The Unconventional Goalsetting Technique That Works!

In this video, you're going to understand a really subtle but powerful difference in types of goals. There are two types of goals that we are trained to pursue in the world. Whenever you set a goal, you always have to understand if that goal is a means goal or an end goal. Too many people fall into a trap by not knowing the difference. Now, to illustrate this difference, let me share with you a story. So many years ago, this would have been around 2002 or 2003. I was teaching a class in New York City. And this was in the early days of me being a personal growth teacher. And this class was on the Silva Method. And it was. A lot of it was on creative visualization. And so I had a student come to me and said, can I apply creative visualization to be a faster typist? So I thought, well, that's kind of a interesting idea. Why would you want to be a faster typist? In my mind, I was thinking, why would anybody want speed typing as a goal? Does she have a fetish of fingers on a keyboard? She said, well, I'm a data entry clerk, and the faster I can type, the more forms I can fill out. So I said, oh, okay. Well, why do you want to fill out more form? She said, well, I'm paid not by the hour, but. But by the number of forms I fill out. If I can fill out more forms in an hour, my hourly rate goes up. So I said, great, now we are getting somewhere. So really, it's not about being a faster typist, it's about increasing your hourly rate. She goes, yes. And I said, let's go further. Why do you want to increase your hourly rate? And she says, I want to increase my hourly rate so I can be saving more money in the bank. Good. I said, now we're getting somewhere. Let's go further. Why do you want to save more money in the bank? And she says, I want to save more money in the bank because I want to have my mother move from Detroit to New York City and live with me. Great. We're going further. I said, why do you want your mom to move from Detroit to New York City and live with you? And this is where she hit on the inspiration, the end goal that was propelling her. She said, look, my mom lives in Detroit in a house in a neighborhood. Neighborhood that's not safe. She's by herself, and I'm by myself here in New York. And we have such a close friendship. I'm so excited about us being together. I want to move my mom to New York. And not only that, I want to be able to afford an incredible apartment in New York. See, my mom lives in this beautiful house in Detroit, and it's filled with heirlooms of our family going back all the way to the Civil War. We want to move all of these heirlooms, get this New York apartment, fill it with the mementos of our family history, have my mom and myself there in that apartment someday when I have kids. I want my kids growing up in this apartment with their rich family history and their grandmother. Bingo. I said that is exactly what you want to be aiming for. You painted a rich picture, a rich tapestry of the life she wants to lead. That is what you set as your goal. That is your creative visualization project. Not being a faster typist, you see, what this young lady misunderstood is the difference between a means goal and an end goal. The end goal was that apartment with her mother, with her family heirlooms. You could feel the excitement as she described it. The means goal was being a fasted typist. Now, look, that's. It's not a bad thing, but it's not the reason you were born. It's not why you're here. It's not what makes your soul sing. But so many people make that mistake. They forget that we have this incredible power within us. As CS Lewis said, you do not have a soul. You are a soul. What you have is a body. We forget that, and we fall into this trap. To try to look at means goals as our dominant goal mechanism, the means to an end. When instead you should be focused and obsessed with the end, with a beautiful picture of the life you want to lead. End goals light you up. Means goals feel like projects. Think about it. End goals are the things that are truly the most beautiful aspects of the human experience. Cradling a newborn baby in your arm, waking up next to someone you truly love. Making breakfast for your family on a Sunday morning. Cuddling with a loved one. Being able to hop on a bicycle and cycle with friends or family as you observe a sunset along the bay, travel the world and take beautiful pictures. Experience fine dining with exotic food. Live in a beautiful apartment that inspires you. Be able to finish a project that you are doing not for some money or some goal, but because you love the act of writing or painting or composing music or coding. All of these are end goals. But we don't set goals for these. We set means goals designed to move us along life, based on a culturescape idea of how life should unfold in Confession. I used to work in the legal industry, so I had a lot of lawyer friends. I worked with a lot of lawyers, had a lot of friends who were lawyers. And I always found it really interesting that people become lawyers. Here's why. If you're a lawyer in America or in Australia, there are studies that show that you have a 50% chance of clinical depression. 