Micro Class - How to Set Goals That Will Actually Make You Happy!

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian with another optimal living 101. This one's on how to set goals that will actually make you happy. It's an important thing when you're setting goals. You want to make sure that you're setting the right goals and that actually make you happy. So we're going to go through my top 10 tips in around 10 minutes. There's so much to cover here. This is actually I'm preparing for a class on how to set goals that will actually make you happy. After my Optimal Living 101 reboot class, this was the most requested subject that you wanted me to go into more detail on. So that starts later this month. Excited about it? I'll have a link below so you can check that out. But here's a quick look at 10 of my favorite tips to consider as you create goals for 2013. We're going to have five tips on the theory and then five tips on the practice. Number one rule, setting goals for 2013. Let's remember the ultimate currency. Let's remember why we're setting goals in the first place. It's really, really simple. We want to be happy. This is the ultimate currency. Talban Shahar talks about the classic Greek philosophers talk about ultimately why we do anything is because we want to feel good, we want to be happy, we want to flourish, we want a deeper sense of well being. Call it whatever you want, but that's why we do anything that we do now when we know that is the ultimate outcome we're after. We need to make sure we're setting the right goals. Because not all goals are, are created equally. They're not all equally awesome. Here's what you don't want to do, what not to do. You do not want to focus on extrinsic goals. Seeing how much fame you can get next year, seeing how much wealth you can accumulate for the sake of it, seeing how much hotness you can have. These are extrinsic goals. Extrinsic motivating goals. Now, unfortunately, our society is completely wired to go for these. But psychologists tell us that you will be less psychologically stable if these are the goals you're going for. You want to switch from the extrinsic goals to intrinsic goals. This is the stuff that actually makes you happy. And if you want to be happy, you might as well do the things that get you there, right? So intrinsic goals are deeper relationships growing as a human being and making a contribution to your family. So as we set our goals, we want to make sure that we're doing what's actually going to lead to happiness, relationships, growth, contribution, etc. So what not to do, do not set predominantly extrinsic goals. Nothing's wrong with money and achieving a certain level of recognition, et cetera. We want to orient toward these intrinsic motivators. That's number two. Number three, we want to remember the highest goal. This is something we talk about a lot in my work. The highest goal goal is to show up moment to moment to moment from your highest self. That's ultimately what it's all about. Can we more consistently show up moment to moment to moment? What we want to do is set up goals that help us do that. We're going to talk about that when we get over to some of the practical stuff. So remember that our highest goal for 2013 is to see if we can more consistently plug into the highest version of ourselves, which is the quickest recipe to feeling great. Number four, we need to remember a lot of people have ambivalence about goals. So I want to tell you about really briefly and we're going to unpack all this in the class in a lot more detail. And I'll probably do videos on these as well, but we can talk about this for an entire weekend. But the happy archetype Tall Ben Shahar tells us you have ways you can orient to the future and to the present. Now, if you have a negative or positive orientation to the present, or a negative or positive orientation to the future, you will fall into one of these four quadrants. If you are all about the future, you get a positive in the future, but you're not about the present. You will be a rat racer, constantly chasing after the ultimate outcome you want to get, never enjoying the moment. Right? Negative present, positive future. Now you could have a positive present in a negative future. You're all about the moment. You are now a hedonist. In my book, I have a chapter that I playfully called the Tolle Trap, which all you care about is this moment, the power of now. But even Tolle talks about how important it is that you balance both. You need to have goals that inspire you and you need to be in the present moment. When you do that, Tall Ben Shahar says you are happy. Positive relationship to the future, positive relationship to the present. You have goals that inspire you and you're enjoying the process. Now, if you don't like either your future or your present, you're a nihilist you're flipping people off and life off. Life isn't good. So we want to move from wherever we are that may not be working into the happy archetype. And we do that by having goals that really inspire us and we enjoy the moment. But that's really important