S3 E4: Gary MacDermid - Set Your Goals, or Someone Else Will

Have you ever had a New Year's resolution? What if I were to tell you that 25% of people that start the new year off with the resolution give up within the first week? 60% by six months have abandoned their resolutions. 95% of people that successfully lose weight on a new diet found fail to keep it off. 86% of patients that have a heart attack fail to make any lasting changes to their diet or exercise. Why am I telling this to you? Because I don't want any of you to be a statistic. I want to talk to you today and share a story about how I learned to systematically set goals and achieve them, to turn resolutions and dreams into a reality. And as I share this story with you, please each of you think about your goals. Where do you want to be in 1 year? 3 years? 5 years? Who sets your goals? Who controls them? When I think of how I started setting goals, I'm reminded of my time as a small boy growing up where I get asked the age old question, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I remember four or five in kindergarten if I were to ask that question and answer it. I wanted to be a superhero like Mighty Mouse. By elementary school, a movie star. Junior high, a professional athlete like Michael Jordan. At high school came around. I wanted to be an electrical engineer like my grandfather. Junior year, I remember getting my first job to help the family earn some extra money. Rockville, Maryland. I started work in a diner, a small diner, as a dish boy. Here, the manager of that diner set lots of goals for me. And as I worked nights and weekends after high school, I somehow progressed through the ranks of a dish boy, to the fry guy, to the pizza cook, to the assistant cook, to the head cook, and finally the assistant manager. Just as I entered my senior year, I. I was at the peak of my career. And if you were to ask me then, what do I want to be when I grow up, I would have told you that I wanted to be a college student, go to the University of Maryland. Because that's what many of my friends and classmates wanted to do. But little did I know that halfway through my senior year, life as I knew it was about to change forever. See January. In that senior year, my father woke me up one day and he told me and he shared with me, son, I have some bad news. There's just no money for college. But I have a plan. And so with that, we all piled into the car and he took me to the recruiting station right there. Silver Spring, Maryland. The border of northwest D.C. and he opened the door for me and he said, army, Navy, Marines, or Air Force, Take your pick. And I recommend Navy, because you can see the world. And so here I was unprepared at that point. If you were to ask me, I wouldn't have been able to tell you how to answer that question, because this was not anything that I ever thought I would ever do. So as I transitioned through this, I went to the Navy, I went through boot camp. I was an electronics technician, somehow got my ROTC scholarship, became an electrical engineer, and then here I was now commissioned as an officer on ships. I spent several years in the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Arabian Gulf. And through this time, I wondered, is this really what I wanted to be when I grew up? I used to think back and wonder, am I setting these goals? I felt like this whole time I'd been following the goals, from the managers to the commanders to those in charge of me. And I started to think and reflect on my time. And I knew that I had one year left to decide what I wanted to do. So I started working to find another job because I knew this wasn't it. And what I realized that there's a market for people like me. They're called headhunters. So now I didn't really have to think too hard. They would do all the work for me. My resume got written somehow, and I was doing interview after interview all around the country. I could have been a project manager for a pump manufacturing company on the south side of la. I could have done agriculture in Salt Lake City. But I didn't want to have this big unknown and take this risk like I did when I joined the Navy. So I thought something very easy. I just decided to be an engineer by degree, and I would do design for nuclear power plants. With that, I started my career as a consultant, traveling the country doing design. And there was a whole set of goals set for me as a consultant, because they really want to maximize value. They want to make sure that your time is being charged appropriately. And so I started traveling, and because of my background actually operating in nuclear power plants, I actually ended up getting all the hard assignments. So much so that at one point, I remember I had to do four conceptual designs in five days at four different nuclear power plants. I started to have that same feeling when I was in the Navy, being away from friends and family. I had thought I had left that, put that behind. And here I was reliving that dream. And I started to have this sense of alignment misalignment if you will, where all the goals that were set for me were taking me away from what made me feel that I wanted to do. And so in that time, now, I had spent plenty of time on active duty in the military. I stayed in the reserves, and now here I am as a consultant, wondering, can I really keep achieving all of these goals? And as I got promoted, I became a manager, and now I had to set other people's goals. But at the same time, the travel and the misalignment started to be too much. And so this whole time that I've been collecting data on different lifestyles, different fields, different careers, I decided that I would make it a point to start my own company so that I could have more time with friends and family. I sought a mentor, I sought