1,000 Day Goals

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Hello my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm so glad you're hanging out with me. I really appreciate it. They really enjoy invading your brain every week or so. So thanks for giving the opportunity to do that. I'm recording this right at the tail end of 2020. It's just before New Year's and my children have just gone to bed. They drove me crazy today. I think back about my time before children and I feel like the same person that I was before kids. But then I just think I had so much time back then and I had no idea how much time I had back then. So, you know, I've developed a new kind of empathy for those of you who are starting the entrepreneurial journey with kids because I started mine at 18, didn't have kids back then, so that was, that was my secret advantage. Back then I did not have children. Although I am more motivated than ever at the as the result of having children and the thing that having kids has done for me from a business setting and this happened as soon as I found out that I was going to be a father. The first time I was is on my 26th birthday. I think we found out and the day of my 26th birthday, immediately that day, that day it happened, my brain started thinking in much longer chunks of time. It started thinking in 18 years or at least a decade. It started thinking much longer. Whereas before I was kind of a world traveler. I would be in this place for six months and I would be dating that girl and I would be living in that house, I'd be doing this little project and I never really had the success that I enjoy now until I started thinking in that very long term way. Because before I would do a project for a little bit, it wouldn't work out. I'd do another project for a little bit, I would start a podcast and I'd go in a little direction and it. I never really hit the momentum that was needed in order to be extremely successful because I was not willing to commit to something for A long enough period of time. And also there was just nothing that I was enjoying enough for me to really dive into for an extended period of time. And if you've read my book 12 months to 1 million, then you know that I got the call or I made the call to my business partner, told him that we got a plus sign on a pregnancy test and that I was all in. And that really changed the direction of my businesses and my mindset of being able to go all in on long term projects. I believe, and I did not believe this a few years ago, but I believe this now. I believe that there is not a, there's not like a right way or, or.

Sometimes it's not even a better way and there's not even like a necessarily a better business for you to do. It's just what path are you willing to commit to? What are you excited enough to put in a long term effort into? That's your best path, that's the best thing, that's the best answer. That is the way that you make decisions. And, and we talked about a little bit in the last episode where I talked about making decisions based on feel, based on logic and reason and why I have found that to be so profound. Well, lately I have been.

Rediscovering the joy and the opportunity that is coming from setting very long term goals, or at least long term goals, longer term goals that I am used to. And it started a few months ago when I brought a new member, Alex, onto the team and he really inspired me to think about making videos as a process rather than a goal. I watched him so enjoy the video making process that it was, I think the first time that I had seen in a while someone who enjoyed their craft so much that it didn't matter so much what the immediate result was. He loved making videos and it highlighted for me how much I was thinking about the result in everything that I do rather than the process. Again, we talked about this in the last episode pretty heavily, but even working out, I would be thinking about I'm going to work out for the result rather than I'm going to work out to feel good or to have fun. And which one of those things do you think is gonna be more sustainable? Is it gonna be when you're going because you feel like you need to burn some calories because you're a, you're fat and you hate yourself and you got to burn off the last cookies that you ate because you hated yourself last night, or is it gonna be that you're going to the gym because you feel good going to the gym and you're doing the workouts that feel good to you, which one of those is going to be more sustainable? Which one of those is going to bring you the best long term result? And that's when my thinking really started to change on this, because I saw Alex enjoy the video making process so much that it took all of the tenseness out of the result. You know, we're all in every game that we do because we want to enjoy the unfolding. We don't really want the stuff. We want the fun and experience of getting the stuff and having the stuff. But it's really about the enjoyment much more than it is about the stuff that we have. Right? So when I started working with Alex, I started enjoying making videos again. I started making really inspired content. I really started to write from a more inspired place, to do podcasts from a more inspired place. And it made me think, okay, if I didn't care about the result at all, how might I show up differently? And how long would I be willing to commit to the process without being attached to there being this big result or having any result? If I enjoyed it so much, then how long would I be willing to do it for no result? It kind of reminds me of. I have. I don't think I've ever shared this story publicly before.

