Goal Setting for Entrepreneurs: The Framework That Works

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome, welcome, everybody. Tony Boccalupo here, and we've got Michael Girdley in the house as well. And Michael's going to be doing most of the talking today, but I'll be your fearless MC and co-host and microphone runner as well. I'm the head of community at Scalepath, which is the peer membership community for business leaders that is part of Girdley Media. So today we're going to be talking about goal setting tools and thinking in decades and how that can help you with your thinking for the year ahead. We are at the very end, Michael, of the first full business week of the year, I guess the first full regular week of the year or two. So this is a time when I feel like people are just inundated with their inboxes and maybe even forgetting what their annual goals were already. In favor of all the crazy stuff that has come up just as people have gotten back to their desks. So, and so what we're going to do, everyone, is we're going to go through this presentation. We're going to cover these two tools, and we will be having a fair amount of time for Q&A at the end. We do have a super hard stop before the turn of the hour, so we will make sure everyone is ready to go for their next meeting. But in the meantime, feel free to say hi in the chat. Let us know where you are. Let us know what you're up to. But in the meantime, I will turn it over to Michael. Oh, I guess one other thing I'll mention is that in Scalepath, we're also going to do a follow-on to this event. So for the next 4 weeks, we'll be talking about the things that we're going to discuss during this event. So If that sounds good to you, Michael, uh, without further ado, I'll turn it over to you.

Yeah, super good. All right, is this louder? Somebody was complaining I'm not loud enough.

Adam, it sounds like you're—

you're—

you sound like you came up a little bit.

