MBA1169 Goals: Should You Set Them?

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits provide perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O. Welcome to the 100 RMBA Show. No matter what year it is, we got your back with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online. It's 2019. Wow. 2018 is in the books and it's a whole new year. And in today's lesson you will learn goals should you set them. In this past year I shared with you the thoughts of many experts that don't believe in goals. They don't think they're useful. Whether it's Scott Adams, David Hanemeier Hanssen or Jason Fried. They believe that you should build habits that lead you to success. So is setting a goal completely useless? Isn't this something that we do at the start of every year? Can we set goals and actually get use out of them? That's what we discuss in today's episode. If you should set goals and how. If so, this is not going to be a complicated convoluted episode. It's actually going to be quite practical and simple, nice and easy to start your year. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. It's 2019. Happy New Year everybody. I for one can't believe how quickly 2018 just flew by. And it makes me think, wow, that means 2019 is going to go just as fast. I got to make the most of it. And often at the start of the year, we all set New Year's resolutions or goals for the year. But recently a lot of experts have kind of piped up and said, hey, goals are a waste of time. It's habits you need to set. Well, in my opinion, I think it's really important to do both. I think they work hand in hand. Why? Because I think you need to have some sort of focus for the year. You need to know what you're shooting for. And I believe in a two step process. I believe you should set some goals, set a focus or some priorities for the year. But don't stop there. You need to break down, what are you gonna do on a regular basis, on a daily basis to, to reach those goals? What do successful people do every day to be the successes they are? Say, for example, you want to lose 10 pounds and put on some muscle. Okay, there's a goal. You know exactly what you have to do. You may want to get a little specific about that, your exact weight, maybe your measurements. But then ask yourself, how are you going to get there? What do you have to do every day to get there? Well, it means a change of diet, it means a change of exercise routine or having an exercise routine if you don't have one right now. It also means having some sort of specifics when it comes to those exercises, what kind of exercises, how often, where are you going to fit this in your schedule, the details, and then committing to doing the things you have to do to achieve the state you want. At the end of the day, when you say you want to lose 10 pounds and put on some muscle, it just means, hey, you want to be healthy, you want to look and feel good, so you got to do the things to make you feel like you're on your way. People that look and feel good, what do they do? So that's what I mean. So what do you do? What's the first step here? Well, I really think you need to firstly make sure you allot the time to do this. You can't just say, okay, I'm gonna just think off the top of my head of what I want this year and that's it. No, you really have to sit down and put it in your calendar. I'm gonna block out three hours to this task. So what you wanna do is, you know, get on your calendar when are you gonna do this? Tomorrow, the day after? Block. Book it. Make sure you invite anybody to this meeting that you need to, that informs these decisions, that is a part of these goals. A business partner, a partner in life. Even if it's like a personal health goal, if you live with somebody, they will affect you achieving those goals or maintaining that lifestyle. If you're trying to cut out useless calories and somebody's bringing home useless calories, then it's going to be hard to kind of, you know, focus on that and achieve those goals. So you're going to sit down with yourself or anybody else involved, and I recommend you have one or two things you want to focus on. Not too many things. It can be a personal goal and a business goal. So say, for example, for a business goal, I want to achieve so and so be specific. You want to grow your revenue, how much money by the end of the year you want to make, how many customers do you want? Do you want to focus on that? Do you want to focus on traffic? Do you want to focus on your email list? Get really specific and just focus on one thing. And if you have another goal or another focus, make it a personal one. Maybe you want to read more books and watch less television. Now, once you have these written down, you got to reverse engineer. What do you have to do every day to reach these goals? If you want to make more sales, you got to make some sales calls, you have to build some relationships, you have to do some networking, you have to do some blogging, content marketing. When are you going to do these tasks? Put them in your calendar. This is the hard part. Setting goals is easy, but building the habits, doing the tasks that actually make you achieve those goals, that's the hard part. That's what those experts are talking about. Goals are kind of useless if you don't do the work. Otherwise it's not really a goal, it's a wish, it's a dream. And if you don't like using the word goal, don't use it. I like to say focus because it allows me to really just block out other distractions. Say, this is really what I want to focus on this year. This is what I want to improve. And this is my plan to focus on it, dedicate more time to it. And this is what I'm going to do to dedicate more time. No one's gonna do this for you. You have to do this planning for you. You gotta sit down and write down all the tasks you have to do to reach that goal, to keep that focus. So I'm gonna continue with this example of maybe you want more revenue in your business. So what are the things we'll bring in revenue? One, writing more content blog posts. Getting people to your website. Cause of your great content. Maybe doing more videos, maybe growing your YouTube channel, doing webinars. This will, you know, generate more sales, growing your email list. Whether you're doing that via guest posting, creating some sort of free opt in. All these things