worthy of note for the intermediate people is your scene is always going to change. And you You can be of a scene, right? Like when I launched DraftRevise in 2013, I think mid-2013, it was because I was very much of that space, right? And I was able to communicate about specific problems in a way that really resonated. I don’t think if I launched DraftRevise’s marketing page, like the exact same one that I did in 2013, that it would land anywhere near as well in twenty seventeen. And that’s because the problem space has changed. The terminology has changed. There’s been more of a push towards optimization and research and a push away from specifically testing. There’s been a greater cognizance of testing as a tool and not something that is that’s like a panacea for an organization. And people have a sense of what size of organization testing works best for, hint, a really big one. So I think if I had launched it today, it would have landed with a total thud, and it would be very harmful for my business, and I wouldn’t have. Um, the rep like, most importantly, like the reputation that I have now. Um, because people view um for better and for worse, people view DraftRevise as like the OG productized consulting thing and me as a particular leader in that space. And You can argue it was right place, right time, but I also think it was, yes, that marketing page was right place, right time, but it was right place, right time because that was researched like nothing else, right? And it came with a lot of it came within nine years of understanding about the industry. Does that make sense?
Very much so. Very much so. I think you’re spot on there. And I think also, were you to launch that service for the first time today, you’d have A similarly different read on the industry. You would have, by being by virtue of being in the industry, understand: oh, there’s more of a focus on optimization, there’s more of a focus on research. Okay, let me scope draft revise to fit the contours of what people are looking for, what people are already buying, and make sure that it’s resonant and coherent with the problem that it’s solving.
Yeah, yeah. And so I think that all of that, you know, speaks to the actual reason we have this episode. which is what is the three month plan, right? And that’s a sense of crafting that response to the contours of the industry.
Yes, very much so. And as I look at sort of a teardown and a rebuild of W audience, it’s interesting for me to apply the lessons learned over the last three years working for clients there. As I revise the positioning for that business, as I revise the service offerings for the business, it’s still going to be from the, let’s say, 5,000-foot view The same business. WR Audience does promotional marketing through digital outreach, but I’m getting more specific on who that target market is and redoing the service offering so it makes more sense as. A ladder from, like, okay, here are the books you could buy to here’s the done-for-you offerings you could buy. And it all comes from knowledge I’ve gained of that industry over the past few years.
So that’s kind of why three year with three month plans. Three year lol.
I have five year plans. Are you kidding me? No, no. It’s an article on my blog. We’ll toss it in show notes. Oh, hell no. I was flying back from BlizCon in 2000. When was this? This was not real. I think it was 2010. And I started thinking about my life in five-year spurts: like, what is 20 to 25? What is 26 to 30? What is 30 to 35? And just at a high level, it was like, okay, strategically, what do I want to be focusing on for these five-year chunks? And 20 to 25 was very much like, learn. Figure things out. 25 through 30 was very much like experiment and start building and seeing what resonates. 30 through 35 is double down on what’s working and turn smaller things into larger things, team expansion, new products. Leveling up in a number of ways, but having that five-year plan at that high level, like 50,000-foot view, has been nice for me because it’s let me say, like, okay, so This is a five-year streak where the end goal is getting to this destination. And I don’t have a monetary number associated with it or like a business goal, but achieve this type of thing or achieve this type of lifestyle. And That’s been nice as a touch point to come back to, just to think about, like, okay, as I think about month goals, quarterly goals, annual goals, and five-year goals How did this all fit together? What should I focus on that both moves me towards my quarterly goal, moves me towards my annual goal, and moves me towards my five-year goal?