Yeah, okay, I put it on master blaster, whatever the— I turned it up to 11. All right, perfect, cool. All right, so, you know, Tony and I got together and we wanted to just talk about the two tools that I've used a lot to really plan how I go about life, both professionally, personally, and kind of holistically as well. And I've gotten exposed to like a lot of these different like planning things, right? There's GTD, Get Things Done, all these different kind of versions of that stuff. This is what I use. So the goal today really is for you as an entrepreneur or wannabe entrepreneur or business owner, like how do we kind of share these tools with you and then you can dig into them further if you want and decide to use them or not. But I'll show you how I use them and how I think it works well for me. 'Cause my problem historically has been I haven't had a good vision of where I wanted to go exactly, and I was kind of very opportunistic and I wasn't very methodical, and I would find which direction I'm heading drifting, right? And, you know, like, the closest way to get to anything is a direct and straight line. So I'm a big believer in trying to pick a path or a set of tools that are gonna put you on a path to be on that straight line going forward. So, you know, you are today hopefully somebody that's curious about these types of methodologies. If you want to be planning your life— there are people, by the way, that think that long-term planning is stupid. There are people that think that planning in general is stupid. There are people think scheduling is stupid. There are multiple different styles in life to figure out how to get ahead and how to achieve what you want. And in the end, we all die anyway. I guess that's a pretty depressing way to say it. So you do what you want. But today, you know, you're probably an entrepreneur that is curious about how to do this kind of long-term planning because you want to, you know, achieve kind of big things in life and build the right life for you. So, um, so that's what you'll get out of today. So I'm going to show you two tools. They're free. We don't make any money from these, don't have any intention of it. I think actually if I tried to make money from one of these tools, I would get sued, but we could talk about that when we get to it. Um, but you know, I want to introduce you to these two things that I've learned to do, and these two things really like work together, um, in terms of figuring out like what is the life I want to have at some period in the future, and then how do I get there, right? Those are the two components. And that's these things here. There's this vivid vision idea. I didn't invent these. I totally stole these ideas from other people. So that's also why I'm not like, like trying to charge you for them or anything stupid like that. So the vivid vision is an idea of like, okay, how do I just write down and think about deeply where I want to be 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now? And I'll talk about this tool. Good news, you can do it with just a piece of paper and a pen, or in my case, you know, I did it with computer typing it out. And then the second thing we'll talk about is this goal organizer and planner where you take your vision and you then translate that into what you're going to be doing, you know, this quarter, 3 years from now, or 3 years from now, this year, this quarter. And then that translates into your goals that you work on of things that you want to achieve to have you on the path to achieve that vivid vision of that, of the life you want to be living, you know, some, some period in the future. So, um, I'll pause there, just make sure people can still hear me and stuff like that. All right, looks like I'm still, I'm still there. Um, one of the funny things about these like lectures and stuff, I mean, they're free and some people just sign up in order to get the recording, but like we'll have like 400 people. One time, Ty, I think we had 1,500 people sign up for one of these and like 300 show up. It's just the nature of the deal. Yeah, for sure. Um, so yeah, so welcome those of you that are here. There's 61 of us here, so that's pretty awesome. Cool. So yeah, so today I'm going to go through these two different tools and give you enough to be able to use them if you want to, and if not, be able to kind of dig in in the future and go from there. So if you have any questions, just like speak up. All right, so let's talk about this tool number one. This is called the Vivid Vision. So the Vivid Vision is an idea that if you go Google it, you'll see this a lot. Tony Robbins talks about it, a guy named Kerwin Harrell talks about it a lot. These are all kind of business influencer, life influencer kind folks that you may or may not have heard of. And there's different variations of this tool, but they all kind of do the same thing. And basically the way it works is, um, you can use them for like business or personal. Cameron Herold talks about one where you write out this vivid vision thing that describes what you want your company to look like a decade from now or 5 years from now. Um, Tony Robbins does one that's slightly different, um, that is basically around your personal stuff. Um, The version I like to do is kind of in the middle of those two. It combines your personal and professional life into one vision that you put together. And, um, you know, interesting note about like Tony Robbins, like, like that guy is like an amazing communicator. The number of original ideas that most business influencer types or even me have is like very, very limited. Like most people are just recycling the hits that have worked for somebody in the past. So a lot of Tony Robbins books are just like repackaging of stuff that he heard. You know, in, in Think and Grow Rich and stuff like that, like in the, in the '30s and '40s. So pretty, pretty fun nuance as I've kind of been like, oh, there's no new ideas out there. It's like, well, there's— true, there's not that many new ideas. So for this vision, Vivid Vision idea, you basically end up, um, with a picture of the life that you want to be living, um, 5, 10 years from now in the future. And basically, to make it happen, you just sit down and you find a quiet place outside the office, and you write down what life will look like for you at some point in the future. So me personally, like, my current version of this that I just did is for 10 years in the future. I just turned 50, uh, 6 days ago, so happy birthday to me. Um, I, you know, I can see 60 happening at some point in the future, um, but I'm, I'm currently 50, so I wrote 10 years because that made it really easy. And basically the way you do this tool is you do it in a narrative style, and you sit down and you write, um, you write basically a 1 to 2 page all-text version of what your life will look like professionally, personally, spiritually, uh, community-wise, meaning, all that kind of stuff, uh, in, in— you just write in a narrative style. So it's just like a picture of what the world's gonna look like, and it becomes very vivid. And the reason it's very vivid is, um, you're allowed to and expected to bring into how things feel and emotional words, um, very clearly into that. So the Tony Robbins version of this basically has 4 different categories. Personal development, like how are you growing as a person? Like, you know, what are, what are you doing fitness-wise? What are you doing in terms of hobbies, friends, family, all that kind of stuff? Um, then there's the second category, which is kind of career, business, and economic. Like, you know, what is your, what does your career look like? What are you doing? What's your job? What, what potentially, like, you know, does your income look like? Those are all things where you can visualize what your future looks like in that category. Toys and Adventure, which is like, you know, some people write this vision, and part of mine is like, I want to have the ability to go spend a lot of time in the mountains and ski all I want before my body breaks down. Like, you know, I want to be continuing to take trips with my wife. Like, you'd write down what those things are, right, as part of this narrative. And the last one is this kind of contribution. So, you know, depending on where you are in life, giving back and meaning um, has varying levels of, of importance. You know, folks start to reach my age, like, how we create, like, uh, a give back to the world to make the world a better place turns out to be a, you know, becomes more important. So this is a category there, like, what is your contribution and noble cause? Like, my friend Nick Longo uses this phrase noble cause to talk about this, like, obligation you have as a person to not just do best for yourself but do best for the world around you. And every good venture, everything you work on, in his mind, should have a noble cause, a around it, which I think is a great phrase. Cool. All right, so this Vivid Vision, again, just to recap it, like, we go through and like we just rate— basically write down a narrative of what our vision for our life looks like 5 years from now, 3 years from now, 10 years from now, depending upon kind of a good timeline for you. So here's some instructions for when you go sit down to write, um, this kind of Vivid Vision. So I took this as a screenshot off of a website talking about the Tony Robbins stuff. So anyway, good. What did they say about good? Good. Tony, what's the line about good? Good creators steal. I don't know. I'm trying not to do that too. Yeah.

Great creators steal. Yeah.

