Sustainable Goal Setting & Achievement

All right. StreamYard says that we're live and that we're appearing everywhere we're supposed to be. So, uh, welcome to Sustainable Goal Setting and Achievement. Uh, if we haven't collided before, my name is Scott Perry. I am a husband, a father, and a grandfather from this beautiful little town in Southwest Virginia called Floyd. And I am a former musician and guitar studio owner who who leveraged a 5-year contract as a head coach in Seth Godin's Akimbo Workshops to create a new endeavor for myself in the second half of life, where I am the Chief Difference Maker of Creative on Purpose, where I do blogging and broadcasting about topics around personal development and becoming the kind of person that knows and gets what they want in life. I'm also an Encore Life Coach. And what that means is I help people in, that are nearing the end of their career or their time, you know, tour of duty as parents, so that they can get clear about what they want in their life's next chapter. Then I help them close the gap between where they are and where they want to be in less time with less risk and hopefully a lot less effort and more joy. And today we are going to be talking a little bit about what I do, which is help people set and achieve their goals. This is, again, sustainable goal setting and achievement. And we've, we're in still in the early part of January. And, you know, this is the time of year when we're asking ourselves questions about like, what do I want from the next, in the next chapter of my life or my business? Where do I want to be? Where am I starting from? What's my plan to get there? And these can obviously be really daunting questions, a little overwhelming for many of us. And the The data shows that, you know, for those of us that set New Year's resolutions— I'm not really one of those people anymore— but, you know, the data shows that about by March, 95% of people have given up on the things that they resolved to do at the beginning of the year. And even if you are not a resolution person, but, you know, set goals for 10 years, 5 years, 3 years, annual goals, or even if you set goals at the beginning of a month or a week, what we know is that the odds are stacked against you achieving those things. Why would that be? Well, what I'm going to do is start with a slide that's going to give what I think are the kind of the top 3 reasons why we don't reach our goals, based on my personal experience, but also the experience of you know, the people that I work with. And so let's go to slide number 1. Let's get rid of me. So here are what I think are the 3 primary enemies of success in reaching your goals. First is a lack of specificity and clarity. We don't really know, we don't say exactly what it is that we want. You know, we say, oh, I want to get healthier, or I want to be more successful in my business. Well, That's a really vague destination. We can't measure our progress towards that. And we won't really know when we've achieved it because there's, there's no clarity; there's no specificity. So that's problem number 1. Problem number 2 is the arbitrary timelines that we set. You know, I'm going to get, you know, even if you say, I'm going to lose 30 pounds. OK, I'm going to lose 30 pounds in 3 months. Well, that's a really arbitrary timeline if you don't have a proven track record of being able to lose 10 10 pounds a month sustainably over time. And so, when we set these arbitrary goals and set arbitrary timelines, what we're doing is we are starting, you know, starting at some arbitrary point in time and saying that if we don't succeed by another arbitrary point of time, we haven't succeeded. What's, what's the point? What's the point of starting on a Monday? What's the point of starting at the beginning of the month? What's the point point of starting at the beginning of the year. Very arbitrary, not necessary, not helpful. Then finally is we tend to decide on really rigid regimes for how we're going to achieve what we say we want to achieve. You know, if I want to lose weight, I'll maybe say, OK, I'm going to, you know, cut my caloric intake in half. I'm going to run 3 miles a day. And I'm going to drink, you know, 10 glasses of water a day, whatever. The thing is, you're, when you go from the chaos of, of the way that you're approaching your health goals or your revenue goals or what have you, to some sort of rigid program, you've created a very fragile situation because life just has a way of throwing curveballs. And if you, you know, when your rigid regime collides with the chaos of everyday life, you're going to not be able to maintain that regime. And over time, you're going to get kind of deflated and eventually give up. So those are the things that I think we really need to worry about. But, you know, the biggest challenge is, to me, what I feel is the biggest challenge is that at the beginning, when we're setting these goals and establishing our system for achieving them, we don't have not only do we not have the clarity and specificity much of the time, we don't have any experience or data to operate from. So, you know, without, without those things, we really— how can we know what weight loss goal we're going to set in terms of pounds? How can we know that we can meet a certain level of caloric intake or, or a certain number of days or miles of exercise and so