Oh man, dude, no, no, I could rare moment, rare moment where I could not possibly disagree with you more of the podcast. I so when we did the 52nd episode of this podcast, it was for the one-year thing. And Kai was talking about all of these like Like very serious things that he was going to do with like helping out his business. And then I was like, I’m going to snuggle my dog more. And it was just this long control in the episode. Go back and listen to it if you haven’t listened to it yet. It’s a good one. But it’s. It’s very obviously, and most of it is true. Like, I definitely do want to snuggle my dog more, but like, who doesn’t? He’s the best. So, um, for me, one-year plans. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing in one year. I think three-month plans are valuable because it talks about the thing that’s in front of you, right? Like. I think we’re in agreement about that. But the instant you get any further than like six months out, I don’t know how people are going to respond to my offerings. I don’t know what long term makes sense for me to be creating at that point. My field moves too quickly for me to actually skate to that particular puck. And I get the feeling like if I like more importantly and philosophically, if I create one-year goals, what happens if I do not fulfill them? Or what happens if I fulfill different goals and do really, really well by them, right? Like if five years ago you had told me, Nick D, you’re going to own a house and a dog and it’s going to be Four times larger than your previous apartment, and you’re going to have gone through some shit. Like, I went through some seriously horrible things in 2015 and 2016 that are unmentionable on this podcast. Life threw a wrench and then things started turning out great. Question mark. And I don’t know how that happened. But if I had looked back on my five-year plan from when I was like 29 years old, I’m 35 now. I would just break down crying and think about all of the things I’m serious. I would think about all of the things that I wanted to be and how wrong I was. And I regret, at the same time, I regret nothing about my life right now. Like I feel very grateful to be in the position that I’m in right now. So I don’t think I think that not only are five-year plans, like they’re so broad that it’s like, oh, I kind of did that, or they’re specific, which is more helpful, but also you’re never going to do it. You’re never going to do something that you plan in five years unless it’s some unbelievably specific thing that you that is reasonably achievable. Like, I’m going to tear up the post-it note that’s sitting on me on my desk with sometime within the next five years.
I’m holding you to that. I’m your accountability partner on this one.
So, so you know, hold on, hold on. There we go.
As you can see, my accounts.
Yeah, thank you for holding me to that one, Kai. Like, most of this, like, It’s so life coachy to do a five-year plan that I just I don’t I would rather respond to the situation that I’ve been presented. At most, there would be a one-year plan if I was like planning a move or like a major job change or like a severe positioning shift or something like that. But realistically, how often does that happen to you in your life? Like four or five times, if you have a very interesting and weird life. If you’re me, it’s about every year and a half. Kai, Kai, maybe that works for you then, having this five-year plan business. For me, like, you know what I want to do for the next 32 years? Materially the same job with a little bit more flexibility in travel and more dogs.
Right. And I 100% hear you. I mean, like, I just pulled up my five-year plan. Like, for age range 31 to 35, I defined a one-word focus. It’s building. And the intention is to hire people, build a product business that supports my lifestyle. Outsource tasks, travel three plus month trips, diversify income streams, transition from an individual focus to a group focus. I’m not sure what Kai meant five years ago by that, but I’m going to think about it. And right more. Group coaching, question mark. Yeah. Probably group coaching, probably switching from one-on-one consulting to more. Group highly, like as we talk about highly leveraged products. So, products versus one-on-one consulting, and the final one being right. And so, it’s not Do these things in this order. It’s more an intention. I’ll use the word mantra here, if anything, but as I look at this age range. I want to build things, and my intention is to do these types of high-level activities to get to that point, to grow my business.
Yeah. So the nice and infuriating thing about what you’re talking about is that it is It’s sima, it toes the line between generality and specificity. Like, what does build mean? Like, it can literally mean build a shed for Burning Man. Like, I have I told you about my Burning Man shed experience. We’re recording the podcast, Kai. But then you go specific, and then there’s these other things that are detailed and relatively reasonable, but it’s also like, write more. And for me, like a lot of my long-term goals are like drink less. You know what the key is to drinking less? Not ordering the drink. When you’re there, and I know like every like reformed alcoholic on this podcast is like horrified by my saying that, but like for me, it’s a matter of like personally, it is a matter of cultivating the habit, right? And just saying, okay, well, I’ll eat more food. I’ll go out for more dinners and fewer drinks. And I’ve been doing that, and it’s been great. So I wrote down a few things and then I started doing them. Um there’s uh what’s it? Um There’s a song by Superchunk that I’m reminded of called Skip Steps 1 and 3, and one of them is Think about doing the thing, do the thing, and then think about that thing you did. And you are just skipping steps one and three. You are just doing the thing, right? Nothing is stopping you from doing the thing. I think we’re getting a little bit like thinky and high level for this and talking about like what the purpose of the goals are. But the actionable thing for the consultant that we can take out of this is Don’t create business goals that are either so general that you’re obviously going to like cheat yourself into believing you fulfilled them. But also not so specific that, like, it’s like me tearing that Post-it note five minutes ago, and you’re like, obviously going to do the thing. Like, they have to be. Actionable, and they usually have to come along with a specific set of actions that you are feasibly able to put into place. Like my goal is drink less. Okay, well, great. What are the tactics? Go out for more dinners. Spend more time at home, cook more at home, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so those are the things that are actionable, right? Like drink less. I’m like, oh, I think I’ll drink less as I go to OSB and order four shots of whiskey. Like, no. Right, but people do that. They’re like, I should drink less. And then, and then they, and then they do that, and it’s so dumb, you know.
