Balancing Ambitions: Achieve Your Goals with a Simple Decision-Making Framework Ep. 021

Unlock the secrets to balancing your personal and professional aspirations with our latest Brightside Business episode, where we dive deep into a transformative three-step decision-making framework. Imagine being able to prioritize your goals using a simple Venn diagram, ensuring that each endeavor not only brings joy but also aligns with your long-term ambitions. We'll guide you on auditing your desires, helping you discern between fleeting interests and meaningful pursuits. With practical examples, like combining the challenge of learning musical instruments or training for a marathon, we promise to equip you with the tools to effectively manage your time and energy without falling into the burnout trap.

Connect with us as we invite you to an interactive Business Growth Q&A session, a space where your questions shape our conversations. Whether you're an entrepreneur facing unique challenges or someone striving for personal growth, we offer personalized advice based on shared experiences and expert insights. This episode isn't just about setting goals, but about achieving them with intentionality and passion. Don't miss the chance to subscribe, share, and empower your network with the valuable strategies discussed. Join our community of listeners who are transforming their lives one goal at a time.

Got Questions? Send them here and I'll tackle them on the show: joey@joeyhyoung.com

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Chapters

• 0:00 Three-Step Decision-Making Framework
• 6:29 Managing Multiple Goals Effectively
• 15:06 Business Growth Q&A Invitation

Transcript

Joey Young: 0:00

Welcome to Breadside Business, where we talk to online entrepreneurs like yourself about how to grow your business. My name is Joey Young. I grew my family's business to seven figures in two years and I learned a lot of lessons along the way. This show. I wanted to do something a little bit different. I read a question recently that I think applies to a lot of business owners out there trying to scale their business. So I'm going to read the question and then I'm going to actually respond to it on the show here and give a process for how to solve this problem.

Joey Young: 0:27

This person lays out Again this question, I think, really helps a lot of business owners who are having this problem with time management. So if you're in the midst of growing a business, this is going to be super helpful. I'm going to tell you how to actually structure your capacity to make the most of your time and grow your business in the most efficient way without burning out. But I'm going to do so by responding to this question, which doesn't really have a lot to do with business specifically. So I think it'd be fun. Let's try it out. Here's the question. I have a long list of things I'd love to do. Get a scuba diving certification, run a marathon, write a book, work on my podcast, go back to school, become a yoga instructor, travel abroad teaching English, learn guitar, practice piano OMG, so many things. Anyone else like this. How do you manage? I have dabbled a little in each, but I may need to just pick one per year and put all my attention on that. What has worked best for you? Well, here's the thing. To this person reaching out, I totally understand what you're asking here. You're asking how to pick the thing to do instead of having this constant tension in your life of all these different things you want to do but not actually doing any of them. I think business owners have this problem a lot, and so here's what it comes down to really to make the decision about what you want to do next, cause obviously you I can't ask you the question simply like what do you want to do first? That's, that's really the crux of your question. So we need to determine what we want to do first and the way we do.

Joey Young: 1:59

That is really a Venn diagram where we overlap three different things. What would bring the most joy in this season of your life? That's the first circle. What would help you accomplish the other goals if achieved. Second circle and then the third one is what would you be most glad you did 10 years from now? So, really trying to find the overlap of those three things, what would bring the most joy right now, what would help you accomplish the other goals in your list so you could accomplish more, and what would you be really glad you did 10 years from now? So you know, I think bringing you the most joy right now is a really personal thing, but if we could dig into just the second one there, you know what would help you accomplish the other goals?

Joey Young: 2:41

Because obviously you're saying here, like I want to work on a podcast, write a book, go back to school, become a yoga instructor, travel abroad. There's a lot of different, various things here, but if we were to categorize them, you might be able to help yourself out by thinking about okay, like, if I want to travel abroad speaking English you know teaching English maybe I won't be able to practice guitar or become a yoga teacher at the same time, but maybe I could learn guitar and piano at the same time, because those are pretty similar things I want to pursue in my life. So be thinking about that. Which one is going to help you accomplish the other ones and you can kind of bundle together and which ones have to be attacked separately and completely on their own. And then for the third thing what would you be glad you did 10 years from now?

Joey Young: 3:33

If you want, let's say, a family in the next five years, maybe now is the time to go do the thing that you can't do right now, that you couldn't do five years from now with kids, like maybe traveling abroad, for example. Or maybe you have a family right now and you see empty nester. You see yourself being an empty nester in the next five family right now and you see empty nester on the. You see yourself being an empty nester in the next you know, five, 10 years. And you're like you know what? Maybe I'll put this thing on hold right now so I can do some of the things that I can do now, like write the book and make the podcast right now. Maybe that's something you can do while you're in this season of life.

