John Assaraf and Joe Fier discuss why most people fail at goals: it's commitment, not knowledge. Assaraf recommends tracking your hourly behavior, writing a multi-year vision blueprint, identifying limiting beliefs, and building a clear what/why/how/when/who plan to trigger anticipatory dopamine and lock in follow-through.
Chapters
Anything that you want to achieve in 2024 or so and 2025, all of the how to already exists.
So that means how to or not knowing how to is not your problem. You're just not committed with a big enough reason why you must. And so you are interested and you do what's easy and convenient instead of whatever it takes.
Period. End of the story.
Yeah. That's commitment to anything. And it's up to us. Yeah. And I go back to the patterns because these are these unconscious things that we're doing all, all the time. All of us have them. Great, good, horrible, whatever. We can label them however we wish. But like, how would you suggest, what are some strategies that you guide people on, on how to acknowledge the pattern or become aware of these patterns in themselves? Maybe the core ones that you see are pretty common that probably should get broken to elevate themselves to the next level.
Yeah. So first, one of the things that I used to do many years ago and when I work with private clients is one of the things I, I, I talked to them about. I say.
Take a sheet of paper or use or on your iPad or your computer or cell phone and start to observe and write down. What do you do every hour? What do you do every hour? Don't judge it, just, just write it down from 8 to 8:30, or 6 to 6:30, or 7 to 8 o', clock, 9 o', clock, 12 o', clock, it doesn't matter. What did you do for your health, wealth, relation, career, business? And we can keep it to, you know, to business if we want to. Like what, what's for two weeks? Let's look at the behaviors. Part one, part two.
What's your vision for a year from now? What's your vision for three years now? What's your vision for five years from now? Do you have it like I have an exceptional life blueprint. I have my vision for every single area of my life. I have my vision board where I have images of things that inspire me, things that I've achieved. But I have future travel, my daily rituals, my courses that I will complete, books I will study, things I'm going to do to contribute to the world, to charity. These are the milestones I've achieved. This is the story of my life.
And you're showing us a book that you made for yourself. That's a personal book to you.
That's my exceptional life group. It's one of the things I teach our students about, I don't know, 70, 65 pages. But what I, what I, what I'm trying to do is deconstruct the behavior so I can see the habits. Habits show up on our calendar, what we do and don't do, right? And so what I put in my calendar and what I follow through on, those are usually typically the same. So then I want to look at, like, what do you believe to be true about yourself? Write down what you believe to be true about yourself. I want you to write down any limiting belief that you have right now.
And.
Every goal requires a belief, right, in order to achieve that goal. But if there is a limiting belief, you have to start working on releasing and removing those limiting beliefs. So think about this. Imagine if your computer had software on it, and one part of the software says, hey, I want you to do this. But another part of the software says, you can't do this because.
You'Re never going to get the this done because you have this opposing software or programming. Well, most people's brains, you know, have got these opposing beliefs. You know, I believe I can achieve this, but I also believe that I'm too young or too right. So we have these opposing beliefs. So first I set together a vision for what I want. Then I ask myself, if I'm committed to it and why must I achieve it? Then I say, okay, in order for me to achieve it, what would I need to believe about myself and the achievement of this goal? I write those out. Then I asked myself, what would be the strategies that I would have to implement to achieve this goal? And then I'd say, what are the habits I would need to create to implement the strategies that are aligned with this new belief to achieve this goal?
Yeah.
So our brain needs, what do we want? There again, there's different parts of our brain. So our brain needs, what do we want? Like, what do you want to achieve? Our brain actually has a GPS system.
That'Ll help you achieve your goals. And so we need, what do we want to achieve? We need why do we want to achieve it? Like, why must we. Then we need, how, how specifically are you going to achieve that goal? So when we know how, we reduce the, the anxiety, tension and stress. So what, why, when? Or what, why how then when, when are you going to do this? So now we have some structure and then we want to ask who can help us? Yes. So now I've activated five different parts of my brain to be able to give my brain the dopamine that it needs alongside the adrenaline and a little bit of cortisol. So when we talk about these, you know, A lot of times, people talk flow states. People think flow state is like, whoa, that's not a flow state. Flow state is a combination of stress cortisol. Okay. And adrenaline and dopamine, the anticipatory neurochemical for reward. A lot of people think you get the release of the dopamine when you cross the finish line. No, you don't. You don't get the release of dopamine when you cross the finish line. You get the. The biggest release of dopamine is the anticipation crossing the finish line. So why do we need to have a vision? Why do we need to have goals? Because our brain is anticipating us getting there.
