How to Be Happy and Successful
Guidance for and from the mildly incompetent on how to be happy and successful.
How to Be Happy and Successful
Ep. 5: Set Goals (Success)
Set life goals, five year goals, and one year goals to design your life and guide your behaviors. Rewrite your goal lists repeatedly to keep your goals present in your mind instead of forgotten most of the time.
Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast for and from the mildly incompetent. Hi, welcome to Set Goals, the first episode on the success side of the podcast. As you no doubt gather from the name, uh this is about setting goals. Nothing complicated there. And we're going to talk about why it's important to set goals and how you should do it. And look, if you don't already understand it, I want you to take it as a fundamental rule that you must set goals. Success by accident, it's so unreliable. That doesn't mean that if you don't set goals, you'll never get anywhere, because you might come under the influence of other people who guide you and push you in certain directions. And maybe those are good directions, and maybe they're not. And of course, those people might not show up. So you see, you're leaving your future to chance if you're not in the practice of setting goals. As I've said elsewhere, chance will always play a role in your path in life. But the question is, do you want your choices and your efforts to play a role as well? As I talk about in what is success, if you look at success in a straightforward way, it's the ability to set goals and do the behaviors you have to do to achieve them. Well, step one there is setting goals. You know, to quote the old lady from the Marvel movie Shang-Chi, aim at nothing, hit nothing. And that's exactly right. You have to set a destination if you want to get yourself somewhere. And again, that does not mean that if you go through your life, not ever setting a goal, ever you know, creating a plan or having an ambition in mind, that your life will be uh your life will entirely sit still and you will never do anything in life worth doing. That's not true. But your life and the path you walk will be almost entirely determined by the world and by the people around you. Now you can't set all the goals you want, and the world and people around you will influence your path and your success. There's no doubt about it. We're not living in a vacuum here. But if you want to have a say in the matter, if you want to have some choice and have some influence on your own life and your success, start setting goals. Now, as I also said in What is Success, there's a smaller or more straightforward view of success, and there's a larger perspective on success. You might come here with a single goal in mind. You know, I want to, you know, increase my income by getting a better job, or I want to run a triathlon, or I want to become a better cook. Of course, there are many individual or what you might call narrow-focused goals that are well worth doing. And maybe you come to a podcast like this, you know, for some help on that. Or you might have a lot you want to do in your life. You might want to do with Jim Rohn, the great personal development teacher, that's R-O-H-N, what he would call designing a life. You might have bigger ambitions or maybe many ambitions. Again, as I talk about in what is success, the bigger perspective on success, from my point of view, is a way of achieving happiness with your life. You're working with this concept of eudaimonia that has to do with reaching your personal potential. And so this podcast episode is aligned with that second bigger idea. So if you only came here to lose 20 pounds, great. You should still listen. You will learn, you know, techniques uh to get there, you know, the first step of your of your path towards getting there. Uh, but you will also hear a lot more. You should still listen because, you know, it just might turn out you do have more ambitions in your life and you do want to achieve more than just getting in better shape. Now, there's something very important to understand about setting goals. While setting goals is very important, I think it's so important that I put it as the first piece of advice on the success side of this site. Just setting goals doesn't get you anywhere. Goals don't achieve themselves. And so putting a lot of effort into making really good goal lists, which I urge you to do, and you constantly, sort of or regularly, I should say, you know, rewriting these goals and reasserting your commitment to these goals, which I also encourage you to do, doing all that won't get you to the finish line. It's the behaviors you set up and that you persistently follow that will get you to the success that you're looking for. Does that mean we shouldn't think about the goals and just think about the behaviors? No. You know, it's like imagine building a house. You really, really want a good blueprint before you get into building a house, or your house will be a disaster. But once you have great blueprints, that doesn't mean you have a house. What you have is a great design for a house. This lesson, this is a piece of advice working on here is about building a great blueprint and making that blueprint present in your life. So it's not a piece of paper sitting in a drawer somewhere that you might actually bup into in a year and a half, and making the blueprint adjustable to changes in your life, changes in circumstance or changes of heart. There's an Italian saying that goes, Tra il dire e il fare, cere mezzo il mare. And you're welcome for that authentic Italian flavor there. And this saying in English means that between the saying and the doing lies an ocean. So, you know, it's one thing to say something, it's another thing to do it, and sometimes there's a big gap in between. But this proverb does not mean that il dire, the saying, is totally unimportant. You still have to say, at least to yourself, what you're going to do. And that's what we're doing here with this work. We are telling ourselves what we're going to do with our lives and with our time over the next five years and one year. So never fool yourself into thinking that just creating the goals is the job. And never tell anyone that I said just creating the goals is the whole job. No misrepresenting me. So here's what we're going to do. Well, here's my advice to you. You're going to do whatever you choose to do, but here's what I suggest. You're going to write out three goal lists life goals, five-year goals, one-year goals. You're going to build those lists for yourself, and then you're going to rewrite those goals. You're going to write them all down at least twice a week. And if you listen to my uh episode on uh on gratitude, you know, I tell you, you've got to write gratitude lists at least five days a week. So obviously, I'm trying to get you to put pen to paper a lot. So you're going to create a life goals list, a five-year goals list, a one-year goals list, and you're going to write them a whole bunch. We'll talk later about why I think it's important to write them down so regularly. But now let's move on to how you build first a life goals list. So, building a life goals list. Now, if you are new to this, if you have not already done some work, you know, setting some life goals for yourself, it's going to take a while. And even if you have done it a little bit, like you've written down a few items, I'm trying to make you trying to get you to create a pretty thorough list uh for yourself. And