Some people borrow. I stole it. So, and so like, um, like when you go write this kind of vivid vision, some people like to do it on paper. I mean, I think Tony Robbins stuff talks about sitting down with a piece of paper and a pen and handwriting it. There's a lot of studies that really show your brain connection to, you know, to what you're producing is much tighter when you handwrite stuff. And it, uh, they've done studies where kids who take notes by hand tend to remember things better than people that type them out. It's up to you. Like, I'm so overwriting at this point. I don't think I could write a full page of text without my hand falling off. But basically you sit down, uh, in a quiet place. Get out of your office, uh, get out of all your distractions, um, and you sit down and just kind of write rapidly. It should all just come out because the reason to write this stuff rapidly in terms of your kind of vivid vision for yourself is to get out of your own head and stop thinking about kind of the limitations that we all inherently put on ourselves. So if you write rapidly, it increases the chance that you're not going to be stuck doing that. Number 2, he says, um, keep it simple. Um, you know, like here he talks about, like, you can talk about, I want to move to Nob Hill, or me, I talked about I want to spend time in Park City, uh, in Utah. Like, that's there, but you don't have to talk about what color the furniture is and stuff like that. Um, and then this last thing is like, be a kid. Um, you know, we, we as adults, uh, tend to put limits on ourselves in terms of our thinking, our possibilities, our hopes, our dreams. Like, um, be okay being a bit like playful with all this stuff. Like, you know, ask yourself what if and then try to do it. So that's easier said than done, but I think a really good, you know, a really good opportunity here. All right, so any questions on this particular tool? No one is speaking up. Perfect.

Things quiet in the chat so far. I think we're gonna, I think we're gonna just keep rolling through and then, and then have some folks speaking up at the end.

Awesome. Okay.

So get your questions ready folks, cuz it's coming. All right.

Or send 'em in now. Makes me, makes me feel like it.

Yeah. That would, that would be even better. Feel free to drop 'em in the chat or put 'em in the Q&A. We do have one. Oh, what timeframe do you usually give yourself? One person asked, so that's, I guess in order to actually write it, like how much time do you give yourself?

Yeah. Yeah. I think the younger you are, the shorter I would make the timeframe. You know, I think I think if you're my age, like 40s to 50s to 60s, like 10 years is pretty, pretty there, right? It's a good, a good number to go with. If you're in your 30s to 40s, 5 years is fine. Uh, I would say if you're in your 20s to early 30s, I would do 2 years to 3 years. Like, keep it, keep it kind of there. And the reason is, uh, realistically, like in your 40s and 50s, you've kind of started to figure stuff out. Like, you're stable. I have high school kids. Like, I'm not moving anywhere. Like, it's just not, it's not there. Like, And so, so 10 years is pretty stable and an easy kind of path to kind of take the complexity of my life and try to figure out what, what it should look like a decade from now. If you are younger, like in your 20s, like, you know, I'm a big believer in your 20s doing, doing the right thing is going to explore a bunch of different stuff and experiencing the maximum change you can to try to learn and find your place in the world. That's really what your 20s are about. You're kind of surviving your 20s to try to figure out who you are. Writing it for 2 or 3 years is totally appropriate. So I think it really depends on where you are in life. Anywhere from 1 to 10 years, I think is totally reasonable.

And then Michael, in terms of the time that you take to actually write it, do you give yourself a boundary in terms of sitting down and writing out your vivid vision, or is it just kind of open-ended?

When I do it, it took me about 45 minutes. Yeah, so, you know, I wouldn't— remember, you're, you know, part of the deal here when you sit down to do this is you're writing quickly, so it should come out pretty quickly. Um, and so I wouldn't spend a bunch of time worrying about structure or form. Um, you know, when we pull up mine, you'll see it's just kind of a random hodgepodge of a page and a half of stuff that came out quickly. But yeah, you shouldn't be spending hours on this stuff. Now, what I would recommend is when you write it, like, come back the next day and read it and see if there's anything you want to change in it, and then do the same thing the next day, kind of the way you would typically do for an editing process. Will we share the slides?

Yes, you'll get a follow-up email with the slides and the replay.

We're gonna spam you. That was for including it again.

Michael, this might be the longest we've gone without somebody asking if— we haven't even had anybody ask if there will be a replay. I'd say that's a, that's a test.

Well, I've learned with all the ads for this stuff to go ahead and put, um, we'll send you the recording. So a number of people sign up for recordings. Love it.

Uh, Reuben just asked, will there be a replay in the Q&A? Thank you, Reuben. You're the man. Yes, there will.

You're the man. Okay, uh, cool. So to bring all this kind of reality of what it looks like, so we redacted mine a little bit, but mine, when I, when I did this, uh, I did it basically 3 weeks ago. And, um, also thank you all for, uh, for being here today, because us doing this today meant I had to get it done. So it was like a good forcing function of me spending time to do about this was going to help me get this done. But I basically just went through and wrote this over the course of about 45 minutes and then edited it over the past few days. And there was some stuff I changed in the editing process, um, and, uh, and that's okay. I mean, that's just, that's cool because basically what this forces you to do is like slow down and think about what you really want. And a lot of times we're all so busy doing the things that you don't think about like, okay, well, what, what for? Like, where am I headed with all this? What am I optimizing for? And so I think the beauty of this kind of thing is it makes you sit down and really reflect on what you truly want, right? So here, like, Tony went through— thank you, Tony— this is the first kind of 3/4 of a page of mine. Mine ended up being like a page and a half. Is that right, Tony? Page and a quarter?