When I was a kid in elementary school, my friends and I had this fake radio station that we, everybody would come over to the house. Me, Aaron Widmar, Aaron Ramsey, Matt Mooney, and the four of us had this stupid, silly, fun, fake radio station. And we all had a character. My name, my, my character sounded like this. And he was the owner of the radio station who was always trying to police, police, make sure everybody followed the rules. Don't get too out of hand, everybody, we have bills to pay. That was my character. And everybody had their own character. And we just did silly, stupid things where we would record ourselves having late night episodes on this fake talk radio station, 64.9 WCAB W cab. And we had a ball. It's like one of my favorite memories of my life, being a. Being a 11 year old recording into this cassette player and recorder. And I listened to it over and over and over again. No one else listened. We didn't care. And I had a ball and loved listening to it. And I would have done that every day and not cared about the result, not cared about who listened. It didn't matter what the result was. It mattered that it was so much fun to Record these silly podcasts. I just called it a podcast because now it's, you know, 2021.

Maybe it set the stage for the reason why I do podcasts. My point being I want to enjoy everything that much. I want to enjoy. I want my life to be that. And when I'm thinking about the result, my life isn't that. And so I came up with this concept, this mental framework of, of 1,000 days. What if I committed to something, a process, without worrying about what the outcome would be for 1,000 days? If I was willing to invest in something for 1,000 days, no matter the results, I would probably end up getting the result. But it also wouldn't matter because I need to do it in a way that is enjoyable if I'm going to sustain it for a thousand days. Now I'm going to share with you the goals that I set for this thousand day challenge, which is almost three years.

It's a thousand days, not quite three years. And kind of the beauty of this is a thousand days is long enough to have a real at bat. As Gary Vaynerchuk would say, it's a real attempt to go at something. And yet most of us can think three years out. We can think a thousand days out. It's, it's so. It's long enough to kind of hit pay dirt, and it's just long enough for us to be able to kind of think about our life. Like, I'm 33 as I'm recording this. It'll be my 36th birthday in a thousand days. Be right around my 36th birthday. 36 doesn't feel that much older than 33. It feels like a new chapter, but it doesn't feel so far out that I can't imagine it. And for me, one year goals always kind of made me feel frustrated because a one year goal, I would get to April, feel like I was behind, and then want to give up. It's why I say so often in my book that it's going to feel like no progress for a long time and then there's going to be lots of progress. We're seeing that a lot right now in the incubator where I have students who for the first four months, you know, for them it felt like nothing was happening except they have an idea and they have a prototype. And I'm like, look, sit tight. Your biggest problem is going to be keeping stock. And now, you know, five months in, they have a launch, they sell a thousand units and they're blown away. And if they can keep Inventory, they can keep stock they're on pace for.

Have a six figure run rate, so it looks like nothing's happening. Most people give up when nothing's happening. And then eventually, depending on what the goal is, you hit this exponential curve. And I want to be able to.

Put myself in the position to be able to hit that exponential curve in everything that I do. I want to be able to set it up, stack the deck so that whatever my big goal is, if I relax into the process and give myself a thousand days, I think that somewhere in there I'm gonna hit an exponential curve up. So again, the beauty of this is it's longer than one year, because one year just isn't long enough to be able to hit all of our goals. That's why so many people give up. It's why so many of us get frustrated in April, May, June. And then we start to feel behind and we get rushed, and then, well, there's always next year, especially if you're a Browns fan. It's also a thousand days, which means that you've got to have a habit. You've got to have a practice to do this. You've got to have some sort of daily focus in order to make this happen. So the way that I've done this is I've set a certain target, a clear goal, and within that goal, I really have a mindset I'm trying to cultivate, and I have a daily habit that I break it down to. Now, I shared with somebody recently, one of the beauties of having just the daily habit that you're focusing on is that if you've got a daily habit, if you fall off the horse, the only thing you can do is get back on the horse and do the habit again. So if you've ever blown a diet, which all of us have, the temptation is to say, all right, since I blew the diet, since I ate the cookies, since I had the cake, since I overate, I won't eat for three days, I'll run seven miles a day, and I just won't think about food for a while. Our brains just make it this big thing. Whereas the most impactful thing that you could do is to just get back on the horse. Like go do your normal routine, go back to your normal exercise and diet, just get back on the horse and keep going. It's not a big deal. You overate, you ate some food, you had a good night, get back on the horse tomorrow. And when you have a daily habit that you're practicing, it makes it Easier to get back on the horse. Whereas if you've got a big goal and you don't feel like you're getting there fast enough, you start taking risks that put you in more of a deficit.