that's going to take some hours of thinking and writing and and maybe crossing off and then adding to it. So, and it's going to take more than one day to get a good life list for yourself. But that time is time well spent. It's how you're going to design your life, right? Aim at nothing, hit nothing. If you don't have aims in your life, you're just going to wander through it. It doesn't make you a bad person, but it is going to hurt your ability to succeed. So get a pen and some scratch paper, or if you really like typing, use your laptop. If you like a tablet, use your tablet. I'm not totally anti-technology. But let's say you do what I do and get a pen and paper. And you can write down a couple of groups of things. You're going to think about what is very important to you to achieve in your life. These are things where you might almost consider your life a failure if you don't achieve them or achieve some version of them. So I have three kids. On my set of life goals is prepare my kids for their financial lives. In other words, teach them how to totally be independent and take care of themselves so they can earn a living and they know how to handle money, and create sort of a safety net. So if they need help from me, uh they can get it. You might have a similar life goal, or you might have a goal to build a very comfortable retirement for yourself, or maybe you have a goal of really helping your parents to do well in their retirement age. Maybe your goal is to have a successful career, a career that brings you the respect of your peers. So again, these are goals that are fundamentally important to you. You feel that you will not, frankly, have had a successful life if you don't succeed in these goals. And then there's other goals that are more things that you want to do. And you should be writing these down as well. Maybe you want to learn how to play piano. You always have. You have never had the opportunity to do so. In this life, you want to do that. Maybe you want to travel across Europe or you want to sail across an ocean. Maybe you want to fly planes. Maybe you want to write a book. Or maybe you want to visit the Tanj Mahal or Niagara Falls. Maybe there's a certain kind of car that you want to own. These are goals in your life that are not as critical as the first examples I talked about, but you know, they're on your mind. You'd say this would make my life more worth living. I'd be happier with my life if I could achieve these things or if I know I'm on a path to achieve these things. And sometimes it can be hard to tell which is which. What I mean is for someone writing a book might be like, oh, that'd be cool to do that someday. For some people, it's really important to them. Even if that's not their career, they're not writers and they don't even want to be professional writers. But still, the idea of writing a book means a lot to them. The same might be true of traveling. For some people, traveling is like a bonus. That would be great if I got to do that. For some people, again, their life, they'd be disappointed with their life if they didn't get to do that. It's very important to them. So with some goals, it's hard to know. Would you categorize it as truly important or just really cool? Luckily, it doesn't matter. We're going to create one life goals list. And I'll say here, you know, I said think about the most important goals and then think about goals maybe not as critical. You know, we're not writing these things in an order of importance. So you don't have to think, oh man, what should be the number one goal? And what should this be number three or number five? You don't have to worry about that. If the goal is important to you one way or another, if you want it on your life goals list, then put it on there. And it does not matter if it's at the top or in the middle or on the bottom, because your plan is to get to all of those goals. You will prioritize them as you set your behaviors and do the work, but it doesn't matter where on the list they go. Now building a full list of life goals, it's going to take you a while. And what I mean is it should take you probably at least a week to really build a decent list. And I don't mean a week of spending a minute a day. I mean you spend a half an hour a day thinking about these things and writing down ideas. You could easily take a week doing this, though maybe it'll take you three or four days, but you had to put some time into it. Don't start off this process lazy. Where you just jot things down for five minutes and you call it a day. Look, we're talking about you shaping your life, designing your life, as Jim Rohn says. Start off by taking it seriously and trying to write down a lot of ideas. Now realize that we're not running down daydreams here. You know, I'm 49, I'm not going to write down become an NBA player or become an astronaut. I think those things will be really cool, but it's not going to happen for me. I believe people can achieve a lot, but I'm not going to be able to achieve those things, and I'm not going to go after them, even though it is fun to daydream about them. Furthermore, we're not going to put on our list, or at least we're not going to keep on our list, every single thing that sounds cool to do. So you don't want to, you know, jump on your social media accounts and look through every cool things your friends have done. They went here and did this, they went there and did that, they ate at that restaurant, all going on the list. Forget that. You're going to come up with a list of 412 items. Do not try to put everything that can happen in life down. Write down what really speaks to you when you put thought into it. You could still get great ideas later. We're going to talk more again about how often you're going to write these lists. I'll tell you right now, part of the reason is that you can adjust them. So whatever you write on this initial life list is not what's going to be exactly on the list five years from now. You'll get to add more cool stuff later. So don't try to put every single awesome thing down right now. If you have five things on your initial life goals list, that's fine. It's great. If you have 20 things on your initial goals list, that's great. If you have 72 things on your list, that's too many. And you should start scratching things off and try to get down to 20. And no, I'm not saying you can only do 20 things with your life and you've got to give up everything else. I'm saying you need to prioritize. So give yourself a maximum of 20 to start off with. And I'll tell you the truth, even if you only have eight items on your list, you're almost surely not going to work on some of those items for years to come. The truth, and you might know this now, or you might have to learn this, is that we cannot work seriously on 20 different topics, 20 different focuses at any one time of our lives. Part of this work and part of becoming mature in this work is realize what can happen and what can't happen, and what can happen now and what has to wait until later. Okay, moving forward. So now you've taken a few days or a week to create a life goals list that satisfies you. It's like, yes, this captures the things that are most important for me to achieve in my life and some things that I think will be really great if I were able to achieve them. And please do not get hung up if you are not fully satisfied with your life goals list. Move forward. You will have lots of time to improve it. All right, time to build a five-year goal