087 - Fail-Proof Process To Knock Your Goals Out Of The Park

If you’ve ever beat yourself up for failing to achieve a goal, then this is for you. 

Not only is there a process that you need to do, but there’s also a few key things that often get overlooked. 

And when you skip them, you can bet your sweet ass that you’ll be in a world of pain and frustration. Or worse yet, you’ll lose your motivation and give up, which is failing by default. 

No one wants these complications, so let’s dig into what should go into goal setting so you can secure your finances and bring the life of your dreams into reality. 

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Transcript

Welcome to Roaming Returns, a podcast about generating a passive income through investing so you don't have to wait until retirement to live your passions. 

If you've ever beat yourself up for failing to achieve a goal, then this is for you. Not only is there a process that you need to do, but there's also a few key things that often get overlooked. And when you skip them, you can bet your sweet ass that you'll be in a world of pain and frustration.
Or worse yet, you'll lose your motivation and give up, which is failing by default. No one wants these complications. So let's dig into what should go into goal setting so you can secure your finances and bring the life of your dreams into reality.
You're such a pain in my butt. I have my moments. So we are back for the long awaited goal setting episode.
Since welcome to the frozen tundra of Pennsylvania. Oh, my God. Tim Shush.
It is so cold. Yeah, it's supposed to be really cold for this next week. Like single digits.
This is nonsense. It's not going to be fun. Luckily, Tim bought a sauna blanket.
I did. It's super nice. And I keep stealing it.
She does. That's not super nice. All right, let's blast right into this.
OK, goals. Goal setting. It's super important and that's all you need to know about it.
Well, the whole reason I want to be back next week, the whole reason I wanted to do this was because a lot of people do the New Year's resolution thing and then they end up quitting. The statistics are pretty high. It's like 76, 75 percent.
Yeah. Quit before the end of January. Yeah.
Like in the average year, I think only like 8 percent of people actually keep their goals or their resolutions for the entire year. Yeah. So to be part of the 8 percent instead of the 92.
There is like a way to process that makes it easier. But make sure you stick to it. The first question that I ask myself when I come up with goals is what kind of pain am I willing to endure? I do it backwards.
Like other other people, you know, they'll actually have goals and they'll like state goals and they're like, how am I going to achieve them? They don't think about like what you have to give up to reach your goals. They don't have a good enough why. Whereas like, yeah, mine is like, OK, I want to like, for example, I want to ride in a bicycle race.
I want to do it this year, but circumstances I want to ride in a bicycle race next year. So what kind of pain am I willing to endure to make it happen? Like I'll be living in a van. I'll be training.
I'll have freaking cats everywhere. We'll have minimal space. But I'm willing to go through all of that to like my goal is to ride a bicycle race and it's going to happen.
I'm going to make it happen. Yeah. But what is goal like goal setting is literally just the process of defining specific measurable objectives and creating a plan to achieve them within a set timeframe.
I can see a lot of you can't have like open ended goals like I plan on traveling to Europe at some point in my life. That's not really a goal. That's just a I think the condo is a really good example of that where we're like, yeah, we're going to have it done.
Hopefully. No, I don't have it. I haven't followed this process with the condo.
And thus the condo keeps getting pushed back. And that's like why I say like what kind of pain am I willing to do is because the real challenge is not determining if you want the result, but if you're willing to accept the sacrifices required to achieve your if you're willing, willing is the key thing. So now there is a good analogy that I found when doing the research for this.
It's called the rudders and oars, not udders, rudders, udders or big guns, rudders and oars like the rudder is your goal, you know, rudder in the back of the ship. Yeah, it turns it steers you rudders, your goal, whereas the oars is the system, how you're going to get to where you're going. You actually have to row.
Yeah. If you're interested in that, just type in the rudders and goals, rudders and oars and goal setting. It'll come up with like this whole huge whole like thesis on it.
It's pretty interesting thesis. But basically that is a way to illustrate what we're trying to say. Like your goal should be like your North Star kind of.
But how you get there is how you get there. You can't just say, I'm going to I'm going to go to the North Star. And then that's a good example of this is in the Lulu community.
If you manifest thing, this is what the manifestos do. They think they want this thing. So they have their North Star, they have their whatever, but they never do any action because they just think the universe is going to hand them shit.
That doesn't work that way. You have to have both sides coupled together. And a lot of people have a lot of the rowing component going in the oar component, but they don't have an actual where they're going.
So what they'll do is they'll move one direction and then they'll like move a different direction. They'll move a different direction. They'll move a different direction.
