The “1-Page Method” to Organize Your Past and Future

How's it going? Happy 2024. Dr. Benjamin Hardy here coming at you from the ocean in Cancun. And in this video I'm going to share with you a really powerful way for organizing and framing your past in your future in the form of what I call a one sheet method. One sheet method is really powerful because it forces you to have constraints. It forces you to focus on less, but better. It forces you to focus on the 20% rather than the 80%. So a one page document to organize your past and a one page document to organize your future is extremely powerful. And I'm going to go ahead and share with you in this video how you can use this on an annual basis, on a monthly basis, specifically because I'm filming this video in early January. I'm going to share with you my one sheet for 2023 now that we're now in 2024. So I'm going to share with you the one sheet of how, how you can organize your 2023 in a very powerful, organized manner. Before I show you the one sheets and explain some of the principles, I want to explain the concept of past, present and future selves. And that's the idea that most people, when they're thinking about the past, they think that the past is behind them. It's gone. When the truth is is that it's not the past that determines the present, it's always the present that determines the meaning of the past. And it's in the present that you frame and shape the meaning of the past. And you really want to get better and better at framing it in a powerful way, but also framing it in a crisp, concise way. That's why the one sheet is so powerful. So again in this video I'm going to share with you my one sheet organization, a single one sheet organization for 2023. Because now here I am, it's me in the present that shapes the meaning and frames the usefulness of 2023. But then also it's not the present that determines the future. It's actually your future self that determines who you will be in the present. You want a massive future self. As Dan Sullivan and I talk about, in 10x is easier than 2x, you want a 10x future self to shape who you are in the present. I love the quote. The bigger the vision, the better the decisions. Also, the only way to make your present better is by making your future bigger. When you have a much bigger, more powerful, more specific future that requires you in the present to make a lot more Thoughtful and discerning decisions when your goal is seemingly impossible, massive, very few pathways will get you there, whereas many pathways will get you to a small goal. Most of what you're doing right now is in the 80% of things that will get you to a small goal. So let me go ahead and share my screen, and I'm going to just walk you through a very simple organization that you can use to frame out your past and your future in a crisp, concise way. And it makes it so powerful. So as I start, here is my one page for 2023. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in, but here's the basic organization. I have my three core goals that I set at the beginning of 2023. So these were the goals that I was going for. Here is my report of 2023 on December 28th. So this was at the end of the year, this was my report. And by the way, this was my second draft. And so I refined it. And this is a really key principle is, is that your past and your future are drafts. They're drafts under constant revision. And from a writing perspective, it's always the second draft that's much more powerful than the first. And so the first draft is just getting it out there. The second draft is refining it. So you've got your four goals. And I love the quote from Jim Collins, if you have more than three priorities, you have zero. So these were my three goals at the beginning of the year. This was my report. And then this is my, actually my third draft of my 2024 goals. So my three core goals were to take off 100 days of work, 150 free days, and focus on my family. I also wanted to sell a million books collectively between all of my books. And. And I. And I had some of the strategy on why I was like, what I was going to do with those books and where I was going to lead people to, like, grow the business. And then one of my goals was to reach a million YouTube subscribers. And so when I'm thinking about my report, I have a few key bullets. I could write about a thousand things that happened, but I really want to isolate what are the most important things that mattered. You are the one who frames the meaning of your past. You're the one who also determines what are the points of emphasis. It's like a movie or a story you want to focus on what are the key things that you really want to emphasize. So here's some of the massive things I emphasized was 2023 for me, was about raising the floor and simplifying. Raising the floor has a lot to do with letting go of the 80%. By the way, your floor as a person is your filter. It's what you say yes and no to. And when you really start to study, the people who are the most successful, they have really, really, really high filters for everything they do. You want to have such high filters that you say no to almost everything. So one of the things that ultimately happened in 2023, as I got more and more connected to my future self, and as I had a much bigger vision, and back to what I said before, when you have a really big vision, it forces you to find pathways that are a lot more effective and a lot more intrinsically motivating. And so ultimately, what that led me to was the idea of letting go and quitting my YouTube channel as a strategy. Obviously, I'm posting this YouTube video here, so I'm still making YouTube videos. But as this goal stated, this was one of my major objectives and major focuses. And as I got more and more connected to my future self, and as I got more and more connected to the 20% focus that I really wanted to master. So how I look at it is there are three levels. You've got your identity, you've got. Then you've got your character, and then you've got your master. Your identity is really about your vision and your ceiling. It's really where you want to make massive commitments. Then your character is really built around your floor, and you really want to have a high floor. And that high floor represents what you say no to. Then you've got mastery, which represents the 20% of things that you really want to go deep on and develop extreme mastery on. Well, just sharing with you, and hopefully as I share this with you, you can think through for yourself where you may be pursuing