Day 2 – Plan | Build Your Long-Term Focus: How to Lead Your Own Life in the AI Era

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In Day 2 – Plan | Build Your Long-Term Focus: How to Lead Your Own Life in the AI Era, we connect your long-term ambitions to your daily actions using the science of Human–AI Performance Psychology.

You’ll learn how to turn your future vision into focused action, and how AI can free up time for high-impact workby eliminating low-value tasks. We unpack Brain State Intelligence®, explore the Ice Cubes vs Ice Sculptures approach to planning, and explain why goals are powerful stress-management tools — not wish lists.

You’ll discover:
• A quick recap of Brain State measurement — and why it matters
• How to map long-term goals back to today’s priorities
• Values prompts that reveal your real strengths
• The Ice Cubes vs Ice Sculptures method for better task planning
• How to use agentic and generative AI to speed up meaningful work
• How to estimate effort realistically and cut overwhelm
• Why goals focus attention and regulate stress
• How to run a monthly review and teach others to lock new habits
• A preview of tomorrow’s session — the Day Designer and Willpower Story

Chapters

• 1:22 Challenge Day Two: Focus And Goals
• 2:50 Recap: Brain State Measurement
• 3:02 Step Two: Task Director Overview
• 5:00 Build Your FAM Story
• 7:53 Values Made Practical
• 11:38 Zooming Out: Future To Today
• 13:07 Start Small: One Thread First
• 16:22 Goals As Focus And Stress Tools
• 18:57 Plan The Next 30 Days

