Conviction is Essential to Set and Achieve Goals with Chet Lovegren

So even I was even a contrarian last year to a certain part of what is now a key part of my motivation and my goal achievement.

Right. You know, would be a potentially interesting exercise for you is where else are you holding on to that type of attachment?

Permission based openers.

See, all right, that might be a place, right. To experiment with a little bit.

Right.

You have to plan, to hit your goals. You have to take the time to do so.

Right.

Like within my goals, I follow like what I call three by threes. What are the three things daily, three things weekly, three things monthly that I need to do to give myself the best chance to achieve those goals. And I'm always making sure that those three by threes are scheduled. Those three things daily, they gotta be scheduled. Those three things weekly, they gotta be scheduled because otherwise you're not gonna do it. So talk to us now about like this prep, this plan, right? Cause we both pulled up planners. We're talking about scheduling and things of that nature. Like talk about this planning process, this preparing process. I also very strongly agree. It's a big difference between good and great. You can, you can wing your way to good. You can, you can rely on natural talent to be good, but to be great, you gotta do a little bit more. So talk about this preparation and planning that you see people do.

Yeah, I think for me personally, so I can only speak to what I do personally because I don't like, I'm not sitting there with these people that I know, that I know do prep and planning and seeing what they do on a daily basis. But for me, the first, the first step is it's really easy, especially depending on the game. Unless it's a Steelers game Sunday night, 30 minutes, just put the time on there to walk through your week. What do I have? What meetings do I have? What things do I need? What things do I need to have accomplished? What did I miss from last week? Just getting your business plan in order. And then once you have your business plan, so your requirements to keep your job, to make your. Make your money, right. Then back your personal life into that. Okay. If I want to. Again, all this with a grain of salt. I'm not a perfect person. My, my physical health is not where it needs to be. And so there are some things I'm still struggling with myself to get where I need to go. So I'm saying this is someone who's accomplished other things and knows that he has other things to work on. But back your personal life into that. Okay. I want to go to the gym at least three times this week. I'm going to fit those buckets into where I need to based on what my requirements are for my job or my work. The thing that keeps food on the table for my family. But that, that Sunday night planning so important in the mornings. I don't touch email or anything for the first minimum 20 minutes of the day. The first 20 minutes of the day. I'm working on things for me, whether that's, hey, get myself some breakfast, go meditate, do something, get yourself in the right head space. One thing I've actually been trying to do too, is they say you're more productive when you don't look your phone for the first hour of the day. Unfortunately, I've not gotten to that part. I'm like, I wake up and half my team is in France. So I'm like, oh my God, I got 18 Slack messages. And I'll look at a couple of them real quick. But I'm like, no, you got to stop. You can't do that. But those first 20, 15. Stop it. I'm telling you, dude, stop it. Yeah, those first 15 to 20 minutes of the day, you really need to spend just on yourself. And that's not, hey, shower, go, go to the bathroom, shower, get some coffee. I'm saying go on a walk, read something, journal something, write down the dream you had, whatever that might be. Because your brain is so busy when you get up because you have, oh, my work stuff. I have kids. Oh, I got to get all my kids ready and stuff. Anything that you thought of in your dream, take those first 15 minutes to get all that out on paper somehow. Clear mind, Sit on the back porch with your coffee, pop your headphones in, listen to some music, listen to a book. You know, I have different books depending on the time of day, the morning. I can't listen to tactical stuff, man. I got to listen to something motivational, like the power of consistency, atomic habits. I can't listen to really tactical stuff. Like I can't go listen to a bunch of sales objection handling 6 o' clock in the morning. I'm like, somebody, for the love of Christ, please motivate me to get through this day a little bit more. You know what I mean? And then at night, obviously, then when you wrap up your day, just start with scheduling. 15 minutes every day to do those five. Those five minutes of each. What did I miss today that I need to get done first thing tomorrow? After that's done, what do I have to get accomplished tomorrow? And then what am I thankful for today that happened. And that's really the big focus. And then obviously monthly, you know, you start looking at your goals from the last month. How did I accomplish those? Whether you want to do it on a weekday, Saturday, whatever, like that's irrelevant. But you need to track those monthly goals. How am I working on these? And then take double that time at the end of the quarter to look at your quarterly goals and see where you're headed. Right. Both personally and professionally. But again I think it's really about however it works best for you. You have to take the time to make the time. But you definitely need to have a daily, a daily routine on the front and the back half of the day where you're doing something other than what you're normally doing. Whether it's meditating in the front half of the day and then at night you're doing the planning and prep or you know, you want to read a book in the morning or whatever. Like that's just going to make you more productive. It's going to make you, it's going to put like intrinsic motivation on achieving other things. You're going to want more out of life. Like it's, it's a weird feeling, it's almost an intangible thing. But there's just something behind like being able to put a stamp on. I did something that 90% of people probably aren't doing, which is self educating through books or I meditated this morning, which a lot of people talk about, but maybe only 2% of people actually were able to accomplish. Like there's something very proud about that and I think that helps drive momentum. You know, James Clear talks about habit stacking and driving momentum and Darren Hardy and the compound effect talks about momentum of habits that, that adds so much momentum to you being able to do a bunch of other stuff. So then in the middle of the day when you're getting a bunch of crap from your leader and you're like dealing with a bunch of stuff, you're like, you know what, I can, I can do that though. You know why? Because I meditated this morning. Like nobody meditates. Like good for me. Spot on. You know what I'm saying? So it's about those little, those little tiny things, man. Really end up stacking up very fast and adding, like I said, you don't have to do the full plan that I have now that took three and a half years. Start small and then you can grow from there. Continue to add, test, recalibrate your process. What's working what's not Katie? What do you do, Katie? This is what I do. What would you recommend? Like you said, Jet, See if you can get that 10 year goal into a three year goal. That's great, man. I'm gonna. Hell yeah. I want that ranch in three years, man. Let's go start looking at Montana real estate. That's what I'm gonna tell my wife when she gets back from the park later today. Hey, let's, let's, let's go look at that Montana real estate, get those recommendations, share that stuff with other people and learn a thing or two. And you might share a thing or two with someone as well.