forth? If You know, you need to set goals that are, you know, specific and realistic and planned and measurable and supported and all that sort of thing. But you need the data and the experience to establish the guidelines around that. And so, you know, what, what to do? This is the big question. Like, OK, so yeah, I get it, Scott. I get why I haven't been able to achieve my goals to date. What you're saying makes sense. But what do I do? Well, what we're going to do in this workshop is we're going to take a proven and trusted system, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and we'll talk a little bit about that and look at that to get started. And we're going to look at, look at that framework and layer over that a goal setting and achievement system that is going to allow us to micro-step into setting clear and specific and realistic expectations that give us a clear and stepwise strategy for achieving the goals that we establish, an honest and diligent way of tracking our progress as we go, and establishing a support network and contingency plans for when life inevitably throws us those curveballs or goes sideways and, and, and knocks us off our chosen path. So, To better explain all this, let's go to Maslow's hierarchy of needs first. Let me— there we go. And so if you're not familiar with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's, it's a system. I can't— I think it's from, from the early '60s that, you know, he established that there are these things that, that individual humans, the sequence that individual humans go through in their development and their personal growth. It's been, it's used in all sorts of psychological practices. It's used in leadership and business management. It's, it's a system that has, gives a very clear visual for how we move through a sequence and a hierarchy to achieve some sort of, some sort of level of competence and excellence. In some sort of endeavor. And the way that it's broken down is there are 5 layers to the pyramid, as you can see. And at the bottom are the basic needs, in the middle are psychological needs, and at the top is, is self-fulfillment, self-actualization. So at the beginning, at the bottom, before we do anything, we have to, we have to satisfy our existential needs. We have to make sure that we have oxygenated air, that we have plenty, you know, clean water, that we have a sustainable level of nutrition to sustain our bodies, you know, shelter, what have you. Above that, once we've established that we can continue to exist, we have our needs around safety. Like, do we have, do we have a safe environment to live in, or a sheltered environment that that is secure? Uh, do we have the resources that allow us to continue to sustain ourselves? So those are the basic needs. And when those are secured, then we can move up the pyramid to our psychological needs around love and belonging, intimate relationships, family relationships, uh, connections, friends, and so forth. Above that is our need for significance, that we are creatures that are status-driven. We like to know where we stand and how we measure up against our friends and neighbors, our allies and our enemies. We, you know, we thrive on a certain level of respect and recognition for our accomplishments. And then at the very top is the Self-Fulfillment need, the self-actualization, where we are realizing our full potential, We are, you know, experiencing personal and professional growth, and we are also doing that accepting and, you know, that our contact with reality. And so that's how Maslow mapped things out. Now, just worth noting that Maslow never put it into a pyramid like this, but this is kind of the generally accepted way of looking at this. It's super helpful, and again, a framework for how we can think about how we set and achieve goals in a sustainable way. And before we do that, I just want to— I'm going to pull up another slide, and I just want to talk about the takeaways that we can take from that Maslow's hierarchy that I just showed you. The first is that it's sequential. You have to start and satisfy the basic needs before you can move up into the psychological needs or the self-actualization You know, we're creatures that are aiming and aspirational. At the beginning of the year, we're often setting these really lofty aspirations for, you know, achieving our potential. But, you know, think about it. If, if you have not yet secured, you know, clean water and a minimum sufficient level of nutrition and shelter,, so that you can just continue to exist. Even if you were to shoot for, you know, intimate loving relationships, you know, toward further up the pyramid, um, it wouldn't do you much good if you're, you're, you know, starving to death and dehydrated, you know, just, just, uh, knocked down by dehydration. So the hierarchy is sequential. You secure your, your, your existential needs, and then you move and secure your needs for security, and then you move to the psychological needs for belonging, reputation, and status, and so forth. And then you can shoot for the self-actualization and optimizing performance at the top. The second thing is that as you move up the pyramid, there is, there are diminishing returns. Now, diminished returns are still returns, but, you know, there's a lot of surface area in those basic needs because they're actually a little bit easier to acquire in