Setting And Achieving Goals | Wendy Day Talks Life Skills

Hi guys, thanks for tuning in. Good to see you again. I just did an interview with an internet radio station, and it was really cool because instead of talking about the music business, we were talking about just life in general, and we were talking about, um, our ability to accomplish goals. So I'm going to kind of carry on that thought here and talk about life skills, because that's something that those of us that have had success in the music business, we don't talk about. We kind of talk about like the artists that we've helped build success for and the projects that we've worked on, but we don't really talk about stuff like setting goals and planning. So I'm gonna do that right here, right now. Um, for me, and again, I can only give you my experience and tell you how I've done stuff and what has worked for me. You're going to need to find your own way. Hopefully you can take bits and pieces of what you're learning from me and then add that to what you're learning from other people, either online or in real life or in your family, and then you just become the best you that you can be. Um, for me, I read a lot of books to figure out life skills. Um, I, I come from a family that's, um, that's, that's relatively poor. Both of my parents are deceased now, but I grew up in a relatively poor neighborhood, um, that bordered on a very wealthy neighborhood. And my parents chose that area because they wanted my sister and I to get a really great education. And the schools on— in this, in this wealthy neighborhood were phenomenal. So I got to go to some really amazing schools. I got a great education. But we were always one of the poorest families in that area. And, um, my family— my mom was a stay-at-home mom, she was a homemaker, and my dad worked at the post office. Like, he was the guy when you go into the post office to buy stamps or to give packages, to weigh them. That's what my dad did his whole life. So my parents weren't really equipped to teach me how to be an entrepreneur or how to be super successful or how to be a millionaire. That was just kind of beyond their purview and beyond what they wanted to accomplish for themselves, which is fine. Um, I just had— I had loftier goals. I, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to have the freedom that money brings, and I wanted to be able to do, um, lots of different things in life. I wanted to experience. I wanted to travel. I wanted to learn languages. I wanted to find hobbies that fulfill me. So what I did was I read a ton of books. The two that really stand out in my mind, one is Brian Tracy about setting goals. He's got like 37 books about how to set goals. He's got books called like Finding Success. He has one called Goals, which is, you know, with an exclamation point. Um, in case you want to know what that book's about. But he's got like a ton of different books about setting goals, and I read him. Um, and then I also read Jack Canfield. He has an awesome book about focus. And, um, I'm one of those people that always has like a lot going on, and I'm pulled in a lot of different directions. And in reading his book about focus. I learned how to really do one thing at a time and do it well, but I was still able to get everything done. Okay, I'm not explaining this well. In his book, what I learned was to have a lot— you know, many things that you're doing, but focus on each one when you're doing it and kind of bang it out and then move on to the next. He basically taught me to be a sniper instead of a shotgun. And if you know me, you hear me say that a lot. I like that phrase. Um, so in my life I prefer— and in my career I prefer to be a sniper. So I'll really focus in on something and complete it, and then I'll move on to the next thing. Um, and there are times where I work on multiple projects at one time, but I always focus on one thing at a time when I'm doing it, even if it's just for an hour or a day. I just make sure that my, um, my attention isn't being pulled in 100 different directions. So you know how that is when you start something and then you get sidetracked, and then you work on that for a while, and then you get sidetracked from that, you work on that for a while, and then you sidetracked from that, and, and you get so far away from the thing that you initially started, and you only get a little bit done of everything. And I think one of the things that, that helps us as human beings is a sense of accomplishment. And if you've got a lot of half projects half done, you don't really get sense of accomplishment. So today we're talking about life skills, in case you just tuned in and you missed out. I'm going to talk about setting goals because I think that without setting goals, we don't— there's no measurement and there's no accomplishment. And again, as human beings, we need that, that sense of accomplishment. And, and with goals, you can't just really sit back and figure out what you're going to do and keep it in your head. You really need to commit it to paper so that you've got some responsibility for it. Um, you can even tell people close to you so that you've got some accountability, because you know how if you tell somebody you're going to do