Set Your Compass—Systems vs. Goals {BEST OF}

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

I've had a strange relationship with goals over the years. When I was in college, the very first self help book I ever read was called how to Be, do or have Anything by Lawrence Bolt. The title sounds kind of cheesy, but he's actually a very wise author and it was one of the first texts that I read that drew heavily upon Buddhist principles as well. As a result of that book, I remember writing down Very detailed 5 year vision statements for every area of my life. Sure enough, within five years they had just about all come true. I don't know when I did that. That must have been, let's say, 2003 or 2004. Five years later I was entering coach training through CTI in 2008. And coach training as well is all about setting the vision and getting super clear on what each of us wants to create and then how do we help others facilitate that process. And this just completely lit my mind on fire. I mean, I fell so in love with coaching and the coaching process and in really helping all of us feel that we're reaching our true potential. Not in a linear ladder, climbing success, growth at all costs kind of a way, but bringing out the exquisite greatness within each of us and the unique work that we and only we can do. About a decade after that first vision, setting, exercise from how to be, do or have anything, I just became exhausted. So those of you who've been in my universe for a long time, some of you almost 15 years, 2013 I call my apocalypse year. Although now I think 2020 really gave it a run for its money. They might just be tied now to Apocalypse Years. I was just exhausted. I was dealing with so much personally, professionally. The year literally started with a breakup that I could not move past. I was restructuring my entire business, rebranding my website, who Am I? All this existential searching and no amount of gratitude, journaling, yoga, Pilates, green juice, none of it was turning this mood around. This apocalypse year, I just had to sit in it. But I was becoming so exhausted from trying to push the river, as the Zen saying goes of goals, setting goals, and they just weren't helping. This was not a time in my life that I needed any goals I like. I actually needed to just drop everything and stop doing everything and, oh, it was just. I don't know if anyone else can relate, but my 20s were a lot about kind of striving and achievement and working in ways that I don't think I knew at the time how destructive they were to my body. I just, it took me time to realize, oh, working in a certain way is going to lead to burnout over and over and over again. So in 2013, I heard a book recommendation from a friend that I, one click ordered, sight unseen. Again, if you've been here for a while, you've heard me talk about it many, many times. The book was Outrageous Openness by Tosha Silver. Oh, and this was just the solve I needed.

Was so soothing. It's all about surrender. It's about offering our lives over to the divine, not pushing so hard. It's about receiving, it's about not having all the answers. It's about dropping what she calls the grocery list for God form of manifesting and goal setting, and instead taking on a stance of divine surrender. And that doesn't mean that we lay down and do nothing, but it means that we become completely open and receptive to what is, grateful for what is, and then surprised by the serendipity of what follows. So in doing this, I finally found some relief of this pressure I had been feeling all year. And I started to go with the flow of whatever my life and business brought my way. Of course, still meeting it halfway with meaningful projects and following little threads of serendipity. But overall, this way of being brought me such a sense of ease and gratitude. Whatever arrived was perfect in a business sense. I had never been that inspired by numerical goals. I always set them, and yet they seemed arbitrary. Like I would set oh, how many people I want to bring in from a launch, or how much revenue I want to bring in from that launch or in the year. But nothing happened. You know, I've read in a business book recently, when you set goals like this, they're basically dreams. If we don't operationalize them, then that's all they are. They're just these little Post it notes we stick in the sky and maybe they're going to happen and maybe not. And after reading Outrageous Openness I had this also this sense that well what do I know? Isn't the number of people who join or the number of revenue in my business and my life like, isn't it perfect? Isn't it exactly what it's meant to be? It's not that I would drop altogether Project B schools. I love working on big, meaty, meaningful deep work. And I love thinking about how to scale myself and my business so I can work with more ease and joy in less time. So yes, I do have a lot of intentionality about what I'm creating and creating some space and ease and scale and of course growing my revenue while decreasing the amount of time to deliver for that. But just the straight up hardcore metrics which never that motivating for me. There's this Peter Drucker quote and I'm sure you've heard it a thousand times because I know I have. Can't manage what you don't measure. This makes its way into about every leadership and systems book despite the fact that I've heard it so many times over the years. I would set these revenue or even book sales goals and then the end of the year would come and I was nowhere near them. So I just started to feel like what was the point? And it wasn't until very recently that I had an aha moment about why these metrics and numerical goals have not been motivating. They were missing something.

