goals, someday to right now

Summary

what are you actually going to achieve next year? not what’s going to happen. what are you going to purposefully achieve. very different question.

1. start with a someday goal. five plus years out. specific, or a way your life feels. doesn’t matter if it’s debt freedom, a car, a level of time freedom, a relationship. it’s yours. don’t let anyone make you feel small for what you want.

2. could do, then should do. brainstorm every single thing you could do to get there. don’t filter. then ruthlessly cut to three. that’s your should do list.

3. goal set to the now. based on my someday goal, what’s the one thing I can do in the next five years. then three years. then this year. then six months. this month. this week. today. right now. every action runs through that filter.

4. ask why five levels deep. why do you want debt freedom. because less stress. why does less stress matter. because I’m a better version of myself. keep going. by layer five you’re at the actual reason, and that reason is what carries you when the year gets hard.

5. goal setting is the activity. goal achieving is the work. you can succeed without goals, I have. but you can’t move at light speed without them. so set them. try harder.

Transcript

your someday goal

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. What are your goals for this next year going into 2024? What are you going to achieve? When you’re listening to this podcast at the end of 2024, I’m going to ask you to reflect at some point, and I want to know what you got done, not what happened.

What did you purposefully achieve? Very different things. We’re all moving forward, right? We’re all taking steps forward in some capacity, but if you don’t have an actual goal, those steps aren’t going to be very meaningful, even though they might be steps forward. So let’s focus on goals today. This is a better human business podcast.

could do, should do

I’m Jerred Moon, and this will be the last podcast I do in 2023. In fact, I’m going to take a couple of weeks off. I’ll come back mid January, just kind of taking a, taking a break, get back to podcasting after the start of the new year, got a lot going on family wise, business wise over the next couple of weeks.

I’m just going to take a break, press pause on recording the podcast until then. But I thought a great way to round out the year would be to talk about goals and walk you, walk you through a simple goal setting exercise. And so that’s what I’m going to do today. And if you just are listening to this in passing, right, you’re, and that’s how I listen to most podcasts and audio books, right?

They’re driving or I’m doing the dishes or something running, there’s something. But this one is a little bit different. You can try it passively, but I highly recommend getting a couple of pieces of paper. And when I say pause, pause the podcast, do the exercises and actually hash out what you want might take 30 minutes, might take an hour, depends on how much you already know what you want.

goal setting to the now

And the ultimate goal here is to create almost like a vision for what you want in the future and get that down to what we want over this next year. So let’s get started. Got a lot of work to do. So we’re going to start, you’re going to identify something that you desire in your life someday. Okay. This is what we call the someday goal.

And someday means to achieve this desire, it will take more than five years. This could be personal accomplishment, financial goal, or even a material possession. And really, I can’t emphasize that enough. If you want a material possession, don’t let anyone feel bad, make you feel bad for wanting what you want.

Absolutely just want whatever you want. Doesn’t matter what the goal is. If you want to be debt free, that’s what you want. Go do it. If you want a really awesome car that goes fast, that’s what you want. Go get it. Go do that thing. Don’t let anybody tell you that your goals aren’t worthy, right? Because that’s, that’s how you get really bad at goal achieving is to buy is by setting goals that you don’t really, really want, right?

why five levels deep

You’re setting goals as if someone’s watching you and they’re going to judge you on your goals. These are only for you. So write down what you want. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to make two different lists, but first you have to decide what that someday goal is. So I’d say pause this right now.

Think, think on it for five minutes, 10 minutes, however long it takes you. What do you want in five plus years, 10 years? Is it a certain thing? Is it a way your life looks and feels? Is it a level of freedom both in time and finances? What does it look like in five years? What’s that someday goal?

Even if it’s not a specific thing like I want this car, maybe it’s, this is what I want my life to look like in the next five years. That’s fine too because if some people could be like, you know what? If I could wake up, I don’t have to rush to work or stress and I could drink my coffee with my wife and we’re, we don’t have anything to worry about financially.

goal setting vs goal achieving

Like that’s a, that’s a way things feel right and that’s okay. That’s a good goal. That’s a good someday goal. If you can do this thing for five to 10 minutes, write down the someday goal. Now that you’re back, you have your someday goal. I want you to articulate everything you could do to achieve your goal.

So don’t worry about prioritizing. Just simply write down everything you can for five to 10 minutes. Everything you could do to achieve that someday goal. If you wanted to be debt free and that was your someday goal, just what’s everything that you could do? Getting a side hustle, starting a business, starting another business, selling stuff, selling some assets, like what’s everything you absolutely could do?