I just mentioned need a game plan. So if you write these four or five things down, how are you going to do that? Well, if I'm going to have to, you know, write a blog post every day, when am I going to do it? When is it due? What do I have to do to write blog posts? Well, I have to first come up with a topic and then I have to outline it. And from outline, I got to write a first draft, then a second draft, then I have to edit it, then I got to find some images to go along with it. Then I have to put it on my website. I have to publish. These are many steps for that one task to get closer to your goal. You see how this gets very specific. You can't just say, I want more money and just expect it to happen. I want to make it super clear. I am speaking to myself as well. This is a reminder to myself that if I want to achieve things, I have to get specific about how I'm going to get there. I have to have a game plan, but I have to follow through. You can spend these three hours and write all these steps and write all the tasks you have to do, but if the next day you don't take action, it's really going to be demotivating and a waste of time. One of the reasons why we don't take action is because we don't allow the time to do these tasks. So when you have all these tasks and you're written out all the details, plug them into your calendar. You have a whole year, right? You have a whole year to do these things regularly. When are you going to do them? Plan and stick to it. Follow your calendar. As human beings, we underestimate how long things take. When it's a short period of time, like you have a goal for the next week, this is what you want to get done. But we overestimate for long periods of time. We don't realize that a year is a pretty long time. I can get a lot done in that time. I could do a lot of these tasks to contribute to my goal, to get closer to the place I want to be. So get specific. Plug all these tasks in your calendar so you actually take action already. You see, as this is taking shape, this is more work than we actually thought. But this is what actually makes it all happen. The work. And how do you actually do the work? How do you actually make sure you allot enough time to scheduling? Well, I really like the concept of time blocking. Very successful and busy CEOs, people like Reed Hasting of Netflix or Elon Musk of Tesla or Jeff Bezos of Amazon, these guys all use this concept called timeboxing. Basically, they have a list of all the things they have to do, and they put a time box in their calendar for how much time they have to complete each task. That means their calendar. If you look at it, there is no free time. It's all blocked out. Why? Because they're firm believers that things take as long as the time we allot for them. So if I give myself three hours to record a podcast episode, it's going to take me three hours. I'm a dilly dally. I'm going to take a long time. But if I give myself an hour, that's how long it's going to take. I'm constrained to an hour. I got to focus. I got to really get it done. So my opinion is, when you have your list of tasks you have to do on a regular basis to reach your goal, right down next to it, how long do you estimate this is going to take to complete? Now, again, we're horrible at estimating. We're always super optimistic. We don't perceive any interruptions or curve balls that will come our way. So I suggest you double that time. So if you think, hey, writing a blog post first draft is going to take you one hour, double it and write two hours. And then put a block of time called writing a blog post in your calendar. Same thing with every other task you're going to do on a regular basis to achieve your goal.

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To wrap up today's lesson. Goals are important, but they're not the End all and be all. You actually need goals, you need a game plan and you need the habits to actually put your game plan into action on a regular basis. There's good news here. I know this sounds like a lot of work, but the good news is that as you start doing these things on a regular basis, you keep doing the things you have to do, these habits so you can reach your goal. It gets easier and easier. Your first few weeks are going to be the hardest. Actually, I think your first, I would say six weeks are going to be the most challenging. After you pass the six week mark, it starts to become, you guessed it, a habit. Something that you're used to, something that comes easy. It's so important to be consistent and to be very, very, you know, I would say strict about abiding by following through and doing the things on your calendar that you time blocked. You're going to be challenged. People are going to ask you to go out for a drink. You're going to be asked to do things that you can't do because on the calendar you have something else. You got to really, really stick to the goal, stick to the actual game plan and do the habits you have to do. If you're serious about achieving your goals, nothing is for free. You're going to have to sacrifice somewhere, but at the end of the day you'll have that self satisfaction that you stuck with it and you got what you were looking for at the start of the year. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I wish you all a wonderful and I thank you all for listening to the show. This is episode 1169. Lots and lots of episodes recorded and it wouldn't be possible if I wasn't consistent. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The reason why I say focus on one max, two goals or things to focus on because there's a lot of work in achieving one thing. It's very hard to have a game plan, an action plan and habits for four, five, six different things. And what happens is that we get overwhelmed in those first six weeks when we're trying to get momentum and we give up completely and we say, oh, forget this, I'm too tired, I don't have time for this. So if you're new at this, just focus on one thing, have an action plan and take action and follow through. You'll find that it's more challenging than you thought. And if you achieve things with flying colors at the end of the year, next year you want to add something. Go ahead and give it a try. Thank you so much. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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