something and you don't, you really feel stupid if you don't do it. And, and that's really a great thing. It's a great system of checks and balances, because if we say to somebody, hey, I'm gonna lose '20 pounds,' there's a better chance that we'll do it than if we tell nobody and just kind of keep it in our heads for ourselves, right? So you need to decide what you want to accomplish, what you want out of life, and then you need to put it in writing, and you need to tell people close to you so that you have some sense of accountability. Um, when I set goals— and I know everybody does this for some reason at the beginning of the year, they do it in January they list all the things that they want to accomplish. I don't do that because if I do it in January, by about the beginning of February I've given up on everything that I said I was gonna do. I usually do it in September. That seems to be the time of year that's best for me when summer's over. Maybe it comes from all those years of going to school, you know, where school starts in September, and it was always kind of like a new fresh experience, so maybe that's why. I do it in September. Maybe I just like fall, I don't know. But I always sit down and set my goals in early September or late August to figure out what I'm gonna do for, um, for the next year. And when I set goals, I do it a little bit broader than most people. I, I kind of take different aspects of my life, both business, personal, emotional, financial, and my health, and I set goals in every area. I don't just sit down and figure out you know, what I want to accomplish for the next year with my job, I figure out, you know, what do I want to accomplish in terms of my family, in terms of my social life, in terms of my relationships. Um, and that's with family, friends, um, with Tony. I really try to figure out what I want and then, um, I list them on paper. So, um, For goals, you're going to want to set what you want to achieve in your career or in your business, whether it's— whether you're working in the music industry or whether you're in real estate, or if you have a day job, what you want to accomplish with, with your day job. But you want to set goals that will help you get to the point that you want to be. And, and you don't want something as abstract as, you know, let's say that you want to be a songwriter. You don't want to just put as your goal, you know, number one, to be a songwriter. You really want to be more precise, you know. Um, maybe you want to be a songwriter who sells 5 songs in the next 2 years. Um, so you want to state like completely what you're trying to accomplish and even add a date to it that you want to accomplish it by, because that's going to help you step up your game, you know, if you've got a deadline. We all work well with deadlines. I know if I've got nothing to do— that's not true. If I've got one thing to do, I don't get it done. But if I have 15 things that I have to do in a day, I get all of them done, and I even go on to like find other shit to get done. It's remarkable. But again, if I have one thing to do, I don't get it done. I end up doing other stuff, or, you know, I watch something on TV, or I spend the day answering my email, or I read a book. Um, it just seems like the more I have going on, the more I can handle, and I like that. So I keep myself very busy at all times. As many of you know, if you've tried to book an appointment with me, it's really hard to get my time because time has more value to me than money does. It's my most valuable asset, so I'm really tight with it. It's the one thing I can't get back. I can always make more money, but I can't make more time. So, um, for my goals, I list my career goals for my business, um, and then I list life goals. And for me, life goals, I consider, um, family. Like, if you want to, um, if you've got a strained relationship with your dad, let's say, it might be your goal to strengthen your relationship with your dad in the next year. Um, if you have kids and you don't spend a lot of time with your kids and you feel like you're missing something, maybe your goal is to spend more time with your kids in the next 60 days. You know, a goal doesn't have to be a year from now or 2 years from now. A goal can be next week, you know. I always set personal goals for travel. I like to take one big trip every year. It's usually around Christmastime because that's when the industry shuts down, and that's where I have the ability to go away. And for me, like, you know, I want to go to Bali, I want to go to China, I want to go to Morocco. I want to spend 3 weeks, you know, in, in one of those places. And then throughout the year, I want to take maybe 2 smaller trips, like, that are a weekend or a week long. You know, they're on my, they're on my list of goals. Um, hobbies. If you've got hobbies, you know, if you like to paint, or if you golf, or if you play basketball, whatever your hobbies are, you should set goals. You know, and it can be something as simple as, you know, join a gym where you can play basketball, or put together a softball team or a volleyball team, you know, whatever your goal is. For me, my goals are more art-oriented, um, and I usually take like a ceramics class every year