list. Now, this to me is the best list. It's my favorite list. Because a life goals list is very important. Obviously, I totally believe in life goals lists, but the problem with them is twofold. Number one, they don't create a great sense of urgency. Humans often have this tendency to believe they're gonna live forever. And so if you say to yourself, I want to achieve this at some point in my life, go, well, you know, I'll get to that then, you know, 50 years from now, start working on it. That's that's no good when it comes to getting at big goals. You gotta start working on them sooner than 50 years from now. You know, you might actually consider calling your list, instead of a list of life goals, list of 25-year goals or 30-year goals. Maybe especially if you're if you're 22, just make it a 30-year goals list. And, you know, even if they're on that list is uh retire in the Bahamas, great. Do that by the time you're 52. Do it by the time you're 50. You can make that happen. I'm 49. I plan to make uh my retirement happen by the time I am 80. If I can do it, you can do it. And the second problem with lab goals is they don't give a lot of guidance on what to do now. Today, this week, this month, a big target that is far away just won't tell you a whole lot of what to do right now. With five-year goals, five years is a good chunk of time. You can get a lot done. In five years, you can maybe complete some of your life goals or make big steps towards those life goals. But it doesn't feel like we're talking about some distant future. They can bring a sense of urgency and they can give you some clues to what you want to do now or what you need to do now. The five-year goals are a bridge between the aspirational, which is what our life goals are, and the sort of the real and the practical, and the reality of life, the practical side of life, all of the responsibilities you carry and the obstacles that arise are such an important part of the path you will take to getting to your goals. So, how do we build our five-year goal list? Well, it's pretty simple. The first thing we do is we're gonna run through, or we're gonna go through one at a time, our life goals. And you look at your first life goal and say, Am I gonna achieve this in the next five years, or am I gonna do I need to work towards it in the next five years? The answer might well be no. You know, on my list of life goals, I have earned a pilot's license. I do not have the time or money in the coming five years to go get a pilot's license. And so that's a that's a no for this five years. I don't have to worry about it on my five-year list. But the answer could easily be yes. Might be yes for all of your life goals. Depends what they are. Suppose you have on your set of life goals, own 10 houses so that you can have a great retirement and leave wealth for your children and have lots of money you can get to charity. Well, you better put something regarding real estate on your five-year list. Unless you already have nine houses, so you just need to buy one more over the next 30 years. You know, if you're starting at zero or one right now, then this coming five years better have something to do with real estate. So if you, let's say you have no houses at all now, you have your life goal of owning 10 houses, put buy your first house on your five-year list. So with each item on your life goals list, you look at it and say, Am I gonna do this or work towards it in this coming five years? If the answer is no, then you don't worry about it, you move on. If the answer is yes, you say, Am I gonna be able to complete it in the coming five years? If the answer is yes, then write the whole, the exact same goal on your five-year list. If the answer is no, make some realistic goal for yourself to achieve in the next five years. It doesn't have to be extraordinary, but it should be something that makes it so that five years is useful to getting towards that life goal. But when we have worked through our life goals list, we're not done yet. Because things can go on your five-year goal list that aren't on your life goals list. You know, let's say you have teenage kids and you want to get them into good college, you want to help them go to a good college. Okay, that goes on your five-year goal list for sure. Let's say you have parents or grandparents or uncles and aunts who are starting to need more and more help around the house and in their lives. It could be on your list, you know, help mom move to an assisted living facility as an example, or you know, find more care for mom or get dad to move closer to me. Something like that, giving a five-year list that wouldn't be on your life goals list. Maybe there's some trip you want to take. You know, you always wanted to go to Argentina. Great, but it isn't something on your life goals list. It could be, but it doesn't have to be. You can just say, oh, I want to go to Argentina in the next five years. So you write it down. It is very important that you think about what responsibilities you will have to take care of over the next five years, and that you put these on your lists. Even though these things might not be your dreams, if you know you have to do them, and they're gonna take a fair bit of time, you've got to put them down because then you can account for your time and you won't be just shocked when you're not moving forward with all the big goals you have that sound so much like so much fun. Okay, real life, the things we have to do get in the way of the dreams we have sometimes. No, a lot of the time. And the main problem is time. You know, if you have this idea, you this these coming five years I'm gonna lose 50 pounds, and this year I'm gonna lose 10 pounds, and I'm gonna start going to the gym four days a week. It's gonna be fantastic. But every day after work, you go and pick up your kids from daycare and take them home, and you cook for them and you help them with your homework, and eventually you get into bed. If you don't consider that while you're making your plans for going to the gym, well, you're just gonna be disappointed and shocked when it turns out in three months you haven't even been to the gym. It's the same thing with all of our life. We have to be honest and realistic about what we need to do today, this week, and in the next five years so that we are not caught by surprise and we don't fail to achieve these goals that matter to us. And this need to deal with the obligations and the busyness of life it comes up most importantly in making your one-year goal list, but you need to consider it even while making your five-year list, which is why I'm saying it now. So you've gone through your life goal list, and for each item set, am I going to work on this in the next five years? And the answer is yes. Then you write down either the whole goal or some interim goal, and then you've thought to yourself, what else do I want to get done or do I need to get done in the next five years? And you've written those down as well. And just like with your life goal list, it's unlikely you're gonna create a really great operational list, a complete list in a single sitting. You know, sit down for half an hour. First time, you're like, oh, I got a life goal, a five-year goal list that's gonna work for you for the next five years. That's not likely. You know, you're gonna think of things over the next week or two that pop in your head. And truthfully, in six months, you're gonna make adjustments to this. All the time you'll be adjusting these lists, but