Replay: Thrive in 2025 - Working Backwards with Noelle

So welcome everyone. So excited to see you today. Thank you for being here. This is going to be so much fun. I am excited about it because I get to share with you something that I personally am a big, big fan of. So this is Thriving in 2025: How to Launch Your Year Intentionally. I will be using a process I learned. Oh, I don't know. 10 years ago, almost 11 years ago, uh, at Amazon. It was one of— it wasn't a leadership principle, but it kind of pulled all the leadership principles together. And it is the way we launch products. It is still, I think, done to this day, though, to be fair, I have evolved it quite a bit, uh, since I left there. Um, and I— but it's 100% worked for me. And so I wanna share those lessons I learned with you. This is something that I encourage you to do as well, kind of Document your process as you go along the way. It's really very interesting when to, to look at how you do things right now and realize there are people just a chapter behind you desperate for some help and support, and you don't really realize how helpful you could be by just sharing what you do. And so that's what my attempt is today. I hope it will be beneficial to you all. So thank you all for being here. Amazing. Yes, feel free to throw your LinkedIn into the chat. This will give you a chance to connect. It's one of the things we love to do inside the AI Leadership Institute and the I Love AI community. Both of those links will be in the chat throughout the session. You are welcome to join us. The difference between the two is that we are here to do, you know, obviously we're gonna be doing some planning over the next hour. But it's— I don't— there's a saying, I always mess up these sayings. Y'all know that, know me. But I'm gonna try and get it right. But like, if you wanna go, Far go alone, faster go together. Anyway, if you wanna go far and fast, it's better to go with people. And so I created the I Love AI community just so that we'd all be able to get together and learn together. AI is fast moving, fast paced, but there's also some tried and true experience that I have gained and many of our members have gained that we share with each other along the way. So we encourage you to be part of that. But for those of you who wanna actually put your fingers on a keyboard, become a doer, not just a talker, and actually get real experience and get certified by the AI Leadership Institute, there is a membership. And right now there is a discount going on. So those links will be available in the chat later on. You're welcome to join us. This is not a sales pitch. It's simply an invitation that if being part of a community, being with people that'll help hold you accountable for your year is helpful to you. We'd love to be that for you. And there are many, many members of both communities, the I Love AI community and the AI Leadership Institute, right here in this session. And this session will be available on demand. So if you are listening to this on replay, let us know. Type in replay. If you're live, which means all y'all people, just hashtag live. Just write hashtag live in the comments so people can see how many people are actually here live. Sometimes people wonder, are you actually live? Are you doing this like, you know, in the middle of the night sometimes? And I'm like, no, no, we're live, right? Look at us. We're all live. Hey, Sky, good to see you. William's in the house. Good to see you all. Yeah, we're live. So this is gonna be great. All right. So what I've decided to do, I think the very first thing, I have a bit of a plan for today. I'm gonna teach you the process of working backwards that I use at, that I used at Amazon to launch multiple products to production. But I also use it now every single year to set up my year. I actually do this process in October, but believe it or not, when I try to do this in October, very few people are willing to think about what, what the next year looks like in October. But it is a bit of a flex if you can do that. This year I will do, I will host a session in October. I hope you'll join us. Um, but if not, the next best time to do it well is at the beginning of the year. And that's what we're doing. Many of us are back in the office for the first time, uh, maybe, or some of us maybe came a little early like myself last week. Uh, but this is the beginning. Of the best year of your life. And you might not believe me yet, but if you follow the things that we are about to talk about, you're going to handcraft your success. And it is a science. It's not an art. It's not a wish. It is a science. And if you set your goal, build a plan to work backwards from the goal, and most importantly, actually do the things that you set out to do, this is going to be the year you do more than you ever thought was possible. It has happened to me many, many times, many years. Uh, let's see, 5 years, not out of like of my whole life, in the last maybe 10 years, 5 of those years I have doubled my income. 2 of those years I 10xed my income, like did 10 times more. And I, again, the first time I was like, okay, this is interesting. I've never gotten a 7-figure check in a 3-month timeframe before. That's never happened. I created a. A goal for myself that I wanted to make back in the day. I wanted to make just $100 grand in a year. So for those of you who are in that moment where you're like, man, I'd love to make $100 grand, like we are about to set a plan to do that. But once I hit $100 grand in a year, I was like, ooh, can I do $100 grand in a quarter? And I set a plan and I did that. And then I did it a few times and I was like, all right, I got this down. Then I was like, can I do $100 grand in a month? And that was last year. I was like, I wanna do $100 grand in a month. And I was like, and I, I, again, I built a plan and I worked backwards. And I, many of you know, last year I worked my butt off, but for a good cause, right? I wanted to be able to do things for my family that I could not do any other way. And then now my current goal is to do that in a, in a week. I wanna make $100 grand in a week. And actually last year I made my first $100K week, but I didn't do it intentionally. So This year I'm doing— it was an accident, like accidentally fell into opportunities that lined up in a single week. So this year I'm doing it on purpose. And most importantly, I'm going to have my first $100,000 day. And that is fun. Like, just thinking about what— think about what it would feel like to make $100 grand in a day. Like, it creates extreme energy for me. I don't know about you, but I'm like, that changes lives. Not just my life, my family's life, the lives of people that I get to talk to and communicate with, people I can inspire, people who don't think that their future is possible. You become an inspiration just by delivering on the promise you make to yourself and then being willing to talk about it. And that's exactly what I'm gonna be sharing with you all here. So, so excited for this year. I'm excited for you all, and I hope that you'll join us in the community and share your wins along the way. So the first thing that is critical to your success and is pr— it, it precedes the concept of, of working backwards, the very first thing you need to do is value your own time. So I'm not going to have us do this because it's a bit of a mathematical equation. I actually have a calculator that I built that I'm going to send to you all who registered for this. And it's not too late to register. You can always go in and register. If you're here, you registered. But if you're listening to this live and you're like, wait, I want to get these cool resources, you could always go to the LinkedIn event or just ping me or my my associate, Sherlyn, you could ping her and we'll send you the link to register and that'll just put you on the list to get all the resources and to hold you accountable. So every month we'll send you just a little