Ep. 15: Set Goals extra

Receive encouragement to do your work of setting life, five year, and one year goals. Hear a few new ideas on the usefulness and practice of goal setting.

Transcript

Welcome And Purpose Of Extra

Get Back To Goal Setting

Why Rewriting Goals Works

Life Is Hard And Full Of Possibility

Don’t Pretend You Don’t Want It

Dreams, Goals, And Plans Framework

Big Goals Narrow Your Paths

Income Ladders And Timelines

Million-Dollar Goals And Tradeoffs

Find Bigger Reasons To Persist

Regret, Resilience, And Rough Patches

Mantra And Core Reminders

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast for and from the mildly incompetent. Hi, everybody. Welcome to our second extra episode. You know, with the short episodes, we're just doing a little bit of refresher or some new ideas about one of the topics I already covered. This is our set goals extra, as you could tell by the title. You know, and I'm a couple things. Basically, I'm just here to encourage you. You know, I don't want to redo the whole set goals uh idea for you. There's a lot in that episode. Go back and listen to it. If you haven't done so already, I'm here now primarily to remind you you should be setting goals. If you listened to the first episode on setting goals and you never got around to getting in the habit, do so. If you started, if you tried it out and you started to do it and you stopped, get back into the habit. Write down goals, and of course, ideally write life goals and five-year goals and one-year goals, and then you rewrite those so you can keep them in your mind. If that idea of rewriting them regularly, and as I say in the episode, I encourage you to do it twice a week at least, that seems sort of I don't know, time consuming or redundant to you. Well, believe me, you can spare the time. Rewriting your goals, life, five-year goals, one-year goals, twice a week takes about half an hour per week. You can make that time happen. And as far as being redundant goes, you know, what you are doing is reinforcing the importance of those goals to your life. And the whole idea is to get the goals that you care about into your mind, into the forefront of your mind. All right, so there's some encouragement. And now I'm gonna cover just different ideas I have. I'm not gonna try to create a smooth flow in the narration here. I've written down some notes, some points I want to say. I'm just gonna read them off my notebook, say them, explain them a little bit, and then we're gonna wrap it up. Yeah, I think the really big idea, the big theme, and maybe in the whole podcast period, but certainly in the set goals idea is that life, you know, life can be too short and it can but it can also seem very long and it can be quite complicated and very challenging, and it can be difficult and terrible at times, and for some people much more than for others. But for all that, it can also, it is also full of tremendous opportunities, tremendous possibilities. And I just hate the idea of you, listener, or anybody just giving up on those possibilities, just thinking, well, I'm just it's just out of my reach. There's no chance of me getting there. Like that may be true. Again, if your idea is to become an astronaut, you're like me, 49 years old, and you want to become an astronaut, I think that chances passed you by. But there's so much in life that you can achieve, and I would like you to go after it. You know, if there are three things or nine things or twenty two things that you would love to have, you'd love to do, you'd love to build for yourself, get after them, get after those things, and you might not get them all. As Jim Rohn says, you won't be able to do everything you find out, but you want to find out all that you can do. You can only do that by getting after it, and first step, you set your goals for things. What I don't want is for you to pretend you don't want something, you really do want it, because you think it's out of reach. It's too late or it's just too hard, it's beyond you, and so you have to pretend that you don't want it. If you want it, try for it. It is possible you'll fail, but it's really more likely. If it's a if it's a realistic goal, it's more likely you'll succeed with persistence. All right, so what's the note I have written down here? I've written down three questions. What are your dreams? What are your goals, and what are your plans? And these are sort of intellectual levels you can think about things you want to go after. So, you know, what are your dreams in life? Well, dreams, again, can be big and they can be, you know, frankly, totally unrealistic. Again, you could dream of being an astronaut, you could dream of being an NBA player, whatever it is, but a dream is also something that can come true. You can dream of having a family that you care about and get to spend time with. You can dream of earning so much money that you can give a lot of money to charity. You can dream of traveling the world or learning new languages or playing instruments, even playing in a band in front of other people. You can have these dreams and they can come true, but you can't just leave them as dreams. You gotta set goals. So it's what are your dreams? What are your goals? The goals are the things that are sort of a realistic version of a dream where you say, What I can do to have that dream is set this target for myself. And then what are your plans? Okay, the plans are the step-by-step process you to get somewhere. So if you have a life dream, I recommend writing a set of a list of life goals. Then your five-year goals and your one-year goals, those are helping you create the plan, the stepping stones to getting to those bigger goals. And then, of course, you end up using monthly to-do lists and even weekly to-do lists and weekly plans. I talk about that in the Work Your Behaviors episode. So you want, you don't want to think dreams are for you know children. You want to have dreams, but then you got to turn them into goals, and then you have to make intermediary goals and plans to get there. Now, one thing you should know, especially if you're dreaming big, is that the bigger the goal, the fewer the paths there are to get there, and the more the goal will dominate your time and your life. So let's say you have a goal of earning$100,000 a year. There are actually a lot of ways to get to that goal. I'm not saying it's easy. If you're currently earning$40,000 a year and you don't have any skills right now that could get you better than$40,000 a year, yeah, it's a big step to get to$100,000. It's worth the years of effort it's gonna take to get there. And with good planning, with good goal setting, it's not gonna take you 20 years. You can do it in three years or maybe five years. You can get there, and that'll be worthwhile effort. But the point I'm making here is that there are actually a lot of different careers and skills, or even you know, sort of side work you can do to help you get to that goal. But suppose your goal is to make$250,000 a year, a quarter of a million dollars a year, that's the annual income that you want. There are fewer options. It's not that there are no options, there are. And it's not just like one path in life able to get you there.