take it seriously in the first process. Try to build a good, useful list for yourself. Okay, we've completed our five-year goal list. What comes next? Well, you already know what comes next. I've already said it. It's the one-year goal list. And this is where the rubber hits the road, people. I'd like to remind you of what I said a little while ago near the beginning of this podcast, that goals don't get you anywhere. Your behaviors and your actions get you to your goals. You design your life with your goals, but you build the life you want. You achieve that eudaimonic happiness by working your behaviors, which is the next article's title, the next podcast episode's title. Isn't that fitting? It is the one-year goals that really help us choose useful behaviors that can lead us to the life we want. And it is with the one-year goals that we really have to face all of the obstacles, all the other things in our lives that we have to do that aren't on our five-year goal list or our life goals list and aren't part of our dreams. We must handle all of our responsibilities and face all of the delays that come up in life and yet still work towards our goals. And our one-year lists are a big way to help us do that. So, how do we build a one-year goal list? Well, to start with, you guessed it, we look at our five-year goal list. We will look at each item on the five-year goal list and say to ourselves, Am I gonna complete this task or work on this task in this coming year? If the answer is no, okay, we'll put it aside. You know that trip to Argentina is on your five-year goal list, but you know you can't do that until you graduate from school in three years. Okay, well then set it aside. But if the answer is yes, then you say, well, can I do this whole thing in this coming year? If so, you write the whole goal there on your one-year list. If the answer is no, I can't get it all done this year, then you write an intelligent and realistic interim goal to achieve this year. So if you have a five-year goal of saving$50,000 towards a down payment on a house, well, you might say save$10,000. Or you might just say, pay off all credit card debt. And then next year you can actually start saving money. Without agonizing too much, make the best choice you can for setting a goal for this year. Now, I'd like to speak for a moment about the danger of enthusiasm. Now, first of all, I am not anti-enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is wonderful. Much of the joy of life comes from that enthusiastic feeling we can get for from many things. It is very easy when we are setting a new track in life, when we're starting to create goal lists, we're thinking about the things we want to do with our lives, and we finally believe in our ability to do them. It's natural to get very enthusiastic. And we write our life goals list, and we then we write our five-year goals list, and we feel great about these things, and and we want to make huge leaps forward towards these goals, or maybe there's one in particular. We say, yes, I'm gonna get after that. This is the year I'm gonna go for it. And that's great. I'm not saying you can't make that kind of priority in your life, but it's so easy to do that without thinking, well, in order to do that, I have to take time away from something else. I must prioritize my time so that I really can put, you know, hours and hours this, you know, every single week this coming year into becoming a great pianist, or hours and hours into becoming a triathlete. You know, you can do those things, but those hours have to come from somewhere else. If you're doing nothing with your time, well, good. There will still be challenges to committing that kind of time to a, you know, a new endeavor. But of course, the challenge is much greater if your time is already full. And I'm sure that's the case for most people listening to this podcast. A similar challenge comes not when you set your sights on a big goal and your life is already full, but when you really get into the idea of turning your life around and becoming the person you want to be. So you say to yourself, you know, this is the year. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna work so hard, I'm gonna get the promotion at work, and I'm gonna go to night school, and I'm gonna finally get myself back into the physical condition I was in 15 years ago, and I'm gonna learn Spanish because I've always wanted to learn Spanish. It all seems so possible when you're just sitting down and writing a list. And it is all possible, but it's not all possible at the same time. And this is where enthusiasm can stab you in the back because you'll find yourself six months later very disappointed with the lack of progress you've made. Because unless you are an unusually driven person and you have no other obligations getting in a way, you can't do all those things in the same six-month or twelve-month period. You know, realize you can do those things through steady application, so use of your time towards your goals. But you have to be realistic when you're writing these goals and especially the one-year goal list. Let me take a moment to talk about the idea of being an unusually driven person. I encourage you to free yourself of the illusion that you're suddenly going to become a person of tremendous willpower because you have this enthusiasm to change your life. I encourage you even to free yourself from the idea that tremendous willpower is what you want or need to achieve your goals. Willpower is essentially the ability to persist at something, despite the fact that persisting gives you a very unpleasant experience. We see having high levels of Willpower as admirable. And it is. But it's also very rare. I'm not trying to insult you. And I'm not talking about just you. I'm talking about myself as well, of course. While I'm recording this moment of the episode, my 12-year-old daughter interrupted me and told me that I would not qualify for the Green Lantern Corps because the single quality you need, most of all, is a strong willpower. She thinks I wouldn't cut it. And despite this fault, I at least had the sense to know that I should not base my advice to people for improving their lives on the idea that they're suddenly going to become extremely strong-willed. That would be a failed strategy. And I don't even want you to exert tremendous willpower as you change your life, because again, the idea there is that you'd be going through a lot of suffering, but pushing through the suffering. That is great for a movie, but it's not how I want you to live your life for years, and the work we're doing here is going to take years to do. So again, I'm not trying to insult you, but I'm saying that the project that we're getting started on here is not going to be based upon you suddenly becoming the kind of person who never gets discouraged by obstacles and never becomes tired when driving towards your goals. If you've become that kind of person, you can stop listening because you're going to succeed, you know, without any more advice from me. Now, back to dealing with time. As Tony Robbins said, people tend to overestimate what they can get done in a single year and underestimate what they can do in 10 or 20 years. It's very easy at this stage to overestimate what you'll get done in a single year. It's not the worst thing in the world, but what can happen is that you can become very disappointed when halfway through the year you have not approached these unrealistic goals that you have