tiny reminder to be like, hey, how's it going? And hopefully encourage you to keep going. So the very first thing though is to really understand the value of your time. What is it? What, what does 1 hour mean to you? What does 1 minute mean to you now? I don't just mean mean to you, but what financially does it mean? Now, this requires you to set a goal for your year, a financial goal. Now, no matter what you think about setting financial goals, whether you're like, I don't want to put a number on it, it's more about how I feel. I'm a big believer that having financial stability is an avenue to getting all the other things that I want, right? Like, if I want to be a better parent, if I want to be a better spouse, if I wanna be a better caretaker for my dad, like I have to be in a good financial place in order to allow my dad to live with me and take care of everything that he needs to invite my family to visit for the holidays, to pay, you know, my parents' mortgages to whatever my goal is. It, uh, much of it stems in my ability to actually generate revenue and create income for my family. So that being said, I need to understand the value of my time and how much What, what is my goal for 2025? Now, I think it's important for you to just maybe just look at how much you make in a year. I'm going to very roughly just say, let's say our goal this year is $200K. That's not personally my goal, but just, just to keep things simple. If you set a goal for $200K, what I want you to do is work, and you can actually type this into an AI system like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, and you could just say, hey, if I make $200K a year, and I work 8 hours a day, which anyway, you could just use it as an estimate. How much is my time worth by the week, the day, the hour, and the minute? And here's what I want you to do once you do that. And again, I'm gonna give you, uh, as we— when I send this as a summary, you'll get an equation that you can use. You'll get the prompt I use in ChatGPT, but you'll also get a calculator that's embedded on my website that you can use to just calculate what your time is worth. Super valuable. It's the most valuable, most important thing. Then you are going to take a Post-it, and you're going to put not the hour, the minute. How much is each minute worth to you? And you're going to paste it, like, put it— I have so many little Post-its on my, on my display. I got a larger display to accommodate them, actually. And you're going to put it right on your either your laptop on the corner or somewhere where you'll see it while you're working. And what this will do is it will start to generate huge levels of self-awareness on how much time you're spending doing certain things. And then I'm going to encourage you to actually calculate in a meeting how much money you're spending. I do this when I run meetings for organizations. And actually I was working with Bryce, I think he's on the call. He was, he was saying, I love this. I'm totally gonna adopt it. He doesn't call these sessions he works with people, he doesn't call them meetings, he calls them workshops because the whole point is to actually do work. And I love that concept. But when you're meeting or working with someone, it's really important that you have a personal sense of how valuable your time is in that meeting and how many, like by the minute, how much money you are spending. Because that, that amount, whatever it is, right, you can use that money in any way you want. You can use that to get more customers. You can use it to drive your brand. And you're going to, as we go through this working backwards process, you're going to want to figure out where to spend your time. And when you become focused, hyperfocused even on the value of your time, you'll realize how well, how much money you end up spending on scrolling on social media or even researching something, right? If you spend over-index on researching a topic before implementing the thing, you'll realize you've now invested a lot of money in something you you don't even know if it's gonna work out or if it's gonna be something you can leverage. It allows you just to create a lot more self-awareness on how you're spending your time. As a result of that, I encourage you to actually track your time every single day. I do this in my Remarkable. I have a Remarkable Pro now. Yay. Um, so that means I can work in the dark, which is awesome. Um, but it allows me every single day to plan out my day from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed. It doesn't mean I have meetings or that I'm Working in a specific area every day, it means every moment of my day is allocated, is identified. It might be to work out, it might be to spend time with family, it might be to go on date night, but it's all identified and allocated. And the benefit of that allocation is that I can look at my day every day and say, am I doing things that work towards the goal I set for myself? And that discipline of every day making sure that something on your calendar, maybe more than one thing on your calendar, is moving you in the direction of the goals we're gonna set today, that is how you get there is little things every day, maybe even big things every day, but little things every single day. Consistency is how you get success. AI Leadership Institute last year saw its biggest year ever. Yay. But it is 10 years in the making. The first 3 years, nobody even considered AI and leadership as a thing that you would do. Why do you need AI and leadership together? Today I have more customers and clients and prospects than I can kind of manage. But, but back then I was like, it was a ghost town, but I was consistent. And many of you know, you could go back and look at my YouTube channel and my TikToks. And over the years I've been very consistent. I say the same things over and over again, but I'm consistent about it so that now the world has caught up and said, oh, this thing, Noelle, you've been doing for 10 years, like, hey, it looks like we all wanna do that. Yay. Now I can lean on all of that practice. And show up in a whole new way in a world that's ready to hear what I have to say. But that only became because I didn't just start it and go, well, nobody's listening to me. Nobody read my blog posts, so I'm not gonna do this anymore. I stayed consistently pushing towards targets that I set for myself. So the working backwards process, I might even have created a slide deck for myself. Let me see. The working backwards process, um, I love this process because it allows me to see very clearly the future. Now, I'm a creative, a visionary, so I, I love this part. It might be hard for some of you who are much more pragmatic and practical, tactical. Many of us have been trained to be very tactical because our organizations are geared on selling in a certain amount in a certain month or a quarter. Right, as opposed to longer-term success. Something I'm off— I always, well, often think about is this phrase that you will overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in 5. And that has been 100% true for me. I overestimate. I always, like, in 2014, I was like, I'm going to do this, this, and that. Granted, I did a lot that year. I built over 100 applications for Alexa that year in my enthusiasm for the platform and in realizing that this was going to be big one day. I'm like, I'm building as much as I'm in a big, I'm gonna create as big of a footprint as I can. But I set my goal much, much higher. Like I was like, I wanna build, you know, 50% of the skills on Alexa. I built 10%, which is still good, but not, not my goal. But I overestimated how much work I would be able to achieve. However, in 5 years, I underestimated how much I got done. Like I never thought I would be able to. Claim all the things, work with all the clients, uh, communicate to all of the customers, be on the stages that I was on. Like, the evolution I never expected. Today is the same thing. Like, I, I've