A 2-Step Program for New Year's Resolutions

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Before we start, I just want to thank you all for being such amazing listeners to the podcast. In 2023, hundreds of thousands of you tuned in, thousands of you wrote in via email, and I had the opportunity to do what I love, which is help entrepreneurs increase their odds of success. I want 2024 to be absolutely massive, and to do that, I want to hear from you. How do you want to see this show evolve? What would make you listen to every single episode in the new year? Do you want more or less guests? Do you want more tactical episodes or less tactical? Do you have any crazy ideas for new content or formats that I should try out? Just shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and let me know what you want to see from me and Founders Journal in the new year. Now, for today's episode, I'm helping you set goals and stay disciplined in 2024. Let's hop into it. As much as people shit on New Year's resolutions, I actually think they're great. It's less about it being a new year and more about there being a helpful force function to reflect on the year that you just had, as well as map out goals and a plan for the year ahead. But the reality is most New Year's resolutions fail. Studies say north of 90%. And anecdotally, we all know that is the case. Think about the amount of people that are in your gym in January versus October, or think about how many people quit drinking the first 30 days of the year only to return to their pre-New Year behavior shortly after. But again, this doesn't mean setting goals for the year ahead is inherently bad. It just means there is some flaw in the process. My view is that any progress in life is a function of 2 things: clear direction and disciplined effort. And people do not hit their goals for one reason or the other or both, meaning they They don't have clear direction, they don't have disciplined effort, or they don't have a combination of the two. I want to have a big 2024 across the board. I'm sure you do as well. I want to crush it in life. I want to crush it in my work. And so I've built a program for myself and others that I believe will help people be the exception versus the rule for New Year's resolutions. I'm going to take you through this program so you know how I use goal setting and accountability in unison to help maintain my direction and discipline throughout the year. But I want to share a few notes about this program before I hop into it. First, it is a constant work in progress. This is my first year doing this program, so it is not at all set in stone. It is simply my best educated guess of a process that will work for progress. Second, my program is loosely based on EOS, or the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which I've talked a lot about on this show and which we've used to run Morning Brew for the last 4 years. I'll link in the show notes to EOS and how that process works, just so if you want more context, you can listen to it before or after this episode. Now let's hop into the first part of the process, goal setting. I believe great goals are comprised of 3 things: a vision or a long-term destination for where you're headed, rocks or a quarterly goal that is highly specific, and habits or recurring behaviors that by doing them increase the odds of you hitting your quarterly goals or rocks. For every pillar in my life, I have a vision, I have rocks, and I have habits. And there are 5 pillars that I focus all of my energy and goal setting on: work, health, wealth, relationships, and play. And so to start this process, I create a 1-year vision for each of the 5 pillars that I just mentioned. Your 1-year vision should be an ambitious mantra that acts as a North Star that your quarterly goals will roll up to. It does not need to be super specific, but it does need to be highly motivating and easy to remember. I view the purpose of your one-year vision in two ways. First, if you're into the idea of verbalizing and manifesting your goals, which is something that I enjoy doing, your one-year vision can become the sentence that you repeat to yourself every single day when you start your day. The second purpose of your one-year vision is to act as a reference point as you set your goals, and the second purpose is to act as a reference point as you set your rocks or your shorter quarterly goals so that you can ask yourself as you set these goals, does my rock contribute to progress that is headed in the right direction of ultimately accomplishing my long-term vision? So to just solidify this, I want to give you a few examples of my 1-year vision for each pillar of my life. Health is be the healthiest that I've ever been. Wealth is be in full control of our money, and by control I mean deep understanding and a healthy relationship. Family, my vision for the year is to be an A+ partner and parent. Play, my vision is to make play a daily ritual in my life. And work, my vision is build a successful holding company that makes me feel like I'm a kid in a candy shop. So that is your vision. Next, we have rocks or quarterly goals. Your rocks, aka goals, should be prioritized, meaning you should have 3 maximum for each pillar, and they should be SMART. And SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, Measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Here's another way to think about rocks or your quarterly goals. If you share your rocks with any family members or friends, they should be able to read your rocks and very clearly know whether you have achieved or missed your rocks by the end of the quarter. So I'm gonna give you an example of one rock for each of my 5 pillars. For my health pillar, a rock is get to 10% body fat on the InBody machine. It's specific, it's measurable, it's attainable, it's relevant, and it's time-bound. For wealth, my rock is read I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. For family, my rock is be an A+ partner this quarter, which I wanna make a point here. This rock isn't complete yet. It is not SMART. It's not specific, it's not measurable. If I gave this goal to someone else, be an A+ partner this quarter, they wouldn't necessarily know what an A+ partner is. So I need to refine this rock because I need to be able to codify what success or failure will look like by the end of this quarter. What does it mean to be an A+ partner? I need to break that down. For play, My rock is be able to play my first jazz standard on piano. And for work, my rock is Founder's Journal averaging 200,000 downloads per month in Q1. So now we have vision and we have goals. Next are habits. Habits are the recurring behaviors that you wish to engage in because you believe that they increase the odds of you hitting your rocks. And then by hitting your rocks, you ultimately are progressing towards your 1-year vision. That's how this all ladders up. Habits can be daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly behaviors. And just to give you a few examples of my habits, for health, I have a habit of logging less than 2,000 calories daily on MyFitnessPal. For work, a habit is phone screen time less than 3 hours per day. And