So we've got a long enough goal and we've got a daily habit. And what we're really going after is a mindset that we're cultivating that to say, if I don't hit the big goal, not a big deal. It's not really a big deal for some of these. I don't even really have a clear goal. It's more. I'm looking to cultivate a certain mindset behind something. For example, one of the things I have written down is for the next thousand days, I am going to make make it a priority and a focus to have a calm mind.

I don't know how to measure that. In fact, I think measuring it would defeat the purpose. I think it would be the opposite of what I'm trying to cultivate. I've shared this story recently, but in 2020, I was diagnosed with something called Graves disease, which I had never heard of before. And it's not super serious. And I caught it really, really early. And when I was about 10 days into taking the medication for it, my mind started to get quiet. And I realized that my brain had been in overdrive just thinking and thinking and thinking. And my body was also stuck in overdrive, which is why my thyroid was hyperactive. And what the medication did is got my body and then my brain to slow down just a little bit, just enough for me to see. Huh. Wow. This is what it feels like to be normal. And I realized that I had the opportunity that if I wanted to practice and cultivate a calm mind, that I could. And that is my priority for the next 1000 days. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go through my goals for the next thousand days. And I'm only doing this so that I can give you some context and some examples of how you might want to play with this concept. Because I can tell you that going through this process of making thousand day goals has really allowed me to relax. Because if I'm going to commit to something for a thousand days, I better be excited about it. If I'm going to commit to something for 1,000 days, then.

I better be willing to say no to other things. And it prompts the question, what am I willing to give 1,000 days to? What am I willing to practice for 1,000 days? It's a wonderful filter for how to make decisions. Now, I want to give you an asterisk. These are subject to change. These aren't final. They're the best I have so far. So I'm going to start with the ones I'm absolutely certain about and I'm still playing with a couple on these. So I'll start from the one that I'm being very public about. And also I have organized these. The way that I kind of came up with these was I used my tribe five.

My tribe five thought process, which if you haven't gone through that, I have a YouTube video about it and a podcast about it. Basically, Tribe 5, five areas of growth, time, relationships, income, body and expansion. And I try to find a daily habit for that tribe 5 in order to balance my time, relationships, my income, my body and my expansion. And I score myself. So how did I do, did I get all five of those habits today? And it's just a way of me keeping track of knowing where my progress is because if I'm feeling really crappy for like, more than about four days, I can usually look at my tracking sheet and say, oh, yeah, I haven't meditated, haven't seen a friend, haven't worked out in four days. That's when my time started getting crappy. No wonder I'm feeling not myself this week. And if you're getting fours and fives, you know, it's a pretty good chance that you're feeling pretty good and you're, you're moving forward. So that's kind of the context that I use to set my thousand day goals. So it's my Tribe 5 process just extrapolated out over what if I was consistent about this for a thousand days, what would I want my habit to be? So with my time, this is number one thing for my t point, my number one thing is I am committing a thousand days to mastering YouTube. And by mastering YouTube, I mean creating wonderful content, getting to know the platform, being active in that community and getting better at the game, just getting better at the process and enjoying it more, Enjoying that entire process of getting better and creating and, and interacting. I want to enjoy contributing to my community on YouTube for the next thousand days. I can do that with excitement and confidence because the whole team is loving the growth that's happening on that platform and I am loving the creation of the content on that medium. And I now have a team that understands and is excited to understand that platform. And I get the feeling that there might be more team members at the end of this thousand days that are supporting the unfolding of this goal. So for the next thousand days I am going to make two YouTube videos a week, interact on that platform, plan my videos in advance so that I know that they are good and promote YouTube as a primary source of content in the company. So every day for the next thousand days, one of those things has to happen. I've either got to be promoting a video, interacting with my community on there, planning a video or recording a video. And if I do that for a thousand days, I'm confident that I will have mastery over the platform and that I will be in the top five if not 2 or 1% of people who go out and make videos on YouTube. And I can't imagine anything more fun from a content perspective of creating from that place of excitement in a medium meaning video that I really enjoy. So I'm committing that for the next thousand days for you that might be. Am I willing to go all in on this business for the next thousand days? Am I willing to just master Amazon for the next thousand days? Am I willing to build a real brand for the next thousand days? Am I willing to ignore what everybody else is doing and listen to my customers and go all in on them? So you might want to play with that. Number two, my R category. For relationships. For relationships.