now seen success that I definitely, you know, didn't— am I saying that right? Maybe I got them mixed up. But anyway, I underestimated who I could be today 5 years ago. And that is what I battle every single day is how do I try to set goals for myself that will reach not just who I will be in 2025, but my longer-term strategy for who I want to be as a human, as a professional, as an entrepreneur indefinitely. So this, let me go in here. There we go. I'm hoping this will work. I think it will. Let's see what happens. Alrighty, let's see. Alright, so I'm going to pull up this slide deck I created as an artifact in Claude. I do slide decks this way all the time. I share this with you hopefully to make it helpful to you. I don't have time to be in certain types of deck creation tools. So instead, I prefer personally to just create artifacts and ask, you know, an AI system to complement me in this. Let's see if it works out. Oh, it looks good. All right, so I'm going to share my screen and walk you through this process. All right. Awesome. Oh, what? Bill Gates said that too? Good. Awesome. I might have read it from Bill Gates. Um, awesome. Oh, thanks for the comments. Yes, I'm, I'm loving it too. Yes, me too, April. Yes. Um, I'm so excited that y'all are here with me. Okay, so let me think here. It's not giving me a great— I'm just gonna share this and see if it's sharing the right thing. It looks black to me. All right, hold on, that was not the right screen. Let me try the— oh, there it is, I found it. Share. There we go. Oh, share. Oh, I see I'm missing the button. All right, I got it, I got it. We'll edit that in post. I never edit anything in post. Um, okay, here we go. So I have to— I'm gonna try and, uh, glance at it over here even though you all are over here, um, and keep the chat up. Also, this is a webinar, so if you have Q&A as as it pops up, if you have Q&A, I'm gonna encourage you to drop that into the Q&A section only because the— oh, is there a Q&A section? I think there is. Yeah. So if you have a question, drop it in the Q&A just so I capture it. Otherwise, if it's in the chat, it gets lost and it's really hard for me to catch up. So I'm gonna encourage that as we go through, especially because we're gonna spend the last, you know, 20, 30 minutes taking questions and just talking about this in practice. OK, so I think y'all see it. I'm going to minimize that. There we go. Let me know in the chat if you can see Planning Your 2025, my cool little Claude artifact. All right, I see it already. Thank you all. I love having— yes, thank you. Awesome. All right, cool. What? Javier's in the house too. Javier, so cool to have you here. All right, so let's get this party started. All right, so working backwards, this process I love it because it generates enthusiasm. And if all of— I don't know how many of you know me very well, but I'm a pretty enthusiastic person in general. It is a choice that I make to be enthusiastic. I like it. I like the vibe I get. I like the vibe I feel. I like the vibe I permeate. I am very much a fan of enthusiasm. When I was a kid, I learned a word called zeal or zealousness, and I even created a magazine, a kids magazine when I was in my 20s called Faith and zeal. Um, and there were two little kids, uh, and it turned out I actually have those two little kids now, a little brown, like a kid who looked like me, a brown kid and a blonde hair, blue-eyed kid. And I actually ended up having a boy who was brown like me and a girl who has blonde hair. Anyways, fascinating stuff. Um, but zeal is such a beautiful leadership principle. However, it has to be tempered with wisdom. And so that is how I've been able to harness success. I've not always been successful. I've actually had extreme struggles, like maybe, you know, the bigger they are, the harder they fall kind of things. Like, but I've had extreme struggles, but in these struggles I have realized that it often is because I let my zealousness, my enthusiasm kind of get ahead, over my skis, people would say, uh, ahead of my ability to practically be able to do the things that I wanna do. And this process working backwards has given me the tool that I can use to actually be as enthusiastic and excited as I want to be, but at the same time, be able to ground it in the truth of execution. And I don't— some of you know I have a book coming out with Wiley, my publisher. I'm so excited. They picked up the book last year called Scaling Responsible AI: From Enthusiasm to Execution. And it is— not necessarily exactly what we're gonna talk about today, but it's based on the same identity, the identification that in order to implement good technology, you need a plan. And that plan, you need to be bought in at the highest level. And today, that highest level, well, it's you. You have to be bought into your success in 2025. That is the number one thing. I think it'll be really cool for you to do the time value exercise and figure out how much money your minutes are worth and then hyperfocus those minutes on activities that will drive your success towards the end of the year. So let's take a look at it. There, the Amazon way. I don't know, anyone here worked for Amazon? Throw one in the chat if you've like worked for Amazon before. We might have a few people. Amazon tends to pick us up and chew us out. Oh, awesome. Thanks, Marian, that you got the book. Okay, great. So, oh no. Okay, cool. Loops are good. Yeah. Or I could even ask if you made it through a loop because that's their own thing. One of the people, I don't know if he's on the call, but one of the people that I've worked with very closely, and he's now going to be joining our team at the AI Leadership Institute. He was a bar raiser, which is somebody who does interviews and, you know, masterfully brings people into the organization. But there is a different way of thinking, and this behavioral like analysis that they're doing when you're interviewing at Amazon and to say, do you think like us? Not necessarily are you functionally capable though? Yes, be functionally capable, but really do you think in an Amazonian way? And there are 14 leadership principles that codify that process, that thought process. And I, here's how I knew I would do well at Amazon is because when I looked at them, I'm like, I think like that right now. And I'd encourage you to do that with every job, right? Go look at their leadership principles, their core values, and unless you're already like, That's me. Oh my gosh, I belong there. Unless you think that way, like it will over time become a struggle if your core values are not aligned. And even over time, the core values might separate. But, but in the beginning, it's a great way to start. So these principles, I mean, I live and breathe them long after I left Amazon because I was breathing and living them long before I got there. And so that's why I feel pretty confident in sharing this with you. But most of the time, traditionally, people start with where they are right now, right? And they'll list out, here's all the things I wanna do. New Year's resolutions. Some of us have, I think Michelle, right? You were anti-resolution this year. We're like, no, no, no, I'm not doing that. That's not working for me. But that's usually what people do. Here's what I wanna do. Let me make a list of things I'll do to get there. And then I hope it works out. And the number one reason why people fail is because they don't have a plan. To actually get to that success and see meaningful outcomes along the way. This is what I do with my clients, is that I show them immediate outcomes along the way. There was a time in software, in the world of software, when I would sell software and then go deliver it, that I could sell them an idea and not have to deliver that outcome, that vision for years. And by the time I delivered what I told them, it looked different, but it didn't matter cuz they couldn't remember the original vision anyway. There was such a disconnect