Yeah, page and change.

Yeah, yeah. So Tony went through and just kind of was like, you know, here's where I talked about like the different categories of stuff, like my relationship, my wife, business stuff going on, big picture. And there's, you know, if you look at a lot of the words here, and I recommend you do that when you use this, uh, when you use this tool, like use emotionally charged, you know, it means emotionally charged words, right? Like, my wife and I like still have a strong marriage, right? Like, those are emotionally charged words. I'm talking about my balance sheet being a fortress balance sheet. Like, there's just those kind of things. I am free. I'm not retired, but I'm free. Like, those things are all very positive are negative words, but they're emotionally charged words. And again, like, I think deep down a lot of us know and feel what we want our life to be, and this is a way for that to kind of come out and for it to be real on a piece of paper.

Michael, can you tell me a little bit about what a fortress balance sheet is? I have a bit of an idea just from what you've written, but is that— oh, is that another thing? Is that like Is that something I can read about?

It's just a common term where like you have like a balance sheet that it's zero, zero risk of, of stuff, right? So, you know, it's, it's commonly used to talk about companies like you have a fortress balance sheet, like it's, you know, there's, there's tons of, tons of excess safety in the balance sheet. So just a common, common finance term. Somebody said it will take years, 10 years to grow a Mills Snellian beard. Yeah, Mills, my podcast co-host, has a really sweet beard. So I tried this year, just wasn't a hit. I didn't talk about having a beard here in this, in this vision. Cool. All right, well, that's basically— I mean, that's basically this whole tool. And what you end up when you do this is like the, the so what, um, that I think is so powerful is you end up understanding deeply and quantifying and explaining in detail what you want and where you want to go. And, you know, that's the, the one of the themes of advice I try to give people is they ask like, oh, should I get into this career, or should I, you know, buy this type of business, or should I work here? And ultimately, like, I think they're looking at it all backwards, right? Like, there is no wrong answer to those questions. It is ultimately like, what do you want to achieve out of life, and do you know yourself really well? And then how do you figure out how work, like, and career and money and all that stuff fits into that alongside family, friends, and, you know, kind of greater and higher purpose. But this forces you to really slow down and think about, okay, what's the life like I want to create?

Michael, just before we move on, was there anything that, since you just did this, was there anything that stuck out at you as like, as you were writing it, you had kind of a moment of realization that that maybe you didn't realize it was in your head, or it felt particularly emotionally resonant to, to get it out of your head onto paper?

Um, I mean, I think an interesting one was figuring out what our path is going to be forward in relationship with our kids. Um, you know, there's part of me that doesn't want to be, you know, saddling kids with responsibilities for a family set of businesses and stuff. Depending on what we still own, you know, at this period of time. Uh, the other part of me is excited about times to get to work with my kids and spend more time with them because they're at an age now where I'm spending less and less time. Our oldest is a freshman at college, so like, I don't, you know, I don't know if you've seen some of the stats, Tony, but the, the percentage of time you spend with your kids, basically like 90% of it like is spent by like age 16. Like it's just basically like like, so there's part of that where I'm like, eh, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about all that kind of stuff. So that was a realization of something I feel like I just haven't kind of figured out how that's kind of work. So that stuck out.

Fair enough. I feel like having kids is an exercise in uncertainty around the bigger picture in the future in so many ways.

So it's really hard.

All right, cool.

Nice. All right, so how are we doing on time? 12:20. Okay, so we're moving right along. All right, so this one is actually more in detail, so I'm going to go pretty quickly on this. So basically, the second thing I started doing, and I started doing this in 2018, is if you're familiar with the EOS framework that we talk about a lot, basically I run the EOS framework for myself personally. Okay, so the EOS framework, if you don't know what it is, it's a business operating system, entrepreneurial operating system, and there are a bunch of these kind of systems that are, um, that are really useful to basically provide structure to a business to run better. So Scaling Up, um, Great Game of Business, um, and then EOS. This is just one of those many kind of things, but they all kind of have the same ideas, right? Like, figure out who you are, figure out like where you're going, figure out why you're doing it, uh, then figure out how you're going to get there, and then figure out, you know, the strategy and tactics to achieve it, and then figure out how you're going to measure that success, right? So they all kind of these same, same 6 things. So, you know, basically what I started doing in 2017, and I have these planning documents going back 7 years now, is I started to run this EOS framework for myself personally, taking— and if you, if you know EOS, you'll see it kind of looks like this, where you have a vision for yourself, and then on the front of the, of the back of the page, you have your set of goals of things that you're going to do. And basically the way the, the template works is it kind of answers those questions that I just talked to you about, like What matters to me? What do I do? Where am I going? Strategy— how do I get there? What does it look like 3 years from now? What does it look like 1 year from now? And then how do I— what am I going to do this quarter to be on track? And you can see how there's a straight line here where it's like, what am I doing this quarter that puts me on track for my 1-year goals, which puts me on track for where I'm going to be 3 years from now, which has me on track for my broader vision. Right, of where I'm going to go. So I'll pause there. I went through that pretty quickly. Again, if you want to understand all this stuff in depth, like I'm going to show you the EOS book, you can buy it. I don't make any money from it, but basically it'll walk through each one of these things and using this particular, this particular tool, it's called the VTO in EOS, and you can buy this book for like $12 and go through this in detail if you want. Same with this book by Cameron Herald that talks about this vivid vision idea. Which is kind of the two different things we just talked about in this presentation. So yeah, so Tony, I went through that pretty quickly in terms of explaining. Is there anything that I glossed over that in your mind didn't, didn't make sense or I should?