the modern age. We don't have too much difficulty. If you're on this call and have the technology and resources to watch this, you're probably not really struggling too much with securing clean air, fresh water, adequate nutrition, safe environment to live in. And, but as you, you know, those things are easier to acquire than say a loving, intimate relationship where you have a strong sense of identity and belonging and that sort of thing. And certainly, it's much harder to optimize, you know, personal and professional performance at the top. So as you move up the pyramid, the return— there's a, the Law of Diminished Returns comes into play. It gets harder to achieve the things as you go up the pyramid. And then the final piece is one that I think people don't think about very often, which is After you satisfy those basic needs, there is optionality for how much further you want to go, and there's also flexibility. What I mean by this is, if you secured your basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter, and a safe living place, your life is pretty good. Uh, you know, if you just layer on top of that, uh, loving relationships that give you a sense of identity and belonging, you're pretty good. Like most people, there are a lot of individuals and a lot of societies that never move further up the pyramid, and they appear to be quite happy and experiencing a great deal of thriving. So you don't have to necessarily continue to ascend up the pyramid if you're satisfied and fulfilled and find meaning and identity and belonging and all those things at, you know, the third level of the pyramid, you, you may very well be good. The other thing is, as you move up, you have to understand that you can also move back down. So if you have secured your basic needs and are, you know, working on intimate relationships, um, but experience some sort of setback or some sort of failure, or you find that to be really fraught, you can always move back down and kind of regain your footing and your composure in a lower level of the pyramid. And so the pyramid is not necessarily just a, a stair-step sequence that you go through. You can move up and down in that sequence. Um, oh, great to have Scott Perry here. Uh, all right, so now what we're going to do is we're going to take this Maslow's Pyramid and these ideas that I just shared around making sure that we understand that we're talking about sequential progress the law of diminishing returns, and that ascending the pyramid is optional. And we're going to layer on top of that a goal setting and achievement framework that is sustainable and will give you a lot more success in setting and accomplishing the things that you want to, to get done in your life. And I'll just, as we're walking through, just for the sake of demonstration, I'll use a personal goal and a professional goal. For personal, we're going to look at a fitness type of goal. And as a business goal, we'll just look at, you know, an increase in monthly revenue. And again, not terribly specific, because we don't yet have the data that we need to get specific about the numbers that we, you know, the numbers that we want to reach or the timeline that we want to reach it in, or the, or the strategy that's going to get us there. What we're going to do is layer on this, this hierarchy in terms of goal setting and achievement that's going to give us the data and experience that we need as we microstep through each of the levels of the pyramid. So here's the way that I think about the goal setting and achievement pyramid. And I should have done this sooner, but I'm going to make sure I do it now. I am taking a lot of these ideas that I'm sharing right now from a presentation I saw Nick Peterson do several years ago. In, uh, it as part of his Nixmas presentations. I think it was 2020, maybe it was 2021. Um, but he, he's the one that originated, at least for me, this idea of leveraging Maslow's Pyramid and creating another, um, another pyramid for goal setting and achievement on top of it. I'm putting all of this into my own words. I'm using different terms than he used, uh, and I'm I'm going to be, you know, using some, sharing some other concepts and different concepts, but I want to give due credit to Nick for, you know, coming, coming up with the idea. I think it's super powerful. I have included links in the comments, um, on Facebook, and I'll make sure I get it done on LinkedIn and YouTube as well. But there's a link to sign up for the Guardian Academy Substack, uh, which is a free publication. Um, and if you go to 2024, it's like the third or fourth article, uh, as you scroll through the Guardian Substack, you can actually see Nick's demonstration and presentation on these ideas. And then a week from now, there will be my own Substack article, a long-form article where I'm going to lay this out in greater detail than I'm doing in this presentation. So if you're not already signed up for my Substack, click that link, sign up for the Substack. Again, most of the content there is absolutely free. So the goal setting and achievement framework looks like this. At the bottom of the pyramid, we start with sufficiency, move up to stability, move up to structure, move up to surprise, and then to sophistication. And as you can see, I've included questions that we can ask ourself at each level. Again, we have to satisfy the basic needs