50%. Yet every year, millions of people decide to go into law. Why? I don't think anyone decides. I want a job where I get to go to court, argue with people, and could potentially be depressed for half my life. Instead, they are seduced by the mean school. Becoming a lawyer or an engineer or a doctor or an entrepreneur is a means goal, not an end goal. Let me tell you why. I have a friend who graduated law from Harvard University. Very dear friend. We went to the University of Michigan together. He graduated from Harvard University, met his wife in Boston, moved into a beautiful penthouse apartment overlooking the city, and was really excited about when he finally was able to practice law. But soon he found that it wasn't what it was made out to be. He was working crazy long hours. He told me 120 hours in some weeks. And soon, within a span of two to three years, his marriage started unraveling. His partner, who was also a lawyer, was also working so hard, they simply couldn't provide enough attention to each other. The marriage ended. He sank into a depression. He was making so much money, but he just wasn't fulfilled. He decided to quit. And when he quit, he decided to go and do something completely different. He decided to buy a bike and cycle across the United States simply on a bike, living a minimalist lifestyle. And for the first time, he was happy. Well, he fell into the same means goal versus end goal trap that I did when I became an engineer at Microsoft. He was chasing the means to an end. Think about if you're doing this too. When I asked my friend why he wanted to become a lawyer, he said because he wanted to change the world. He was excited about getting into international law, about being able to fight for the rights of refugees. He never actually got to do that because he fell into the means gold strap. He decided that his life was going to unfold in a specific way. He was going to do good in school, pass the lsat, get into a law firm, become a partner, work hard, eventually work harder and harder and harder until he could be a famous international rights lawyer. And of course, it didn't go that way. But if he had done the three most important questions and asked himself the questions that lead to discovering his true end goals, his path to happiness might have been a lot more streamlined and effective. And that's really where end goals benefit. End goals allow you to streamline your path to happiness by giving you clarity on what you truly want. You see, my friend didn't really want to be an international rights lawyer. That was a means goal. What he really wanted was to help people, to support human rights. That was what made him light up. It didn't matter how he did that, it was what he was obsessed with, human rights. I wanted to experience culture, travel, work in a job with people. I became an engineer because I thought, well, it would allow me to earn an income that would let me do that. But I didn't have to do that by I was working for a non profit paying me below the poverty rate. But I was happy because I got to travel, to meet people, to experience cultures. That was what lit me up. You see, very often when we nail our end goals, something happens. It's like our minds, our subconscious, our spiritual core figures out a way to shortcut our movement towards those end goals. This is why we should momentarily set aside the means goals and focus just on the end goals. If you study many great spiritual practices involving creative visualization or manifesting, you will hear the spiritual teacher say, focus on the what and the why. Forget the how. This is essentially what we are doing when we apply the three most important questions. You're going to ask yourself three questions designed to get you to the core of your end goals. And these questions are going to shine a beautiful light on your life. Now, end goals fall in three different buckets. The first bucket is experiences. Experiences are things like travel, adventure, falling in love, raising children. The second bucket is growth. Growth is about transformation. It's about becoming a better version of yourself. Growth and experiences are tied together. When you get to the second question on growth, you would ask yourself to be the man or woman who has all of these experiences. How do I need to grow? And then we come to the third bucket. And the third bucket is contribution. The Dalai Lama said, if you want to be happy, make other people happy. And that is the essence of contribution. When you get to that third bucket, you're going to ask yourself, well, if I were the man or woman who had all of these experiences, who has grown in such a way, how now can I give back to others? By answering these three questions and removing means, goals and going just to end goals, you end up with a beautiful picture of how your life can unfold. And to Understand this. I want to share with you the story of a man who did this exercise, and his story will blow your mind. His name is Dreamer. Dreamer was a young Sudanese Internet. At my company, when he was 22 years old, Dreamer attended a team retreat. So in my company, we take our employees on a team retreat to a beautiful location. Everyone sits down and does their three most important questions. We guide them through a session. Thousands of companies do this now, and you have the right to take this program if you're a mindvalley member and take your company through the process as well. Now, when Dreamer wrote down his three most important questions, it. It was really beautifully done and also really bold. He wrote that he wanted to speak at incredible institutions around the world. At Harvard, at the United nations, at Google. He wrote that he wanted to be a published author. He wrote that he wanted to be able to stand up for human rights. Now, Drima, at that time had come from a country, Sudan, that was going through a dictatorship. He had a blog called the Sudanese Thinker, and he used to write about what was going on in his country. And he was passionate about civil rights. Obviously, if you are living under a dictatorship, civil