2020 Goals and Actions

Hello, Book Thinkers family! It's 2020. How crazy is that? In today's video, I'm going to talk a little bit about reflections on 2019, but most of the video is going to talk about 2020. What are my goals? What am I going to do to accomplish them? And I'll kind of talk a little bit about how I set this kind of stuff up for everybody. Maybe I'll give you an idea or two. So this binder right here, I call it 2020 Success Buddies, which is an accountability group that I belong to. Goals and actions, and within this binder I've typed out 2019 reflections. That's how it kicks off. I can go back and review this at any time throughout the year. I can also go back and review this five, ten, or twenty years from now, which will be a lot of fun to do in the future. So 2019 yearly reflections: I've journaled about different categories in my life—the goals that I had. Did I hit them? Did I not hit them? Why did I hit them? Why didn't I hit them? What could I have done better? As well as where I currently stand now that it's 2020, as far as. Health, wealth, love, friends, family, relationship, happiness, fulfillment, travel, and other areas of my life. So that's kind of what I did for 2019. It's a very fun practice to go back and reflect on pretty much everything. And just as a checkpoint, I'm at the best spot I've ever been in every one of those categories, and I owe most of that to these books behind me, as well as taking action on the things that I'm learning from all of these brilliant people. So that's awesome. Now going into 2020, I've set up 10 goals for myself. So I've listed the goals here in my binder, but then moving forward, I've expanded on those goals, and it'll be fun to go back and reread the expectations that I was setting for myself for 2020. The question that you need to ask, or at least that I'm asking and that I would recommend that you ask yourself, is are the things that you're looking to do in 2020 aligned with Where you want to be in 5 years, in 10 years, in 20 years? Are they aligned with who you want to be in 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years? If they're not, you're doing yourself a disservice. If they are, pat yourself on the back and see if you can even challenge yourself more. What I'm going to do now is talk a little bit about my 2020 goals. I would talk about 2019, but moving forward, I'll be able to reflect on this video in the future and it'll be a little bit more structured. So for 2020, I have 10 goals, and I'll dive into each one of them for you. The first goal is to read 60 books. Now, in 2019, I finished about 74, and for the first couple months of 2019, I didn't really read that much because I was traveling so much for over a month at a time, and I didn't get a lot of reading done. I still finished with 74, but what I'd like to do for 2020 is back that up a little bit. I'd like to slow down my pace. I've realized after reading hundreds of personal development books over the last 5 years that there's a subset of those books, probably about 20% of them, that have led to 80% of the success and new developments and discoveries that I've made over the last couple years. I want to refresh the fundamentals, flex those neural pathways again, strengthen my relationship with those books, reread them, and talk about them with the Book Thinkers family and community and Instagram and everything like that. I'm going to read— probably reread 30 of those books this year. The other 30 are going to be TBD. There'll be paid book sponsorships and reviews. There'll be books that come out that are exciting and trending that I want to jump on top of, or just general books that I want to check off my list that I've heard good things about and I haven't read yet. Very excited about that goal. The second goal on my list is to visit 5 new countries. In 2019, I did visit 5 new countries, and I had such an amazing experience. I already have a bunch of that planned out, and I'm really excited to execute on those in the first half of the year. And then my third goal here is to solo travel to another country. In 2019, I did 5 weeks by myself in Argentina. It was a brilliant experience. I would highly recommend solo travel to everybody. It's a very different experience than going somewhere with somebody that you can lean on, because embracing discomfort by yourself is, I don't know, one of the best experiences in the world. So I can't wait for that. Goal number 4 here is to invest in 2 new multifamily rental properties. I think diversifying your investment portfolio is very important. I've read a heck of a lot of books about this subject, and I executed on my first deal with some friends in 2019. I want to build on that. I want to double my pace. I'd like to get 2 new investments in my portfolio this year. So that would be a total of 3. That'd be super exciting. Number 5 here is to pay off my government college student loan debt. And that sum, I'll