things in the 80% that aren't really going to get you there. They're not what you really want to master. So for me, YouTube was a means to an end. I thought that growing a massive YouTube channel would be effective at ultimately helping me with this much higher and more important goal for me, for my future self, for the person I want to be. This is a really important point, that my future self is different from your future self. Therefore, my strategy, my approach, my 20% areas of focus and depth and mastery are going to be different. But a really important point that I learned throughout 2023 that I didn't know before is, is that when you're thinking about your future self, the Path, meaning like the pathway that gets you there, the 20% that you master. The means in the end, really want to be very similar. So for me, writing books is not only an end, but it's also a means. It's where I really want to develop mastery. It's where I get really excited about being in the process. And a lot of people, they discuss the idea of process or goal. From my view, the process and the goal should be very synergistic. They should both really be intrinsically motivating in and of themselves. The goal and the process should go hand in hand. For me, writing books is not only a goal and getting better and better at them and selling more, but being in the process is just as important, really developing mastery in the craft. There was a really good book that I read recently, and it's called Winning. I actually read the book a few years ago and referenced it in the book the Gap in the Gain but Winning by Tim Grover. In that book, he talks about people who ultimately are really star athletes. Like they're college athletes and ultimately they end up going pro. But what he talks about is that usually when someone is really, really good and they get to some next level, maybe a young athlete goes pro and gets a huge contract, sometimes their focus shifts to the wrong things. Rather than doubling down or tripling or 10xing down on their craft and becoming so good they can't be ignored. They focus on the wrong things, they focus on the externals. They focus on things like branding, like for example, shoe deals or things like that. And they end up spending all their time on their brand. But then they are not getting great and excellent and ultimately elevating to the next level of their craft. Getting so good, they can't be ignored. And ultimately, by focusing on their brand, they end up screwing themselves because they're not getting better at what they do. The most antifragile thing you can do is become so good you can't be ignored. I love the concept from Nassim Taleb. He said rather than creating work that you have to promote yourself, it's better to create work that's so good that other people promote it for you. So ultimately, the YouTube concept was about growing the brand, growing the audience. And I decided to let that go and focus instead far more exclusively on the craft of writing 10 times better books, knowing that if I write much better books, ultimately my brand will take care of itself. I don't need to focus on the brand. I can just focus on doing my best work. Yes, that doesn't mean that I'm not doing some marketing, I'm going to move forward. But the idea is this, with this section was just letting go of more and more of the 80%. Even my $20,000 coaching program, which I had for four years, I let that go. I transitioned that off to my mentor. I made some massive progress with my family, a lot of really amazing trips. We're in process of adopting a 15 year old girl from Guatemala. And one of the big shifts for me in 2023 was, was of course I'm a family man. I've got six kids now, going on seven since we're adopting Rosemary. But the big shift for me right now is, is that my family is becoming not only more and more of a focus and a priority now that we have basically four teenagers and from my view, a very short window, call it three to five years where they're in our house. But not only is it becoming a more timely priority, it's also becoming more of an intrinsic desire and an excitement where I really want to just become an amazing husband and father and, and really focus on that. And part of the 80% in terms of things letting go with my kids, I'm learning to let go of attachment. Learning to let go of overly focusing on attachment to who they are, who they become. Certainly I want to guide them, I want to love them, I want to support them. But there's a great book by David Hawkins called Power Versus Force. And I think where I'm learning to let go is I'm learning to let go of the force where I'm trying to force them a certain direction. And I'm learning to operate from a much higher power of love, acceptance, peace and trust. And so ultimately when it came to my book goal, I ended up selling a little over 600,000 copies. In 2023, over 200,000 copies of Be youe Future Self now sold in Korea. It was one of the top books in Korea. It was actually the number one book in Korea in October that surprised me. We launched 10x is easier than 2x, sold 200,000 copies. And part of that process was raising my floor as a speaker. Raising the floor over and over and over again. One of my favorite books is called Go for no. And Going for no has a lot to do with setting a really high floor and creating no's. Think about it like this. Think about my young, you know, son, 16 year old son. And if he wants a girlfriend, but he's always getting yeses, that means he's not, he's Got a low floor, a low standard, like he should be asking do you want to go for? No, that's the idea. And so you want to set a really high bar and then start to learn how to master at that new level rather than just accepting. This was also a massive year financially for me. One of my favorite books is called Antifragile and so one of the things that I've been focusing on is creating a lot of anti fragile. So one of the things I'm really focusing on is building an antifragile situation which gives me a lot of peace of mind. It also gives me a lot of optionality when you have a massive setup where you've got a building growing body of assets and ultimately you've got freedom of time, money, relationship, purpose. Those are the things that we talk about and who not how. With Dan, you can be in a position of what Nassim Taleb calls option out. So with my pub actually just barely in the last 30 days paid back $233,000 of advances so that instead of getting a lower royalty fee, now I get zero money in advance, but I get a much bigger royalty