between the the sell— selling of the idea and the delivery of the outcome that, I mean, that was software. Like, we would deliver broken stuff and we'd say, oh, it doesn't matter, we'll fix it later. I mean, it was— it's just a crazy model. The world of AI has forced us— no, I won't say that. It's forced me anyway. It's encouraged me to be who I've always wanted to be, which means I get to now do something, see immediate direct response from that doing, and then build on that success incrementally. In an agile way. If any of you are familiar, last year I spoke at an event called Scaled Agile. Um, and I was like, oh my gosh, just like at Amazon. I'm like, oh my gosh, I think just like you guys, just like you all. I love it. Uh, and being a scaled agile architect or thinking in this way of setting milestones, creating a process, that's exactly what we're doing now, except instead of doing it for your client, for your employer, you're gonna do it for you. And I wanna invite you all to consider this, that you are all in, in a business. You all have a company and that company is you, you LLC, Noelle Inc, right? Like you are your own business. Everything you offer, right? You are selling every day. Your, what you do, what the services you offer, the value you can create, whether you're gonna be an employee, whether you're gonna be an entrepreneur, it doesn't really matter. An entrepreneur, entrepreneur. Doesn't matter. The idea though is that it's you that you are building and that your business, investing in your business, and most importantly, setting targets for your own success is going to be key to actually achieving those results. So Working Backwards is done a little bit differently or a lot differently, uh, depending on your comfort level with this. But first thing you're gonna do is define success as clearly as possible. You're gonna define what is success to you. We're going to scope that to 2025. The number one question, We're going to ask, and I want you to think about it right now. And if somebody wants to, someone's usually really good at this, at like taking this, that what I'm about to say and writing it in the chat for me. But the question, right, is what's the most important thing that will need to have happened in 2025 for you to have called the year a success? And it doesn't matter what it is. It could be getting your first 5 customers. It could be getting your first 100 customers. It could be, uh, locking in a, a job at a company that you love and are aligned with. It could be Being a better parent, whatever it is. But at the end of 2025, when we are ringing in the new year for 2026, what do you wanna look back on and go, I did that. That is it. What is the one thing that you want to have accomplished? It's okay not to have the answer right now. Think about it. Use what I've learned in this book called The Artist's Way. Use morning pages every morning. Think about that question and just free, freehand. Like, what do they call it? Freeform? No. Uh, I can't remember, but it's like you just journal about that idea. Keep writing and writing and writing 3 pages a day until you realize what you wanna do. And it does come, right? You have to have a little faith, but it does come. It's like free form. I can't remember what that phrase is in journaling, but free association maybe. Yeah, a brain dump. Exactly. So just like think about the question, uh, and again, in this case, what do I wanna do in 2025? What at the— and, and I do this in consulting as well. For those of you running a business, the number one question you can ask your client is, at the end of this year, what will it take for you to think that this investment in our relationship was worthwhile to you? What's, what's the one thing or the five things that need to have happened? I like one thing. What's the one thing that if I do it, I will be extremely satisfied with how I spent the year? That becomes your vision, whatever that is. So for me, let's say it's become a bestselling author, right? I have a book launching this year. It could happen. It's with Wiley. They've made many bestselling authors, and I don't mean bestselling on like Amazon, which I don't know if you know this, you can like pay to play. I mean, you can pay to play all of them, but that one, I could just buy the books and have a garage full of books and call myself a bestseller. I mean, like people actually want to buy what I have shared. Right. And that, and then I end up being on, like, there's a bunch of things that will come out of that. But the vision is I wanna be a bestselling author and top paid speaker, right? Like that, that whole, that is who I wanna be. It, it isn't entirely, but I'm just gonna use that for reference. That becomes the vision that I wanna have, and we're gonna work backwards from that. So whatever your vision is, you wanna have a certain, a business at a certain level of income, you wanna have a job at a certain salary, whatever it is. We're gonna work backwards from that, and there is a very distinct plan, quarter by quarter, month by month, week by week, day by day, that you can use to work towards those goals. And for those of you who feel so called and, and are vulnerable enough to share, it is extremely powerful when you share these ideas with people. So if you choose to, and you're somewhat in a private space in this webinar, no one can see the chat except people who have committed to being here ahead of time. If you want to share what that vision is for yourself, and you can synopsize it, you can throw it right into the chat. If you don't, I will tell you one thing I learned as a kid. I read a book by a guy named Charles Fillmore, and he was talking about producing results and prosperity. And he said sometimes when you have a vision for yourself, it's like a pot that's boiling. I don't— I just last night made rice, so I'm going to use that reference. But it's like a pot that's boiling and you put the COVID on it. And as it boils, if you take the COVID off, what happens when you like a boiling rice and it's about to boil and you take the COVID off? The energy dissipates. The heat that was being built up to help the water boil actually dissipates. And so sometimes you might be in that moment where you're like, I don't necessarily want to share it with the world because the pot's just starting to boil and you want to keep that energy contained. And that's totally fine. I like, I share my ideas, so that's completely up to you. But if you are wanting to share your ideas and share your goal and be held accountable, like, this is a great opportunity for you to share that. And it's, and it's inspiring to some people to know they're not alone in their journey to try and do a thing. So let's go ahead and take a look at how we're going to map out this plan. So the process, and so this is the, the first step of this process, and I'm not going to give you all this time. This is a workshop that I typically do in 4 hours for clients. So you can see the piece, but this is the statement that you want to create. This is the headline of a document that we're going to write. So the Working Backwards process starts with a document known as a PR FAQ document. And a PR FAQ is a press release plus frequently asked questions. So imagine, if you will, that at the end of 2025, a press release is going to launch saying, Noelle Russell, Bestselling author, top-rated keynote speaker finally makes her debut on Good Morning America. Whatever. I just made it up, right? But this is the, like, what is Noelle achieves major milestone in her transformative 2025 journey. You can of course adjust this. You can use ChatGPT to help you with it, but this is the headline that you're gonna have at the top of your press release. This press release is fictitious, of course, because it hasn't happened yet, but the idea is that it serves as a vision board. I don't do vision boards, but I do do press releases of what you're going to do in the future. Make sense? Um, awesome. Yes. All