No, I think it's gonna be, it, it'll be fun to just kind of step through this and then come back around and, you know, look at how all of it fits together. Brendan in the chat is saying Traction and EOS is such a great grounding framework. Why not use it for our lives? Totally agree.

Yeah, I like it. That was, that was my conclusion. Uh, cool. So yeah, if you, if you take away this whole thing, like imagine your life is like you want to reach Mount Everest, right? And Mount Everest is this 10-year, at the top of the 10-year target. Basically you have the top of Mount Everest, you have base camp number 3, which is the 3-year picture of where you want your life to be 3 years from now, and you have base camp number 2 and base camp 1, and it goes down to this quarterly thing. And each quarter what I do is I have my 10-year goal, I have my 3-year vision for myself, I have my 1-year goals, and then my quarterly goals, um, I update every quarter. And at the end of the year I update the 1-year plan. So, so when we published this idea last year, I went through and put forth like a redacted version of my personal VTO, um, that I have for this planning. And so basically if you want to tie this together with the Vivid Vision stuff, this 10-year target here where I want to be 10 years from now, that ties into my Vivid Vision. You can a 5-year target, you can make that a 3-year target or whatever, but it basically encapsulates the ideas that were in the narrative that we did in the other tool. So, um, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through each one of these boxes just real quickly, kind of show you like what answers look like for them. Um, the one thing you'll notice is, um, starting here on the left with values, that's this one. Like, these are my personal values, um, and like You know, what you'll notice when you look at kind of the answers to things here in, in the VTO is it tends to be pretty short, right? There's not a lot of text here because you— I really spend a lot of time narrowing it down to the core things that are important. Like, I'm an optimistic guy, um, I feel like I want to be always growing and curious. Like, these are just— if you told me I'm not these things, I would be really angry, right? Those are my kind of core values of stuff. Core focus. Like, I love creating opportunity for others. Like, if you think about the fishing metaphor, it's providing the lake for other people. I love to incubate businesses and own them, uh, and make things happen, uh, and do high leverage stuff. So that's the niche that I'm in. So here you can see we're kind of going through this document here, right? Answering those questions that I told you, like, what's important to me? What do I do? Where am I going? How am I getting there? What does it look like? And how do I measure success?

Those are all the things that show up And Michael, before we go past that, I just jumping in, I feel like it can be very easy, especially if this is your first time doing it, to get caught up in what do I put here or how do I, how do I edit it down? Like, have you found that, that you can, you can kind of get stuck in the mud if you're, if you're overthinking it too much?

Yeah. Well, and I think people, to your point, expect it to be perfect in the V1. Like the first version of this is gonna be ugly and then it gets better over time. So I think that's perfectly normal. And you know, I would tell people don't expect it to be— expect it to be a living document. That's kind of the most important thing.

Got it.