before we can move to the psychological needs, before we can move to the self-fulfillment needs.. And we have to remember that there's a law of diminishing returns as we move up the pyramid, which may change our plan, our, uh, about how far up the pyramid we want to strive for or progress through. And that the pyramid works in two directions. We can move up the pyramid, and when necessary, we can move back down the pyramid when necessary. So let's just go ahead and start to, to walk through some of these things. So At the beginning is sufficiency. We have to answer the question, can I do enough? Can I do enough to start making a change? We have to remember that when we're talking about goal setting and goal achievement, what got us where we are won't get us where we want to be. If we just continue to do the things that we're doing, we're going to continue to get the results we're getting. And that doesn't matter if we're talking about a fitness goal, a revenue goal, or any other kind of goal. So what we're talking about most of the time with goal achievement Setting and Achievement is our desired change in behavior and our plan for creating these new habits, creating these new attitudes and creating and learning these new skills and, and, and changing the way that we see and be and do things in the world. So the first thing is, can I do enough? Let's just take the fitness example for, for now. If we have a desire to, uh, you know, lose some weight, increase our energy level, um, just say for the sake of argument that, you know, we want to be more present and available and involved with our kids or with our spouse or with our partner or what have you, the first thing that we have to do is we have to establish first, like, where are we at? So If you, for, I'm just going to be throwing some numbers out there. I'm not a health coach, but let's just say for the sake of argument that you're eating in excess of 3,000 calories a day. You're only drinking a couple glasses of water a day, and you're not really engaged in any kind of exercise. Well, the first thing we have to do is we have to set our baseline. This is where we're at. And then what is enough? What is enough enough reduction in calories, enough increase in activity, and enough increase in our water consumption to affect some sort of change. And so, there will be a little bit of arbitrariness to this at the beginning, but what we're going to do is we're going to try and test things and see if we can establish what enough looks like. So, for the sake of argument, I'm going to say, okay, well, I'm eating 3,000+ calories a day. I'm going to reduce that to 2,500 calories a day. I'm only drinking a couple of glasses of a day, I'm going to try to increase that to 6 glasses of water a day. I'm not getting any exercise, I'm going to see if I can walk a half mile a day, 3 days a week. Now, notice that I didn't say, well, I'm going to go on a fast, and I'm going to go on a keto diet, and I'm going to run 3 miles a day, and I'm going to drink 6 gallons of water a day, because that would be arbitrary, that would be rigid, that would be unsustainable. I'm going to start with, you know, reach goals that are attainable. And let's just say, for the sake of argument, that, you know, after a couple of weeks, what I've noticed is, okay, well, I'm eating 2,500 calories or less 5 out of 7 days a week, and I'm exercising 2 of the 3 days a week that I said I was going to, and I'm getting— drinking 6 glasses of water 4 out of 7 days. I'm I'm good. Like, it's— that's all over 50%, right? Wrong. I want you to think about this. When you're talking about your system and its efficiency, you know, your system is 2,500 calories a day. That's the goal. If you're only doing that 70% of the time and you're satisfied with that, think about this. If you were to turn on a light switch and the lights only came on 70% of the time, or you booted up your computer and it came on only 66% of the time, or you started your car and it only turned over 75% of the time. Would that be good enough for you? Of course not. Yet, you know, what this illustrates is that the weakest component of our goal setting and achievement system is the human at the controls. And we have to learn to not settle. Like, enough, it doesn't mean good enough. It means enough, enough to sustain, to be, to be able to maintain and sustain in terms of that activity in our lives, but also to get some sort of minimum acceptable result. So that's what we're doing at the sufficiency stage. Where are we starting at? And what does a minimum level of progress look like? Um, and Again, can we go from 3,000 calories to 2,500? Can we go from 2 glasses of water to 6? Can we go from no exercise to a half mile a day, 3 days a week? And so, if and when we accomplish that, then we're going to move up the pyramid to the stability. And this is the answer that we're— the question that we're answering here is, can I sustain this? Can I do this consistently? Now, at this stage, we might find that, okay, well, you know, we're not really able to sustain that 2,500 calories a day, but we're actually pretty good at keeping it under 2,700. So maybe you have to change your nutrition goal to 2,700 calories a day. If, you know, you're not working, you're only consistently walking those 2 days a week, maybe it's time to think about setting the goal at 2 half-mile walks a week. If