right. I love it. I'm going to help you all with this. By the way, if I know your goal, my goal is often to help you. Uh, who did Zig Ziglar, I think? Maybe, maybe it was the Proctor guy. I can't remember, but one of those nice men said that, you know, success is often a function of how much success you help others create. And I believe in this 100%. I didn't get the saying exactly right, but that's what they meant. All right, so you're going to— and I'm, again, I'm going to send you this worksheet. Actually, I think I can send it to you in the chat right now. I'm gonna try and send it to you in the chat right now. Uh, I think it's this one. Oh, I don't have it. Oh, it's not a PDF. Okay, never mind. Um, I'll send it to you right after this. So it's just a worksheet where we'll go through each one of those things. So I'm going to talk you through it now, then you're going to do this work. I'm— I mean, it's up to you. If you want the success, you'll do the work. I do believe in actually doing the work. That's part of why I get to, you know, have the success I have is that I do, I do the work. I make a plan and then I actually do the work. So this is the first step is to create this phrase that says your name achieves whatever the milestone is. Noelle Russell achieves the, you know, I'm not gonna use achieves, but I'll say Noelle Russell becomes bestselling author featured on Good Morning America in her 2025 journey or whatever. Right? So dream headline. What do you want the world to say about you, or what do you wanna just be able to say about yourself at the end of 2025? Super important. Okay, now we've got that. That's the first part. I'm gonna encourage you, and we have accountability. So inside of our AI, uh, or our I Love AI community, we're gonna start coworking sessions where we get to actually hold each other accountable for the plans we're putting together right now. So this is just a chance for us to hop on and do daily accountability.. And if you wanna join, you're welcome to. You do have to be part of the I Love AI community to do it, but it's just a quick check-in. You're gonna log in to a Zoom call and we're all gonna, and there's a lot of people, we'll break out into small groups and we're just going to say like what we're going to be doing to hold ourselves accountable to the vision we created in this press release. But it's imp— it's a critical part, like how your behavior is so much more different when you say it out loud. It's why I do lives. It's why I get online and I do live lessons because I say it And then I hold myself accountable to the things that I say. It helps me make sure that I'm moving forward in the direction of my goals. Oh, I love it, Joe. That's awesome. Amazing. All right. So we're going to be doing these discussions live inside the AI, I Love AI community. So if you haven't joined, you're welcome to join us there. Sherilyn just threw it in the, in the chat. So feel free to join us., for those. And those will happen during the weekday unless I'm traveling. But even then, we have other mentors that will drop in. Again, it's not about learning or getting a lesson on AI. It's just about holding yourself accountable, saying out loud, this is what my goal is to do today. And that's it. What are you going to do today to move in the direction of your goals? I have made many millionaires. I have helped facilitate the financial benefit of people in my community. By just getting on a phone call with them and listening to them every day say they're working in their goals. And I will tell you, 90% of people drop out of those calls because they, A, either don't wanna do the work or they're super hard on themselves when they fall off the bandwagon or they spend 3 days not doing what they wanna do to achieve their goal. It's totally fine. I'm just gonna encourage you, consistency is key. Just pick a habit and stick with it. All right, let's go, let's go. I don't know where my mouse is. All right, where, where? Oh, I'm using the wrong mouse. There we go. All right, where is— there we go. Found it. Okay, so next part. So now in order to achieve— so now we've built out the headline. Now what we need to do is identify this like OKRs. If you are familiar with the OKR process, throw OKR in the chat for me. If you know what that is and have ever heard of that. OK, awesome. Javier, great. I know, to maybe our dismay, right? OKRs are a very tricky thing. I have found most companies, they say OKR, they start the OKR process, but they don't implement it fully. It was one of the first workshops actually that I started teaching, like 10 years ago as part of the AI Leadership Institute was actually how to create meaningful metrics for results that you wanna drive with AI projects. But that being said, okay, awesome. I was at Microsoft and Scott Guthrie at the time, who is still there, he's still the corporate vice president of all of Azure. But at the time, he was very focused on OKRs. He was also focused on checklists. And I do find that the combination of the two is kind of magical, not only identifying the objective that you want. And so for those of you not familiar with the term, it stands for Objectives and Key Results. So you're going to set a set of objectives, which is your goal. Like, if your job is to become a bestselling author and keynote speaker, then your objectives— you'd pick 3 things that are going to get you there. I want to be a bestselling author. I probably have to write every day, or I have to write. I have to figure out what that looks like, right? So I need to be consistent at writing. If I want to be a keynote speaker, I need to create a pipeline, a billion-dollar pipeline of speaking opportunities. I need, you know, like, so I have to identify what are the things that I need to do to get to that goal. This is going to take some time, right? So once you've identified what your sentence is, you're going to say, what are the 3 things I need to do to get there? And it doesn't matter what they are. I mean, In other words, like, you can pick what those 3 things are because you might not get to that dream goal, right? If you don't clearly articulate what it takes to achieve that. Again, here is where AI can be your friend. You can go to ChatGPT and say, hey, here's my goal for 2025. I need 3 things or 10 things. Well, give me a prioritized list of activities I can do. Like, use it to help you ideate. That's one of the huge values we have in a tool like this. Is it'll give you ideas that maybe you are having a hard time getting on paper. It'll just start bubbling things up that you can choose to take or reject, but it'll help you get off the blank page. So that being said, those success— once you've identified the objectives, meaning in my case, write, now I need to figure out what is the metric I'm going to use to measure that. Is it 30 minutes a day? Is it 2,500 words a week? Is it 5,000 words a day? Like, what is the metric I'm going to use to measure that success? I encourage you to do it on a monthly basis so that we can then break that down by week. But you could do it for the year. Like, I wanna write a 35,000-word book. Okay, if that's what you wanna do this year, then you're gonna break out that 35,000-word book throughout the rest of the year so you can create meaningful and measurable milestones to get to that completion. What I always like to do is I wanna be able to look at my calendar at any given day and be able to see, If I'm making my goals, it should be evident in the way I'm spending my time, right? It'll— if I'm meeting my revenue goals, meaning I'm getting the clients that I want, it means that I'm getting in front of the right number of clients. That means I'm spending my time talking to prospects to get them to become a client. It's evident in my calendar. Oh, I had 15 client meetings this week. No wonder I have lots of prospects, like lots of prospects becoming clients. That makes sense. If I wanna write a book, and I don't write