for family, a habit is do one thing weekly to show investment in my relationship with my wife. And so I have 1 to 3 habits for each of my 5 pillars. Again, the pillars are health, Health, wealth, play, work, and relationships. So these are your goals. If you've done this properly, you have 5 vision statements. You have one for work, health, wealth, play, and relationship. You'll have 5 to 15 quarterly goals, which is 1 to 3 rocks or quarterly goals for each pillar. And you'll have 5 to 15 habits, which is 1 to 3 habits for each pillar. This first step on its own is an amazing way for you to orient yourself for the year and have a sense of where you want to go, how you measure your progress, and the key behaviors you want to engage in that will support that progress. But I didn't stop there with my program because, as I mentioned, discipline is the second part of the progress equation. And discipline is something I know I struggle with, as I mentioned during my episode on Focusmate, which is the tool that I use to do focused work without procrastination. And I'll link to it in the show notes because it's been such a game changer for me to be more focused when I'm doing work on a daily basis. Okay, let's talk about step 2. Step 2 is creating accountability to your goals. And I've modeled this step loosely off of EOS as well. At Morning Brew and in any company that uses EOS, you have your quarterly rocks and each week your company leadership team meets for your L10, which is a meeting where you take a pulse check on the business. And one of the ways you do that is by reviewing rocks where each leader shares whether they are personally on or off track to hit their personal quarterly goals by the end of the quarter. And what this rock review in your weekly meeting does is it serves as an amazing force function for leaders to stay on top of their shit, because there's nothing more defeating than having to tell a team of people that you care about and respect that you are off track in hitting your goals. But in life, we don't have a leadership team. So I wanted to recreate one that can serve in this capacity. So what I did is I posted the following on social media. I wrote, I'm looking for a few accountability partners. I just finished Setting goals for 2024 across 5 buckets: family, health, wealth, work, and play. Now I want a few people to hold me accountable to my goals, and I'll do the same for them. I'm thinking daily texts and monthly calls. Reply below if you're interested and for what bucket. I ended up getting 500 replies and messages from folks who were interested in being a part of an accountability group. So since that post, I have done the following. I went through every single person who reached out, and I created 2 10-person accountability groups. One is an accountability group for life, which includes the pillars of health, wealth, family or relationship, and play. And then I created one accountability group for work. The point of both of these groups is very simple: to have a community and accountability to create an environment for discipline such that we do the things necessary to hit our quarterly rocks and ultimately our one-year visions. I'm keeping programming in these groups pretty simple because everyone is busy, but I sent out commitments that everyone in these groups had to agree to before I allowed them to join. And I want to read these commitments to you. So if you decide to do this program with one other person or with a group, you can at least follow these commitments loosely or completely as well. The commitments are as follows. I commit to setting a 1-year vision for each pillar. I commit to sharing 3 quarterly goals for each pillar. I commit to sharing 1 to 3 habits that will create the right behaviors to achieve my quarterly goals. I commit to texting the group daily when I complete my habits or relevant tasks and texting the group weekly to indicate if my quarterly goals are on track or off track. And I commit to taking an ownership mentality in this group, celebrating members as they hit habits or goals and holding members accountable as they get off track. On top of this, everyone in this group will be shared on a group Google Sheet that will include each person's visions, goals, and habits, and people will have the option to mark whether they're on track or off track on a weekly basis. And ahead of starting these groups, I shared a Google Form for people to share their visions, their goals, and their habits so I can read through them before we start the group. I can provide feedback on any goals that I think can be tightened up, and then they can change their goals to be reflective of the feedback. The final thing I did for these groups is I invited everyone in each group to a shared WhatsApp, which is where most of our communication will take place on a daily or weekly basis. The final thing I want to share is that I want to make this as easy as possible for you to follow. So if you want to follow this 2-step program, the first being goal setting with vision, rocks, and habits, and the second being with accountability. I want you to be able to do this. And so I wanna leave you with 2 resources. The first resource is a Google Form, and it's gonna be in the show notes. This Google Form is a template for you to fill out your goals. By completing the form, you will have created your 1-year vision, your quarterly goals, and your recurring habits. The submitted form will be shared with me and me only. I will not share it with anyone, but it will create a feeling of accountability that you have to me, even if you don't do step 2 of the program and actually create an accountability group. The second resource that I'm going to share is around forming a group. The easiest way to form an accountability group is to set it up with family or with close friends, and the number of people in the group is way less important than everyone committing to the expectations that I mentioned above. Keeping it to one accountability partner is also totally fine. You don't have to have a huge group. You can literally just have one peer. If you don't have family or friends that you want to do this with, I encourage you to post and partner up with someone on the Get Motivated Buddy subreddit, which is dedicated to people who want to find accountability partners. I'm going to link to that subreddit in the show notes so you can check it out. And so that is my process for goal setting and for goal keeping. I hope that you find this program valuable and I hope you have the best year of your life yet. Before we go, one quick note. As I mentioned at the top, I want to make 2024 the best year for this podcast and for your businesses. My goal as a creator is very simple. I want to be the most helpful creator to entrepreneurs on the internet. And to do that, I want to hear from as many of you as possible. So shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and share any recommendations you have for this show, ranging from specific topic ideas to changes you think I should make or new things you want to see me try out with the podcast. As always, thank you so much for being a part of this community, and I'll catch you next episode.