We'll be right back just after this.

So I heard Scott Adams put it this way on Tim Ferriss podcast. This was an interview from several years ago. He says goal oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre success failure at best and permanent failure at worst. If things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

So good, right? I've never heard it put this clearly that goal oriented drivers, they can be motivating. And if you're someone who is super motivated by numerical goals. Oh my gosh, continue. Don't let me stop you. But for a lot of us it just has this sense of like foreboding near failure. Like there's this one moment in time where we may or may not hit it but the rest of the time we're failing, falling short. Essentially, we're focused on how far we have to go. Again, if that's motivating for you, go for it. Systems oriented people. And this is what I resonate with so much. It's less about the end goal and it's more about creating smarter systems and then feeling a sense of satisfaction every time they work. And I do find that if you focus on experimenting and building just the right systems and tweaking them and improving them, you can get to some really big, meaningful goals and you can make a lot happen. But your sights are set on a different part of the process. I'll link to the episode, the interview I did with author Josh Kaufman. He wrote a book called the Personal mba. He was one of my early interviews for this podcast and he said the same thing. He said that book has sold over a million copies, but he purposely did not try to go for the New York Times list, nor has it ever made any of those bestseller lists. Instead, Josh was so much more focused on creating a system that would sell a million copies of his books over time, rather than some burst that he may or may not hit during launch week due to arbitrary list managers. Let's say there's another great quote that I've been hearing a lot recently. Maybe you have too. It's a zinger from James Clear's book Atomic Habits. You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. He really explains things clearly. I also think it's a masterful example of how to organize a book. Well, I just write it clearly with lots of diagrams, nice chapter summaries. I'll say it again, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. He had a great conversation. Brene Brown had him on her Dare to Lead podcast and he said, focus on building a system, developing a process, rather than trying to achieve a goal or an outcome. The goal is not the hard part. It's building a system that executes on that, that carries you inevitably toward the goal. He said, almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed for your current results. Your life bends in the direction of your habits. I just love that he's saying, because he's confirming something I've felt for a long time. The goal is not the hard part. Every year I could set a book sales number of how many books I want to sell that year. That's not hard. It just takes me saying to you, I want to Sell a million copies of Free Time. Okay, that's great. But if I just leave it at that, nothing is going to change. Nothing is going to happen. Now, in the converse, as I did, even with Pivot, I would just say, yeah, this number would be nice. A certain number would be nice, but let this book reach anyone. It's meant to reach Tosha Silver. She had that intention for outrageous openness because she self published it, but it became this viral word of mouth sensation, and she just turns it over. She says, this is not my book. This is the divine. This is the, you know, God's book. It's not my book. It's. I am a vehicle, I'm a messenger to get this book out in the world, and may it reach everybody who can benefit. So for me, that's more of an intention and a direction and a feeling to cultivate, which is, may Free time make it into everybody's hands who can benefit from it. What do I care what number that is? I mean, the more important thing, right, it's like, what if a million people bought it, but then 990,000 just sat on a shelf or nobody used them, or nobody benefited from them? That's way less important than just the right 10,000 people, let's say, in year one, checking out the book. And by the way, that's the size of my first print run, 10,000. So I am prepared to give away.

Tons of books to get that momentum snowball started. But it's so much more interesting to me to imagine those 10,000 books living, breathing, making their way with perfect serendipity and synchronicity, into exactly whose hands who needs them most. I don't know. There's just something inspiring to me about that. To find the happy medium here, I have this idea. It would be amazing to sell a million copies of Free Time. For comparison, my two previous books, Life After College and Pivot, have Both sold about 35 to 40,000 copies. It's rare. I think only 5% of books sell more than even a thousand copies. Certainly 10,000 is another threshold. So they've already done very well. But of course, I mean, as an author, it's like, of course you want to see the work reach as many people. Like, I have this vision of freeing 50 million hours. You know, if the book or this podcast could reach a million people, well, then I feel really confident that we get free 50 million hours that year of just all the time people would save by putting some of the principles into practice. So if we find a happy medium here, we could say there's a goal, there's also an intention, may it reach whoever can benefit, and then we can create the system. This is where it gets more interesting and this is why I love systems and and why the focus of Free Time is operating principles to create these kinds of systems that free our time far into the future.

