How To Stay Focused - Part 2 The Details That Make It Work

How to stay focused. Part two, the details that make it work. So we're on the subject of goal setting and having a plan for the day. What are some ways you can keep from getting sidetracked as the day goes by? Perfect question. Take the whole rest of your life and let's look at this little spot here and enlarge it. We'll blow it up and say, how do you get it done after you set that goal? Okay, so how can you set that thing? But then make sure that you make it happen. All right, so let's go in here and blow it up. We have one month's period of time, and it's like we said right here. Maybe you're already at this point here. Maybe you only got this production going, and then by this month you want to move it up here. So you want to do this over 30 days, but you got 30 days and you want to increase. See, the deal is you want to increase the activities. That's going to increase your income. The whole idea is to constantly be driving your income up. Otherwise, why improve? Why work hard? Also, if you want to develop as a leader, the more money you're making, it shows that you're getting, you're growing, you're more efficient, and you've got something to teach. It inspires people to follow you. How do we stay on track as we go the 30 days from here to here? Well, here's what you do. You have for everything you want. That's how you succeed at goal setting. The reason people fail at goal setting, they have the big goal. This is why people fail at New Year's resolutions. They set a big goal. So check they did that. But they never go and set lots of little goals to keep them on track as they go through the month. Because here's what's going to happen as you set out in the months. You have your game plan. You're going to do this, you're going to do that. You got some people to help you. You got some people to see. You got some resources. But guess what happens? Surprises. You get all kinds of surprises. Things happen you could never anticipate. Plus you get behind. It takes more work than you expected. So what happens is, if all you have is this great goal of success by the end of the month, every day that goes by with a disappointment, it just becomes a steeper, more challenging type goal. In other words, it was as if when you started, you'd set your goal up here. See, if you get, let's just say you ruin, you lose, A whole week, things happen and you lose a week. Well, now here's your trajectory. Here's how much work you got to do to hit that same goal. Now, you're not going to believe you could do that if you lose these days. Because if you believe it, when you started the month, you would have set your goal up here. You would have been up here, not here, because you would have been fully confident. I can do this much work, I can get this much done, I can explode this much. But that's not what you did. You set yours up. You said, I got confidence, I got confidence, I can do this much, I can do that. I believe, I believe I can do that. But I'm not confident here. Once you lose a few days, all of a sudden now it's a tougher challenge. Plus the clock is ticking. You've got less margin for error because fewer days left. And you know what you do? You quit. You give up. And isn't this what most people do? And isn't that why, David, you guys are asking the question, how can you avoid doing that? The way you do it is real simple. Little targets. And you take the little targets and make them get as serious about them as you are the big target. Because you know these guys. Let's just say you have it in your mind where at least, if nothing else, say, where do I want to be by mid month? And then that's two weeks. So you can at least have your first week, your second week, your third week, and then of course, this is your final goal. Now let's just say you know that you and your team are always slow starter. Well, then you come and you adjust your goals to where instead of making the first goal here, maybe you make the first goal much smaller. Week one, we never get much going. So I'm going to move Week 1's goal further down here and then try and get back on track. And once I get momentum, then I can be back on schedule by the third week. Now on the other hand, some people might be fast starters. So in their first see, this is week one, week two, week three, they might say, I'm a fast starter. So in week one, bam, we can. What we usually do is we start with a bang and then we get sidetracked and we slow down at the end of the month. Well, if that's your pattern, you just get a game plan to explode and be halfway to your total by the mid month. And that way the pressure's off. So if you slow down, you can still get there. But what you do is you lay out a strategy. Number one, you've got to lay out a strategy. And here's why. What the little goals give you. Here's how Art Williams said it. You have lots of little goals to counteract what. These are small, they are achievable. They are things you set for yourself and you know you can do small, achievable. And the purpose is to counteract the millions of disappointments. You're going to have millions of disappointments. Millions of, here's the key word, temporary. Just because something is exasperating, cause you to want to clap your head against a tree, doesn't mean that it's permanent, temporary. So what you do is since you know, you use your brain and you say, I know I'm going to run into. See, this is really the price of greatness. You know, the price of having success and monster success in life is dealing with the millions of little disappointments. Putting, taking control. Have lots and lots of goals in there so you can have some yeses. See, what these are, are no's. It ain't going to happen. Didn't turn out the way you want to know. No, no. See, anytime you're trying to do things, no, we can't get it done today. We ran into delay. No, they didn't show up. No, we don't have what we need. No, no, no, no. So since you know you're going to have millions of these little no's come along, it's nice to have some little yeses. So you can say to yourself, it's working. You can have proof positive, yes, it is working. I'm going to win. In spite of all these things going on, I am still making progress. I'm going to get there. And this keeps you in a positive frame of mind. So what happens when people go out and start out the year with what they do is this. They start out like if it's a year, let's say this is January, let's go back over here and it is January 1st, whoop dee doo, New Year. Here's 12 months. Well, they'll set out some goal. I want to lose weight, I want to make money, I want to do this, that and the other. But most of the time they set a big goal and they don't make it specific at all. They don't even say in one month I want to be here. They just throw goals out. I'm going to lose weight, stop smoking. You know, I'm going to get that garage organized. I'm going to do something. But they don't say, I'm going to get it done by such and such day and then line it down where they have steps along the way to make that happen. They just throw these things out and then they work on it a little while and then they say, oh, forget it, it's not going to happen because of this thing right