because a lot of people are ambivalent. I know I have been. And you bounce between these two and this one. But we want to land in the happy quadrant. Now, dynamic tension we can talk about for another whole weekend. But the basic idea here is that we want to have tension, a rubber band that's being kind of pulled between our ideal and our current reality. We want to be in a stretch zone out of our comfort zone, but not so far that we're snapping. Scientists say we want difficult but possible goals. Then we have true confidence. We know we can do it, and we know it's going to be a challenge. We're going to unpack that a lot more going forward. But that's kind of a theoretical framework. Set goals that actually make you happy. Focus on the intrinsic. Remember the highest goal, remember the happy archetype. And then dynamic tension. Stretch, not snap. We're already at six minutes going quickly here, so let's see if we can get done in these 10. So practice. If we want to set goals that really make us happy, we've got to start with what scientists tell us is, is the key to happiness. You've got to put your virtues into action. You've got to take those signature strengths I talk about all the time, the key things that really help you shine. Your signature strengths. The scientists call them virtues in action. We want to write a calling description for our life where we see how we can put our virtues into action day in and day out again. We'll talk about this in more depth, but if you haven't taken the signature strengths test yet, do that authentichappiness.com via character strengths test. It's awesome. Now, number seven, you want to put some fun in your fundamentals. I'm all about the fundamentals. The meditation, the exercise, the relationships, the gratitude, the practices that we do that help us stay plugged in. But let's make it fun. As we look at 2013, what can we do to make our exercise goals fun? One of my goals last year was to row a million meters. I hit that, I don't know, a week or two ago. I'm going to do it again next year. I'm going to have fun. I'm going to meditate for 10,000 minutes. It's about 27 minutes a day. That's a fun goal. I'm going to see if I can go every single day meditating and can I log 10,000 minutes? It sounds like a lot, but when you're consistent and you show up day in and day out, which is what the fundamentals are all about, you can hit these goals rather easily. And your entire life will transform as you develop that level of self discipline and self mastery. But what fun goals can you set for yourself? Exercise. Maybe it's 10,000 pushups. Maybe you're into yoga. You could do a thousand sun salutations. That's three a day. Relationships wise, what can you do? I'm going to walk with my little guy, Emerson, our little baby, 350 times at least. Next year. He's going to be on my chest in the little sling. We're going to go for a walk 350 times next year. That's a fun goal for me. Gratitude. Can you do a gratitude journal every day and keep track of over 1500 things over the course of the year that you're grateful for? You do these things, you're going to have a really hard time having anything but a pretty awesome year. So have some fun. Put some fun into your fundamentals and rock that. Then we got roles and goals. Stephen Covey tells us we need to identify our primary roles in our life and then set goals for them. Tony Robbins calls them categories for improvement. Ken Wilber describes it similarly as lines of development. So what are your roles and how do you set inspiring goals? My roles include philosopher, teaching, right. And doing this kind of thing. CEO running in theos, dad, husband, energized human being. And I've got some more. But those are my primary roles. What are my goals? And I'm going to tell you about more of this in the future. But I've got goals for each of these different roles for we need to have roles and goals. If we want to set goals effectively, then we want to focus on creative production goals. We want to focus on giving. How can we serve in 2013? Getting needs to be a byproduct of giving. Don't just focus on getting. That's a great way to stress yourself out. Make that a byproduct of giving as much of yourself as you can next year. How can you serve? Set up some really fun creative production goals on that. And again, you're going to have a great year. And then Best Selves Diary. This is another scientifically great thing to do. Think about your life five years out. All is rocking. You've worked hard. You've done a great job. That's your best Selves diary. Great way to build your optimism muscle. Then we want to create vertical coherence between that ideal and your current reality and set up these goals so you're in integrity now. Again, I'm going to go off on these. If you want to join us for a three day immersion into how to set goals that will actually make you happy, check out the link below. Hope you enjoyed this quick look at some of my favorite ways to go out and rock it. We're at 10 minutes. Have an awesome day. See ya.

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