A short interview excerpt where Hal Elrod explains how to pursue multiple ambitious goals by reframing a single most-important objective as a "mission." Hal recounts his transformational 2005 year: replacing the word "goal" with "mission," setting a single enabling mission that guided many concurrent objectives (doubling his best sales year, writing and publishing his first book, launching a speaking career and coaching business, leading a high-performing sales team, gaining ~17 pounds of muscle and reaching ~5.7% body fat, and meeting his future wife). He emphasizes that missions shape who you become and thus enable achievement of other goals, and contrasts ephemeral "goals" with the weight and commitment implied by a "mission."
Hard chargers like me. And you always have multiple goals.
Sure.
And it seems like the extraordinary effort part requires singular focus, but it's not like you've only had one goal over the last 20 years.
Yeah.
So explain to me how you can do multiple goals with the necessary effort that it requires.
Absolutely. And this is. So in 2004, five. That was the transformational year for me, like a quantum leap where I went from achieving pretty great or pretty good results to, like, beyond what I ever imagined possible. And Cutco at the. Yes. And part. I was part of it, so. Well, actually, it answers your question. You're gonna see that I achieved, like, 10 goals, that each one of them would have been, like, a singular.
Okay.
That would have been the best of my attention. Yeah. And so here's what happened. So. So I had hit hall of fame with Cutco, and I went to a conference in February, and I was like, I'm done. I'm not even taking notes of this thing, dude. I just. I'm like, I'm just collecting my awards, and I never have to sell another knife again, Right? Nothing wrong with selling knives. But I was like, I'm done, you know? And so I was. I was moving on to the next phase of my life. And the. I saw two people in our region, right? They were the top two of the top reps in the country, and they got the coveted Rolex for the highest level of sales in our company. And I could care less about a Rolex. In fact, I sold mine. I didn't want to. I don't care, but I had this pain. And if anybody's listening, right, like, if you really get present, I think that all of us at some level, can get in touch with some degree of this pain. And it was the pain of unfulfilled potential. And I realized. I watched them get. Walk and get their award. And I went, I never did that. I'm about to leave this company having never really given it my all. Like, I had broken records, but I was a very incons. I would break a company record for, like, the biggest month ever. And. And then I'd be like, cool, I can just take the next month off, right? I would just. Then I would just take a vacation until I ran out of money, and I'm like, oh, gotta go break another record, right? So I worked in these sprints, and I went, I never fulfilled my potential as someone who could consistently show up for 365 days, right? And I thought, I can't leave. I gotta give it one more year. Which was a radical emotional shift from like, dude, I'm done. And so I pulled out my computer and I wrote my goal for 2005. And then I ended up deleting the word goal. And I wrote my mission. Because you think about language is really important. And the goals are something that we set. And we often set them. It's fun to set them. It's a cute exercise. They change. We don't hit them, we don't look at them. And each year it's like, it's more of a fun exercise to do it, whereas we're not really committed to actually doing whatever it takes to hit them. And so I thought mission holds different weight. Like, military organizations carry out life or death missions. They don't hope, they don't die. Like, it's all or nothing, right? Humanitarian organizations carry out missions to save people. And I thought, this is going to be my mission. And in the new book, the Miracle Equation, that's what I have people focus on, is you've got to get clear on your mission. And in simple terms, it's just, what is the single most important goal of all of your goals? What's the one? And the way that I look at how you figure out the importance is which goal would enable you to develop the qualities and characteristics that you do not right now possess, or at least at the level that they could be, that would allow you to achieve any goal you ever set. And that's the real purpose of a goal. Right. Jim Rowan, I think, taught that decades ago that it's not about hitting the goal. Most of us think in this black and white paradigm that's it hurts us more than it helps us. Where it's like, if I hit the goal, why succeed? And if I don't hit the goal, then I have failed. But it's like, no, no, no, no. Who you become during that process of putting forth extraordinary effort to achieve a goal far outweighs the value of whether or not you hit any individual goal. And so the point of the mission, though, is this. And this is really to directly answer your question about, well, we've got more than one goal, is that that year I set all my goals for the year. And there were some pretty radical goals. The first goal was to not was to go out and double my best year ever in sales, which if you're in business, right, to increase your revenue by 100% is pretty intimidating, right? 10% is like, okay, I can get a little better, right? 30%, 50%, you're like, Ah, but 100% was terrifying. And so what I did a hundred percent on.