we were to look, let's look at the business goal for a second. Let's just say that for the sake of argument, we want to increase our revenue. We're a freelancer, which means that, you know, our revenue is very dependent on the number of contracts that we're working on month to month. And the way that we get those contracts is through discovery calls. The first thing we have to do is establish our baseline. What's the current number of discovery calls that we're making to get the level of revenue or the number of clients that we have. Let's just say for the sake of argument that I make, you know, I make 9 calls a week, and that nets me 3 clients a month, and I'm earning $3K a month. If that's our baseline, then what we want to think about in terms of, you know, sufficiency for making a change is, OK, well, how do I get 1 more client a month? Well, you could, uh, add 3 calls a week because on average you're closing 30% of the sales. So if you add 3 more calls, theoretically, you're gonna get 1 more client that's gonna add $1,000 to your monthly bottom line. You could also decide, okay, well, um, I'm going to increase my closing rate from 33% to 45% or 50% or whatever it's going to be. You— that's part of what we're talking about here is you are taking small steps into possibility. You're experimenting and you're playing with your, um, not just your, your, your numbers, but also how you're going to achieve them until you find something that works for you. The big thing here is playing your game. Like oftentimes we will look to the guru who's got this, you know, crash diet program or has this, you know, secret formula for increasing revenue. And we say, okay, well, it worked for that person. And what we don't realize is it worked for that person, and we're not that person. And it worked for that person in the past, and it's not the past. We have to find what works for us and what works for us now. And that means we have to collect our own data, and we have to try and test these things in the field, in real life. Let our— let our metrics and our methods come into contact with reality so that we can get clarity and earn confidence in our ability to do that. So there we have the basic needs in the Goal Setting and Achievement Pyramid. We've established, you know, sufficiency— what is enough change in behavior to make positive change happen? And can we achieve stability? Can we sustain this and maintain this over time? Now, We can notice we've already started to make progress. And if, if we are at, have made those changes and are consistently doing the things that we said we were going to do, we are already making progress to the, our ultimate goal of, of higher level of fitness and energy or a higher monthly revenue number. But now we, if we want to continue to optimize, then we move into structure. And at the structure level, we're answering the question, can I schedule this? So this is where your Putting a little bit more structure and scaffolding around the things that you've already established. So, you know, with your fitness goal, this might be scheduling, like, exactly when your meals are going to be, exactly, you know, what days and at what times you're going to exercise. For your business, you might be establishing the days that you make your calls, or the times that you make your calls. You're structuring these things and scheduling these things because Now you're establishing them as a priority. They— you have scheduled specific times that these things must happen because these are the things that are important to you. So we have already got a little bit more clarity and specificity about our goal and our, and our plan, and now we are scheduling when that's going to happen. We've incorporated that time element. Now Again, what we will usually find at this point is that we are optimizing and amplifying our success. We may find ourselves closing the gap between where we are and where we want to be with a little less effort, with, in a little less time, maybe with a little bit more enjoyment, and certainly with less risk that we're going to blow ourselves up or fall off the wagon and not be able to get back on. If we choose to, now it's time to move to the 4th level of the goal setting and achievement pyramid, which is surprise. Can I add variety is the question that we're answering here. So, you know, all work and no play makes Jack or Jill or Jonah a dull boy or girl or what have you. And so what we are establishing here is, you know, what happens if we introduce a little novelty into the schedule and into, into the, the guidelines that we've set for ourselves? In fitness, this might be introducing a cheat day, like, okay, on the weekends, I want to be able to have a glass of wine with my spouse or have a slice of cheesecake, you know, for dessert. Can you do— introduce that without setting yourself back? Or if you do set yourself back a little bit, can you recover in a, in a reasonable amount of time? And so we are at this point kind of looking at introducing cheat days in our fitness program, introducing a different exercise schedule, or maybe even a different type of exercise. Maybe we want to replace a run day or a walk day with, um, uh, a day on a cardio machine or a day, day where we're doing some weightlifting. Um, in terms of our business goal, you know, we might want to introduce, um, a, you know, a new idea like cold calling. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna randomly go through social media and find people that I think I would be a good fit for. I'm gonna reach out to them, uh, in a cold call. Or, uh, maybe you're gonna cycle back through and call back people that, um, initially didn't show any interest or didn't have the, the means or, or the need for your services. But maybe by reconnecting them now, you'll be able to drum up some new business. So you're trying, uh, you're putting a little innovation, introducing a little innovation, a little creativity, a little bit of surprise, uh, a little bit of novelty in what you're doing to achieve the goals that you want to achieve. Now, again, you know, if you introduce that novelty, that cheat day, and you notice that your weight starts to creep back up consistently, well, then you just drop back down to the level of schedule where things— where you were making measured, uh, consistent achievement, and you reestablish that as your baseline. You're not going to go backslide all the way back to, you know, overeating and doing nothing and not hydrating yourself properly. So again, this idea that you can move up and down the pyramid, and there's no rule that says you have to move up if you're happy at the level that you're at. For a lot of people on this call, you are probably the type of person that really does, you know, you're a Type A overachiever type of person. You're definitely going to be reaching for that level of sophistication when you're ready for it. And the question you're answering at the top of the pyramid is do I want to optimize? Because at this, at the level of sophistication, you are getting into the minutia and into the micro, right? This is where, like, in, in your health goal, you might be looking at, like, you know, count, like, looking at the specific nutrients that you, you're introducing into your diet. You're adding supplements, or in your exercise, you're isolating muscle groups. In business, this might be when you start to add a webinar funnel to your discovery call process, or maybe you're, you're hiring call setters to optimize the, the number of calls that you have and the, and the closing rate of those calls. Again, that's a level of optimization that may or may not be up to you. Or up may or may not be for you. And if not, just drop down to the level, the level that you're at where you, you were happy. The whole point is you're playing your game and you're setting your own definition of, you know, what fulfillment, meaning, identity, purpose, happiness, uh, well-being is, what that means for you. Does it mean that you have to only that you only get it when you work your way all the way up the pyramid. Many people will find a level of success that's— they're just fine with somewhere in the middle of that pyramid. So that is the, that is the goal-setting pyramid. I'll bring that up one more time just so that you see that. So again, we have 5 levels: sufficiency, stability, structure, surprise, sophistication. We have questions that we need to answer in the affirmative before we move up to the next level. We understand that we don't have to move up if we don't want to, and we understand that we can move back down when we are meeting— when we are not hitting our marks at any given level. We can slip back down, get traction, and then we can try again. When we have a little bit more momentum or a little bit more experience or a little bit more confidence or what have you. I'm going to leave you with one final slide. And I'm not going to go into any detail in, in, in these. But the, one of the things that I do in my work as an Encore Life Coach and the things that I write about and broadcast about at Creative on Purpose are you know, mental models and principles and practices, many of them based in ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions that are time-tested and scientifically vetted, that help people become the kind of person that knows what they want and is able to get it. And around goal achievement, the concepts that, that I find I go to most often, and that my clients and subscribers find most helpful, is this understanding that what got you where you are won't get you where you want to be. If you're going to If you're going to make a difference, you're going to have to see, be, and do things differently. And so you have to be able to adopt that growth mindset and that willingness to do things badly in your pursuit of being able to do things well and having this sense of playfulness and experimentation. The second is every system is perfectly designed to get the results they get. The system, you know, wherever you're at, if you're unhappy with the results you're getting, That's because the system that you're, you've developed and that you continue to repeat over and over and over again is designed to get you the results it's getting. If you want to get different results, you're going to have to, you're going to have to tweak your system. And so system reliability is a big part of what I do. I would say the 3 fundamental things that I approach every situation, whether I'm helping a coach increase their monthly revenue or helping someone that's exiting from an entrepreneurial endeavor to find their life's next chapter's goal and live their legacy, I'm always looking at reasoning from first principles— what's required to get