made, and that can make you lose heart in the project, make you stop believing in yourself when really it's just an error in your in your planning. It was a misunderstanding of what's realistic. Another problem with enthusiasm is that it fades. That's how it is. You're a human being, so it will. And so we we get so enthusiastic, we launch ourselves into working out a whole bunch, or studying a new language, or going to the job more. And then you know, a month later, it's like this isn't as fun as it was two weeks ago. And then maybe we end up, you know, stopping the behavior altogether. We stop working towards the goal in any way, and uh, and we don't want that. So enthusiasm. I'm all for it, and we can use it to our advantage and certainly use it to feel good, but we have to be careful. Here, when we're setting our goal list, what I'm saying is don't say, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna save that$50,000 towards the down payment of a house. I'm gonna do$35,000 this year. I I never saved a penny in my life before now, except for maybe$200 as a teenager, but this is the year I'm gonna save$35,000. You know, don't make up stories like that. You know, don't say to yourself, I'm gonna run a marathon in three months, uh, even though I'm totally out of shape right now. You know, there's there's no point in being childish and lying to yourself. You know, and again, you can really do remarkable things. It is true that you could go out and make enough money and cut expenses enough if you could save$35,000 in a year. That can happen. But it takes remarkable effort and sacrifice, and that might not even be possible for you in your life right now. So just use your head, take a step back away from your enthusiastic feeling in order to make reasonable plans. Now, you have worked through, let's say you have worked through your whole five-year goal list, and you said, Am I gonna work on this goal or not? If I am, you've written that down on your one-year list, and you've gotten through your whole five-year list. Now, of course, there's a lot more to do this year than just work on those goals. There could be other things you just want to do. And you might say to yourself, you know, I've always wanted to eat at more restaurants uh around in the city. So I'm gonna do is that uh I'm gonna every month go to a new restaurant with friends. Once a month, pick a new restaurant that's on the list. That's a that's a great goal. Go after that. And it really put all those things down that aren't on the five-year list, but just come to your head as like this would be a good thing to do. As long as you're ready to make cuts when you realize, okay, these are too many things for me to do in this one year. The most important thing, though, are things that you must do. You know, if there's some project that has to happen, you have to move, or you want to move, or you've got to clear out the backyard of your house and build a new fence, or you have to start school, or maybe you have to help your kids get ready for school, or help your kids move so they can start going to college. You have to get dental work done. You need a new car. There's so many things that can and should go on your list. But again, these are the things that aren't necessarily on your five-year list or frankly a goal of yours at all, but you know you need to get them done this year, put them on your list because it's a project that you have to account for. You have to think about these things when you're planning your time, and your one-year list will help really guide you when you do to-do lists for your month and week and uh, you know, even your day. So get them on the list, and you're not gonna think about them all the first time you build your one-year list, not even the second time, and in three, four, five months from now, you're gonna be adding new things to this list as they come up. All three of your lists, your life goals list, your five-year goal list, and your one-year goal list are living lists. I like to think about them. Isn't they can and will change. We can adapt them. We should adapt them. But the one-year list is the one that will need the most adaptation as you go through your year. You know, things change, you succeed or fail with some particular plan, so you got to adjust that. So just understand that it doesn't need to be and it won't be a perfect list starting off. As I said in the very first uh episode, uh, the bad news is you'll never be perfect. The good news is you don't have to be, and that certainly goes for this one-year list. Okay, so we have talked about our life goals and our five-year goals and our one-year goal list, and we're gonna stop making our lists there. You know, let's say you know it's a a week from now or two weeks from now, or whenever you take on this work and you've made, you know, good initial drafts of those three goal lists. We're not gonna keep moving forward to make a six-month goal list and a three-month goal list and a one-month goal list and a one-week goal list. And you might say, well, why not? It's just a logical progression to do that, you know. And some people just love making lists and they're like, Yeah, this is going great. I'm gonna keep on doing this. And I encourage you not to. And I will tell you why. There is always a danger with this approach to getting things done in your life, which I think it's a very important approach, as you've heard me say already. And clearly I believe in it. But the danger is that we can emotionally, psychologically confuse the work of writing our goals, creating our goals, and even writing them down with actually doing the work of achieving the goals. And I've already said the goals don't get you anywhere, but we can feel like, man, I'm I must be halfway there by writing all this down. And that incorrect feeling, that incorrect belief, will only get stronger if instead of three goal lists, we have five or six goal lists. So we include a quarterly goal list and a monthly goal list and then a weekly goal list. We don't want to fool ourselves. We want to guide ourselves, but not fool ourselves, into thinking, well, I've done all this work of writing all this stuff out. I guess I should go relax. This is such a such a human thing to do, but we are not going to do it. We're just gonna do our three lists that I've talked about. There is still the danger that writing out these three lists will make us believe that we have done the work we need to do. But the benefit of having these guides is worth that risk. Now, of course, you can and I think should you use like to-do lists. You know, you're gonna still, it's okay to plan out what I need to get done this month. No doubt about it. You know, of the things that are on your list, and also, again, all those things that aren't on your goal list, but how to get done in your life, you you need to account for that, the time those things will take. So, yeah, you can make a month plan. And certainly, I believe in using a calendar to make a week plan. I think that's necessary in your life. Uh, and I'll talk about that more in work your behaviors and to-do lists for your day are useful just like you know, shopping lists when you go shopping. But the three that we've talked about, the life and the five-year and the one-year goal lists, those are the big three that we're going to use to design and guide our lives, and that we're going to write down in full at least twice a week. And that's right, we are not doing this so that we can create and write