$250,000 is a big goal. There are different options, but many fewer. And so you have to realize that, and you've got to pick the relatively small number of possibilities. And of those small number of possibilities, maybe some of them are not possible for you. You have to be realistic about that. It may be that attending med school and then becoming a resident on your way to becoming a doctor who earns more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, that might not be possible in your life. So, with that bigger goal, the number of options to get there is smaller. In some ways, you can make it easier, it can make you focus like you don't have to decide among so many choices. But in truth, it's a challenge to have fewer options to get somewhere, and it'll take more dedication. You know, if you're earning$40,000 a year, it's almost surely going to take you more than three years or five years to get to that quarter of a million dollar level. It might take you a decade, a decade of you know, serious effort and planning. Now, along the way, you'll be stepping up your income. So it's not like you're making 40 grand, 40 grand, 40 grand, 40 grand for nine and a half years and suddenly you make that big jump. So all along the way, you'll be getting rewards from your effort. And suppose it's your goal to make a million dollars a year. Even that is possible. People do it. And it's not just about sheer luck, but there really are, you know, if you're not just counting on luck, now there really are few options. And the ones that are there, like you becoming an excellent orthopedic surgeon, okay, that's a long, hard road. You can do it, depending on where you're starting from. I'm 49, like I've keep saying. I don't think I could take that route now. I'm a nurse, I probably could get into a medical school even in their 50s. I think some medical schools they want to promote the idea that they'll take people and not be ageist. But, you know, that it's a huge process. I'd be 65 before I could probably start operating on people, you know, out of residency. So the possible paths are few and they likely won't all be open to you. So just understand that the larger the goal, the fewer the paths you can take to get there, and the more work and dedication it'll take to achieve your goal. Now, of course, I'm all for you having big goals, the goals that take a long time. Now, that does not necessarily mean you earning a quarter of a million dollars a year or a million dollars a year. You know, I'm perfectly fine with you earning smaller amounts as long as it satisfies the goals you have for your life. But, you know, I urge you to set life goals because I think you should have goals that matter a lot to you and they're gonna take decades to reach. But those goals are very easy to give up on because they're so hard, they require such persistence. And sometimes, you know, they really take a lot of work, maybe not for 30 years, but three to four years of really hard effort, and that can be hard to do in of itself. One of the ways to help yourself get there is to create or remind yourself of big motivations. Another thing Jim Rohn would say is that what you need are enough reasons or big enough reasons. You have to remind yourself what is so important about doing this. If you can earn that income, if you can build that much wealth, if you can lose as much weight, what's it gonna do for you? You know, is it gonna help you give more opportunities to your kids? Is it gonna help you have a just a retirement of your dreams, or even before you get to your retirement, have opportunities to see the world or do other things or live where you want to live? You know, if is getting physically healthier gonna make you able to spend time with your grandchildren you hope to have someday and quality time with them, you know, get in your mind some goal that some reason for a goal, I mean, that it makes a lot of sense to you, it moves you, and keep it there. Remind yourself of it. And while I'm talking about positive motivations here, and I think those are the ideal motivators to have, it's not terrible to have negative motivations to as in to think what I don't want to happen is the following. You know, I don't want to let my kids down in this way or that way. I don't want to end up like my parents ended up, or my my friend ended up without the kind of life they wanted to live. That's fine to have that. You know, there's this quote from the play The Glass Menagerie, great play if you haven't seen it or read it. And Amanda, who's the mom character, she says, The future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past fills with everlasting regret if we don't plan for it. Now, whether or not you achieve a certain goal for you set for yourself, or if you fail to achieve a number of goals set for yourself in your life, which I hope is not the case, I don't want you filled with everlasting regret. But you know, if we don't go after things that matter to us, or if we don't persist in the efforts to get there, we will regret them. And it's okay if the the fear or at least the desire not to have that regret is part of what motivates us. I've already said what you already know, which is that life can be very challenging. It has ups and downs, and the downs can be pretty rough. And those can be times when you know you're going along and maybe you have some goals and you're working on them and you've got a plan for your life, and then that all falls apart, or part of it falls apart. And it's very easy in those times to just throw our hands up and think that we've been wasting our time with the whatever plans we've been working on. And so we just might want to stop doing this idea of setting goals and making a path for ourselves and working on that path. Because it seems like we don't make good choices or the whole thing seems kind of pointless, but it's not. Those difficult times, they're it's more important than ever to work on your goals, to see the future, see the possibilities of the future, you know, have your dreams, set your goals, and then set your intermediate goals and go after them. So do not let difficult times shake you from the practice of setting goals and improving your life. Okay, there's a lot more to say, but this is just an extra episode. It's meant to be shorter, I've said enough. So set your goals, life goals, five-year goals, one-year goals, and create these lists, write them repeatedly so that they stay in your mind. They're part of your life, they're not just some pieces of paper that you find in six months or in 18 months and think, oh, yeah, I remember those things. They should mean much more to you than that. Okay, let's wrap up with our mantra. How does that go? You matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. All those things are true, so you know, believe it. Okay, thanks for being here. I'll see you 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 successful.com. So it's happyandsuccessful.com, there's types 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 add a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, or 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 of the mask. 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. So actually I barely have time to put this thing together, so I won't promise, but I will try. Okay, I think that's it. Until next time.