So even if you've long since dropped your New Year's resolutions, I encourage you to think about what systems you would be proud to create this year. I normally choose a word or theme for the year. In the past I've also done mind maps where I put the year in the center of a piece of paper and I just rewrite as many spokes as I want to different areas of my life and work and then I do tertiary spokes to what would be fun and engaging to focus on in every area. I'll put a link in the show. Notes One of the only viral videos I've had was CNBC did a feature on this practice. So I'll try to find that and put it in the show Notes this year I'm adopting a compass. So there are four themes that I want to improve my habits and systems for and I want to just drop something into each bucket every day. So that compass is healthy, wealthy, wise and grateful. The title takes its name from the proverb early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise that was first used in print by John Clark in a 1639 book of English and Latin proverbs. If you've been here for a while, you know that I call myself a grandma. I go to bed earlier than my grandma. Let's just be real. In my ideal world I am heading upstairs into bed around 8:30 and definitely would love to be asleep by 9 given that I have a husband and a dog. Just doesn't always happen like that. But I love this proverb. Early to bed and early to rise makes a person. Gosh, I should have just done that the first time. Make it more gender neutral. Makes a person healthy, wealthy and wise. For me, this compass is less about goals, it's about did I exercise for at least 45 minutes today and I'm giving myself permission. It can be yoga, bike combo doesn't always have to be vigorous exercise, but did I move my body? Did I do something to improve my long term wealth creation or savings? Whether it's canceling certain subscriptions, hiring a new bookkeeping service, reading, learning, educating myself in the area of finance, just more and more deeply, did I? This is for the wise bucket? Did I meditate, journal, read or act in service of my highest self self? And then the Gratitude bucket. We just we all know so much of the research points to gratitude being hugely transformative and beneficial for our happiness, I find. Oh, with all the chaos of the media and politics in the last two years, it's just so easy to get swept away by fear and lack. So for me, this gratitude bucket is about expressing gratitude every day to friends and family, Michael Ryder, all of you who are here listening and also just feeling gratitude in my body instead of focusing on what's wrong or what I'm missing. So if I notice myself focusing on what I don't have, what I don't want, feeling down to really try to come back and see what's in front of me, the abundance that is already here. With all of that said, my brother, he runs a real estate business. He is going to all in on traction. This is a very popular book by Gino Wickman with what's called the Entrepreneurial Operating System eos. So I am going to experiment with a weekly metrics scorecard this year with my team members and it's less about obsessing over hitting high level sales and revenue goals, but more about if we were to track our metrics weekly, which we used to do monthly, but if we would track weekly, could we improve our systems week by week in order to make things more easeful, automatic and abundant? So with with all my curmudgeonliness around goals and metrics and numbers of session, I am going to take a little turn in this direction, run a little pilot and see how do we do when we track weekly, does it help us get smarter about our systems? Again, less about some end state but more especially through AB testing and I'm going to talk about that on a future episode. Will that awareness help us create smarter systems? So how about you? What word or theme have you chosen for 2022? If you were to create a compass that guided daily systems and habits, what four values are most important for you to honor each day? And these don't have to be your all time forever values, but maybe there's four values that you want to focus on this year? Or as my friend Leanne is doing a quarterly word or theme. So for the first three months of the year, is there a word or theme you want to focus on and cultivate? Are you someone who is motivated by setting specific targets and if so, what helps you design the systems to reach for them? I'll end with a longtime favorite, Henry David Thoreau, quote as he wrote in walden, published in 1854, if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. If you have a favorite time saving system that you think other listeners could benefit from, I want to hear it. Send me a voice memo. Hi'sfreetime.com thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. Happy, Happy New Year and have a beautiful rest of your day.

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