They'll move a different direction. If you're not heading towards something, you're like all over the place and you end up kind of end up seems like you'd be going in circles. Yeah.
You basically be going in circles. You end up pretty much like a one armed man running, rowing in a boat. So you might as well not even bother.
You got to take the time. You have to set up the thing and you have to have like the will or like the willingness for that thing you're striving for. If you're a one armed man, I apologize for the joke.
Nemo. But yeah, like the rudder and oars. I actually really like that example.
Because you have to focus on both the vision and the action. Like that's. Yes.
And if you know you're the kind of person that lacks vision, get in with your friends, get in with some other people, like bounce ideas off, message us on like the YouTube video. If you're up on here, like we can help you vision board. That's actually something we're both really good.
For example, my like example, the rudder of my example is I'm going to ride a bike race next year. So the oars are my training, my dieting, my sleeping, my the sauna blanket, like all the things I'm willing to do. Like I'm going to train probably two or three days a week.
I'm going to probably go 80 to 100 miles before I actually even get into the bike race. That's that. But that's just a cool analogy I found.
So like what skills are required when it comes to goal setting there? Believe it or not, there's actually skills involved in this. It's not something you can just like spit out. The good news is the good news is all the skills that I came up with, they can be learned and developed to practice.
It's not something that you need innately have to have. You can actually develop it like a muscle. The first is planning.
I love planning, planning. Yeah, like that. Like you have to have a plan.
That's just simple, simple enough. Yeah, because again, if you don't have a plan, if you don't have a map, where the hell are you going? Planning and organizational skills are integral to the goal achievement process. Like you have to plan through proper planning.
Planning we can prioritize and maintain focus and focus is super important because if you don't have focus and you're kind of doing what she was just saying, like rowing all over a lake without any like specific. Literally no rhyme or reason. You think you know, but then you're like, oh, this what is my bigger goal? Your vision is too short.
So you're just like. So that's one that's one skill that you can actually develop as planning. You can seriously Google self-help planning and like there's so much shit out there for planning.
Oh, good to know. Second skill is self-motivation. Like when you're setting goals, it is from inside of you that you should be doing it, not from external factors like so.
And this is, I think, what's hard for people because the school system and like the society system as a whole has a thing set up for you. So you don't have to make the plan and all the other stuff for you or motivate yourself for you. Because a lot of people, they either get overwhelmed or that ties into that anxiety overwhelm analysis paralysis episode that we did because people either overthink.
So then they don't know how to clarify or they aren't motivated. Oh, well, actually, that ties into the whole knowing why thing. So there's a lot of ties into this episode.
The key adjective to me when it comes to self-motivation is desire. Like if you don't have the desire to achieve anything, then the attempts are going to fail because you're not. Yeah.
So if you think if you have issues with procrastination, motivation and all that, either you have an apathy thing, which is health cause like amino acid thing going on, or you don't actually have a reason that's big enough to get your butt off the couch, get your butt off the gaming system. You have to have a good enough why to motivate you to want to do it. So we never we never want for the self-motivation because we're both very motivated.
I am struggling with the condo, but it is because I no longer want to work on it. So I'm struggling. This is a tough skill to actually learn.
You're going to need to read out. See, I don't think it is. If you're following, you have no idea what you want.
Well, see, if you don't know what you want, there's your problem. And you like lack desire. Like it's this is something that you like a coach may be able to like for me, the condo isn't something I want anymore.
I want to do all this other stuff. And because I can't do that without that first, it's been really hard, like tricking my brain into one thing to do the condo to get to that point. And I'm trying to figure out why I'm just saying if you go back to my how much are you willing to suffer? Like if you don't have the desire, you're not going to want to suffer at all.
Yeah. Like you will. Anytime a first negative hurdle shows up, you'll be like, I quit.
And that's a sign that you're why isn't right. Like when I tried quitting smoking for years and years and years, I never actually had the desire to quit smoking. So I never did it.
If you don't quit, I'm never going to talk to you. Yeah, that was that was the that was the carrot. I was like, oh, I better better quit this nasty shit.
So like quitting smoking probably was one of the hardest. I was just trying to get video. I didn't think you'd do it because nobody else quit smoking.