Joey Young: 3:59

So you want to think forward, like what would I be really glad I did 10 years from now, thinking about where my life is going and thinking about like, what would I really regret not trying, at least right now. And as business owners, we have to think about this in terms of, like you know, what would bring in the most revenue 10 years from now. If you're thinking about what would I be really glad I got into in terms of a business line item, or in terms of a business decision, a key hire, whatever what would be, what would be the monetary value of that in 10 years versus continuing to do what I'm doing now? So with that Venn diagram, you really got to figure out which ones have the most, which ones fall right in the middle of those three things the most, and then you really got to do an audit of your desires at the same time, because this is something that I think not a lot of people talk about, but sometimes we hear things and we think like, wow, that would be really cool, I want to do that. But we don't really want to do that. We want to have done it Now.

Joey Young: 4:59

Let me explain so you know if you're thinking about starting a direct-to-consumer company or a direct-to-consumer item project inside of your existing business, you know that's having kind of a moment right now. It's really popular Tesla, allbirds, warby Parker. The last 10 years have been dominated by a lot of these direct-to-consumer brands that have succeeded, but a lot have not succeeded as well. So, if you're thinking about man, it'd be so awesome to start a direct-to-consumer brand. Are you really saying I want to develop a product, I want to develop a go-to-market strategy that's direct-to-consumer, I want to develop all the logistics to get my product or service direct-to-consumer? Or are you saying I just want to say I've done it? There's a big difference. And to this person who's saying I want to become a yoga instructor, are you saying you want to become a yoga instructor because you actually love yoga and can't, and you already, like, are teaching your friends because you love it so much? Or did you see someone you thought was pretty cool being a yoga instructor yoga instructor once, five years ago and you're like, oh, that'd be cool to do one day, but you don't know how to do yoga right now and you're not really interested in learning how to do yoga? Like you know what I'm saying? Like there's a big difference between you know, a desire that comes from internal motivations and ones that comes from an external desire, like an external validation system. So we want to make sure that we're playing the game that we want to play for the game's sake.

Joey Young: 6:29

If you want to do the goal of writing a book, you don't want to write a book just to say you've written a book. You want to write a book because it's going to be fun, because you're going to get to the end and feel like you've accomplished something you've always wanted to accomplish, not because you just want to tell people oh yeah, I'm an author. That's not a good enough reason to write a book. You want to do these hobbies, these goals, because they are intrinsically interesting that you would do without being paid, ideally, or at least you find a lot of short-term value in them. The reason we find value in any sort of phase in our life or any sort of project that we're working on, whether it be a hobby or in your business, is because A it challenges us and B it helps us feel like we're making progress.

Joey Young: 7:16

So if we're engaged in some sort of business activity or accomplishing some goal and it's way too easy, we're going to lose interest and it's not going to be fun. Or if we're engaging in a project or business activity that takes so long to accomplish that we don't feel like we're making progress along the way again, we're going to give up and lose interest. So we want to make sure that we're playing these games for the sake of the game itself. We're having fun along the way, not just looking at oh, I want to have done that five years from now, one year from now, wherever long it takes to write this book. Become a yoga instructor, you know. Learn guitar, whatever it is you want to learn. You know whoever you know this person is. And, as business owners, same thing. We want to make sure that we're having fun along the way to scaling a direct to consumer brand, if that's really what we want, not just jumping on a bandwagon, okay.

Joey Young: 8:08

So, with that in mind, we thought about the Venn diagram of the three things that got to overlap to decide what we want to do. We've audited our desires to make sure they're valid. All right, what do we actually do now? How do we determine our capacity to do the top one, two, three things now, versus next year, versus when I get to it? Well, capacity is simply how many things you can be intentional with at the same time. Before slipping into burnout, I'll say that because it's a really important point Capacity is how many things you can be intentional with at the same time.

Joey Young: 8:47

So you can say that you're writing a book, learning guitar and traveling abroad to teach English, but if you're doing all those three things at the same time and they're all not working very well, then you're actually outside your capacity. Even though you're doing all those things, you're practicing your guitar 10 minutes a week. Your teaching abroad is probably 90% of your time, because that's a huge project in and of itself and everything else just gets put in the back burner. So you want to be very honest with yourself about how many things you can actually be intentional with at the same time. Otherwise, you're just kidding yourself, because the reality is things take twice as long as you think they will. Things take twice as long to do. To accomplish the result you're looking for is probably going to either take twice as much time scheduled to work on it per week, or you're going to have to extend the timeline out from six months to when you think you can do it, to a year, because always when you're doing something new and you're learning something, things always come up that you didn't anticipate. It's true for any person in any business. If you're trying to accomplish something new, trying to launch a new project. It's very, very hard to predict because you've never done it before. So let's break down the exact steps here to actually work through your capacity and know how many of these things you can work on at the same time. Again, let's take the example that you brought forward here.

