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Thoughts on goal setting as Brian brings up some examples from books we’ve covered here before such as, The One Thing, The Slight Edge and Mini Habits.

Transcription

Long term goals suck.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I wanted to talk about long term goals, goal setting the traditional style. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with setting a long term goals, and then laying out the steps necessary in order to get it.

In fact, just the other night I was talking with you about this book, The One Thing and in it, he does a really good job at discussing how to come up with a with a large goal, or both.

Both these gentlemen that wrote it talked about how to set a large goal and how to move yourself back and kind of pull out a big goal and and break it down.

Let’s say you had a five, a five year goal, and we’ve talked about this a lot on here.

Oh, here it is. This is this is from Oh, Chapter 14, Live by Priority.

Goal setting to the now.

Okay has a little diagram here.

You start with a someday goal.

And you break it down to like, okay, well, to get to that someday goal, how would I get there?

Like in five years, where should I be in order to reach that goal?

And then at one year, then you pull it down to a monthly goal?

You know, if I’m going to reach that one year goal, how can I?

What do I need to do every month, and then based on that?

What do I have to do every week, and what do I have to do every day?

Then it comes down to what do I need to do right now, and that works really, really well.

For a very small percentage of the population, I’ll tell you where this type of goal setting works well, it works really well for organizations and groups of people and teams and businesses.

And that’s why I talk about it a lot.

I talk about long term goal setting a lot here because most businesses lack it. But it’s the type of thing that that pulls everybody together and gets everybody on the same track in thinking it’s kind of necessary in order to move this a behemoth like a business or an organization forward, you do need those things.

Here’s where it gets into issues.

It gets into issues personally, when you’re doing it with personal goals.

For some reason, it’s very difficult for most people to do, and I was reading a book, and I’ll tell you more about it in the future. But I because I’m still digesting, and I’ve been done reading it, but I’m still digesting some of the thoughts in it.

And some of the ideas that they presented in that book was a they said that this might have a lot to do with people’s mindset regarding, you know, short term versus long term thinking.

The ability do we you know, does a large percentage of the population really have the ability to?

You know, what is it what is the term it is?

And of course, it’s completely slipping my mind what the actual term is, while I’m talking delay gratification, there it is. delay gratification, do people have the ability to delay gratification.

And it all comes back to this concept of the marshmallow test?

Where I don’t know if you’ve heard this one, they had a bunch of five year olds, and they said and they give them they put a marshmallow in front of them and they said okay, you can have this marshmallow today or tomorrow.

You can have two if you decide not to eat this one today. But if you eat it today, you won’t get one tomorrow.

A good 80% or so eat it while a certain 20% say okay, I’ll wait for tomorrow. And then they they track those people through time.

Supposedly the ones that were able to delay gratification have all these great things that occur in their life because of it. And that’s I mean that that’s a it’s a believable concept, even though there may be issues with that specific study and so forth.

But they take that and then they make they tie it back to the ability for people to be able to goal set and delay gratification within the moment.

I know for myself, for most of my life, I’ve always had a difficult time sticking to goals.

Getting my brain to stick to one idea for longer than a few minutes, let alone a few days is very, very, very difficult for me, until I read.

There was a book that came out and I’ve discussed it here before we had it.

I had a copy, I was showing you a few weeks ago, called, The Slight Edge. It discusses you know, what if you just focus on doing putting one habit into play at a time is one tiny little habit and talks very vaguely about it when this book came out, and I discussed this book.

I didn’t have a copy, I just now got a new copy of it because I let someone borrow when the old copies I haven’t gotten back to one of those books that kind of slips away, Mini Habits, by Stephen Guise.

And I’m going to go through and review this in whole in the future. But the concept of it is, what if you just focus on one tiny little thing, like so miniscule, very easy to do, very easy not to do but so miniscule that, you know, if you really wanted to, you can get that one thing done every day, and just focus on getting done for the day.

And then kind of build a chain of days.

So this is partially based, I heard a great example of this, where they talk about Jerry Seinfeld, when he was attempting to become a better comedian.

He said, I’m going to write a joke every single day, at least one joke, I’m gonna do it every single day and had a calendar, he just put an X on the day, as soon as he was done writing his joke for the day, and just collected that over time, just built on it built on and built on.

And if you can do that, without focusing too much on a long term goal, without having this destination that you need to get to, without having the end of the race with the ribbon that you’re going to get through. And in this great explosion of pleasure that comes from achieving the goal.

Just saying, I’m not focused on getting there, I’m focused on doing the task necessary to go the next step.

Most people can do that, if it’s done properly, and there’s ways to not do it.

And there’s ways that work a little better to do it, I found that the least amount of rewards you can offer yourself is actually tends to work out better.

Celebration is one thing, but not a hit big heavy reward. Because if you have too big of a high, then you end up going low right immediately afterwards.

And if it’s based on daily basis, you’re going to be a yo yo.

This is a very interesting way of doing it as opposed to a long term goal, that short term and I don’t know what you would call it.

This guy calls are mini habit, if you could build on a mini habits making it to where it becomes automated to where you do it.

And it doesn’t take any effort whatsoever eventually, and it doesn’t just take you know, the traditional is to say it takes 21 days. It and they said that that’s not necessarily true.

It’s a good straightforward number that sounds realistic.

But it could be a little longer than that it could be six months, it may take you six months to build up a habit or it can be shorter. It could be just a handful of days, depending on the habit depending on the person.

But we know eventually that you can build a habit. And I’ve done it here. unintentionally. It was one of these things where I just knew that I had to be consistent with it long enough, and I started doing these videos.

These started out as videos that you may also be listening to this on audio because we take the audio from the videos and put them out over podcasting.

But it’s one a day and that’s all it is, and my producer Sean E. Douglas, he puts it out there and does the hard work on this stuff, every day.

It’s just one a day.

One a day he goes through the steps one once a day, I go through the steps of taping this, putting it through the system going through. I’ve got to specifically during this period of time.

I’ll tell you a little bit behind the scenes, we take this video, I then have to add on the image that you’re seeing if you’re watching this that says AmazonProofBook.com that’s for my free book you go check that out AmazonProofBook.com, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business and I add that little title on here.

I cut it if it needs to on the on the ends, tighten it up, and then I take that converted.

I then put it through another converter to take it from the mov file that the iPhones create and turn into an mp4 file. I upload that into Dropbox and then Sean takes it from there.

Well that’s something it’s just something we do day after day after day after day. And now it’s like clockwork, I can’t stop myself from doing it.

We’ve already gone way over on this once I’m cut it loose.

You have a great night. Get out there and let the magic happen.