rights matter. And so he wanted to be able to stand up for freedom, for human rights. And he was really passionate about all of this. But he was 22 years old and interned at a company, a blog that was making no money. How would he possibly get this done? Well, the universe had other plans. As Dreamer wrote down all of his goals, something beautiful started to happen. You could call it coincidence, you could call it serendipity. But his blog started taking off and he got asked to write a book. During that specific time, there was a vast democratic movement happening in Northern Africa. Countries were using Twitter and Facebook. Facebook to overthrow dictatorships. And Dreamer was asked to write a book on this digital revolution. So he did. He wrote a book called My How Fundamentalism Stole My Soul and Doubt Freed My Mind. And it was really about free thinking under the suppression of fundamentalist religion. Amre's book was so beautifully written that it went on to be listed on a list of Foreign Policy Magazine's most important books to read in 2013. And this blew up his career soon, exactly like he had written on his three most important questions. He was invited to speak at major institutions around the world, such as Google. And then he was invited as a guest speaker at the Oslo Freedom Summit alongside incredible people like Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia. I was so proud of Amir. The crazy bold dreams, he wrote in his 3M IQ came true, in the most remarkable, beautiful, elegant way. He never would have guessed that his life would unfold this way. And of course, all of this happened not overnight, but over a span of five to 10 years. But it happened. It's as if the clarity from the three most important questions allowed his soul or his brain to move him in the exact path he needed for his end goals to manifest. Dreama today is living in Canada. He's living an incredible life. And he's just one of the thousands of success stories of people who have applied this exercise and seen a shift in the way their life unfolded. Now notice something about Dreama's goals. He went straight to the end goal speak at incredible institutions. He wanted to do that because being able to speak at these places was what gave him joy. He didn't write down speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum, but he did write Stand up for Human Rights. And he got that by being able to speak at this activist summit. You're going to learn to do the same. But to do that, you must ensure that as you go through this exercise, you don't confuse a means goal with an end goal. So here's how to distinguish between the two. The first rule is this means goals usually have a so in them. I want to do X so I can do Y. I want to graduate from this class so I can be this person. I want to get this book deal so I can be a best selling author. Whenever there's a so, it's a means goal. If you want to be a best selling author, write that down. Ignore the book deal because you don't need a book deal. You could self publish, for example. But the mistake people make is by obsessing on the mean, they actually limit their choices. So if there's a so at the end of your goal, it's a means goal. Don't add it. You're going to be focusing on end goals. Now, the second quality of a means goal is this. Means goals are often about conforming to rules. What is a brule? Well, means goals are often about conforming to the brules of the culturescape. A brule is a bullshit rule. I coined that term in my book the Code of the Extraordinary Mind. In the culturescape, there are rules that help us. They're rules that help us understand the complex world around us. For example, how to cook an omelette. And then they are rules or bullshit rules that are simply passed down from generation to generation unquestioningly, without someone going, hey, should we really be doing this? You must be able to distinguish the brules from the rules. And much of our brules come from media, from religion, from culture, from politicians, from the way things have always been done. Is your goal being influenced by a brule? If it is, it's not a goal. You're probably aiming for a means goal. When I became an engineer, I was actually conforming to a brule. In Indian families, or at least in my Indian family, you have four job options. You're either an engineer, an entrepreneur, a doctor, or a family failure. So I had chose to become the engineer. But that's a brule. And by questioning that brule, I was able to free myself from the shackles of the corporate job I didn't want. Now let's go on to end goals. End goals also have two qualities about them. The first thing is end goals are about following your heart, your intuition. When you think about end goals, you light up. Often with end goals, you don't know how to get there. That's okay. If we only set goals for things that we knew how to get to, our life would be really limited. The greatest visionaries in the world, the people who do the most amazing things, set goals of things that they feel they really want to experience, irregardless of whether or not they know today how to get there. The how will come to you. Focus on the what and the why. The second thing about end goals is end goals are often feelings. There is a feeling to an end goal. When you speak about the end goal of raising children, it's that feeling of love and connectedness with your child. When you talk about the end goal of traveling the world, it's that feeling feeling of adventure and discovery. End goals are often associated with feelings. So by understanding these rules, you can see the difference between a means goal and an end goal.