You were already smashing records.
Exactly. I mean, I was so, so the, my previous two best years out of 50,000 sales reps in the company to give you, you know, kind of perspective, I was number six one year and number five the next year. Right. So. So I was trying to. Yeah. Not just double, like, I suck and I don't work, so I'm gonna stop being lazy. It's like I'm performing at a record breaking level and I have to double that to, to, to fulfill my potential. And so I decided that if I did that, I could do anything. But that year I thought, I also have other goals that are really important because remember, in my mind, I was done with Cutco. So my goals before I went to that conference were I'm going to write my first book this year, which that's a big undertaking. I thought I want to launch my speaking career. That was my dream, is to be a professional keynote speaker and I want to launch a coaching business to kind of support myself. I also.
That was after you decided you were gonna leave Cutco.
Yeah. So these were the goal.
Now that's not happening. And so all that has to get rearranged somehow.
So now. Yeah, so now I'm going, okay, do I put all those goals off till next year? And then as I, I don't know, you know what, I just was inspired and I go, dude, what if I did all of it? What if I doubled my best year in sales ever while I wrote my first book and published it? And I, and I launched my speaking career and I launched a coaching business and I, I wanted to get in the best shape of my life and put on 20 pounds of muscle. And that year I put on 70 pounds of muscle at 5.7% body fat. I don't even know if that's healthy, by the way. I don't think that's healthy.
17.
17 pounds of muscle and at 5.7% body fat that year. And like I said, I don't know if that's healthy to be at 5.7% body fat. But. And then I also, that year my goal was like, I literally was like, I took the ceiling off. I go, I want to meet my wife. I'm tired of dating. I'm ready to like settle down. I thought, I really, I just got into rock climbing. I thought, I want to rock climb three days a week. So at the end, and I think there's more. Oh. And I thought, this isn't meaningful to Me, unless I lead a group of my colleagues to exceed anything they've ever done in the same way that I'm trying to do for me. And that year more I led a team of 20 sales reps and more reps achieve surpassed the highest level in Cutco that were on that team than in the 50 year history of the company. I wrote and published my first book. I gave my first two paid speaking engagements. I. And I'm gonna explain how this all fits into the mission, right? And I launched my coach. I had five paying coaching clients. Before the year was over, while I was still selling, I doubled my best year in sales ever. I did it the final week. I mean, I was, it was to the, to the wire.
You basically said, I'm gonna have the best year ever.
And then you did, and then I did. And then, and here's, and here's, here's where it's counterintuitive. The idea of mission scares people because they go, well, I can't just commit to one goal. I've got all these important goals, like you said. And so for me, here's what having a mission does. All it is, is you set five goals, six goals, eight goals, three goals, whatever, and you go, which of these is the most important and would be the most beneficial for my future, my present and my future? And then here's what it does. All it does, Ryan, is it organizes your time. When I woke up in the morning, the rule is I wasn't allowed to go to the gym or open my computer to write or get on the phone to make calls to get a coaching cl. I wasn't allowed to do any of that until I engaged in the activities that I had predetermined would make my mission inevitable. And so that's it. And every day we wake up and we usually human nature is to pursue the path of least resistance, right? So it's like I'll just check email. We look at our goals and go, which of these is the least scary, has the least potential cause of failure, on and on, and we just do the easiest thing and it becomes habitual and the year ends and you go, what happened? But when you commit to a mission, at the very least that's going to happen by the end of the year.
