1,000 Days: The New Way To Set Goals & Achieve ANYTHING You Want

Over the years, I've started to kind of resent goal setting because when you go to do it, it can be kind of daunting. You want to set goals that excite you, but also you're faced with the crippling reality that you might fail when you hit them. So I completely flipped the model on its head recently into a way that has provided some really amazing results for me in the short and the long term. It's something that I call setting 1000 day goals. And I'm going to unpack the whole thing for you in this video. The way that I used to set goals was to set 90 or one year targets that I wanted to be different about my life. And when I thought about it in that way, maybe this is just me, but my experience was I was always setting goals from a place of lack because I was really writing down what I wanted to change about my life, what I didn't like about my life, and what I wanted it to be instead. And so I was always writing these goals for, for the next 90 days of what I wanted to be different. And I'm sitting there focused upon what I don't like about my life. And after several years of that just not working or making me happy, I knew that I needed to get a new strategy. I was feeling burnt out by the fact that every 90 days or every year I would flip the page and I'd have a new set of things that I was unhappy about and trying to fix. That's really no way to live a life and that's definitely not a way to set goals. Something changed for me last year when I had the realization that if we were going to see results in any new direction, it was going to take about three years for us to see real success and a real payoff of any new project. So when you're starting something new, whether it is getting into ridiculous shape or it's having an amazing relationship, you can bet on it taking three years to have the type of outcome that you really want. How long does it take to date, meet, court, get engaged and get married to the love of your life and have a good marriage your whole life, but at least three years, right? Whereas most people spend 90 days or a year saying I'm going to meet someone or I'm going to fall in love. Well, what does that do now? It just puts you in this position of like, must fall in love. Tell me how that is going to end. It is not going to end well or start a business or make new money when You've got a goal to make, let's say $5,000 extra a month by starting a business. And you do that for a year long goal. If you don't have $2,500 a month in income come June of that year, your brain starts freaking out and trying to take shortcuts along the way to try and make up for the deficit. So what do you end up doing? You start making bad decisions that hurt your business, or rather than doing the long term steps that would actually get you there faster. So in my opinion, a year long is just not enough time to set a goal for the real type of long term outcome that you want. And so I came up with this concept of the thousand day goal. Why a thousand days? Two reasons. That's almost three years. And three years is really what it takes to be able to hit true success in any area of life. If you do something for long enough, meaning three years, there's a good shot that you're going to have amazing results. The second a thousand days means that there is a regular consistency. And if you're going to do something for a thousand days, then it requires you to actually enjoy the process through which this happens. When you are setting a goal for 90 days, you can force something for 90 days, you, you can force yourself to do something every day or five days a week for 90 days. Most people don't, they end up burning out and quitting. But some people can squeeze that extra energy out to hit a 90 day goal. But for a thousand days, you better find a way to do it that is really sustainable and really enjoyable. And when you do that, you definitely end up getting the results. Here's a way this is applied to my life and my business. A few months ago, I decided to make YouTube a real priority in our business. If you've seen the content change here on the channel or you've seen more consistency, it's because I'm taking it seriously. So I decided to spend the next thousand days to getting better at YouTube, to making this a commitment. No matter what the result was, no matter how many people are watching, no matter how many dislikes I get, no matter how many negative comments I get, no matter how few people subscribe, I'm going to make consistent videos for a thousand days. I'm going to either promote or outline content, or post new content, or engage in the comments or something every day for a thousand days. Well, guess what's happened in just a few short months of being that consistent. Just a few short months of me being that active a few short months of being that engaged and committed. Our numbers are growing faster than they've ever grown in me doing content, and I've been doing content for over a decade. Not YouTube specifically, but making content consistently for over a decade. But this is the first time that I'm being extremely consistent with a strategy that I'm going to do for a thousand days. And within a few months there's more consistent growth than any other platform I've ever done. Nice. So the fact that I am giving myself the strategy and the permission to be involved in some way that I know is sustainable allows me to be be freed up to focus on the thing that will bring me long term results. And I have to do it in a way that I will enjoy for the next thousand days. Notice that the goal is not to have a million subscribers in a thousand days. It's not to get 100 million views. It's to get better every day for a thousand days. And the end result of that will likely be that we get a lot of new subscribers and views too. But I'm going to do the process regardless of what the numbers say. And that frees me up to actually create in a way that will end up getting the numbers too. So that leads me to a very important piece of the thousand day goal, which is to not set your sights on what you want the outcome to be. You put your attention on what the process is. I call it process goals versus outcome goals. An outcome goal is focused on what you don't have. And you're trying to get a process goal. Put your focus on how you will enjoy the unfolding along the thousand days. Remember, to do it for this long, it has to be done in a way that you enjoy. So putting your attention on the process allows you to only focus on what's right in front of you. For example, have you ever blown a diet? We all have, right? Well, the temptation when you're focused on an outcome goal is to say, oh, I blew my diet and now I'm up two pounds. So now I gotta starve myself for two days and run nine miles in order to counteract those calories? I'm sure you can relate to something like this, right? But what's the appropriate way to get back on track to just go back to getting on the horse and the habit that you said you were gonna do for a long time? And if you've got 1,000 days to just go do the one habit you gotta do to stay on track, then you don't beat up yourself when you are falling off the horse or you get slightly off track, you just go back to the daily habit that you set for yourself. So the way that I do this is I have a little acronym that is T R I B E tribe. And these five areas are what I track for my thousand day goals. And it looks like this T R I B E stands for time, relationships, income, body and expansion. These are my five areas that I set thousand day goals in. And I'll just give you a couple of them as an example for T time I'm looking at where do I want to be spending my time? And I'm a creator, I'm a creative person and I like to make content. And in my business and in my life, what I really like to do is make content like this. So that's why YouTube and being involved in the process of getting better at making videos is my key point. So every day for a thousand days I'm working at getting better at one type of content and it's making YouTube videos. And my only desire is to align my focus behind doing that for long enough for it to have consistent growth. And that's already happening.