which in the long run is a much better approach and a much more anti fragile approach for my future self. I'm just sharing this with you. Ultimately you can frame out yours. I'm not going to go too much in the details. I'm just showing you an example of transformation. One of the most important things for you to know is, is that your current self is not your past self. I'm not the same person I was in 2023. And a lot of what I've accomplished and achieved and learned right now, my past self even a year ago could not have even comprehended it. So here's just a quick organization. You've got your goals, you've got your report. I would consider doing a few drafts on that and refining it. I even have links for mine. And then ultimately I've got my draft of my 2024 goals and again focused on family, faith and books. Really simplifying for me. This is my 20%. These are the areas where I want to develop much higher degrees of mastery. These are the things that are related most to my future self. These are also the things where the path or the process and the outcome are both intrinsically motivated and deeply connected to each other. Yes, there are outcomes. It's good to have goals, it's good to have outcomes, it's good to seek results. But. But at the same time you want the goal and the process to be very synergistic and you want both to be deeply aligned. Now I'm going to go ahead and briefly show you my 2024 report and just give you a few principles there and I invite you to go this process yourself. So this is actually the third draft of my 2024 report. And as you can see, it follows a very similar structure. Here are my goals, my three goals, which were also at the bottom of my 2023 report. Here's my actual report, which is obviously written from the perspective of, of my future self. One of the things that I want to say is, is that this is focused, by the way, my report is focused on the 20% in terms of essential progress and experiences. So these are the areas that I view as my 20%, where I want to develop 10 times higher levels of mastery and depth and quality. And then here is a draft, and this is where it's a little different. Here's a draft of my Q1 goals. And one of my favorite ideas is the concept of the 12 week year. And so the main idea here is, is that every 12 weeks or every 90 days, and I live my life in 90 day cycles. I believe you can accomplish more in 90 days than most people do in a year or even than your past self did in a year. My Q1 goals represent far more powerful progress, growth and meaning than everything I accomplished in 2023 combined. One of the reasons for this is that a lot of my time spent in 2023 was focused on things that now became part of my 80% that I let go of. So I'm focused on higher quality and less quantity of things. I'm focused on things that I really want to develop depth and mastery on. And ultimately my report is just a reflection of what I would love to see happen in 2023 and really going big. I believe you can squeeze 10 years of juice out of every single year. Time is qualitative, not quantitative. It's not about the amount of years in your life, it's about the amount of life in your years. Every 90 days. You can, you can actually live, achieve, experience, squeeze more juice, transform more than you're, than you did the year before every single year. So for example, 2024, you can approach it like it's 10 years of growth, 10 years of experience, 10 years of transformation. A big aspect of doing that is obviously having extremely high goals, having a very high Florin filter, saying no to almost everything, and then ultimately really going in terms of focus, depth, quality on the few things those 20% of things that really matter and a big part of that, not operating from your past self, but loving, forgiving, reframing your past, operating from your future self and creating what psychologists would call psychological flexibility, where you become more and more comfortable with the unknown. You become more and more comfortable doing things from a position in a place that is above and beyond what you've done before. If you're pursuing goals in 2024 that you actually think you can accomplish, you're pursuing the wrong goals. The whole idea of realistic goals is trash. It's not a good filter. Your past and your future are tools. They're tools for operating effectively in the present. And there's a lot of research on this in constraints area. You want your goals to be so big that it forces you out of the 80% and forces you to find and filter for the few pathways with the highest upside, the few people, the few partnerships. You want a really, really high floor and filter and standard. And you want to go for goals that you probably can't achieve, because by committing to those and going for those, it's going to force you to start operating from your future and start operating very differently than you have in the present, where one of the key concepts in psychology is called the principle of consistency. Most people, they're operating very consistent with their past self. You want to have a massively different and empowering future self and you want to let the future self be the guide and the dictator of what you do in the present. And you want to make massive moves. And what it's going to invite you to do is it's going to invite you to be psychologically flexible. It's going to invite you to make some moves that and do some things you've never done before. Even on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis, you're going to be making some big moves and you're going to be letting go of things that you feel you can't let go of. That's the 80%. The 80% of things are the things you think you need but you don't want. So I invite you to use this one page method to frame, organize and crisp, make crisp. Your past, your future. You can even do this on a monthly basis. On a monthly basis, you can do a monthly report. I do this with myself, with my team, where I do, for example, at the end of January, I'll do a January report. At the end of February, I'll do a February report. Very powerful. And you can even go back, you can do a one page report for the last decade. The last three years. You can do a one page report, but one page reports are very powerful. That one page document for organizing your past and your future. Have an amazing day. I strongly invite you to do your one pager for 2023 now that we're out of it and do it from the perspective of 2024, the future self at the end of the year. Have an amazing day. Love you. Talk to you soon.