The mindset that I want to cultivate is giving without expectation.

That is what I want to cultivate. It's who I want to be. On the other side of this, the practice that I'm going to have for this is that my focus for the next 1000 days is putting all of my focus on product quality.

Now if those two things sound at opposite with one another, I understand. But for so long I come from the marketing world, the direct response marketing world where people run traffic to a conversion page, to an upsell process and it's all transactional. And very few people in the marketing world have excellent products. In fact, product people and marketing people tend not to go to the same conferences or interact with one another or be friends. They have very different ways of thinking about their businesses. A lot of people who are good at marketing their business is the marketing. And I come from that world. That's the world that I kind of.

It's where I cut my teeth and now.

My brain is trained and so many entrepreneurs brains are trained to think about what do I get out of this, what do I get? How much money will I make from this? Rather than how can I create something so good that other people can't help but Pay me for it. And I want to enjoy the creation and the service that is my products. I want to have products that are so good that people can't help but get amazing results from them, talk about them, willingly promote it to their friends. And I want to feel immensely proud of them. Like I'm proud of my content.

Now the difference there, and this is a little bit humbling or a little bit scary to say out loud, but I'm very like, our products are excellent. But a lot of times I have found myself making products from the place of.

I'm making this to sell it, whereas when I do a podcast.

I'm just doing it because I enjoy it, want to contribute and like this process. I want to feel that way about my products too, which means that I want to give without expectation and I want to focus on making our products in incredible, incredible. That doesn't mean that they won't be profitable. They'll be really profitable. Our products are on the high end in the industry and I think underpriced, I think, or at least like there's way more value that our customers get.

Compared to the price. I am 1000% confident on that and I can only imagine what it will be in a thousand days when I have practiced this idea of just.

Committing to making amazing products. And so we've got a lot of really great momentum on there. We brought on a new full time product manager. His name is Justice. If you haven't interacted with justice inside the 1%, he's so awesome and he's so fun to work with. And I literally woke up yesterday going, I can't wait for Monday and I get to work with justice again. He is just infectious and caring and giving and I'm proud to be working with him. And we're doing this together of just committing to make our communities and our products as amazing as we know how to make them. And if that is the focus versus.

The marketing of the product, then can you imagine what we'll be in a thousand days of doing that?

So that is the focus and kind of the outcome that I want is to learn to give or create from that place, from that place of contribution, that place of no expectation.

My body point B in the Tribe five is for the next thousand days, my focus is going to be on mobility and being really lean. So I have.

I've gained about 20 pounds of muscle in the last two years and I honestly feel too big.

And I also have experienced what it has been like to be 30 and in pain, like hard to move kind of pain. Wtf is that about? I started working with a trainer here in Austin about a year and a half ago. And I went to him and I was like, look, I've been working out hard for five years. I'm really happy with my physique, but I'm too young to hurt this much. And started completely rebuilding my squat form. And he put me on a regular stretching routine. And now after being close to pain free and I now have normal range of motion. I mean, after, imagine this, after a year and a half, I now have normal range of motion, not good range of motion, normal range of motion. So for the next thousand days, my focus is going to be being really mobile and agile and really lean. Which means that if, if I can only do one workout, I'm gonna do a cardio workout and I'm gonna do stretching and cardio most days and I'll work weights in there. But instead of four or five days a week, it might be two or three days a week. And my focus is gonna be feeling really good in my body, light and mobile and pain free and have easy moving movement in my body. So that's my focus for the next thousand days, being really lean and pain free and mobile. And I don't need to add any more muscle. I don't really want to add any more muscle.

