Evan Carmichael and a guest help Amber and Tyler, both 29, catch up in life by breaking big goals into daily tasks. They share how to write a book while working full-time by setting a daily word count, then explain Michael Dell's idea: find your single highest-leverage activity and focus there.
Question's from Amber and Tyler and is about trying to catch up. So he feels rushed, 29 years old, married, but feeling behind on the goals, you know, trying to pay the bills as well as reach that new level of success, but is feeling like he's always playing catch-up and hasn't gotten where he wants to go yet and wants to kind of rush his way to success and manage his schedule to do that. So what advice would you have for them?
For me, it's all about visualizing the end goal, right? So I think it's really difficult to achieve your goal if you haven't defined it, you know? So define that goal. And at first it's gonna be like really big and broad, you know? So if your goal is to start a business and you have a loose concept for that business, that's a really big, broad, you know, and if that's all you have, I don't wanna say it's unattainable, but it's gonna be really difficult to attain that. Goal. So taking that big concept and then start chunking it out into smaller milestones, and then taking those milestones and then starting to chunk those out into actual tasks that are going to get you closer and closer to that goal. So I'm really passionate about fiction and I'm a writer, so I've never written a book, I've never written a piece of fiction, but just this past year I started writing my first book. But I work full-time as a project manager. I have a wife, I have a son. Really difficult for me to just like drop things and work on this book. But I had my end goal in mind and I chunked it out into the chapters. And then from the chapters, I chunked it out into smaller outlines. And then I blocked out time on my schedule each day to hit a word count. So I had a tangible goal. I wanna write, you know, 1,000 words a day or 750 words a day. And then I really woke up in the morning with that drive. I looked at my goal, which I have on a Post-it note, which is sitting right by my bed, you know, and I woke up with that passion and that drive and I reminded myself how much I wanted it. And then I sat down and I just started doing it. You know, I started writing words and maybe they're not that great and I'll edit them later, but just the fact that like, you you just have to start doing. You know, you can talk, talk, talk, but at the end of the day, just visualize your goal, chunk it out into, you know, actual tasks, set metrics to show that you're making progress, and then just—
That's cool. I'm looking forward to seeing the book too, man. That's exciting.
I'm excited. It'll be fun.
One of my favorite bits of advice is from Michael Dell, who talked about understanding your point of leverage. One of the things that I constantly try to think about for myself is what's the best use of my time to drive the needle as far as I can forward? So, you know, you have a task list of 100 things, plus you're behind, you know, you feel in your life, and you're catching up on your bills, and you want to spend time with your, your wife. Uh, there's a lot of things on your plate, so you only have a certain amount of time to be able to focus on this new thing. What activity are you great at that you can really spend energy on that's really going to move it forward. So yes, you have your goals, you have your vision, you have your plan, and then look at that task list and which one that if you attack today, that's going to help really move your project forward because it's leveraging what you're passionate about, what you've got, you know, you have great skills at. I feel like if people understood their point of leverage a lot better, then you'd be able to make faster growth and catch up and get to where you want to go a lot sooner.
