The Life Operating System Everyone NEEDS!

The people who win in life are the people that go after a goal for a long period of time, like 10 years or more. And as I looked at a lot of the planning methodologies that people did to think about monthly goals or weekly goals or daily goals, none of them really were thinking long-term enough. And for me, knowing this lesson that that's what it takes to really get ahead and achieve your dreams, right? I wanted to have a system where I was going to think longer term. So this is the system I use to plan my whole life. I took an entire framework that commonly gets used for planning out small businesses, and I adapted all of that and created this own thing for myself. And so this is what it looks like. I call it the Vision Goal Organizer, and here's the front of the piece and here's the back of it. What's powerful about the system, and the one I copied this from that's called EOS, is they force you to develop a document that is just front and back, and that 8.5 by 11 piece of paper concisely defines all those important things about what you want to be as a company, all that kind of stuff. You encapsulate that all and put it into a very to-the-point document. And basically the way this works is it has you set a 10-year goal for yourself of some big ambitious thing that you want to have encapsulate your life 10 years from now. Evidently part of my vision is to have lots of coffee around. Sorry. Anyway, back to this document. It's taken me years to get it to a point where I feel like it really encapsulates what deep down in my heart I want to be doing in life and spending my days working on. So let me walk you through, uh, my 2024 and beyond plan. I've been running this same exact System since 2017. Usually this is where somebody doing a video like this tells you that it's transformed their life. It has. I highly recommend it. But look, if you don't want to do it, I don't care. So you do you. But here, let me walk you through the document. So on the left here has a couple different things, and each one of these is a box that you fill out. And so if you're familiar with company core values, that's where this starts to come in. And, and the section here is— it really is supposed to be things that define what you are as a person. For me, I wrote different stuff here, and the good test of as I write these things is they're emotional words, but then they're also things that if you told me I wasn't optimistic, I would be really insulted. Always be scaling is another one, and to me that has a bunch of meaning to it, that it's not just scaling my businesses, but it's scaling my impact and scaling myself to do more over and over again. So that answers like the who am I, what are my core values. Number 2 here, we move on to the core focus, and there's really two sections here. And the purpose, cause, and passion— and again, this is all stolen from the EOS framework, which I run in all my businesses— it's something where I think beyond a certain level of sustenance in— for each of us, we have the opportunity to do things that are bigger and more meaningful, have, have a real why about our day-to-day. And that's this, this thing, like, what is the idea that you're put on the planet to do that is bigger than yourself? So for me, you know, I— the reason I get up in the morning and what gives me the most joy is creating opportunity for others. If you know the, the idea around giving a man a fish or you give them— teach them how to fish— like, I want to create the lake that people can go fish in, stocked full of fish. That's really what I do and my why of the things I want to like create in the world. My niche, and this really describes what do I do, like if somebody had to say what is Michael's day-to-day, what category am I in, like I'm gonna— I'm a business incubator and owner. I love creating businesses and I love owning them and I love everything about that. After 49 years, I know that's the category that I to be in. This 10-year target is supposed to be one or two numbers that define what your life is going to look like 10 years from now. For me personally, like, I define it as like a net worth in terms of money. For other people, this can be a different set of numbers. You could have X amount of cash in the bank, or you could have, my 10-year target is be retired and, and never have to worry about money again. Like, those are all things that you can have as a 10-year target as you start to plan for that kind of outcome. But The forcing function here is it truly makes you slow down and think about what's really important to you. And because you can only in this section pick one number and maybe two numbers, you're pretty restricted, right? In terms of, of what your true goal is. A system like this really forces you to focus, which I love. Okay, so that's the 10-year target. Let's talk about how to get there. And that's where this strategy section comes in. And there's really three different sections that show up here. One is, is like, what is my focus, right? You know, I talked about me being a business incubator. That's what I love to do. I have a new venture checklist, which is the type of things that I want to work on as a new venture, and I'm only going to work on things that match that checklist, that set of qualities that I really want. I think you as an individual can do the same thing here, and you just say, okay, what am I going to be focused on? I want to be focused on being somebody who is going to be a great CEO. So I wrote mine here that way. And again, all this sounds really simple, but it takes like a long time. 3 uniques. So this is the idea of like, what do I do in the marketplace or in the world that's unique and nobody else could say that they all— that they do that as well. And the idea here is they're features of the things I bring to the world. So I have I have a playbook, which is all these systems that I've learned over time to run businesses really well and standardize them. I can get involved in all different types of businesses. So I mention myself as a business type on omnivore, and I have a tech background which a lot of other people don't. My process is where you define what I do all the time, and that could be different for who you are, but I envision companies, I start them, I automate them, I help them, I supervise them, and then cash flow them or exit them over time. These are all things that can be defined specifically for you, but it's just like, okay, at the core, what do you do to create value in in the world. And that's this idea of the proven process. And this is where things get really interesting. So we've talked about the 10-year target, and then it moves on to this 