Write down everything you could do to achieve that someday goal. Don’t filter it. Don’t prioritize it. Don’t worry about things being stupid or good idea, bad idea, anything like that. Just write down everything you could do. Five to 10 minutes. So pause it right here. Go ahead and do that. Once you’ve done that, you’re going to come back, okay?

Now we’re going to go from a could do to should do. Now on the should do list, you’re going to be looking at your could do list. Now we’re going to prioritize it. We’re going to triage it, right? And I want you to only pick three. Three things. So if you spent five to 10 minutes thinking of your could do list, say you came up with 50 things that you could do, that’s great.

It holds onto that list, but we’re only going to focus on three. So you’re going to bring those three over from could do to should do. Now this makes you look at each one of your could do tasks with a magnifying glass. And you’re like, yeah, I could do that, but is it what I should do if I only have three things that I could do, right?

If I only have three things on my could do list, should I do it? It’s going to make you really ask hard questions about whether or not what you’ve set is worth doing and is it actually going to move the needle? And you’re using your best guess here, right? So spend another five to 10 minutes on that.

Narrow your could do list down to a should do with only three things. Now we’re going to jump to goal setting to the now. Based on your someday goal, this is the focusing question. Based on your someday goal, which whatever it is, what is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

So that’s the focusing question. It comes from the book, The One Thing. So I’ll read it off one more time. Based on my blank goal, what is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary? So as we go through this goal setting to the now exercise, what you’ll do is you’ll write down your someday goal.

We already wrote that down. Now the second thing you’ll do is you’re going to say, based on my someday goal, what’s the one thing I can do in the next five years? So it’s narrowing it down even more to these big rocks, right? So based on my someday goal, what’s the one thing I can do in the next five years?

Okay, you got that? Take a minute. And we’re just going to keep going down. Okay, based on that five-year goal that you now set, that’s the one thing that you can do in the next five years, what’s the one thing you can do in the next three years? Write that down. Certain level you have to get to, certain size, certain number of actions.

What is it? What do you have to do? Write down what you can do in the next three years. Now we’re going to go down another level. So based on my three-year goal, what is the one thing I can do this year? You see how we’re lining up all our ducks in a row here? So what’s the one thing I can do this year?

When you land on that, you’re pretty much landing on your annual goal. But you want to keep it going, keep it going further. So you’re going to say, based on my yearly goal, what’s the one thing I can do in the next six months? You’re going to write that down. And then based on my six-month goal, what is the one thing I can do this month?

Let’s say that’s January 2024. And then you’re going to go one step further. Based on my monthly goal for January, what’s the one thing I can do this week? Then you’re going to say, based on my weekly goal, what’s the one thing I can do today? And then based on my daily goal, what’s the one thing I can do right now?

If you’re always running your actions through this filter, you’ll know that you’re not wasting your time. So if it’s a random Wednesday and you have this list in front of you and you’re not sure what you should do, there’s some things that we have to do just for work, for business as an entrepreneur.

But when you have that time to build your business and to grow and to expand, are you wasting your time? You might be. You might be. And so you have to look at it like, okay, going from someday, someday to five years, to three years, to this year, to six months, to this month, to this week, to today, to right now.

Do these things line up? They line up. Cool. I’m going to keep going. Do they not line up? Don’t do it. It’s not worth your time. It’s not helping you get towards your goals. Now the last thing I’ll leave you with is really answering why you want something, okay? So I recommend writing down your someday goal.

And after you write down your someday goal, you should write down why you want it five levels deep. If you want it to be debt free as your someday goal, why do you want that? And then you might be like, well, it’s because if I was debt free, I wouldn’t have to stress so much about money. Okay? Then the second question would be, why is stressing less about money something I desire?

That’d be the second question. And you’d be like, when I stress less, I’m a better version of myself. And that’s ultimately what I want. Okay? So level three. So when you stress less, you’re a better version of yourself. Why do you want to be a better version of yourself? Then you’d answer that question.

When I’m a better version of myself, my relationship with my wife is better. My relationship with my kids are better. And those things are super important to me. Then you go one layer deep. Why is being the best version of yourself for your family, for your kids, for your wife? Like why is it important for you to be the best version of yourself so the relationships are better?

Like why are the relationships so important? And then you just keep going, right? And some of those sound like easy to answer questions are obvious, like obviously we want a good relationship with our family members, but really having to think about why that’s important to you, it gets hard because we only went three or four layers right there.

