Guide to Success: Finding Your North Star (Part 1)

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Better at your business, better at your relationships, better at health, just better at life. Let's get into today's topic. Actually, It's gonna be a two-part topic, so we're gonna address part one here today, and we'll tackle part two tomorrow. What we're gonna be talking about is how to determine your North Star, how to chart your course in life, and we're actually gonna focus today's efforts on the writing your own eulogy part of determining your North Star. Now, writing your own eulogy, don't turn me off just yet, hear me out. Okay? I understand that this could be difficult for many. I understand that many may see this as morbid. Clearly, I believe a little differently, because I believe that with this No Days Off movement, we're striving to get a little better in our health, in our business, in our financial, in our relationships every single day. And it's great to make improvements. Maybe you want better experiences or better relationships or or better health because you want to live a little longer, whatever it may be, that's great. But I believe that most of us listening, we have something bigger than all of that. We have a life that we desire to lead. We have a legacy that we desire to leave. We have an impact that we want to make. So the question becomes, how do you determine the direction you'd like to go? How do you determine your North Star? I think it starts by actually beginning with the end in mind. The first step in creating your life plan is to begin, is to begin with the end, with the funeral. Again, tough, but just bear with me here. Now this concept, where I borrowed this from, is from a book called Living Forward that made a huge difference in my life several years ago when I read it, by Daniel Harkavy and Michael Hyatt. Fantastic book. On How to Plan Your Life. And they talk about taking this first step by beginning at the end, starting with the end in mind. And again, that's your funeral. So it can be uncomfortable to think about your own mortality, but reality is it's a challenge that we've all, we all must face, right? It's something we're all gonna have to endure. And thinking about it this way gives us a lot of perspective about our life and frankly, what's most important to us. So we're going to engage our minds, we're going to engage our hearts, and we're going to write this eulogy. And it's going to create what I would say is this, this pull power that is required to change how we think today and how we feel today and how we act moving forward. If we write our eulogy, think about where we want to be, compare it against where we're at today, and think through all the steps we need to take, to have that end that we desire. So let, let's get started around what this exercise entails, okay? So you're gonna write your own eulogy as if your life ended today. I actually want you to imagine that you're attending your own funeral. Let's call it your own celebration of life. And I want you to think about what those in attendance would be saying about you. Specifically, I want you to think around the first 3 rows. Who's sitting in those first 3 rows? Odds are it's the most important people in your life. Now, when I think about my first 3 rows, who's sitting there? It's probably my wife, it's probably my siblings, it's probably my kids, but it's probably my kids' husbands, my grandchildren, maybe even my great-grandchildren, maybe friends that I haven't even made yet in my life. I mean, it's really interesting to think about it, but a lot of the people in attendance are people that have not even entered my life yet, but these are the most important people to me. Now, what are these people feeling? What are they thinking about this celebration? What stories are they telling about me? Are they laughing? Are they crying? Are they sighing? What are they saying? Now, at this celebration, I hope, I would think, somebody or somebodies are gonna be walking up there and speaking about me. And my hope is, you know, maybe it's my daughters. What do I want my daughters to be saying? What words are coming out of their mouth? See, for me, you know, my dream is to have my daughter stand up there and say, you know, my dad was an amazing father. You know, he was always there for me. I could always count on him. I could talk to him about anything. He made me laugh. He was my shoulder to cry on when I had to cry. You know, we were in business together. We had these all sorts of crazy different experiences together. I'll never forget these times. And on and on and on and on. You could see even as I'm saying this, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up. It should be that visceral an experience. If that's what I want my girls to be saying, if those are the experiences I want those individuals at my celebration actually experiencing? Then what can I do starting today to make certain that I'm on that path? You follow me? So if that's my goal, what's my present-day reality, and how am I doing with respect to that measuring stick? Am I progressing towards that? Am I off the track? Am I off the rails a little bit and need to get back on? See, that's really the focus of this whole exercise, right? If we're going to begin with the end in mind, if we're going to document or think through it and document where we'd like to end, we've got to compare it against our current reality, and we're going to see a gap, and that's awesome because now we're aware of the distance between where we're at and where we want to go, and we can either stay the course, we could double down on the course, or if in fact we're off course, we can get back on. And that's the power of this exercise. So in summary, if we want to determine our North Star, one part of doing that is going to be to begin with the end in mind, design exactly what we want that to look like. And in this particular case, it's our celebration of life, our funeral. Design exactly what I want it to look like, what I want people to be saying and experiencing. I then walk it all the way back several decades to my life today and decide what changes do I need to make, what corrections do I need to make, what conversations do I need to start having, how do I have to behave, start behaving, how do I have to start showing up. See, today is full of all sorts of focusing questions. Usually I end with one or two, but I think you all have plenty to think about today. That's all I have for you. Remember, No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Today was part 1 of a 2-part series around determining your North Star. I hope you got a lot out of it. Remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's go get after it.