kind of keep that to myself here and my close friends, but it's very doable and I'd like to eliminate that. I'd like to get that off my plate. It was a 10-year loan. I'll kind of finish it off in less than 5 years, so I'm really excited. The next goal is to build an emergency fund that cannot be used for anything else. I've built emergency funds for myself in the past, but I always seem to dip into them for investment purposes or for travel or fun or whatever the experience might be. I dip into that savings account. I'd like to build up enough money that I can set aside in a high-yield savings account or money market account or something and not touch it, not touch it unless I absolutely need to, unless there's a legitimate emergency, and that'll provide me more comfort. It'll provide me the opportunity to hedge against future stresses and stuff like that, allow me to be a little bit more risky with the rest of my money. So I'm excited for that one. Then I'd like to meditate for 100 days straight. This is a little bit more of a vanity metric. I've been meditating for 5 years, but I've never meditated for 100 days in a row. I got up to 82 in 2019, and then I failed because of some travel and craziness. But I'm not going to fail this year. Maybe I'll meditate 365 days straight. Who knows? The next is to squat, back squat, 365 pounds. This is a goal that is very achievable for me. You know, I'm about 330 right now, but you know, and I want to continue to grow in the gym and to experience new personal records and things like that, PRs. But the gym is not where I'm primarily focused, so I don't want to go crazy. I could probably, if I dedicated myself, go over 400. But that's not the goal. The goal is to grow over the next 5 or 10 years in the gym, not necessarily go crazy for the next year and then plateau or whatever the case may be. After that, I would like to finalize a book proposal and outline, submit it to a publisher or get a literary agent. I'd like to outline my first book. Essentially, that's the first step in the process, and I know exactly what I want to write. I know how I want to write it, and all of it's kind of up here, but I need to take actual action on that. I need to take very specific action that can be measured against so that my friends can hold me accountable, so that everybody here can hold me accountable, and so that I can achieve in 2021 publishing my first book. That'll be a lot of fun. Then the 10th goal here that I have for myself in 2020 is to successfully launch the Book Thinkers mobile application. So if you've made it this far in the video, you're probably one of just a few people that are going to hear about this right now, but I'm going to talk a lot of— a lot about it in the future, especially in the next few months. So shh, if you're watching this, keep it to yourself. But I'm going to be launching a mobile application, and it's going to be a huge focus of mine, kind of the thing that I'm the most excited about. In my life, there are certain ways that I make money, but none of those are necessarily on a path that could lead me to where I want to be in 5, 10, or 20 years. That's just the transparent truth. So I need to take some bigger risks. I need to be an entrepreneur. I need to create this wealth for myself as a side hustle. Eventually, years and years and years from now, it could become a full-time hustle. But for the time being, I need to take steps in that direction. I need to build momentum, and I need to find a way for myself to produce additional income. It's in the works. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I have a partner at Book Thinkers now, and like I said, if you're If you're this far in the video, you're probably one of just a few people or a couple hundred people that'll actually make it this far. That's my guess anyway, so keep that a secret. And then I also define goals that I'd like to accomplish within the first few months— 12-week year, really the first 13 weeks of 2020— and those are to finish 15 books to be on pace, to pay off X amount of that college debt, as well as to land X amount of book review deals for Book Thinkers. I would highly recommend printing all this stuff out, journaling it, putting it in a binder like this to keep for yourself. And then you can accumulate these every 3 months. You could do an update. How are you doing on your goals? Set some new 12-week year goals for yourself. And then 20 years from now, you'll have an entire binder of how you became successful. It can be replicated by other people. You can find what works, what doesn't work, and it's such a fun experience. Comment below with some of your 2020 goals if you feel like you'd like to do that. I'd love to experience more of what people are trying to accomplish. It's so motivating to me to be able to share my goals with you and for you to share them with me. With that, let's all crush 2020. Go read some books and have a great day. Bye. Bye.