out these big three goal lists so that we can have some kind of precious documents that we then put up on our refrigerator or on the wall next to our bed or on the bathroom mirror or something. And I know that doing that can be common advice in the personal development world when they talk about setting goals. If you've ever done anything like that, where you you make a note for yourself and you put it up somewhere, it you might realize, you might remember how easy it is to start ignoring that. It is automatic that you will start ignoring it. You just won't even see it in your environment after a very little bit of time. And even if you say post a lists and you set an alarm for yourself every day when you get up in the morning or when you come home at night or right before you go to bed, you set an alarm, you say, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna read these lists now. Whenever I set hear that alarm go off, and you do, you are conscientious. So you walk over it and you read your life goals list and your five-year goals list and your one-year goal list. That is still not the point. I don't want these lists to be external to you. I don't want the distance between you and them. That will come up. You know, if you are reading these lists that you have posted and you created them a month ago, six months ago, nine months ago, two and a half years ago, you are not gonna feel that these things are internal to you. And that is the real point of making these lists. We want them in our brains, easily accessible by our frontal cortex. You don't need to obsess about them all the time. You don't need to dream about your goal lists, you don't need to bore all your friends as you constantly talk about your goals, unless, of course, you're telling them about this great podcast you started listening to. You know, it's this guy who says he's incompetent is telling me how to run my life. It's wonderful. So you don't need to do that, but you want to refresh your memory of these goals and your commitment to these goals by writing them out regularly. If you listen to my episode on uh gratitude, you know, I strongly encourage you to write gratitude lists and those reasons for writing it down rather than just, you know, sitting quietly and thinking uh grateful thoughts. Not that that's a total waste of time, but writing it out is so much more useful. It's the same for your goal lists. And it's not about having, you know, a wonderful copy of something at the end. I'd write my goal lists on scratch paper and then I toss the scratch paper. I don't need the paper anymore because I've got it in my head. You know, I'm sure I'm not the first person who's ever advised you to write goal lists. Maybe someone directly told you that or you read it in a book or something. You know, it's it's a common piece of advice, right? Again, nothing I say on this podcast or on the website is created by me. But so often people they do, they write goal lists. You know, maybe on January 1 or January 2 as they start their New Year's resolutions, or anytime they write them out and they mean them when they write them. And then they put that list somewhere, and they find that list again six months later. And I think, oh yeah, I remember when I wrote that. And oh yeah, I remember I wanted to do that. It's just it's almost as if somebody else wrote them, and it's like some different you in a different universe. Or they're like childhood memories, you know, they they rise to our mind and we say, Oh yes, I remember when I wanted to do that. I remember that feeling I had. I wish I had stuck with that. Why didn't I stick with that? Now, obviously, when you have that kind of relationship to your goals, you're not doing a lot to get to those goals, right? We just have reverted back into getting through our day and not designing our life. So, what we want is to keep these goals in us and motivating us. How do we do that? Twice a week, we sit down and we take some scratch paper and we write our goals. If you want to know exactly what I do, I take an 8.5 by 11 piece of scratch paper that I, you know, from some piece of mail or from whatever, and I fold it into fourths. And on one fourth, I write at the top life, and I underline it and I write my goal lists. So you can see you can't have 85 life goals. I'm already telling you, you don't want to do that. I have actually, at this moment, I have exactly 20. I counted in preparation for recording this uh episode. And uh that might change. I can, of course, add life goals, and I can also cross off life goals if I've achieved them, or if I say, you know, actually, that doesn't matter to me as much as I thought it did whenever I came up with it. So I have 20, and even that's a bit tight to fit onto this little quarter page, but I do it. And then I move over to the next quarter page and I write my five-year goals, and I move down to a third quarter page, and I write my one-year goals, and then I've got a blank quarter page left over. You know, I can doodle or whatever I like. But it's not about the final product, it's about how we're internalizing these goals. And again, if you are just doing this for the first time, building your life goals lists and your five-year list and even your one-year list, that's gonna take a while. It's gonna take hours of work to do it well. But once you have built them, it doesn't take a long time to write them down anymore. And the more you write them down, the the quicker it will go. It still takes me about 15 minutes to do that. And, you know, partly because, you know, while I am going through my list, I can become distracted because I'm a human being, either by what's going on around me in the environment, or you know, I think of a goal and then I realize just something about that. You know, maybe I think I should really be working that more, or I think, man, I just can't wait till I get to do that, or something. My mind will wander and then I can bring myself back to it. And of course, that is the more easily done. It's more likely that I'll get back to the work of reviewing my goals and writing them down if I've got a pen in my hand, a piece of paper in front of me. So, about 15 minutes, I can knock out writing my uh my three goal lists. And you should do that twice a week. At least you can do it every day for a while. That's fine. It'll get boring to do it every day if you if you do that. So I think twice a week is a good amount to really keep it in your head, but that's a minimum, not a maximum. And yeah, it's half an hour a week to keep these ideas and goals that are gonna help guide you towards your dreams, towards your potential. And 30 minutes a week is not too much time to commit to achieve that end. Now, if you've done some quick math, you might realize, huh, that's a that's 104 times a year. I've got to write down the same thing. And if it's a life goal that's gonna take me decades to get to, that's more than a thousand times in a decade. I've got to write out the same thing. And if it's it takes me 20 years to get to a goal, that's more than 2,000 times I have to write down the same thing on different pieces of paper before I finally accomplish it. Is that what you're telling me? Yes, that's what I'm telling you. If you have some goal that's gonna take you a year to get to, I have no problem if you have written it down a hundred times on the way. And if you have some goals gonna take you 30 years to reach, it doesn't bother me at all if you've written it down 3,000 times on the way to that