Write Your Personal Goals

When a goal has high uncertainty as to what level is achievable to reach within a particular time-frame, it is better to set specific targets in the middle of the process.

Plan your goals with the variables you do have: overall direction, time-frame, level of effort and strategies.

• Uncertain goals should be set in the middle. This will enable you to set the correct challenge level to maximize effort.
• Some research shows that for very complex tasks, goal-setting can hinder effectiveness. This is because complex tasks are cognitively demanding in the beginning and can be frustrating because you can't perform adequately. To add on more tasks can impair your performance.

• Decide on your mission for your quarter.
• Break mission down into objectives. 
• Draft your Key Results. Key Results are specific, timely and measurable indicators of your progress.
• Consider the purpose of each KR.
• Find an accountability partner. 
• Check in every 2–4 weeks with your partner. 

• Step #1: Take Your Emotional Temperature, around the most important areas of your life.
• Step #2: The Neurology of Ownership: When we take ownership of something–an item, an idea or a goal–we are more committed to it.
• Step #3: Outcome + Process: Most people set an intention or an ideal outcome and try working toward it, but that gets you only halfway there. You have to pick an outcome and a process.
• Step #4: Identify Blockers: When we first set our goals we are super optimistic and filled with hope–and that’s great. One thing that happens, however, is we fail to identify possible blockers.

Rate these areas of your life on a scale from 1 to 5 and plot it on your Goal Wheel. (1 being extremely dissatisfied, 5 being extremely satisfied)

• Business: How do you feel about your work, career or business effectiveness and success?
• Friends: How is your social life? Your friendships and support system?
• Family: How are your personal relationships? Your partner or spouse?
• Personal Passions: Do you have personal passion projects, hobbies, or fun activities that fulfil you?
• Spiritual: You can interpret this one any way you like. It could be your faith, mental health, personal journeys or mindset.
• Health: Are you happy with your physical health and wellness?

Hold the idea of wealth and success in your mind long enough and hard enough, until you draw into your life the resources you need to accomplish it.

Your main focus is to keep your mind fixed on improving your personal finances and achieving financial independence.

Keep your vision in mind, but start wherever you are.

Work back from the future to the present. Make a list of the logical steps, in order, that you need to take to get from where you are to where you want to be. Then figure out what big or small action you can take today.

1. Clarity: clear goals help with understanding the task at hand.
2. Challenge: the goal should be challenging enough to prove motivating, but not impossible to achieve. 
3. Commitment: involve your team in the goal-setting process.
4. Feedback: measure your progress and seek advice.
5. Task complexity: be careful in adding too much complexity to your goals as it can impact morale, productivity, and motivation.

• Objectives – This is what you hope to accomplish. Objectives usually take the form of broad goals that are not measurable (that’s what the Key Results section is for).
• Key Results – Based on objectives, the key results are almost always defined with a specific number.

We all need personal philosophy in life or we risk wandering and responding to random stimuli and information with little or no impact on our long-term goals.

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

Almost no popular self-help authors are going to have had the experience of pursuing a dream (like becoming an author) and not having it eventually work out. 

Understanding reality means that you have to accept that some of your dreams won’t come true just because you work hard enough, be creative enough or go to enough seminars. Don’t base your decisions on a false model of reality.

When pursuing a dream you have the underlying assumption that when you reach it you will be happy. That is false. 

Achieving goals doesn’t make you happy because achievements on their own hold no lasting emotional value. Only growth, fulfilment and passion has value.

The main barriers to accurate affective forecasting:

• Impact Bias: Your tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of future emotions. 
• Projection Bias: However you feel in the present, you tend to project that onto the future. 
• Focalism: When picturing an event in the future, you tend to focus only on that event, to the exclusion of everything else that may happen.

“Our ability to look into the future and think about what will make us most happy is the way that we get to a present that pleases us.”

Your style of speaking, or writing, choice of words while conveying your idea, or point of view are very powerful components in communicating with effectiveness and purpose.

The right word said the right way can make all the difference.

Your words need to be interesting both in terms of content (what is being said) and delivery (how it is being said) to be able to draw the people towards what you are trying to say.

If you fail to meet them, you probably set difficult ones for yourself.
Goals should inspire you to stretch yourself. If you hit all of your goals every time, they might not be ambitious enough.