No, it's, it's true, man. Right, because you know what, what's the quote? Right? Like our greatest fear is not that we know we're foul to our greatest fears that you know we're invincible beyond measure.

Right.

Accomplish so much more than we realize. But then we do, we'll set these 10 year goals and then we're shocked when it takes us 10 years to accomplish them. Whereas because you, when you have 10 year goals, you'll have 10 year ideas.

Yeah.

When you have three year goals, three year ideas, right. If I told you you couldn't get the ranch if you didn't get it in three years, I bet all the ideas changed.

Yeah.

You have three years to get it or it's gone. You have different ideas, right? And those are ways to approach it once it's in your. And you look for it and then you act towards it every single day. I think, you know, the Internet's always fun with quotes because like, you know, they can attribute to them whoever. Like, so this one gets attributed to Tony Robbins and I think Brendan Burchard and a few other people. But like the concept behind most people drastically overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in three. Like even listening to you, man, three years ago you were a contrarian against books, and now you're name dropping some of the best of the best dev books out there in three years. If I pulled up your experience again on LinkedIn, what you've done in your career in three years, right? Where a lot of people want to do that, in one way, I should.

Be a director now, I should be.

A director next year. And so they overestimate what they can do in one, but in three, a manager, director, head of.

That's.

We underestimate what we can do in three years. Right? And focusing on that. And so when you touched on A good topic as we start to wrap here. Like, what are some of those time habits? Right, so we've talked about goal setting. We've talked about prepping, we've talked about planning. We've done a little bit of, like, kind of manifestation. Like, what are some of those other tiny habits that you've seen really attribute to, you know, greatness, whether that's for you or for people you've worked with? Like, what are some of those tiny places people can get started?