or a glass class every year. Um, sometimes I'll do it 4 times a year. It just depends on my schedule and how many clients I have, and financially, you know, it's very expensive. Art classes. So financially, I have to make sure that I can afford to take more than one in a year. Um, have education goals. You know, if you want to learn a new language or two new languages, or if you want to learn a new skill, um, if you want to learn about another culture, you know, whatever interests you have, set goals so that, you know, maybe in the next 6 months you want to learn basic Spanish or basic Arabic or whatever, you know, whatever your goal is. But, but put it on your list and add a time to do it. Um, have a health goal. You know, for me, I didn't have health insurance for like 20 years, so I didn't go to see any doctors to get physicals for a really long time. And then about 3 years ago, um, I decided that my goal was to make sure that I was healthy. I was gaining weight and I wanted to make sure that my heart could handle it. I wanted to make sure that my knees and my hips could handle it. Um, and I wanted to make sure that I was healthy, and I, I put the money into health insurance and went to see a nutritionist and went to get a full physical, and I made sure that I was healthy, which by the way, I am, thank you very much. And that was one of my goals, and I set that goal in September, and it took me until July because there was like a 6-month, um, There was a 6-month period I had to go through where I couldn't use my insurance if something was wrong with me. So I had to really plan out that goal, um, a little bit more pointedly than I did, like, taking a ceramics class in my neighborhood, right? Um, and you might have, you might have, um, society goals. You know, I'm somebody who really cares about the environment in which I live. And I care about people. So I have goals that I set to help guys coming home from prison because that's the thing that I really care about. You know, I'm, I'm really distraught about how when guys get out of the joint, they can't really get a job and they don't have money to start their own businesses. So I've helped a lot of guys coming home, a lot of guys coming home. Aside from society goals, you're going to need financial goals. You know, as, as I list all my goals, you know, a trip to China is not free, so I have to price out everything that I'm trying to accomplish. And then inside of my financial goals, I know exactly what I need to make in that year, what my nut is in order to just survive and accomplish all of my goals. And of course, then I want a little bit extra above that so that if an emergency arises or, you know, something happens with the house that I live in, like a new hot water heater, you know, I can, I can, I cannot have to worry about putting a $2,500 hot water heater on my credit card. I want to be able to take that out of a savings account. And savings are really important, guys. Um, you, you really need to build a cushion. And if you've got an income where you're just living paycheck to paycheck, you've got a serious problem. You need to figure out other streams of income that you can achieve where you're not actually working. And, and what I mean by that is, um, real estate. Real estate's a great opportunity if you learn how to flip houses, or if you learn how to buy and hold houses, then you can have an income from a rental property that you own, right? Like, these are all goals. These are things that you need to figure out how to do and when to do it so that you've got some financial freedom, right? I say, um, you know, there are times in my life, you know, money comes and goes in life, right? It's like this, it ebbs and flows. So there are times where, you know, I'm one paycheck away from being homeless, and then there are times where I'm doing really well. So I've learned to structure my savings so that I don't hit those really low lows. You know, and that's— hello, Loz— and that's important. So, um, your, your goal should be challenging. It shouldn't be something easy, like it shouldn't be, I'm gonna lose 5 pounds in the next year. It should be something that really pushes you to the limit, like maybe I'm gonna lose 50 pounds in the next year. It's got to be something that's achievable. You don't want to say, you know, within the next 60 days I want to play for the NBA. It's just not realistic. You know, unless you're LeBron, he can absolutely say that, but it's got to be realistic but also challenging. It's got to stress you a little bit. It's got to be something that's a little bit bigger than you think that you can do so that you're always like pushing to get it right. And then, um, you want to break down that big goal into smaller goals and then set due dates for those smaller goals. So, um, if your goal is to make $100,000 in the next 10 months, that's basically $10,000 a month. It's not necessarily, you know, you going out and having to raise $100,000 in the next 30 days. If you break it down into smaller chunks, you know, that's basically $2,500 a week. So it makes it a little bit easier for you to figure out, okay, what can I do in my life where I can make that kind of money? You know, do I have enough time in my schedule to