Want to be smaller and move really easy. So that's my body point for the next thousand days. And then E is a calm mind. And my goal is to have a calm, creative mind, which means that my habit is going to be wake up early and meditate. Can I wake up at 6am and meditate for at least 15 to 20 minutes every day for a thousand days? That's not that it's not hard. You just have to do it. And so can I. What would, what would my, what would my experience of life be like if every day I woke up at 6am and meditated and I had a calm mind that was quiet and creative? That's what I crave the most. So I'm committing to that for the next thousand days. Now, I skipped one, I skipped. I, I skipped income because this one took the most amount of thought for me. And what I ultimately am playing with right now is that my I point for income is to operate like an investor.

And as an investor, I mean, I don't want to be an entrepreneur anymore. I want to be a capitalist. I want to be a creator and I want to be an investor. An investor doesn't operate the business. An investor doesn't worry about day to day operations. An investor is one of the people who brings together the resources.

Maybe I should call this think like an owner because it's what I talk about when I'm coaching entrepreneurs is you have to think like an owner. Own the business, owner don't run the business. Bring the pieces together. Owners have CEOs, owners raise capital, owners sell their businesses for millions and millions of dollars. Entrepreneurs don't. Entrepreneurs do whatever it takes to not have a 9 to 5 job, which is what homeless people are. Owners, capitalists multiply resources. They create things, they build things, they bring together the elements that need to work together, cooperate together to create really amazing businesses. Investors owners can create more impact in 30 minutes than an entrepreneur can make in 30 hours. Because it's just making a decision. Your job as an owner or as an investor is to have such a calm mind that you come up with the next breakthrough that you have, the next great idea that you know what to do when things get hard. You steer the ship, you don't drive it, you tell people where to go, you don't figure out how to get there. That's the next step for me in my journey as a leader, a business owner, a capitalist. And so right now my habit is that I'm, I'm really, I'm really enjoying my side hustle, which is day trading and day trading, you know, 30 minutes a day essentially. And so that's my habit. Can I get really good at that type of investing? And I know it's not investing, which is why I kind of had trouble with this one, but it's where I'm at right now. I really like getting to understand the company and the story behind the company and practicing that, that skill set. And eventually I want to have that mindset in all areas of my businesses. And it's starting to happen. That might be a good future podcast for me to do is how my brain has changed while thinking like an owner. And I have had so much growth in my mindset this year as I started to even consider that as an option for me. Because until Covid until quarantine, I never slowed down. I was always thinking about the next thing and what I could do to get there rather than bringing the resources together to make that happen. And once I really took on that mindset for myself, I was able to help other entrepreneurs better too. Because the point is not to be working 18 hour days doing things that you don't like so that you get a great experience of life later. So that you get a big payday later. The point is to enjoy the unfolding now. The point. There's a reason why people want to leave their boring jobs and it is not to go replace it with an equally unsatisfying career that they're in charge of. That is not a step up. That is not progress. It's one shackle replaced with the other. And the one that you replace it with, you have to work from home, which is the worst thing ever. You don't even get to see people in the office anymore, which is the one thing you had going for you in your corporate job. And so now life is worse.

I don't want that. And I think that is where most of the world of entrepreneurship is. I want to be an owner and I want to create things and I want to take bets and I want to raise capital for projects and I want to create ridiculously amazing content and classes and I want to. I'm really starting to cast visions for things that could be billion dollar companies. I can't do them on my own, and I certainly am not qualified to operate them.

I'm qualified to put together a vision and raise capital and go build a team for them.