goal. It's gonna help you keep moving towards that goal. And it's better that then you end up in 30 years just wishing you had kept trying. And writing out the goals so often has a couple of benefits that can seem contradictory. One is what I've already said about it, is that you know it helps sort of solidify the goals in your mind. It makes those goals a part of you. But doing so also makes these goals more flexible. By writing them out so much and thinking about them so much, you can change them. You can realize that maybe goal is not so important to you. Or maybe your goal is not exactly what you meant, or is there something, some version of this goal that's more important to you, or maybe you just have to change the timeline. You know, this is a five-year goal. You thought you're gonna work on it this year and get it done this year, or some part of it done this year, and you realize halfway through the year, I I can't even approach this. This year, I've got to put it off. I did that with my, you know, my desire to earn a pilot's license. That was a life goal, and I put it on my five-year goal list. And after a while, if you're talking to someone, a friend of mine, who had earned a pilot's license, I realized there's no way I can afford to do this, and I don't have the time to do this in this five years, so I put it off. This is an advantage of writing these goals regularly, is that you are not just, you know, this is not some religious statement that you must keep exactly as it was in the beginning. You can adjust these goals, recreate the goal lists as you need to. Now let's talk about one of the practicalities of writing these lists as time goes by. As time goes by, your life goals won't change much unless you change your mind about them or unless you achieve one. Then you can stop writing it down on your list. But let's take your one-year goal list. I write mine so that they are set to expire, you might say, by the end of the year. So I write a list for things to complete by the end of the year. So I'm recording this in August of 2025 with my one-year goals. I'm working on the goals that I set up to complete in 2025. What that means is that I'm not every month, certainly not every week, recreating a new set of one-year goals. In other words, let's say it's January and I've written my goals out for the year, and then I hit February. Do I now have to recreate the goals and think, well, where am I going to be 12 months from now? So one month past where I was thinking about before, and then in March to the same thing, I maybe add a little bit to some goal of mine. No, I don't do that. It's true, it'll be too confusing. And it would change the goal list from useful work into just a lot of busy work. What I do is, again, I set my goals to achieve by December 31st. And as the year goes along, I keep writing the same goals. I only change them if I actually decide to change a goal for some reason. So that means, of course, I'm almost never working. Maybe for a single day, I'm working on an actual one-year goal. Because if on New Year's Day it's a one-year goal set for December 31st, you know, by March 31st, it's only a nine-month goal. By the time I get to the end of June, it's really a six-month goal. But I'm writing the same goals. I don't want to, again, keep wasting my time by recreating my one-year goal lists, and I don't want to feel emotionally like I'm chasing an ever-receding horizon, a goal that's always moving away from me. I want to feel like the goal is planted and I'm moving towards it. That feels good, though it can also stress you out, or at least raise alarm bells when you're not actually making progress. It's the end of June, and I'm not halfway towards this goal. I'm not even a quarter of the way towards this goal. Now, all of our goals, our life goals, our five-year goals are one-year goals. We don't work on them in an exactly even consistent manner. We know that, right? So maybe I've got a one-year goal. I'm not even supposed to start it until September. But there are some I should be working on through the year, and it's very useful for me to say it's supposed to be done by December 31, and I haven't gotten anywhere with it by August. So just know that though I think of it as a one-year list, really, once I create the list, the amount of time it represents gets shorter and shorter as the days go by. At the top of my list, when I write them at least twice a week, you know, my one-year list, I write 2025 at the top. And next year, guess what? I'll write 2026. I don't write one year list. Now, as I get closer to the end of the year, if I were to do this up through December 1, that means I'd be writing a list that's essentially a goal list for this month. And I do think that's too short a window. So you have to find a time where you make a transition. So I do it in the last quarter. What that means is I go along and I'm writing the same one-year list up through the end of September. But when I hit October, then I change my plans to the next year. So when I get to the first week of October of this year, 2025, I will start making a new list that says 2026 on it. And I will go through my five-year list and think which of those goals am I going to work on over the coming year? Now, of course, I have 15 months, right? It's the first week of October. But again, unless I'm going to every month, every week, maybe every day, change my goal lists, you know, my one-year goal list to say what's one year from now, where do I want to be? I've got to make some kind of an adjustment like this. So my one-year goal lists are actually created in October, and they are initially 15-month goal lists, stretching out until the end of the following year. And I keep using that same list, though, of course, I make adjustments as I want to as I go along, up through the following September. Of course, you don't have to do it that way. I mean, you don't have to do anything that I'm suggesting you do. But I strongly encourage you, of course, to the life and the five-year and the one-year goal lists. As far as this kind of adjustment goes, you could do something instead where you go like halfway through the year and then you think, well, I'll make a one-year goal list from now, from July 1 to where do I want to be at by the end of June of next year. And then at the end of the year, starting January, want to make a new list for the following year. That kind of thing gives me a headache. I prefer my uh strategy, but maybe my strategy gives you a headache. You do as you choose. Now, the same problem will come up with the five-year list. You create a five-year goal list, a year goes by, so now what are you going to do? Well, you can create a new five-year plan where you push out the horizon by one year, and and some of the goals won't change at all, and other ones you can adjust to be one year further along. So if you're, you know, one of your goals has to do with saving money, you can say, okay, let's add a year to the total I want to achieve. Uh that's not as crazy as like remaking a one-year list every month. I think that's just going too far. Recreating your five-year list every year, that's not going too far, but that's still not what I do. What I do is I create a five-year goal list. And what I want, I want to work on those goals for years and have those goals in mind. So after a year goes by, I don't change my list. What that means is that after a year has gone by, my list actually becomes a four-year list. That's just the truth of it. And