We still have to go at least one more layer. And why I recommend doing this is because again, when you set a goal, you have to want what you want. Don’t let anyone else influence or decide what your goal should be because that’s a fast track to not achieving your goals is letting someone else set your goals.

Now goal setting or goal achieving, I like to make sure that there’s a category for each one of those. Goal setting is just an activity we can do to feel good. Goal achieving is the hard work that you have to put in to actually achieve the goal to do the work, right? But it gets hard, it gets hard throughout the year to achieve the goals and to stay focused and stay on track.

And we have the someday goal of what we want our life to look like. That can be a little bit motivating. But when you answer why five levels deep, you start to really uncover your true motivations and why you want something. And once you get to that point, it’s not very hard to find motivation and discipline again whenever you fall off track because all you have to do is remember that fifth layer maybe has something to do with, you know, the love of your family or something you desire.

It doesn’t have to be those things. I’m a family man, so that’s what it always ends up coming back to. But whatever it comes down to, you have this gigantic why it keeps you motivated, it keeps you pressing forward when things are tough, when you don’t feel on track, when things are scattered. So don’t skip the why step.

Now if you’ve done all this, you have your annual goal because you answered it in the goal setting to the now, right? You went from someday to five years to three years to what can I do this year? And something I recommend doing again just to get a little bit more concrete on your annual goal is the could do and should do list, okay?

I like to do this list frequently for anything, for projects, for goals. So when we set the someday goal, which is something five years in the future or more, I had to do the could do, brainstorm everything, cut it down to three. Do the same thing for your annual goal, right? So you already did the goal setting to the now.

So you said, okay, based on my someday goal, here’s what I can do in the next five years, here’s what I can do in the next three years, here’s what I can do this year. So you already have what you need to do this year to be on track. So that becomes like your annual goal, doing that thing. But now to expand the activities more so in the year, you would write down, again, a could do list just for that annual goal.

So spend five to 10 minutes, okay, I’m just going to go through every single thing I could do to achieve that goal this year. And I know that goal is in line with my three year, which is in line with my five year, which is in line with my someday. So you sit there five, 10 minutes, brainstorm every single thing you could do to achieve your goal for this year.

And then the last thing you would do is you would go, you would whittle it down to the should do list, right? What should I do this year? What are the three things? If I could only pick three from my could do list, what should I do? Now you have your success list, right? So now you can move forward, you’re starting to make progress.

And then you can do this on a monthly basis too, because you can’t guarantee those three things that you brainstormed are going to get you where you want to go. But you’re asking the right questions and you’re putting yourself in a good position to set yourself up for a solid year. You can do this for your business life, your personal life.

Now I take goal setting way deeper than this, way longer, I have entire courses on goal setting, planning out quarters, planning out days. It’s a big part of what I enjoy teaching and what I enjoy doing just because I’ve seen it have such an impact on my life when I went from just doing random stuff, unfocused effort that got me, got me somewhere.

I don’t want to say, and that’s what I try to point out to people when, when we’re talking about goals is I’ve been, I’ve seen success as an entrepreneur without goals. And if you are that person too, you are not special because if you’re halfway motivated and moving in the right direction and making half of your decisions being right decisions, you will move forward, but you are not special.

But what you have to know is you’re not moving as far or as fast as you could be in the direction that you want if you’re not actually setting goals. That’s what I try to express to people. I absolutely have seen success as an entrepreneur when I’m just doing stuff I think I should do with no direction, no bigger picture, no annual goal, no someday goal, no five year goal.

I have made more money and made more progress in a year with no goals whatsoever. So if you’re, if you’re sitting there as one of those people who think that you’re special because I don’t really set goals, it doesn’t matter. All you’re saying to me when you say that is I could be so much better, but I refuse to because I don’t want to put in the hard work of setting goals and going through an exercise like we just went over for the last 15 minutes.

You can achieve things without set, without writing down, without doing, without having goals, right? You can still achieve things, but you will be so much further off if you just do something like this and you follow your goals and you put them in order from right now all the way to what you want someday.

Because when I do that, I feel like I’m moving at light speed compared to the random year where I’m not doing this. Even though you can see success in both, writing everything down will make you way better. And I know it’s a lot. It’s a lot of work to try and find the time to do this at the end of the year, but you could be better than you are right now and you could have an amazing 2024 if you just take some time to put in the work.

So if you won’t do it, all I have for you is try harder. See you next year.