3-year picture. Basically what you do in the 3-year picture is you pick a date 3 years from now. And because I'm doing annual planning on a calendar year, it starts in January of each year and it ends in December at the end of the year. And because I'm measuring my personal vision in terms of what I want my net worth to be— your number may be different that you're pursuing— I can start to talk about my net worth and my profit. And then I can also start to talk about things that are quantifiable quantifiable versions or quantifiable measurements of what I think a good life would be for me. So, you know, I own multiple businesses. So 3 years from now, I plan to own 12 businesses. I own, I think it depends on how you count it, 11, 10 or 11 right now. How many date nights I'm having per week, per month, uh, with my wife. Cuz part of that is a measurement, I think, of how healthy our life is. Uh, and then how much time I'm not working. So I have a number that I wanna have 5 vacation weeks a year, um, 3 years from now. And then things get super interesting here because the vision of what you want your life to be 3 years from now, it starts to get much more vivid, right? You start to be able to go through and quantify what your life looks like business-wise, professionally, and also personally. And you start to detail those in this next section. And so you write things like, um, how much staff do you have? Do I have a job? Um, I don't want a W-2 job. That's for— it's a great life for other people. It's not the right thing for me. I don't have any operating roles in any of my businesses. I'm on, I'm on boards and stuff like that. My kids are happy. I have how many in my family, what my weight is. These are all things that I can start to quantify. And the thing you'll see here that's really interesting is this quantification is all, uh, all numbers, right? Every one of these things I try to quantify as best I can. Some of them it's obviously impossible, like happy kids. Okay, like what's— what is happiness? I can't do like happiness measurement with my kids, but I can decide how much I want to weigh. And I've decided, uh, the best proxy for me is my level of thinness for my health. I tend to eat very healthy anyway, so I just eat too much of it. So I can do that kind of thing and quantify those numbers here. The 3-year target is in theory supposed to be the thing that has me on track to achieve my 10-year target, right? I'm building businesses or however I'm doing it. And so you can start to see how the line gets drawn, right? And that's where we move on to the back side of this page, which is we know our 10-year target, we know our 3-year target, we move into this 1-year set of goals. And what's powerful here under the EOS system or this planning system in general, I can't have too many goals. I have to pick what's really going to move the ball forward. And that is one of the insights of life that I think is really important. I see a lot of people do these planning processes and they come out with like 25 goals. And really, when you look at those sets of goals, there's 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, maybe 7 that are the ones that truly move the ball forward. And that's the insight here. You have to decide what you're truly going to focus on and make that stuff happen. So the one-year plan is a set of goals designed to identify things I need to do this year to be on track for my 3-year plan of where I want to be in 3 years. And the 3-year plan, of course, ties to the 10-year. So at the end of this year, 12/31/2024, I should hopefully have a net worth of redacted. I remove that because that's none of your business. No offense. How many businesses I own, how many date nights we have during the year, and how many vacation weeks we have, right? Then it turns into, okay, like, let's start to manage out what I need to do this year to be on track for that. And these are different things that I have here. There's You know, there's some family stuff. My family is optimized for one family member's recovery health-wise. I want to launch new businesses. I want to weigh a certain amount. I want to measure my extracurriculars as well. There's stuff here about Spanish, and then there's some stuff I deleted. I can't put it on a video. I'm so sorry. But, but you kind of get the idea of how all that works. And I actually have these 6 goals for the year of how I want to be set up. And then that transitions into the next step, which is the quarterly goals. And I write those in terms of a very special methodology, which is a goal-setting methodology of how you do goals well, and they're called SMART goals. So SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, right? And any goal that doesn't have those 5 characteristics is not a valid goal because you can't measure it, or it's maybe not relevant to what you're doing. Causes you to create goals that are just not useful. And so you can see how a lot of these things tie back into the annual goal. So here's like the Spanish one, right? I know if I want to have B2 Spanish proficiency, B, which is like upper intermediate by the end of the year, then I need to restart my Spanish lessons. Incubating companies, I do it through this associate model. So like I would need to hire them and get them going in order to achieve this annual goal here of launching some new businesses this year. So, and you can see how these are SMART goals. There's another one that's removed here. Sorry, private stuff. But the idea being that I have these quarterly goals and the quarterly goals get updated every quarter based on my progress, and they put me on track for these one-year goals. And that keeps me on track for the long-term vision that I have. And then there's this last column, which I think is really cool, which is a parking lot for big questions about how do I, or how do you, if you're running the system, identify and track like those big meaty things in life that you need to have and figure out. And so, and so that's it. So it all ties back together. In practice, to build a document like this, I actually like to go away. Up until this year, I would go away almost every December and do kind of a think couple of days, like Think Week. Where I would be spending time, you know, alone and really try to think deeply about all aspects of this and narrow it down to precisely what was going to make me happy. And that proved to be an awesome habit. So this is what works for me. Hope it maybe works for you. I have a number of friends that I've told this about and they use this exact system. But if you're somebody that wants to think and plan for the long term, this is the best system I've run across and I hope you enjoy it.