another year goes by and I still don't change it. Now it's really a three-year list. Here I've been talking about how important five-year lists are, and I believe that, but I think it's okay to work your way into that five-year list. A three-year list is still perfectly good. So I have three-year lists. But as I approach the end of that year, I know that I've got to make a whole new five-year list. Because a two-year window, it just is too close to the one-year list. The five-year list is supposed to give me effective guidance for creating my one-year list. It's supposed to, remember, be a bridge between the one-year list and the life goal list. If I'm down to just a couple of years on the five-year list, if it's changing to a two-year list, it's not enough of a bridge. So I create a five-year list, a year goes by, I don't change it, another year goes by, I don't change it. Somewhere around the end of that third year, I'm going to rate, make a whole new five-year list. That's how I like to do it. It works for me. And who knows? As I have I said in the first episode, I'm not really an expert on this. I'm still working on myself. Maybe in 10 years I'll feel differently. But that's the technique that I use. I gave it to you to answer that question that's going to come up if you try this strategy where you're two months into your one-year list. You're like, wait a minute, do I have to make a whole new one-year list? No, you don't. And realize that this whole problem, this whole decision-making you have to do, it only comes up because we're paying so much attention to our lists. What a lot of people have in their head for making a list, like a one-year list, is that, oh, they put effort in, they write a one-year list, and then they go through the year, and maybe at the end of the year, they'll look at their list again. They'll take it out of a drawer or whatever and say, well, how did I do on my list? I did a couple, I didn't do a whole bunch. Let's make a new list for this coming year. And that's, of course, what I don't want you to do. I want these things constantly in your mind. And I again, I don't mean every time you're talking to one of your children, you can only think about your goals. I just mean regularly, every week you're thinking about these things. And because of that sort of persistent interaction with your goals, then you have to sort of figure out what are you going to do. Am I going to keep adjusting the list or am I going to stick with the list for a while? So I'm talking about writing these lists over and over again, and I'm talking about you doing it for years. Now there is a downside that will come up as you write your goal list again and again over long periods of time. And that is the frustration you will feel sometimes when your goals seem not to be coming any closer. Sometimes you'll feel even that they are further from you than when you started. The truth is that when we have goals that take a long time to get to, we will have periods of progress and of stagnation. And that stagnation will sometimes come because of obstacles. It'll sometimes come just because we can't even get going. We're waiting on somebody else or something else in our lives to happen before we can even work on a goal. And sometimes we will make mistakes that set us back, or we will frankly stop doing the work. We'll lose our motivation and stop doing the work. We've all been there. Continuing to write your lists out presents these failures or the stagnation to us over and over again, and that can be frustrating. Now the solution to that feeling, that frustrated, discouraged feeling, is simple. You stop writing the lists and you put your goals out of your mind. And then you don't have to worry about how you're not getting to your goals. If you write a goal or a goal list, and then you don't even think about it, like many of us do, and so you don't work in your goals, well, then you will feel some pain eventually. You'll remember a year later or five years later, oh, I wanted to do that, and I've done nothing to get there. I feel disappointed in myself, or I just disappointed in my life, or whatever. So there's some pain there, but you know, that's a year down the road or five years down the road. It's not as often as you will feel it when you are so regularly reviewing your goals. That is a price we're paying in order to be more successful. We are persistently paying attention to where we're failing to achieve what we want to achieve so that we can get ourselves to start making progress. So again, if you don't want to feel like frustration, just put your goals out of your mind. But of course, what I urge you to do is to keep your goals in your mind. Keep them in your line of sight all of your life. Until you get to them. And that will come with this frustration. But we must bear up and persist. Okay, we're about done here. That's my advice on setting goals. Why I think you should do it and how I think you should do it. You know, remember the two sides of this. Setting goals, it's very important. It helps you design your life to use that phrase that Jim Rohn uses, but it's not the whole job at all. It won't do the work by itself. In this sense, setting goals is different from the first piece of advice on the happiness side about gratitude and writing gratitude lists. If you only do that, you will add a lot to your happiness in life. If you just do that work regularly. If you just set goals regularly, you won't do much for your success at all because it's a it's a several-step process. It's at least a two-step process. Set goals and then set up behaviors that you'll do. So next time I give advice about success, which will actually be in two episodes, because I alternate talking about happiness and talking about success. So the next episode will be on happiness. It'll be particularly on the idea of self-compassion. After that, it'll be an episode titled Work Your Behaviors. So we can talk about how to actually get to these goals that we have set and that we write out twice a week or more. Okay, now you know we're not going to wrap up without reviewing the mantra. The mantra is you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. You do matter. And it naturally follows that you achieving your goals and working towards your potential in life also matters. And you can do this work. Okay, thanks for being here. Until next time. All right, this has been the How to Be Happy and Successful Podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. So if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this uh podcast episode, you can go to the website. Website is www.happy- and dash successful.com. So it's happyandsuccessful.com. There's hyphens in between the words. You can read articles there. You can also sign up for the mailing list there. So when I put out new content, you will get an email saying, hey, there's new content. Go listen or go read. I also offer coaching. So if you'd like some help being happy or being successful, or both, you think my ideas are good, reach out to me to the website. If you like the episode, please go write a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, why you just keep that to yourself. And if you really like the episode and the podcast in general, feel free to go to the Patreon page and become a supporter. That'd be awesome. If you have any questions or comments or complaints, go to the website and uh send me an email. I will do my best to respond, though. Okay, I think that's it. Until next time.