So yeah, so this stuff here kind of like I wanna work on big inspiring things. These are the things that I do that are pretty unique. I have a playbook of how I operate stuff. I can work in multiple different things. I'm an omnivore and then I'm, I'm technologically, um, competent. Other people don't— can't say that. There's other technologies that I don't know anything about, like healthcare, and I don't play in those type things. So, um, and then I tend to, you know, envision stuff and incubate them and then hopefully exit some stuff, which is fun because you make money. So we're just working through this kind of left column. Um, let's see here. Core focus— I did that stuff already. Yeah, and then you end up here, like, um, in the right, right column of the sheet where we've like taken our kind of 10-year approach of where we want to be in the vision and said like, okay, what does it need to look like 3 years from now? And this is where I start talking about the different things that are important. And what I'm doing here is I'm actually going through and putting numbers and specifics next to the characteristics of what my life and business looks like 3 years from now. So like reading 20 books a year, like I don't have operating roles, like I don't have a W-2 role. I'm involved in 12 companies with significant stakes, like that kind of stuff where I'm like defining what my kind of strategy is in life and, or what my life looks like 3 years from now to be on track for my vision, which is my 10-year view. And so basically we've gone through and that's the whole front of this document, which tends to not change that much, right? You tend to use this like on a, you know, you look at it once a year, that sort of thing. Then on the back side, that's where we say, okay, we're going to achieve all that stuff that's on the front of this one-page document. These are front and back. Of one page. Then you start to edit these one-year goals, quarterly goals, and then open big questions, things that I don't know. So, so then what I did when I did this was on my document from last year. I went through and like did the one-year and the quarterly goals, right? And I wrote 3— you can write 3 to 7 SMART goals. And if you're not familiar with SMART, it's just a way of defining goals that are specific, measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. So basically it's an acronym for those things. So basically it's like, okay, I want to have this much money in the bank this year, I want to have my family optimized for, you know, potential— a family member's health recovery, launch new businesses, average weight. Like these are all things that I wanted to have as goals for the year. And then what I would do is each quarter I would set and break down what I needed to accomplish that quarter in order to be on track for the one year. And you can kind of see how this works, right? If I'm doing— if I'm on track with my quarterly goals, then I know I'm on track with my 1-year goals, and I know I'm on track with my 3-year goals, that I'm on track with where I want to be 10 years from now. Like, straight line, and those all tie together. And all I have to worry about is just updating my quarterly goals each quarter and then updating them annually to make sure I'm on track. Um, and then these were questions like my business coach helps me, like, ask me questions like, how do I know 226.5 is the right weight for me? Oh, uh, like, it's a good question. Like, how and when should I, should exit things? These are all big questions that were on my mind towards the end of 2023 when we, uh, when we published this document. So that's it. So I'll pause there. This is, um, this is a great tool. I've been doing this for years. As I go through it, I'm like, oh, this is so great. So any questions or concerns?

Well, you, you said you've been doing it for years. I'm curious, is there anything that you're doing substantially differently or emphasizing differently when you do it today versus when you started? Is it, are you finding certain sections to be more useful or helpful if you approach it in a certain way?

I think, I think it's a great question. I have evolved how much, how many goals I will sign up for. So I think at this time I was signing up for 3 to 7 and I was pushing more to 7. Um, more recently, I think when I redid it a couple weeks ago, I think I was at 5 or 6 for the year. I'm just trying to narrow down and be more focused. So maybe that just reflects life there, but I think there's a real danger, you know, as an Achiever, people tend to want to do more, right? Um, and one of the beauties of this tool, I think, is it, it doesn't let you have more than 7 goals for the year. in order to achieve what you want to achieve. Um, and so that's good, but even then, 7 is too much. Um, so you can measure, uh, this— these numbers up here are measurables that you can choose for yourself in terms of how you're going to approach the year. Me personally, I have a net worth goal that I want to reach, um, and so that's how I measure stuff. And basically I just take the net worth that's on my financial statement as the, uh, as the number there.

Oh, Michael, this also came up recently in a discussion in Scalepath. Do you find in a goal setting that it's more useful to set a more aggressive or ambitious goal at the expense of being less likely to achieve it? Or do you think it's better to set something that you feel like is more likely that you're going to say you got it done by the end?

Yeah, uh, EOS would tell you that, uh, you should be hitting 70 to 80% of these goals. So that means you're pushing pretty hard. Um, and then out of those goals, there's maybe one that you just miss entirely and another one you get pretty close on of the ones you miss. Um, so that's generally where you want to be. If you're achieving 100% of your goals each and every year, um, you know, there's two big questions that come with that. One is Um, do you do the, uh, are you actually achieving and moving the ball forward, uh, towards your kind of bigger vision? And if you, if you aren't, then that probably means your goals kind of suck. Um, then the second thing would be like, if you're not, if you're having 100% achievement, like, your goals may just be not tough enough, right? They should be a little more aspirational. You should be pushing yourself more if you want to. You don't have to. I mean, there's tons of people that don't push themselves. So, but yeah, I would say you're shooting for 70-80%.

Well, we got some more questions rolling in. So we've got the goals set. Now, Stephen's asking, what about task management? How do you turn this into ongoing kind of, you know, day-to-day task management, project management, that kind of thing?