the result that you want to get— and focusing on just the 3 things that you have to do well enough to get there. And then looking at the efficiency, your level of efficiency in completing each of those things, and raising the floor on the ones that are least efficient. And then, and then finally, this idea of microstepping, taking small steps into possibility and improvement every single day. That it's, it's that daily discipline, rather than the big, bold leaps to achieve the things that we want to achieve. We really underestimate what we can get done over time, and we really overestimate what we can get done in short periods of time. So the idea of reasoning from first principles, system reliability, and microstepping are really important. Progress: the right step at the right time in the right order. We saw that in the hierarchy. You, you know, you, you can't take a step into self-actualization if you haven't yet achieve those psychological needs or those basic needs first. You have to do the right things at the right time in the right order. Navigating with Google Maps, not MapQuest. Again, a lot of the time, and back in the day, when you printed off MapQuest, you know, you had a printed document and you just followed those directions. It didn't take into consideration that there might be road construction ahead or an accident has happened or a tree has gone down across the road. Google Maps allows you to course correct as you go. And you may find yourself getting to where you want to be on a slightly different path than you initially thought. But you are on an optimized path that, that is always course-correcting and helping you refine and refine and define and refine your destination and how you get there. And the last one is just this idea of checking the rearview mirror as often as you look out the windshield. We are aiming aspirational creatures. We when we're looking down the road at where we want to be, we are paying attention to the gap. And that can be really discouraging. We need to look in the rearview mirror every once in a while and realize that this microstepping process, and by following this, this sustainable method of setting and achieving goals, that we are making, we are making incremental progress that compounds over time. And when we check the rearview mirror, we'll see that we've come a lot further than we we thought we had. And it also reminds me that, you know, the results that we want are really not completely up to us at all. You know, our health, our situation, other people, external circumstances around, you know, things that happen in life can all conspire against us getting the things that we say we want. But if we are approaching those things and defining those things and our system for getting them with intention and integrity, The journey itself becomes its own reward. You know, we're fond of saying at the Guardian Academy, the process is the shortcut. And I like to add, it's also the reward. If you are following a path, uh, with intention, with integrity, and you, uh, have this daily discipline of doing it in alignment with who you really are, what you're really good at, and where you really belong, you're going to have a, uh, find that not only do you have a sufficient level of fulfillment and meaning in your life, but you're probably going to find that the the things that you want become naturally occurring side effects of doing the right things at the right time in the right order in the right way, making sure that you're playing your game and that you are carving out your unique path to get there. So I hope that all of that is helpful. It's— I see Scott Perry and Chris and Kato have been leaving some comments here, and I'll be happy to get to those in a little bit. Um, this is the second time that I've, uh, that I've done this workshop. I felt like this time around it was much clearer. Cato and some of the others that saw it last time can weigh in on that. And, uh, again, next week this will be published in more detail as a long-form article on the Creative on Purpose Substack. There's a link down below that you can click, uh, to access the article when it comes out on Wednesday, or you can click on it now and subscribe for free and get it delivered to your inbox on Wednesday. There's also a link to join the Guardian Academy Substack, and if you use that link, join the Substack, and then search for 2024 all spelled out, uh, there's an article, uh, where Nick Peterson goes through the same process, uh, using his examples and his words. Um, again, credit and a hat tip to Nick for kind of originating this idea of layering a goal-setting and achievement framework over Maslow's hierarchy. I thought that was a real stroke of genius. And I know that he is always game for people to, to take his ideas and repurpose them for their own networks. And again, hope this was really helpful. It's been a privilege to present it all to you. If you have any questions, drop them in the chat wherever you are. And if you have any lessons, ahas, or takeaways that you want to share with me. I'm always eager to hear from you and to, you know, know that you've achieved some level of value from these things. And also always interested in how I might do it better, refine it for next time. So I hope, again, that this was all helpful. And we'll look forward to seeing you wherever we see you next. Have a great day!