No, and I’ve experienced that firsthand, especially in relation to marijuana, just as somebody who has smoked in the past and smoked for anxiety issues, as I’ve reached a point where It’s where I’m I no longer feel the need to use that substance to help with my anxiety. Part of it has been, okay, so I’ve unintentionally developed a habit around this. How do I modify my lifestyle? And this really fits into quarterly goals and gets very, very specific and personal, but. How do I modify my lifestyle to support that goal? And there’s been a number of attempts and failures in just learning about what works and what doesn’t. Doesn’t work. And I did a deep dive into habit change about three weeks ago now, just reading a number of articles from people who study behavior change and habit change. Like, well, what exactly should you do? One of the major things that came away was willpower is not enough. Your willpower is a fungible resource. You’re going to run out of it. Don’t rely on willpower alone. And so I read that and I’m like, okay, so the idea of me having like my pipe or my vaporizer. In the bedroom or in the spare room, that alone isn’t enough since like Kai just walks up there and, oh, well, we’re back at the same problem. But Okay, so how do I modify my lifestyle to support the outcome I’m going for? And that’s resulted in me packing up all my stuff, putting it at a friend’s house, and saying, Hey, I’m taking a three-month break here. Don’t give it back to me for three months. And Making sure that I’m not able to take action that I don’t want to take, constructing my life to motivate that behavior. Another example of it has been. I’m working on losing weight. Quarterly goal is to drop 15 pounds. And one tiny little habit change I did, which actually has had a huge, huge, huge result, was I took the large dinner-size plates. And I put them in the storage room. And the only plate available in my kitchen is the small salad plate. And I’ve always heard it as like, you know, the dumb stupid diet hack, use a smaller plate. But By removing my ability to use a larger plate or a larger bowl, I am eating less. And I’m seeing that, oh, if there’s food on the plate, I’ll eat it just out of habit. And so if I put less food on the plate, I actually end up as full as I was eating more, but I’m eating less because it’s a smaller scope of serving. And so, just reading about these habit changes and thinking about how they fit into more of the personal goals has been really, really fascinating for me.
Yeah, so the OG on this is a guy named B. J. Fogg. He’s a Stanford professor. I think we’ve talked about in the past, and I’m going to link it in the show notes, but he has a course called Tiny Habits. And if you haven’t taken it, do it. It is free and five days long. And it’s basically, he calls it life-changing. I’m just like, more, it’s more like. Oh, that’s really interesting. And I got like, I actually, and I’m a huge critic of this sort of shit. Like, I actually got something out of it. And it’s basically. You set up three things that you’re planning on doing. And it can be things as simple as like forgetting your keys when you head outside or wanting to drink less or having a smaller plate or something, you know, like whatever those things are. And to bring this back to consulting, like those are important because no one is looking over your shoulder when you’re an independent consultant, so they can’t like nitpick what you’re doing. And also, like, there’s no performance review when you’re a consultant other than your bank account. So, like, you’re not really getting a whole lot of feedback on what you’re doing every day. It is very, very, very easy to fall into a trap where you’re like taking lengthy naps at 3 p. m. or eating too much food during the day or just underperforming, right? Like you’re not. You are not psychologically showing up after a time. And you fall into this slump, and I do it, and Kai does it, and everybody listening to this is probably nodding vigorously. And you ain’t going to fill anything on your three-month plan if you don’t have the right habits and the right And the right routine to actually go through with doing it. The number one thing. Oh, please, you first. You first. Yeah. No, no, I would just do that.