Yeah, uh, yeah, he says like, uh, might be a good idea to share and meet with a family friend mentor and check in on your rocks with them to hold yourself accountable. Um, so me personally, Sean, like, nobody, nobody holds themselves more accountable than me, so I don't tend to need those type of things. Like, I have a whole system here where like what I actually do with these goals is, um, they show up every few weeks in my inbox, and you're not supposed to do this but I use my email inbox as a to-do list. So I'll snooze things or archive things I'm not supposed to do, but I use my email inbox as a to-do list. So I have a reminder where these goals are emailed to myself, and then they show up in my inbox once every few weeks. So that's how they— that's how I end up holding myself accountable. I have shared these things. My wife has my, you know, has seen all this stuff. My business coach has seen this stuff. My my in-person peer group that I'm part of, um, we go through our goals, which we'll go through in our January meeting here. And then my chief of staff, she has access to all this stuff, so she knows what our goals are for the year. So totally there. I think the, the short answer there, Sean, is just in terms of holding yourself accountable, you know, just some combination of systems and other people. Totally makes sense, and I'm with you there.

Do you find, uh, Mrs. G is open to the systematic way of approaching things. I feel like it could be an interesting challenge in a partnership or in a family context to processify or document these kinds of things. I think it would be a good thing in general, but I'm curious if people run into resistance.

Uh, it may be that way with other people's spouses. Like, I've screwed up some stuff in life, but like, my wife is freaking awesome. Like, she's just great. She, you know, she, she figured out what she was getting with me when we were dating. You know, she just— she's, she's the first person in the world that wants to go on a wild ride, but she doesn't want to organize it, and she doesn't want to be the person going there, right? Or she wants to be— she wants to be the person to go have those adventures, but she's happy to be part of the team. She doesn't feel the need to lead the team. And you know, with me, that's somebody who feels the opposite. So, you know, opposites attract and it works super well. I mean, other people may have spouses that aren't going to be supportive in terms of this kind of planning. I haven't seen a lot of that. Um, and I haven't had to deal with it. So that's all I know about that. If you are dealing with it, like send me a note or whatever and let me know so I can think about how to deal with it. Um, but yeah, Tony, I haven't, I haven't seen too many spouses be jackasses about it. Well, yeah.

And I guess I'm also thinking in terms of like maybe if you don't have a partner, if you basically, if you don't have another person to be accountable for too, when in the business context you have a team, you have your, you know, other folks who are going to be counting on you to, you know, follow through on what you said you were going to do. But I feel, I feel like if I'm snoozing my own goals and no one else knows what they are or no one else is going to, you know, be let down if I don't meet them, then it's very easy for me to kind of ignore them, put them off, that kind of thing. Yeah, I guess that's why we have communities.

Oh, man. I mean, I come into all of these lectures like, "Oh, we're not gonna sell that much," and you're doing an amazing job, so keep it up. Cool. All right. I don't see any other questions popping up. So further reading, these two books I would recommend. The EOS book is this one, Traction. You know, I use it in almost all my businesses to varying degrees of success. You know, it's not a panacea that solves everything, but it's excellent and I'd recommend it and read it. There's some other versions that kind of use the same ideas. Uh, Scaling Up is another one, great game of business. Just, I would look into those and figure out, um, Ryan Dyson's stuff is really good too. Um, again, I would check in on those and figure out what makes sense. So, um, and then we have the Vivid Vision book from Cameron Holland. He talks about some of the stuff which I think is good. And you can Google the Tony Robbins version of the Vivid Vision if you want. Um, let's see, Kevin asks, hey Kevin, have you ever had to reset your 10-year goals based on things that happened to you during the previous year? Absolutely. Um, so again, all of these goal settings and stuff like that, they're meant to be living documents based on how circumstances and your thinking on things change. Um, you know, if I was diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, I would most likely change my 10-year goal, right? Like, just sometimes life happens that way. So these are living documents. Your Vivid Vision and your, your VTO, the, the planner, should be changing every quarter, and you should be totally okay with using your best judgment to change them to reflect what your best thinking is at any particular time. So I've had companies using EOS change their 10-year goal 3 months after making it, and there's no reason you as a person can't do that as well. It's just a living document meant to reflect your best thinking right now.

We've got one in the Q&A as well, Michael, regarding a business vision. This is from Sam. What's a good way to create it so it can become an inclusive and collaborative exercise with others?

Was that in the chat? Am I missing something?

No, it's in the Q&A feature.

Oh, no. Oh, there's a— somebody's using the Q&A.

Yeah, yeah, we have a few.

Yeah, right on. So there's different ways to do a collaborative generation of a business vision. And if you do the EOS style, they talk about how the meetings would go. There's a whole meeting kind of set of prescriptions that you would do. In terms of offsites to kind of figure out and focus the business in the right way and figure out your shared vision for stuff, um, in the 10-year goal. Personally, the more I use Traction and see systems like OKRs, the less I think those kind of kumbaya, everybody get together and collaborate visions for stuff, um, are truly like the best way to go about it. Like, I like, you know, key leader or leaders defining what they want out of the business that reflects their life, um, and the desires of the shareholders is kind of where I lean more these days, if that makes sense. So maybe I'm going full Elon on people and being, being much more kumbaya than, than I was in the past.