every day, or I don't write once a week, or I don't write at all, I cannot be surprised if I never get that goal. Like, if I never do that work, I will never get the result or the outcome that I want. And so this way, your calendar becomes a reflection of your direction, your trajectory towards your 2025 goal. So I usually bucket these goals. I usually bucket these goals in different categories. There's a, uh, concept you can Google or Bing or whatever, uh, called the circle of life. There are 9 different categories. It includes personal, professional, financial, spiritual, and there's 3 or 4 different services in each one. It's, it's a bit of a self-reflection exercise where you go and shade in how confident you feel your life is operating in each one of these different areas, and it creates a circle, a wheel. And many times we will be overcompensating in some parts of our life and not compensating enough in other parts of our life. And so our wheel will be lopsided. And so this is an opportunity for you as you build out your success metrics to make sure that it is as well-rounded as you want it to be, right? Maybe you feel like you're pretty good at the income making, like you feel pretty good about your income, but you're not really happy about your family life or your friends or having relationships in the community, right? Whatever your gaps are, this will be an opportunity for you to set goals to attack those specific areas. So success metrics are key. You identify the statement, and now based on these success metrics— whoopsie— you're gonna write your press release. And these are the components. Now don't fret. For those of you, I am gonna give you a worksheet. So it has all of these pieces listed out in them. I will send it to you right after this call. So you'll look for that email. It might be in your spam if I've never emailed you before. So please keep an eye out. For that, but includes the masterful headline that we just talked about. It's then gonna include the opening impact. What that means is, how is what you are doing or what you will have done in 25, how has that impacted the world? This is otherwise known as your why. Why did you do this? What was the impact? Why did you know? For me, like, I want to have trained 10,000 people inside the AI Leadership Institute through the free community that we have. I want 10,000 people to have gone through this course and seen some kind of change, right? So if that is the case, my opening impact statement would be, you know, 1,500 people get new jobs through the internship program that the AI Leadership Institute organization created, whatever. I, I'm just making these things up right now, but I want to specify what my impact will be based on the outcome that I'm looking for, right? If my goal is to do X, What's the impact of that goal? This impact should drive you every day. You get up and you're like, oh my gosh, if I don't do this work, those kids never get to learn AI. Those families never get to be, you know, have a, a spouse who's employed and be supported. Like, I want my why to, my, my impact statement to be so dramatic that when I read it, I'm like, oh, I gotta get to work. And it takes time to curate that. But that is, that's the reason for that statement.. You'll then identify the problems that you're trying to solve. So for me, it's AI literacy, right? And, and again, I've come to these over time, but like, I care about AI literacy. I care about responsible AI. Like, what are the things that you care about? What problems are you trying to solve? For us entrepreneurs and even intrapreneurs, if you're inside a business and you're trying to grow that business and help that business with the value you can give them, what I always try to, you know, I, I, I always say that I'm, in love with the problem. I'm in love with the problem that companies have that they don't understand enough of about artificial intelligence or responsible AI to use it to grow their revenue and reduce their cost. That is the problem. They don't know enough about it. They don't understand the value. So I become an advocate for their understanding. That's what I'm, I'm driving. How do I teach them how to do more with less, how to grow their business, hire more people, create better culture, all with AI as an underpinning technology. So that's the problem. I'm in love with that problem, how it gets delivered, whether that's in a free community, whether that's in a $75,000 AI leadership accelerator program, whether that's in a minimum remarkable AI implementation that I do, right? In any case, I think I accidentally zoomed in on myself. Oh well. But in any case, those are the, the things that I outline in my press release, like Noelle Russell Russell worked with, and I might even, in at Amazon, I would list key clients that I wanted to work with. I'd be like, Noelle solves this problem for, you know, UHG. Noelle solves this problem for Adobe. Noelle solves this problem for, for Microsoft, right? I become a vehicle, like in the press release. I'm literally creating the stories that I want to be able to tell at the end of the year. Awesome. Okay. Oopsie. So quotes from you. I also like to fictitiously create quotes. So maybe if you're a fan of Elon Musk, You might say Elon Musk, uh, quoted that Noelle Russell Russell was one of the best technologists in the world or whatever. Um, right? Or you might say, like, mine always had a quote from Jeff Bezos, maybe the CEO of NVIDIA, right? So who is in your Dream 100 list? For those of you who know what that is from our, uh, Solution Architects course. But who is on your list of people that you wanna interact with this year and put them as having quoted? Like that you got a quote from them to celebrate your success in the year. Set— put a stamp on the page. I'm going to create a relationship with this person. They're going to say something nice about me at the end of the year. This document serves as the fuel for you to do this work throughout the rest of the year. You're going to read it hundreds and hundreds of times. Finally, the metric and the future vision. Again, this document serves as a press release that literally you could launch at the end of the year because you will have delivered on everything you said. Yeah, I know, I know. I, I, when I said Elon, I was like, that's gonna trigger people. But you know what I mean? Find someone in your Dream 100. I mean, for me it would be like Jennifer Lopez, right? Or Jessica Alba who started The Honest Company, or Jennifer Garner. I mean, any of those people, like, I, I love like the work that they're doing and the people that they're impacting. So anyway, Oprah, exactly right. Go big. Um, exactly. Oprah, like, Anyone. So you're right, I hear you, Joe. I hear you. All right. So that is the next part. Now we build our Working Backwards timeline. So the first thing you do is you've got your big goal. You're going to say you're going to break it down by quarter. Now, I literally did this on like a good old-fashioned sheet of paper. So that's what I'd encourage you to do also, is to pull out like a notebook, dedicate the notebook to this work and write down, okay, in Q4, like looking at Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4, what would you have to have accomplished in order to achieve your goal? Again, if I wanna be a bestselling author, maybe my goal is to actually write another book, or maybe my goal is to tour 25 cities. If that's the case, how am I gonna break up that work over the year? Maybe I wanna make sure that I'm in 5 cities a month. 