drive for Uber? Can I learn how to flip real estate and, and make $100,000 in a year? Yes, that's very doable. I've done that, so I know that it's doable. Um, but you have to learn the skill set that allows you to do that. If you don't know what you're doing and you go out and you try to flip real estate, you're going to lose a shit ton of money. Just like if you come into the music business and you don't know what you're doing you're going to lose a shit ton of money. In any business, if you don't know what you're doing, you're going to lose money, right? You really have to understand how the game is played, who the players are, and, you know, what are the best resources that you can put your money towards. And education is a really strong one— learning how to do whatever you want to do, whether it's speak a language or flip houses or you know, whatever you want to do, you need to learn as much as you can about it. And then you want to schedule everything that you're doing on a calendar. You know, I find that if I have an appointment with somebody at 10 o'clock in the morning, I'm going to do whatever I have to do to get up and get to that appointment at 10 AM. And I am not a morning person, so that's really hard for me to do, is get up early in the morning and get it together and get to, you know, an appointment, um, in the morning. But the really sad thing is that if I schedule to go to the gym at 10 o'clock in the morning— and you can probably tell from looking at me, I do not enjoy the gym— I won't do it. Like, I'll just roll over and go back to sleep at, you know, 8 o'clock when the alarm goes off because I just, I don't, I don't care enough about it. And that's a really sad statement because I'm willing to get up and make an appointment that I've scheduled with somebody else, but I'm not willing to do it for myself. And there's a whole lot going on there. But if you, if you make appointments with yourself so that you're scheduling time for whatever it is that you need to do, and you treat yourself with the same respect that you would treat another person, then you're gonna get up and do what you gotta do. When you're— let's say you're trying to write a book and you decide that you wanna write a little bit every night, which by the way is, you know, a nice little bite-sized thing to do. You know, you want to schedule time on your calendar. Maybe it's every morning when you wake up because that's when your house is the quietest. So you wake up half an hour earlier every morning to write. Once you get in that habit of doing that, it's going to be easy to do it. You're just going to naturally wake up and do it. But if you don't schedule it and you don't force yourself to do that, you're probably never going to do it and the book will not get written. And I've, I've written a book. Believe me, it does not write itself. You've gotta— there's nobody that has enough time to write a book. You're going to have to give something up that you're already doing, or you're going to have to figure out a way to get it done. And for me, the thing that's the easiest to give up is sleep. So I'd rather give up an extra half an hour, an hour of sleep every day and get up and actually write. And, um, be able to have the book done after, you know, a couple months, 6 months, a year, whatever it takes to finish the book. Um, I think that's everything. I took notes so I wouldn't forget anything. Um, again, read some books on setting goals. Um, if you're— if you like to read, definitely read that Jack Canfield book on focus. It's, it's incredible. I learned so much from his Focus book. He has another book that's really great too, something like The Secrets to Success. It's, it's a book that he wrote about how he was able to become so successful in his life, and it's a book that I read almost— God, I read that at least once a year, sometimes every 9 months or so. It kind of gives me that jolt. It's not that it's telling me anything I don't already know, It's one of those books where when I read it, it gives me motivation and incentive to get back on track because sometimes I get, you know, a little bit over here. So, um, that's it. Set goals, achieve them. That's what I do. I put blinders on and I just go for it. And if other things come my way and it's not on my list of goals, I'm probably not going to pay any attention to it because sometimes you can be all over the place with ideas. And especially when you're in a position where I am, like so many people in the industry come to me and say, hey, I have this idea, hey, I have this great thing. And those of you that have come to me with ideas, you know that I'm gonna pass on 99.9% of them because they're not helping me achieve my goals. And I've got a list of stuff that I want to do So if somebody comes to me with an opportunity and it doesn't really fit in with what my mission is for my life or what my goals are for that year, I'm gonna pass on it because I'm more important to me than outside projects. So that's it. Thanks for tuning in for Life Skills, and, um, tune in again. These drop every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11 AM, and then we go live on Wednesday at 7 PM to answer your questions. I hope this was helpful. Go set some goals.