Joey Young: 10:10

One of your things you wanted to accomplish here was run a marathon. Okay, so you picked that. Now we've got to decide okay, what does that mean? Run a marathon, what's the tangible result? Run a marathon, what's the tangible result? So you're probably not just going to. You probably don't want to run a marathon because you want to just, you know, go in your backyard and run in a circle 5,000 times to run a marathon. What probably will be a lot more motivating and a lot more tangible is like okay, picking a race nine months from now, I want to run X marathon. You know this race with all these other people in this span of time. So that's pretty simple. For a marathon, you're like okay, I want to run X marathon nine months from now.

Joey Young: 10:47

The second thing you got to do is decide how you'll learn, because obviously there's going to be a lot of skill development along this way you can't just say I'm going to run a marathon, show up the day of and run it. You've got to practice, you've got to train, you've got to learn about nutrition, you've got to learn about nutrition, you got to learn about workouts. So are you going to be self-taught or are you going to invest in a coach? Or are you going to purchase a program to like self-learn and self-directed sort of on-demand program Like how are you going to do this? And once you have that picked out, so you know what the goal is and you know, kind of, your path to get there, again, you don't have to make every decision and know every little detail. But you're like, okay, I every decision and know every little detail. But you're like, okay, I'm going to run a marathon in this day and I'm going to learn using, you know, john, who I found who can help me, like training, and get ready for it.

Joey Young: 11:28

Then you got to actually schedule it in. So schedule in the activities that you'll need every single week to do this and in a realistic way, like you don't want to be under, scheduling the actual activities that you'll need to do to accomplish this goal. Like, say, you put in your week, oh, I'm going to do two hours a week of running to practice for the marathon. That's probably not realistic. Or maybe you say I'm going to do five hours a week of running and that's definitely enough, but you don't account for the time to meal prep or to recover and do some stretches in that. So you're just putting a block of one hour on your calendar and you're thinking, oh, get up, I'll run this hour and then I'll be done, and it's like no, no, no, you need to do warmups and cool down. You need to have some time to do your research. There'll be some miscellaneous tasks, there's all sorts of ancillary tasks that again cause whatever project we're working on to take longer than we think. So be realistic when you put this in your calendar.

Joey Young: 12:30

You want to run a marathon. Well, you're signing up for a lot of other stuff besides just going for a run five times a week. There has to be stuff you learn. There has to be time for your body to recover and to do stretches or whatever, or cold baths or whatever you're doing. So after you put all that in your week and you actually see, okay, this is what it's going to take to run this marathon, because I'm going to have to do this every week for the next nine months.

Joey Young: 12:53

Now you can review your availability and be very specific and very realistic. This is the last step here. We've gotten to the point where we see what we're doing with our first number one goal that you wanted to accomplish running a marathon. Now we can take a look at the calendar and say do I have time to finish another project with excellence at the same time that I'm working on this marathon? And for business owners it might be. Do I have time to launch this other product while we're actually taking this huge company initiative to change our marketing plan on this product?

Joey Young: 13:29

Like you got to think to yourself while I'm doing item number one, do I have time to execute item number two with excellence? Because, again, going back to what makes things fun, if something doesn't have enough time to challenge you and it doesn't have enough time to make progress quickly, we're going to lose interest in it. We're going to drop it, because projects need to challenge us and keep us engaged and they also need to be moving forward at a steady pace. Otherwise they just don't work, they fizzle out. That's just human nature. So if you don't have time to execute project number two with excellence while you're doing project number one, then it's time to be realistic and say listen, I've only got time for one thing and that one thing I've decided is running a marathon in nine months. Once that's done, I can pick something else, and you know what. I'll even take that list of everything else and I'll put it in an envelope marked you know the date after the marathon and I'll put it in a drawer and I'll open it up then, because right now I'm working on this marathon.

Joey Young: 14:30

So the key is just to face reality, face the facts and don't bemoan reality. Don't think that, don't wallow in the inability to accomplish all these things at the same time, because that's a recipe for unhappiness. The real juice and the real life comes from doing one or two things really, really well, having fun, making progress and then being challenged by them. That's where the real juice of life and where the real business growth comes in. So I hope that helps you whoever asked that question there, and I really hope that you've enjoyed this podcast as a business owner.

Joey Young: 15:06

If you're looking to grow your business, hey, send me your questions. I'd love to tinker with and really dig into your question. So send me an email it's joey at joeyhyoungcom or send me a DM on Instagram. That's at joeyhyoung on Instagram. Send me that question you have and I'll attack it and I'll unpack it on the show, just like this, and we'll find a solution for you. And hey, if you've made it to this part of the podcast here, you probably liked it. So hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, you know, share the show with a friend who you think might be able to use this information. And until next time, my