10 cities a month or whatever, right? So if that's the case, how am I gonna get those cities? How am I going to, you know, create more impact? How am I gonna get in front of enough customers? Whatever your key results are, now is your chance to say what would be the numbers that you would need to achieve. Like if you wanna get, I'd say a new job, right, in the new year, how do you become the most attractive hire? And this is again something that generative AI can help you with. You can go to a model and ask it like, hey, here's my skill set, here's my resume, here's what I offer. Who are the best companies that I can offer these skills to? And what are the things that I should work on, or what should I do to amplify that to the marketplace so that they know that I'm available? And it'll give you some really great examples. I can also help you, right? But the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna take your big goal, and your metrics, and you're going to break it up over the year. So that being said, when you break it up over the year, you've now got quarterly goals. Those quarterly goals— and I say start at the end of the year and work backwards, hence the name, right? So you're going to want to say, if I want to have this done at the end of December, what do I need to have done by the end of November to get that done? And then break that down by the end— or let's say by the end of December, you'd go to like October and then July and then April, right? Whatever the end quarter marks are. But building metrics, numbers you will evaluate for yourself. How many clients are you going to reach out to? How many? You know, I don't like measuring things that I don't have full control over, like sales. I can't control how many people buy from me. I can control how many people I talk to. And over time, when you talk to enough, like me, I know the ratio of how many conversations I have lead to a customer. So my metric of success for client acquisition is not how many sales I'll make. It is actually how many conversations will I have, how many stages will I be on, because those stages lead to my clients, right? And so that's the metric I can control. I can get on more stages. I can't necessarily force people to buy from me, but the more stages I'm on, the more conversations I have, the more customers say yes. And that, again, that's based on the— what I've done to, to figure out how I measure success in my business. So that is what— that is the first step is to break it up by quarters. And again, use generative AI. Like I said, in this document I'll send you, it has the prompts that I use. I never have— I didn't do that until this year with generative AI. Up until now, I just literally cleared out my desk, put a bunch of paper down, and just wrote out my plan. And it's very invigorating to write out this plan. But if you need help or you feel stuck, Just leverage generative AI to get you through that thinking process. Don't use it to write out your goals, but use it to help you ideate on some of the metrics you can measure and how you might measure them. Okay, so once you've got that, then you're going to refine it, right? You're going to take that quarterly goal and you're going to break each quarter into months and you're gonna again, take that metric. Let's say I want to talk to 100 people in a month or in a quarter, right? How many am I going to talk to every single month, right? Oh, 35, right? So if I'm gonna talk to 35 customers in a month, how many does that mean per week? How many does that mean per day? And obviously if it's like a client conversation and I'm at like 2.1, I round up. That's what I do. So I would talk to 3 clients a day. That would be my goal. And I would measure that goal every single day. I would prioritize my time to say I would rather have— and now, Grant, I talk to you all the— like every Friday I spend 2 hours, right, talking to our community and answering questions. But you all are my clients too, right? So that I prioritize that time. But in my case, like if I'm thinking about like, you know, my enterprise business, those conversations are different. I have one tomorrow, for example, with an aviation company. Like, I will prioritize that time because I need to have 3 of those valuable conversations every single day in order to hit my target. So this is a critical process. Like, step is not just creating the fancy title, which is the fun part in my— like, I love that part, creating like, Noelle did this amazing thing in 2025, and then I write a press release. You can ask Based on your, your title, you can ask GPT, AGPT, uh, model to generate for you a press release in the style of Jeff Bezos using working backwards. Like, this is the prompts that you can use. But I encourage you to really think through that process. What is the thing you want? One thing. And this is hard. Most people don't, don't want one thing. They want 100 things. You will get what you want. As a function of your precision and your consistency toward that goal. If you have one thing you go after, it's much easier to track your performance against that one thing. When you have 3 things, it's okay. But when you get— you, you can achieve, I think, uh, the metrics that came out of the, um, OKR book by John Doerr. If you look at that book, there's a bunch of metrics of success on people that have implemented this the OKR process successfully. And if you have 3 objectives that you're going after, your ability to deliver on all of them drops to about 80%, meaning that it is very difficult. If you have one, your ability to deliver on that is like, it's 100%. If you do the work, like, you can get that one. You'll narrowly focus on that one thing, and you can definitely achieve that goal. But if you drop from that, right, if you add another one, add 2 more— I'm gonna try and zoom in, see if it'll let me. Yay! A little bit more. Um, my— if you drop from that, right, like let's say you add 3, your ability to deliver on all of your promises across 3 different objectives drops by 20%. If you add 4, catastrophic. Number 4, I try to tell companies about this all the time, but if you have 4 It drops by 75% your ability to deliver with excellence on all of them, meaning that the more objectives, right? And this makes sense. You'd spread yourself thinner across all of the objectives, meaning that you won't be able to pay as much of attention to any of them, and you'll do all of them maybe, but at a mediocre level as opposed to narrowly focusing on one. And knocking it out of the park. So I encourage you to pick one, write your M, write your press release on one thing you want to achieve and work backwards from that one thing. And then everything else can be good. You know, you can add them as key results, you can add them as additional objectives, but measuring the success of a single thing. And remember the question we asked ourselves is what's the one thing that would make 2025 worth it for me? That 2025 was a good investment of my life, that I did good things, that I got what I wanted. What is that one thing that is more than 100 things you kind of want right now, right? It is incredibly important to have this discipline of what do you want to achieve in a world where you could achieve anything, and AI will be an accelerant for you. Awesome. Yes, you're welcome. Absolutely. All right. So Those of you who have provided and gave me your email address as part of the registration process, thank you for doing that. I will be sending you out the worksheet as well as the prompt guide that goes with it. I didn't, like I said, I didn't use AI to help me build the process nor implement it for the first, I don't know, 8, 9 years that I've done it. But this year I did use AI, and it was helpful because it allowed me to create systems for measuring my success. So I asked it to create me a dashboard. I asked it to create me, right, a calculator. So all you can actually use AI to augment your ability to deliver on this even more. But the working backwards process, creating the press release is critical. But the last thing I wanna cover with you is the FAQ and the, it's called a PR FAQ because the first part's the press release, the document that says I'm gonna do this thing. Here's how I do it. Here's the impact I made. Here's how I measured success. That's your North Star document. The PR, the FAQ piece is all the questions people are