So, but you could, you could go through what we just went through here in a personal context. You could go through this with your and have it be a whole exercise. Yeah, together, right, where we talk through this.

Yeah, well, the, the, the Traction stuff for sure, you know, they'll tell you their prescription is the leadership team called the L10 put together the, the whole VTO. Like, you do it together in terms of if you're doing this kind of planning system, um, for your business. Like, that's what they'll tell you to do it. I'm just saying I'm, I'm not as sold on that kind of kumbaya. Group thinking as much as I used to be, if that makes sense.

Well, I'll say as a, as a, as a member of the team at Girdley Media going through this exercise with everybody has felt very useful and helpful to me as part of the team. I started out honestly pretty skeptical of Traction, you know, like basically all business books in general. But, you know, seeing it in action has definitely been great.

Yeah, uh, we got a shout out from Sean for Atomic Habits. I like that book too. Um, Sean, I think, um, I think what's super easy— interesting about James Clear stuff is like kind of what I talked about before with Tony Robbins, like no zero, basically zero innovative ideas here. Like, and it's one of the things I've learned to appreciate a lot more, like curation and packaging and delivery. Is just as valuable as an art as creating the ideas themselves. Because what James Clear did with this that's so good is basically package it up in a way that is so accessible to so many people. He just wrote like an amazing book and then went out and talked about it for 3 years. Like, kudos to that dude. Like, and Tony Robbins is the same way. Like, Tony Robbins is just rehashing all the same ideas, um, that have been said for dozens of years just in books that were relatively unintelligible and not that inspiring. So So, um, but yeah, I love Atomic Habits. Good book. I read it in the pool once. Remember that? Hot tub.

You always remember your pool reads.

Indeed. All right, um, all right, so we haven't sold much, so I think this is where we do a little bit of selling, Tony. So this is your 45 seconds to talk about Scale Paths. If you guys like this type of stuff, if you want to be part of a peer group of other people that are doing these types of exercises, we have Scale Paths. One of our businesses— Tony, Tony runs it and he's awesome. Tony, over to you.

I appreciate that, Michael. So yeah, this is a membership community and the reason that this exists and why I think it's important is because folks who run businesses tend to have a hard time finding other people who understand the kinds of challenges they're dealing with, who, who they can confide in. And so the members of ScalePath are people who run businesses that are generating $500K or more a year. In annual gross revenue. And we are a community of folks who are helping each other and answering each other's questions and providing just a little bit of shared sense of identity that we can, we can help each other through these things. And we're doing a follow-on to this particular program. So we're gonna actually work through setting up our vivid visions, creating our concrete goals, ironing out the questions that we have as we go and keeping each other accountable. So it's, it's $199 per month, Adam. We just made a change to our, to our signup flow. So appreciate you calling it out. We also have a peer advisory group, which is the $399 a month you're seeing, but you should also see an option to sign up for the $199 a month membership level. And it's month to month, no additional fees or anything like that. Also gets you access to our resource hub with templates and playbooks and all those good things. And Michael, you will be happy to hear we got one person who filled out the application while we're here chatting.

So nice.

We're off to the races.

Well, it's— Tony's done an amazing job with the community. We've been doing it for going on 2 years now, and it hasn't been any more vibrant and engaged than what's going on right now. So I love what's happening.

And I'll also just drop my email in the chat and a link if you want to book a call with me if you want to discuss more. And we'll be kicking off this follow-on to this event next Thursday.

Nice. All right. Well, I don't see any other questions or stuff. Everybody, thanks for being here. We're going to be recording this to YouTube and we'll email it out to everybody. But hopefully these tools can be as helpful for you as they were for for my life. I feel like things really started to come together when I started to be really proactive and engaged in this type of planning. And, you know, I've had some, a lot of wins and a lot of losses in my career. And the W's started to come pretty fast once I started to do this stuff. So highly recommend it.

Just answering a quick question in the chat about membership. It's mostly people who are running existing businesses, although some people are making acquisitions and building up their holdcos. But the idea is it's people who have, who are operating businesses and have been operating their businesses for a while. And in terms of what kinds, it is all over the map. We have people doing consulting, we have people doing manufacturing, we have larger and smaller. And so what's amazing is that it's really the discussions work across many different industries. A lot of the same kinds of questions come up. So definitely feel free to reach out to me if you have more questions about that. Happy to chat.

Super cool. All right, everybody.

We get some thanks in the chat. Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, everybody, for your questions. And thank you, Michael Girdley. Great chatting with you.