I think a big one is accountability, and I have not found a great way to make this work, but I have three direct mentors, and I've signed habit contracts with them, and they have access to my habit sheet. And if we meet on a monthly basis and, yeah, I could go in and check all the boxes right on my. I could do that. I'm not going to, because I really want that accountability. But if they look and they're like, oh, hey, you're not there. All right, sweet. You just want a $50Amazon card. You know what I mean? I don't know if, like, that works for everyone. And I wouldn't say that that personally is the most motivating thing for me to accomplish these tiny little habits, but it is a little piece of all the little things that are in place that I remind her and go, oh, man, if I don't get this done, Brad's gonna, like, give me shame about it. And, man, I didn't get some stuff done last month, and I had to send him a $50Amazon card. And that felt. I felt stupid for doing that, because it's an easy thing to accomplish. Me, personally, it's. It's. It's a little weird, I think. I don't know. It's, like, cheesy, maybe. But, you know, I have. I have picture. I have a picture of me and my wife, and then a picture of my kids right next to me. And, like, little things, like, looking at that. Like, it's just those tiny little things where you're like, really? Does anybody want to work all day long? No. We all probably wish we could be on Maui, you know, sipping my ties on the beach. But it's like looking at those things and going, I know the world that I came from. Love my parents, they work their butts off, but I had nothing growing up. And I'm like, the fact that my son gets one of those cool little Mercedes mechanic mechanical electric cars that you can drive around, like, I always wanted one as a kid. My parents, like, we're not spending 200 bucks on one of those. The fact that I can do that for my kid, and I see him driving around, he has so much fun running it into the garage door, and it's so funny to him like that. That makes. That makes me feel so good. Right? So it's like those little tiny reminders and those little tiny things on my. I build a vision board every year, and it's the back. It's the desktop wallpaper on my. On my screen here. And I was walking through it with my wife the other day, and I was showing her. I was like, wow, there's like, two things on here that did not happen this year, and the year's not over. And it's mostly just towards physical health because we had a kid last year, and it's. You know how it is when you have a kid. That first year is really tough to get back on track. And it's mostly just health stuff around working out religiously and upping my golf game. But everything else, you know, speaking building our backyard, like, we're building a new. A whole new hangout spot in our backyard, a whole outdoor kitchen and everything. These vacation spots that I have, we went to every single one of these this year. Like, we accomplished the majority of the things on here. The only thing I didn't accomplish were the personal things. And I think if, you know, I'm not getting enough time out there to go golf and perfect my swing, my. I'm probably spending more time with my kids. And so my wife's okay with that, right? She's like, hey, I'm okay. You didn't accomplish that goal. Now, the weightlifting goal, maybe we want to work on that. The golf goal, I'm not so worried about. You know, I'm the best. I'm the worst golfer out there. So, like, I'm a terrible golfer, but if you threw me all the other terrible golfers, I'd probably beat them. But I want to be, like, the worst. I want to be, like, the worst of the next level. You know, I'm trying to get into, like, that next level. Yeah. Yeah. I want to be able to hang. You know what I mean? Like, I can't hang with that group. But I think you, you know, you have to figure out what's going to keep you motivated and keep you going, and you have to surround yourself with those things because you could make spreadsheets and goals and track things all day long. But if you don't know yourself and you don't know what's going to keep you going or the best way that you learn or think. I mean, you got to figure out what that looks like. You know, I thought vision boards were cheesy as hell. I did one this year, and this is probably one of the best years I've had in my professional career. So even I was even a contrarian last year to a certain part of what is now a key part of my motivation and my goal achievement. Right.

I, I am, you know, would be a potentially interesting exercise for you is where else are you holding on to that type of attachment?

Permission based openers. See?

All right. That might be a place, right. To experiment with a little bit.