For R. That's relationships. And my process goal for relationships is to give without expectation. I want to be in the mode of giving and serving and creating from a place that doesn't expect anything from anyone else. I want to drop expectations of other people and just live my life and be a giving, kind, creative, collaborative person. And I think a lot of us, or I should just speak for myself, are used to thinking about relationships selfishly. What do I get out of this? What can I extract from this? And that feels like crap. So I want to cultivate a giving mindset without expectation for the next thousand days.

I is income. And I know that the best way that I'll make a lot of money is ensuring that everything that I do is a very high quality work. So for the next thousand days my entire focus is ensuring that my products on capitalism.com are excellent. Top of class, world class. I used to set outcome goals here. I want to make this much money, make this many sales, but I know that the fastest way and the best way that I'll make a lot of sales, a lot of money is have great frickin products. Marketing is really easy when you got great fricking products. And I'm really proud of what we have at capitalism.com, but I want to focus for a thousand days on cultivating an amazing experience for my customers. And I know that that will lead to the outcomes that I want. But the process is creating great products for our customers.

B is Bodi now. Man am I used to setting 90 day goals for Bodi. And how long can you sustain 90 day sprints on your body? I've done it before and I have had a hard time keeping them. When I look at my goals for body, what I really want is have a good feeling body that has no pain and is super mobile. I used to set goals for weight loss or muscle gain or strength. But you know, I'm 33 now and I've got two kids and what I really want is to be super mobile and to be super pain free. So what's the process for that? My process for that is ensuring that I've got the flexibility and and the mobility to carry me into old age. So my process for this is to just focus on stretching and being really lean, which means doing things like riding my peloton or going for long walks. So it's like low impact cardio and being super mobile and lean. I'm going to focus only on that for a thousand days.

And E is expansion. And expansion is things like what I'm growing into, what I am becoming, what I'm learning and discovering. And for my focus for a thousand days I just want to cultivate a calm mind. I focus on so much chaos going on in the world and I work at a computer and so I'm seeing news and interruptions all the time. What would my life be like if for a thousand days I only cared about having a really calm mind, a non distracted, focused, present mind? I think I would really love the experience of life if that was my focus rather than learning one more thing and listening to one more thing and consuming one more thing. So for the next thousand days I'm just cultivating a calm, quiet mind. So you might have heard the old adage that people overestimate what they can get done in a year and they underestimate what they can get done in a decade. I'm seeing it as people underestimate what can be done in a thousand days if they just put their attention on the process rather than the outcome. I used to be afraid to set that type of long term goals because three years felt like a really long time. But ever since I became a parent, three years isn't such a long time because when I found out I was going to be a dad, that was in 2015 is the first time that I started thinking like, oh my goodness, someone's going to be in my life for at least 18 years. When you have that shift and you start thinking that long term, three years doesn't seem so long. I'm 33 right now and three years from now I'll be 36 and I'm like, that's like the same age as I am right now. So if I spend a thousand days doing something and I don't quite get where do I want to be, I know I'm still going to be way further ahead than if I had been distracted all over the place for three years. And I'm still only 36. And if you're watching this and you're 24, in three years you're gonna be 27.

You could still get everything wrong and still be super young. I know no 27 year old wants to hear that, but for some reason actually time seems to like get shorter. Like not as big a deal as you get older because three years is only 10% of my life up to this point. So like go ahead, commit something for three years. Like you'll knock it out of the park. That focus, to be that into something for that amount of time is the unlock to being able to achieve extraordinary results. It's the hack, it's the secret. So pick what you enjoy and create a process goal out of that for a thousand days and watch all kinds of things that happen for you. I hope this is valuable for you because it's had really fast results for me that are continuing to compound and, and produce fast results. And I can't imagine what's going to happen over the next thousand days. I'm not only excited to see the results, but I'm excited to do the process of the thousand days. And that is a completely different energy than being stressed about getting the results. So I invite you to test this in your own life. I'm ryan Moran from capitalism.com I help entrepreneurs build businesses and invest the profits. And I am really appreciative that you watch this video. Thank you. I'll see you next time.