Chad Silverstein breaks down a goal-setting method: one yearly goal becomes four quarterly targets, then monthly benchmarks, then daily habits so small they're almost trivial. He uses losing 20 pounds as an example, where the daily win is just 20 pushups, avoiding the gap trap of chasing an ideal that keeps moving.
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So here's a real simple recipe for setting goals. Because most people don't set goals, they don't write them down. I don't know why, it doesn't make any sense. And all you have to do is just take 10 minutes to sit down and take a piece of paper and write out a goal that you have for the next year. Could be about anything. No matter what you have going on in your life right now. Personally, professionally, if you're in school, with your job, with your relationship, whatever it is, write down a goal that you have and make it very specific for one year out. And then all you're going to do is you're going to break it down into four quarters underneath that. And you want to set up a quarterly goal, something that's going to be really easy to do in 90 days. Something that you feel like you can measure and make sure that you can attain, right? Something, you know, a little bit more realistic than maybe that, that, that yearly goal. The yearly goal should be a big goal, should be something that you're really striving for. It shouldn't be something that you can attain right away. So it could be anything from a dollar amount that you want to pursue in regards to your income or a raise or sales, or it could be, you know, meeting someone that you love, whatever it is. And then you want to break that down into four different goals for each quarter. And within each quarter you're going to break down your goals, then one step down into monthly goals. And you want to just get a few of them. You don't want to have a ton, but your goal is to keep breaking these down and making them more manageable and smaller and easier so that you can actually start knocking off wins, so that you can have lots of wins in your life. Because ultimately what you want to do is have your yearly goal, break that down into four quarters, and then have monthly goals for each month of the year, and then break it down to a daily goal. And the daily goal should be so simple, so easy, almost to the point where it doesn't even make sense that you don't even feel like it's a goal because it's a no brainer, you're going to do it. So I'll give you an example just so that you understand what I'm talking about. If you want to have a goal of working out, losing weight, a lot of people do this at the beginning of the year. So say you want to lose 20 pounds, right? And you want to exercise, and so you want to Say, okay, I'm going to lose 20 pounds. That's going to be my big goal. You know, say I weigh 180 and I want to weigh 160 at the end of the year. And so each quarter I'm going to make sure that I have either certain benchmarks that I want to be able to measure that I've gotten, and each month I want to have certain goals that are going to be attainable, like going to the gym three times a week or doing whatever it is that you feel will make you healthy and help you lose weight. Maybe it's drinking eight glasses of water, maybe whatever it is, you write down your goals. That's not the point of this video. But then what you want to do is you want to break that down all the way into your daily habits. So it might be doing 20 pushups a day, something again, easy, something you know you can do that. It won't be a challenge and you don't want to have a ton of them because day after day if you're winning and you're hitting your goals and you're able to check them off, you start to build this momentum that gives you this energy and, and it's the hardest to do. It is right at the beginning when you first start. So that's again why you want to make it so simple for yourself. So again, make the tough goal, the unrealistic goal, more your yearly goal. And again, all you have to do is think about what happens at the end of the year. Everybody sets these New Year's resolutions and they say I want to lose 20 pounds. Why do you think all the gyms are empty on three weeks into January? Because they took this big goal and they made that their goal. And you can't do that. You got to make your daily goals so manageable, so easy, so simple. And then make the bigger goal going to be your long term goal. So break it down and compartmentalize it. Annual, quarterly, monthly, daily, and again. Make sure that they step up in regards to how hard they are. But your goal is to focus on the daily ones. Forget about your yearly goal. Put it down on paper, you can see it every day, read it once a day, but then focus on what you need to do today and just keep doing those. And day after day they will compound and you will see after a couple months you'll see yourself making progress towards the bigger goal. But if you're just going to set up a big goal and you're going to look at that after a few weeks and realize how far away you are, you get caught in what we call the gap trap. You can check out that video, the gap trap that I have on my channel. It's a concept that we learned in our strategic coach program with Dan Sullivan. And it's when you're measuring where you are to where you want to be, and you have to understand and realize that where you want to be is an ideal. It's not real. You're making it up. And so you can't measure where you are to something that's made up because as you get closer to it, you're going to keep throwing that rack out further. So you always want to measure backwards. And this is again, why the winning is so important. Because if you win little goals every single day, the ones that are so easy and manageable, you'll start to look back and say, like, wow, look how much progress I've made. So there's no secret to it. You just have to actually do it. But there is a strategy to it, and the strategy is to make it manageable, easy, almost dumb. I think in one of the cultures, I'm not sure which culture they call, called kaizen, I think, and it means it's like small, almost minuscule changes that you make that when you combine them all and you see what you've done over time, they're huge changes. But when you're doing the changes, you don't really feel that. That they're that monumental. And you can't start with a big goal and expect to just have that, you know, be something that you're going to measure yourself against in the first few weeks and feel good about it. You're going to feel terrible about it because you're not going to even be close to it. So compartmentalize your goals and break them down and try to make sense of them. If you have any questions, feel free to leave any comments in this video and I'll respond back to you.