And that's the mindset that I want to cultivate. I'll talk more about that in 2021. But what I really want to encourage you to think about is what are you willing to commit to for a thousand days? Would you be willing to commit to what you did today for a thousand days?

Are you willing to commit to your focus that you have it on right now for a thousand days? Are you willing to commit to the business that you're operating right now for a thousand days?

Because if not.

You might want to reconsider your focus and your business and the things that you're putting attention on. I can't wait to make YouTube videos for a thousand days. I can't wait to.

Have my focus be being mobile and lean. I can't wait to practice having a calm mind. I would do these things no matter the result.

Do you feel that way about the things that are your focus right now? If not, I just want you to play with this. What would you be willing? What in your life is exciting enough.

To warrant you giving a thousand days of attention to?

And I will. I can already tell you that asking that question has brought peace. It's brought some relaxation. It's brought an easier unfolding of the path.

It's starting to bring joy because I've taken a lot of pressure off. So much pressure off. I've got a thousand days to figure this out. I got a thousand days for YouTube to hit its exponential curve. I got a thousand days for this product to be amazing. It's okay that we have this hiccup. I've got a thousand days to have a calm mind. It's okay that I was stressed today.

Even a year and a half from now, I'll still have like 400 days.

More than a year to figure it out. So I really like having this chunk of time, but it's still being long enough that I can commit to it and it not be my whole life. I will leave you with two quick, selfish pitches. Number one, if you consume YouTube videos, look up my name on YouTube and subscribe, it's going to be really fun. Pitch. Number two, if you're willing to commit a thousand days to a business that really lights you up, or if you want to find out what that is for you. So many of you are running businesses that are there for the result and you're frustrated with the results and so you're driving yourself crazy because you want this business to work out, but you're really in it for that end game. And so there's nothing that you're excited enough about to be really focused on for a thousand days. And so you're on this hamster wheel that sucks. So if you're in that position and you just want to make a pivot in your business to get really excited about it so that you can cast a seven or an eight figure vision and build the kind of company that you can enjoy and yet sell.

Then I would like to invite you to join us inside something called the Capitalism Incubator. We start on February 1st and one of the members in there posted Ryan, your superpower is that you teach people how to build eight figure businesses in a way that is so enjoyable that they feel it's crazy to sell for eight figures. It's like, I like that there's something there. There's a good marketing pitch there. The results have been.

Amazing and.

You'Ll hear from some of them as their stories unfold. There's about half a dozen businesses that I personally hope to invest in from the first group of 25 people. And so our next round starts on February 1st. If you're ready to discover the business that you're willing to be excited about for a thousand days, or if you need to make a change in your existing business so that it's scalable, sellable, and one that you're proud of and that you want to operate to see its growth or at least oversee its growth, because I don't believe that entrepreneurs should be operators. We talked about that. But if that's you, come join us. Or at least come see what it's about. You can find out more@Capitalism.com Inc.Capitalism.com Inc. There's a video explanation, there's another explanation if you want to go deeper into it and there's an application and all the details are there. So if that calls your name, come join us. Thank you for letting me invade your thoughts for a little bit. I love hanging out with you guys, and I'm so excited to spend the next thousand days with you. Let's do this. See ya. It's a true stat that 99% of business owners never clear a million dollars. And that is why I started a mentoring group called the 1%. I have helped hundreds of entrepreneurs cross seven figures. There's a reason why that's the case, and it's because we have a formula that works really well. And this year in 2021, we've introduced mastermind groups at each level in the process. That's the grind, the growth, and the gold. So when you come join us inside the 1%, you'll be partnered with other entrepreneurs who are at your level to help you get through that level and accelerate onto the next step in your journey. You'll be following the same roadmap that I teach in my book, 12 months to 1 million. That's why we have such a high success rate, getting people to where they want to be. So go to capitalism.com1, scroll to the bottom, hit the join button. And for less than you spent on eating out this past month, you'll be in a room of entrepreneurs who are pushing you to go from where you are right now to the next step in the process. It'll be the best investment that you make all year. Come join us. We're ready for you. Go to capitalism.com1.