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:41

Hello, habit mechanics, Dr. John Finn here. I hope you're well. Today is day two of our four-day challenge, where we're helping you to build the habits that are going to be the foundation of your success in the AI era. So if you don't want to just survive, if you don't want to get left behind, if you don't want to become replaceable, this challenge is for you. And we're working through four core steps of the AI edge success cycle. Yesterday, in day one of the challenge, we covered step one and we helped help you to manage your brain state. So if you haven't listened to or watched the day one video, the that there's the podcast is available, and the video of the podcast recording is available. Go back and watch that, and that's going to set you up for today. So today, by going to, and I'm just going to share my screen again so that we can um see the exact system we're working through here. So today, like we're on this journey that you can see on the screen. Or if you're listening, essentially, we uh started by just introducing a few core ideas yesterday, then we moved on to step one, where we measured your brain state. So you should have a brain state score if you listen, listened yesterday, should have an understanding of your brain state profile, either across the bear, a jagged jewel, or an arrowhead. Today we're going to move on to step two, and we're going to work with the task director. So we need to put our brain states into context. And to help us to do that, we're going to, and this is from Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution. And as I said yesterday, I'd really recommend if you don't have this book in front of you, get it. You can get the book for just one dollar. Um, there'll be a link beneath the video or the podcast. So we're gonna we're gonna start to create what we call your future ambitious, meaningful story. So you may have done this before, you may not have done this before. But what we're doing here is we are getting you to very deliberately think about your distant future. What are the kind of things that you want to have that you want to be doing, let's say in the next 10 years? You can go further than that if you want. And then you work backwards and think, well, in order to achieve and have those things in the next 10 years, what do I need in the next one? What do I need to be doing achieving in the next one to four years? And then what do I need to be doing and achieving in the next 12 months to achieve those things in the next one to four years? And then what does that mean I need to focus on this month? And then what does that mean I need to focus on this week? And what does that mean I need to be working on today? And ultimately, today is being driven by your brain states, and if they're not where you want them to be, we're gonna have to build some new habits to um give yourself a better chance of achieving the things that you want to achieve this week and this month, and in the next 12 months, and the next one to four years, and in the next 10 years. So, this is what we call intelligent goal setting, trial and testing methodology. And what we do in uh step two of training your brain for their revolution is we map out how to create your fam story in a step-by-step fashion. We start by uh getting you to reflect on some meaningful value-based questions. You know, everything in our approach has evolved by working with people in real time through coaching and workshops and big programs that we've run where we try and test things out. And I remember trying to test out values with people, uh, because it's often talked about that people need to understand their values. But what we found was that people found the idea very abstract and it actually wasn't all that helpful. So instead of just thinking about values, we think about these things instead. So the first question this is kind of the warm-up for the fam story is think about who inspires you, be specific name names. And here we list some examples: parents, siblings, grandparents, family, colleagues, people who've changed society, scientists, Nobel Prize winners, entrepreneurs, mentors, writers, sporting champions, political leaders, high achievers, musicians, artists, other creative people. The list goes on. And it says think about why the people who inspire you actually inspire you. Again, be specific, identified, identify their shared and individual qualities. So some examples of why they might inspire you because they're dedicated, they're persistent, they're self-sacrificed, they're determined, they have desire, work, ethics, success, tolerance. They're committed to making progress, they're committed to excellence, innovation, humility. Uh, they're dependable, they're resilient, they've got a great attitude, they've got guts. And then the next question is think about what you do to feel like your best. So, again, some examples have fun, help others, develop myself, relax, do meaningful work, show humility, give my best, have a good work-life balance, achieve results, be dedicated, be determined, persistent, persist with difficult challenges, be resilient, show the right attitude, make personal progress, be diligent, be dependable, be tolerant, eat well, sleep well, show self-control. So, you know, we're just asking you to pick out a couple of these things, and we go on. So uh four here is um think about why it's important for you to do these things, what outcomes they will help you to achieve. Five is think about your top strengths. Six is think about the most important and difficult things you've achieved in your life so far in the last 12 months. Seven, think about how you manage to be persistent to secure this achievement. So, what we're doing here is we're getting to really zoom out from yourself and think about what is important to you, why it's important to you, who the people in your life are that you look up to, what you've achieved in your life so far that is gonna act as a foundation for achieving the next big thing that you achieve. And then we move on and we go into chapter 16, and we get you to start thinking about what you want to achieve in the distant future, what you want to do in the next one to four years, what you want to do and achieve in the next 12 months, then in the next six months, the next three months, the next 30 days, this week, and today, so that you've got that interconnected idea. Now, you might be thinking that's a lot for me, and I don't have time to do that. Just pick one thing to start with. So just say, for example, I haven't met anyone. If you think of the top of the iceberg, the sort of the apex, that very top diamond shape of the iceberg, or just the very peak of the iceberg, that's the furthest into the distance that you can think about. That could be 10 years, it could be 20, it could be 50, whatever you want it to be. I haven't met anyone yet who doesn't want to be healthy and happy in the distant future. So if you just think about that one core thing, that's gonna mean that you need to have a good sleep habits, you need to have good stress management habits, and some other things as well, probably about uh income, about job satisfaction, about family things, about where you want to live. And it goes on, and that's a really good starting point. So if we just get kind of one thread between the top and the bottom, that's