there. They start losing time. Maybe they make a little progress, then they go backwards. It's like, oh, this is too tough now. I quit. It's not. They couldn't do it. They just can't do it with that little planning without being that sloppy. So the best thing I could tell you, the first thing is get lots of little goals to keep you on track as you go through the month, to keep reinforcing yourself that. See, like if I want to do in a month, let's just say this is a month I want to get in, start my workout program at the gym. I'm going to try in this month. I'm going to try and get in about three to four workouts a week. There's four weeks. So I'm going to try and get in this month I'm going to try and get in 12 workouts. Well, if you start out and you say, I want to get ahead of the game the first week you get four done. Well, now you got a great attitude. Hey, I only got eight more to go. I got three weeks. And then if you do four the second week, you could say, hey, I've already got eight done. If I just do two a week for the next two weeks, well, maybe that's something good. Because maybe you had get sick or maybe you had to go out of town on business or something happens with your kids and you only have time to do two and two, but still you hit your goal. But on the other hand, let's just say you have a goal of 12 and you say I'm shooting for like three a week. Three, three, three. Well, so that's your target. Well, let's say the first week, right off the first week it gets the flu and you don't even get any in. But then you recover and you say the next week you start and you say all I've got to do is get four a weekend and I can still hit my goal. So as soon as you hit four, you say, only eight left. And so it's a way you can say, I'm beat the flu came in, but I can still hit my first month target. And then your second month you might say, I'm going for 14 workouts or 15 workouts or something like that and stretch it up to where all of a sudden maybe you're going five days a week, which you don't need to do that. But that's just an example. You know, I. I've told this story before, but I got. Andy had one of those YMCA camp retreats up in Pennsylvania. It was about an hour north of Philadelphia. Well, you know, I spent the night, but then I spoke first thing in the morning that I had to get out of there. You know, I had to get there. And so Ron Schmidt Senior Junior's dad, he had this little sports car. And of course he was all wound up from the meeting the night before and the meeting the morning. You know, he was gonna knock it over the wall. He was just. He'd been out listening and now he wanted to talk. And so he was like talking my ear off. And so here he's the guy driving me to the airport. You know, I was on short time. You know, I had to go like crazy. You only had a little time to get there. And he's. He's going like 90 miles an hour, which I was happy about because he was going to get me there with plenty of time. And he's just talking. He's driving like 90 miles an hour, but he's talking like 200 miles an hour. And so time flew. You know, we're just seeing signs go by so fast, I didn't even notice them. Well, all of a sudden he kind of had talked himself out. It had been about an hour. And I knew we should be about that. He actually should have long since been at the Philly airport and I see a sign says welcome to Harrisburg. And what this sucker had done, he had driven me like 120 miles in the middle of halfway across Pennsylvania, almost to Pittsburgh. And long since forgot about the turnoff to go down to Philadelphia. So now we had missed the plane, turn around, haul back to Philadelphia. I missed all my other appointments for the rest of the day down in Carolina. I don't know, I might even have to spend the night. But, you know, he was going like balls to the wall in the wrong direction. What's sad is the guys who feel like they're working like dogs and a lot of them are working, but they're working on the wrong things and they're working on things that ain't going to take them where they want to go. You know, they're working real hard, but, you know, they're taking stuff that's going is going to make their job of getting up here twice as hard. So that's what you do. This is how you manage yourself. It's how you keep. You don't just keep chanting to yourself, have a good attitude. Have a good attitude. Have a good. You manage yourself so that you will naturally have a good attitude because you're getting closer to your goal. And then it makes it easier for people to follow you because you know where you go. See, all of life is project. This is a project. That's a project. If you want to make something, any positive thing, if you want to have a positive life and make positive things happen, you do that as a result of going through life and accomplishing projects. It's like climbing stairs or a ladder you've got to climb one at a time in life. The whole thing, there's no shortcuts, is there's no elevator to the top. You have got to lift up your leg and climb. So it's projects. But projects have targets and they have time frames, in other words, deadlines. So the people who have positive, productive, they get things done. That's how they get it done. They've organized themselves, discipline themselves to knock out projects step by step, knock out the things standing between them and where they want to go. Putting these things in place, building your skyscraper one floor at a time. And in each phase, they've got a target they've got to hit, and they got a deadline they got to hit. And so what you do to become effective is you put yourself to work by giving yourself targets and deadlines. And you start knocking these things out like, this is a project. Getting up to there, that's a project. And then you reset and you get another project and you just keep on marching. What value have you ever placed on the buddy system for having a partner that keeps you accountable? And you say, absolutely, Sometimes the buddies, your coach, sometimes it's a peer. But you got to have a buddy, man. You got to have somebody. Sometimes it's a spouse, but you got to have a buddy to help keep you honest, to help measure against, to help bounce things off. In the early days, when I want to, you know, everybody wants to quit, but the great thing about a buddy is usually you don't want to quit on the same day. And I can remember early on when I'd want to quit, my wife wouldn't want to quit. She didn't work in the business, but she was, you know, mentally involved in it. And then when she wanted to quit, I didn't want to quit. So we never wanted. Fortunately, we never wanted to quit at the same time. And so, you know, a buddy is absolutely essential, I think. And that's one of the reasons it's toughest in the beginning and to just force yourself to go through that activity so you can figure out how to get a running buddy. And even if it's just someone in the office, someone else in the office, or even in another office for a period of time, you hook up with them because you go do stuff. Then you can get back together until you get some recruits of your own. Then you can go back to a coffee shop and bat it around, get some new ideas, and then go out again. So thanks so much. Do it big.