Anyway, connecting with the idea of tiny habits, the number one thing I recommend to students, honestly, anybody who applied to the freelancer marketing program or people who are accepted into it is. Block out time on your calendar to work on your business and send me a screenshot of it. Just two two-hour blocks a week or two one-hour blocks a week. Start the habit of spending time on the business instead of in the business. Because if you don’t have that time blocked out, it’s going to get filled with: I was on Reddit, or I was doing client work, or I was just procrastinating because I thought I should be in front of my computer. By intentionally blocking out the time, you build that habit. A friend of the show and a close friend of mine, Eric Davis, we were chatting about me. Last year, I bought a new road bike and I was working on building the habit of biking more often and working up to biking like a hundred miles a week. I got to that point, and it was wonderful. And one thing he said to me that was very, very impactful was: don’t set a mile goal. Don’t be like, You have to go out and bike 10 miles because you’ll be like, Oh, I’m tired. I don’t feel good. I’m not going to do it. Set a goal of: I’m gonna go out and bike for 10 minutes. And at the end of those 10 minutes, you get to make that decision. Am I enjoying biking? No, it’s raining. I don’t wanna be out here. Go home. You accomplished the goal for the day. You built that tiny habit of going out and biking. Or if you’re loving biking, if you’re having fun, if it’s a great day, Go and bike for another 10 miles and see where you go to and see where you end up. But by focusing on that small habit, by focusing on spending an hour a week on your consulting business. You build that habit, you build that expertise in doing that thing consistently and doing that thing as a habit, and then you’re able to expand and grow on it to, okay, every day I’m going to try to bike for 20 minutes. To 30 minutes. Every week, I’m going to work on my business for four hours, for eight hours. I’m taking a whole day and spending it just working on my business to get to that next level. It all starts from I think first, defining what that goal is, what you’re playing towards, what success looks like, what that victory state is, and then what’s the smallest habit I could start putting in place today. That moves me closer to it. And I think this also feeds into the importance of measurement and analytics. How do you know you actually are working towards that goal? Well, if one of your quarterly goals is to get to this income level or get this number of clients, Well, what’s the immediate thing that precedes that? It’s probably talk to more leads or send out more proposals. If you want to lose weight, well, you should probably track how much you weigh and track how much you eat because those are the direct Precedence to gaining or losing weight. So, I think this all circles back in a way to measuring and monitoring that most important thing. But you only know what that most important thing is by first defining what the goal is you’re playing towards.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and like you’re not going to be able to set that if you do something unrealistic or Do something that doesn’t actually fit your abilities. You have to have like a very clear-eyed assessment of your own abilities, right? Like, I can’t just be like, okay, within two weeks, I am going to lift as much as Kai does at the gym. I will die. I will this is a matter of life and death. Someone has to talk me out of this. Right? And and like, again, like nobody is gonna nobody is gonna make you accountable to that because you don’t have any coworkers or shareholders. You may have an angry life partner, and that’s about it. That’s about it. Who’s pissed that you’ve died?
The arms fell off as he was trying to deadlift a thousand pounds. What happened? Now, one of the best things that my personal trainer ever told me, and this is very much a part of like gym and bodybuilding and fitness culture, is it doesn’t matter how much the other person lifts. It doesn’t matter really how much you want to be lifting. What matters is You’re showing up, you’re lifting the weight, and week over week or month over month, are you lifting more? If your goal is to lift more weight, are you lifting more in volume? Are you lifting more in mass or are you losing weight consistently? And just. Tracking that and seeing week over week, are you headed in the right direction? Since it doesn’t matter how good somebody else’s consulting business is doing or how much money somebody else made, what matters is Are you tracking the right things in your own business to move towards the goals you set for yourself? It doesn’t matter where anybody else is. What matters is you’ve set the goals for yourself, you’ve set the metric to monitor. And now you’re tracking that, moving forward, taking actions, and you’re seeing: well, as I do this thing more, am I getting closer to that goal?
Notes
- Tiny Habits: http://tinyhabits.com & http://tinyhabitsacademy.org