enough to get going. The Future Ambitious Meaningful Story, it's an organic process in the sense of you don't just do it once, you revisit this at least once a month to start with, and you build it up and you layer it up. And the beauty of goal setting in this way is goals are focus and stress management tools. So by setting a goal, you give yourself a focus, and you also start to create this self-fulfilling prophecy about your future, especially when you write it down in this level of detail, and then the goals are not set set in stone. So at any point in time where any one goal is feeling overwhelming, you can change it, you can make it easier to achieve, but also you can make it harder to achieve if you need a bit more motivation to move forwards. Motivation in this sense is just direction and intensity of effort, that's how we define it, and goals are really important for direction and intensity of effort. Think about the goals on the wall, and your motivation is like a dart that you throw towards the goals. Um, so in chapter 16, we help you to kind of unpack all that stuff and really create a clear plan for up to the next two or three months. Um again, don't feel overwhelmed by this, you can do it relatively quickly. And then what we do is we actually ask you to um break this down into the next 30 days, and what we want to start thinking about in the next 30 days is what kind of tasks do you need to be achieving. So, some of those tasks we think of ice cubes. Use your medium charge brain state to do that type of work, so easy administration jobs. You've probably already got a list, but you can extend the list, and then you're gonna have a list of what we call ice sculpture tasks, like um more complex, high-impact, high-charge thinking work. So ice sculptures are things that we build up over a period of time. So, me doing this four-day challenge, doing the content, doing the recordings of videos, it's like an ice sculpture. Um, writing the habit mechanic book was an ice sculpture, writing Train Your Brain for their revolution was an ice sculpture, you know, writing a new client proposal about um helping teams improve how they work with AI is an ice sculpture the first time you do it. Creating become a certified habit mechanic coach training program was a big ice sculpture to build, and so on. But what you really want to work towards is having that clear list of ice cubes and ice sculpture tasks that you want to be achieving in the next um 30 days, and then what we can do is we can make a note next to each one about where it is in terms of priority and how long it might take us to complete it, especially for the ice sculpture task, because often ice sculptures feel overwhelming, like creating a fam story. So if you think, well, actually, I can do that in 30 minutes, it just feels less overwhelming, and then you have a clear focus on what you need to be prioritizing to do every day to give yourself the best chance of achieving your goals today, this week, this month, this year, and so on. And that's what the fam story is about. And what we can also start to do is we can go back to these neural network AI technologies and think, well, how can they help me to get my the stuff done that I want to get done? So yesterday we talked about there are two AI, neural network AI is a bit like a species, and there are two types. One is agentic AI, we can use agentic AI to help us with our ice cube tasks, so we can fully automate already some of the ice cube tasks that we used to have to use our own brain power to do, and we can semi-automate others, and we can also use the other species of neural network AI, which is LLMs and generative AI, to help us to uh get our ice sculptures built faster. So, what we're doing here is we're not only organizing our goals in an intelligent way, we're also very deliberately thinking about how can I harness this new powerful technology in my day-to-day. And even if you just pick one tool, that's going to be helpful for you. So you might start to be more deliberate in how you work with Claude or ChatGTP in um building a nice sculpture that you need to build, like creating a new proposal for a new client, working on your own book, whatever it is, working on your sales and marketing plan. So that's what we're doing here is we're connecting our brain states and how we can use AI to get a better balance across brain states. Because if we use AI tools to help us to build our ice sculptures and to automate or semi-automate our ice cube tasks, we're going to get that stuff done faster, we're going to feel better about ourselves, and we're going to have more high-quality recharge time. So that's what we're doing here. So, again, all of this is in step two of training your brain for the AI revolution. So, I'd really encourage you to go in there and uh work through these chapters. And if you've even if you've already done it before, update your fam story. Remember, what we're doing here is we're learning how to become our own expert habit-building coaches. And the best measure of being able to do that is to be able to teach it, teach others how to do it. And that's why we're really encouraging people to become certified habit mechanic coaches. That's the training we've put together to help people to actually do this in a formal way where you can get that recognition. Um, even if you just want to help your family use these tools. But equally, if you want to get the next promotion at work, because you've got this set of expertise, everybody now is starting to desire in their businesses, or you want to um set up your own coaching business using that. That's why we created that certification. What we're doing here is in this four-day challenge, we're just dipping our toe into the water. Um, we're always going to go from knowing to doing to habit. So the first thing to do is just to get the knowledge about this system, this simple four-step AI system, and just start to put it into practice in a way that works best for you and your schedule. So that's all I wanted to share today. So I'm just zooming up the document here that I'm sharing in the video just to share where we've got up to. So we've covered Brand State Measurement, we've looked at the planning today. Tomorrow we'll look at working with the day designer and creating a willpower story. Thanks for listening. Listen back again if that's helpful. But the all the details are in the book, which you can get for one dollar. Uh, but I know most people who listen to this already have that book. So use it. It's a playbook, put it into practice because this is the key to capitalizing on the amazing opportunities that the AI era is bringing for us, not just to get your work done faster, but to be healthier, happier, and at your best more often, and ultimately to help others do this, help others to become brain state intelligent. That's going to be the most important, or I'd argue it's already the most important type of intelligence on the planet for humans to develop. Many of the intelligences that we've prioritized developing are now fully automatable, so they become less important. The most important intelligence is brain state intelligence, understanding how our brain works, so we get the most out of it. Uh, get into those high charge brains consistently, spend ample time in recharge brain states. And that's why we say you're only ever one brain state habit away.