going to ask you when you're done, like when you get there, all the questions along the way. How'd you come up with this? Why these metrics? Like question— it's literally the work you might have done in like building a business plan in the past, right? Why did you choose this over that? Like, what are the most commonly asked questions? Imagine yourself yourself at doing a press release and standing in front of a podium, what are the questions the audience is gonna ask you about this press release? How'd you get there? How'd you meet that person? How'd you build that collaboration? How'd you get the job? How did the interview process go? It's the process of visualizing what all of that looks like ahead of time to better inform your plan, play-by-play activity guide, throughout the year. Now again, it took it, I don't know, it took me probably 3 hours to write it all out, but it was the best 3 hours I've ever spent. Like I said, I'm now, I mean, this year will be the 4th year that I have consistently been able to draft out my 2025 and then exceed the expectations I set for myself. So much so that I'm like radically growing my expectations for myself because I'm like, well, all right, now I've done this 3 years in a row. Like we're doing this this year, we're going bigger, right? So, But it's an opportunity to really set some goals for yourself that push the envelope. I do have a Q&A question, so I'm gonna go there if you have questions about this process. Yeah. So one question is from Sheila. Thank you for that. Is if we use ChatGPT, how would we word it so that it spits out accurately what we're wanting as an outcome for the press release? So that is in the prompt guide. So I will send that to you. You'll get that in, in an email today. So please take a look at it. If you don't get it for some reason, just ping me, but check your spam is usually the number one place that it gets caught if I've never emailed you before. And then save me, put me in the contact list. We could be friends. The other thing— oh yeah, thank you, Sherilyn. Yeah, the Scaling Responsible AI book is in the chat. You're welcome to be part of my bestselling journey. It is one of the objectives I have. It is not the objective. Um, over the holidays I got very committed to helping every, like equalizing access to AI. And I've always been a democratized AI person. Like that's always been my, my journey is to help people. But now I realize that it is extremely, um, inequitable right now. Uh, and the world is only growing more inequitable., and it's social media creates these little cir— like little, what do they call, like little echo chambers of people. And in inside those echo chambers, you don't realize the impact this AI is having on other countries, on even other cities in our own country. Like anyway, so, so I have a, my mission has changed a little bit in, in order to impact more people, um, and really create a more equitable world as a result of this. So, Silos. Absolutely. Thank you, Doll. Yes, silos. These— it's— and the danger of these silos is they're very self-affirming. They make you think that everyone thinks this way and everyone— like, literally, they use words like everyone, everyone this, everyone that, no one this, no one that, always, never. These words are words that should alarm you as to, wait, we're probably— if it's always that means we've got a very narrow focus on who we're talking about, and that means someone will be left out. And so I'm really— aww, don't make me cry, Padmini. That's nice. But yes, like, and I think my vision is that all of you become this to your community, right? Like that you spare a tiny bit of your life to share with people who would never know about AI. You share it with them, you get in front of them, you create an AI leadership. Little meetup in your town and we, you know, we just spread the word that this technology is gonna change everything. It's changing everything from intrapreneurship to entrepreneurship to working every day. And unless, like, not every high school even understands technology, let alone artificial intelligence, they don't realize that they can leapfrog certain technology understandings. Like Marian had asked a question the other day, don't I need to know about Python and data science. And I'm like, you really don't. You can, but you don't need to in order to take advantage of the time that we're in. And the only way people will take advantage is if we actually use these goals to generate enough space in our lives to help people, to talk to people who are not in the fold that we are in, in the room that we're in, uh, in the room where it happens. So I'm here all about expanding awareness about AI, uh, and creating mechanisms to equalize its access to people. All over the world. So it's been amazing. Thanks, Sherry. Oh, y'all are awesome. You all are awesome. So I hope you found it helpful. Like I said, the, the guide is coming to you. We are also going to be, if you please join the I Love AI community, you will see on the calendar every day that I'm at home. And actually, we'll put it on every day. I just might not myself be there every day. Some of our leaders will be there instead. And we're just gonna facilitate the ability for you to come to the table and disclose what you're holding yourself accountable for that day. It's really powerful. You don't have to come all the time. You can come once a week. You can decide, but it's a really powerful practice. We don't spend a lot of time there, so if you are late, you'll miss it. Um, but it is a chance to just say out loud, I'm doing this for myself today. And then the next day be like, did I do it? Yes or no? This is not a time to tell— you don't tell your stories. You don't provide the reasons why things didn't work out or why you couldn't do the thing. You just say, nope, I didn't do it, but I'm gonna do it today. We use the word recommit as a principle at the AI Leadership Institute, that it's okay not to do a thing, but then you recommit the next day as if you never failed at it before, as if you never, you know, missed the mark. You recommit every single day to this vision you have for yourself, this PR, this press release of what you wanna do in '25. You recommit every day no matter what you did yesterday. Maybe you met your goals, but yesterday was yesterday. The only thing that matters is what you do today to move in that direction. So So excited. Yes, I, Padmini was one of the people that inspired me to do it. It's so good. But I will tell you that we're gonna be extremely disciplined on that call. We are not gonna be, you know, you guys can all break out and talk to each other and have, you know, but remember time, like your time post-it. We need to be laser focused with our time. Do not let the world distract you from your goals and what you want to achieve. And the only one who will own that is you. You are the CEO of your life. I'm super excited to be here with you. There's another— might be another question. I don't think so. No, maybe not. If there are any other questions, now's your chance. You can raise your hand or say hello. Yeah, of course. Thank you, Tara. I'm so glad you're here. Nice to see you, Tara. Thanks, Mark. Oh, good to see you. Good to see you. I'm looking forward to Eric's launch this year. Whoa. So many good things. Lots of really cool stuff happening. But yeah, thank you, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it. Uh, here's to your year. Write it down. Take action every day. Join us in the community and actually make your dreams come true. They are 100% possible. Thank you, Joe. I hope you all enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Awesome. Yes, trying to drop some gems today. Um, but like I said, you all are the true gems. So glad to be here with you and, uh, really excited. Thank you very much. Um, and I will talk to y'all later. Have a great 2025. I see it for you. And I'm here to support you. All right, bye everybody! See you in the inside.