counsel of somebody that had done exactly what I wanted to do, an expert in the field, somebody that had his own private equity company for 30 prior years doing exactly that. And I knew if I had stayed 20 years in the active duty Navy, that I would have had a certain salary, which I would call retirement. So that was now a target that I set that I had to build to. And as the momentum me learning the knowledge from my mentor, I started to understand what I needed to do. But as people started to find out what I was doing, I could not get momentum because everybody questioned it. What are you doing? You want to do what? Are you crazy? You can't do that. And I would just feel shut down. I was trapped. But I kept trying. I knew that the method worked because there were so many other people that had successfully done this. And so I kept it on, and I made progress that first year and that second year. But by the third year, I was starting to wonder, am I ever going to make this work? And so I was lucky that at a networking event, I overheard some people talking about life on a submarine. And so I knew in that moment that I would have something in common. Now, I wasn't on a submarine, but I was in the Navy. So I broke out of my shell and I walked over to the group, and the guy that was on a submarine, his name was Chris. You see, Chris was, in fact, in the Navy. He was in the nuclear power field. And furthermore, he was an engineer that had successfully retired and started his own company and was financially free. Now, this was somebody I could look up to. So I was excited, and we started to talk and get to know each other more. We had a lot in common. He was in a different field from what I wanted to do. But just the track record and where he was in life at that time is what I wanted to aspire to become. So, and this was the magic. This is what took me from where I wanted to be to where I needed to be and to actually hit it. Because now I found I had an accountability partner. And so we would talk weekly. He had goals, and I would make sure that he was on track, and I have goals, and he would make sure that I was on track. Those calls would start with, Gary, have you made your calls? Have you done your offers last week? And so the momentum really started to build halfway through this year. I remember being able to tell my boss at that time that I am going to end up retiring at the end of this year. And so I kept the momentum going. And so for the first time in my life, I felt that I am in charge of my goals. I can set my own goals. It's not just about what the commanders or the vice presidents set for you. It was what I could set for myself as an individual. And this was the most important feeling and the most important action that I was able to overcome. At the end of the year, I retired. And it was Chris who had also, in that moment in time, increased his sales more than he ever has in any year, and was now the top five, the number five leading manufactured home dealer in the entire state, just behind Cavco and the Warren Buffett owned Clayton Homes. We had achieved our goals. So I want to share with you this formula that I learned through the culmination of my time in the Navy as a corporate engineer and starting my own private equity company. What I learned was that five steps is really what it takes to set your goals and turn them from resolution to dream into a sustained reality. And that is to first visualize what it is you want. And when you want to have it, one year, three year, five year, then you seek counsel. This is not about asking your friends or family. This is about finding an expert that's already doing what you want to do at a high level. If you want to be an author, you're not going to ask your friend that's never written a book. They may be supportive, they may not. Then you're going to want to work backwards and set targets. So when you have your goal, if you want to, say, read 10 books a year, you need to work backwards. And maybe you need to read five pages a day. Make the targets practical so that even on your worst day, you can still hit them. Because it's very important that if you want to achieve success, you minimize the setbacks. You will have them just like I did, but minimize them and set your targets, then commit to your goals. That last year when I had the accountability partner, I realized that I needed to commit to my goals. And that's not just about, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. It's visualize it and actually write it down. Every morning I woke up and I would write down, I will retire on December 31st. And every night before I went to bed, I would retire on December 31st. And that is what will enable you to commit to your goals and feel them and actually step by step, hit those targets. The final, which I called the magic, is the accountability partner. You need somebody that you respect, that has a track record, that has ideally done what you've done before and will hold you accountable. Check in with you when you're feeling down, when you're feeling like you want to give up, they will push you, and that's what it takes. So if you remember anything, the five things is visualize your goals, seek counsel, work backwards, set targets, commit, write them down, tell everybody, tell the world, then find that accountability partner. And even if you think your goals may not be achievable, they may be a little bit of a stretch. Just look at me. I'm an engineer, I'm an introvert. I've never been on a stage. And here I am in front of you because I set a goal to do this, to get out, to be a speaker, to tell this story. And I implore each and every one of you to take these five steps and continue to make lasting changes in your life. And please set your goals. Because if you don't set your goals, someone else will. Sam.