Yeah, quitting smoking was so much harder, like eating better food and stopping drinking and exercising. Those were all easy. Quitting smoking, whatever's in the fucking cigarettes, just like trigger something in your brain.
I cannot quit. I used to be an alcoholic and I self quit through like I would focus on the pain of the thing I wanted to give up and that I focus on the pleasure of when I was actually doing that. And it's like there's the carrot and stick.
Some people are carrot motivated. Some people are stick motivated. I use both of them to like get away and go towards the two options.
So you're starting to see that like the goal setting can actually is that it's applicable to your normal life as well as your investing. It's literally everything. So you can just click and paste stuff into your investing goals.
Third skill, time management. This is super important because we only have limited time. I mean, that's just common sense.
I've actually read like eight books on time management and I'm still here. Yeah. Yeah.
Time management is about prioritizing stuff and then like basically having boundaries to not let stuff that's irrelevant to the goals. Well, if we do not properly consider the time scale required to obtaining a goal, it'll you'll fail just because like if you have a goal that's like six years down the road, that's not the odds. The probability is you're not going to achieve that goal at six years down the road because it just has so much time between now and.
Well, if you're only if you're only focusing on that end goal and that's where the milestone and like breaking it down into pieces and then doing the small wins and celebrations along the way gets you in the direction. So it's like you need the longer vision, but you need the shorter vision and then time management of actually doing it. Otherwise you give up on the super long goals.
And I see that happen with a lot of people that was found in a study that the more time spent on the planning stage, the more likely that the people succeeded in there. It's probably why I always eventually get my stuff. Sometimes it just takes longer than I want.
So that's like that's so like time management actually is not just like what you're willing to do. You actually have to plan it out. Like the more the more thorough your plan, the more the higher probability you have of achieving.
I mean, that's kind of the same thing as the Oren Rudder. Like you have to have the planning thinking phase and then the action phase, because I know quite a few people who will act before they think and then they screw something up and then they get like destitute and all spazzed out and then they have to do it again. And some people are willing to do it again.
And it's like we just spent a little more time in the planning phase. You could have avoided the pitfalls. That's something I extremely excel at, although sometimes when it's a complicated thing, it's like I got so much stuff going on that I'm trying not to like whatever, whatever.
And that's sometimes when I get stuck and then I'm like, I just have to take action, even if I have to overdo or redo a couple of things or like waste a couple of steps going back and forth, like I just got to get moving. Now, the next two are super important when it comes to goal setting. The first is flexibility.
Like things are not going to go according to plan. You have to have the ability to be flexible and change it up on the fly. And however, however you want to describe flexibility, like you have to be able to be flexible because if you're not the brittle stick breaks, if you're rigid, you're doomed to fail.
Yeah. And then the second one is self, like they call it self-regulation, but it's basically not the same thing as self-motivation. Well, I guess I guess you're right.
It isn't. Basically, you need to regulate and manage your own emotions in order to achieve your goals, like with developed emotional intelligence, which we've been trying for ever to teach you. Tim's really good at this.
I'm still working on that because I have more like manic swings. Well, with with developed emotional intelligence comes the ability to efficiently consider and describe motivational goals, aims and missions. But that's a 2004 study.
So the more the more emotional intelligence you have, the higher probability of actually achieving your goals. Yeah, because your emotions go on left field. Don't like emotion like like there are times and places for emotions, but people actually apply their emotions to the wrong circumstances.
And it basically sabotages anything you're trying to do. That could be part of the condo because I'll like. So part of the issue, I don't know if we talked about it on here, but every time I start one of the many projects in here, I do it and then I run into something that literally could not have been planned for or it's more screwed up.
Like when we took the bathroom floor, it was just covered in mold. I had to cut the subfloor out, which was above the electric. And it was this whole thing that was super freaking pain in the ass.
And I just was like so freaking annoyed that it it just was not what I expected. I had like a mini emotional meltdown. And then like I stopped making progress for a while because I was so annoyed and pissed off because every single project in the condo has been like this and I've been spoiled.
I assume this is an expectation thing for me. I've been spoiled growing up because my dad always built new construction and my dad's super anal about like how things go here. This is obviously shoddy workmanship.
And it's like trying to fix the people who built this as screw ups along the whole way has just literally been grating on my motivation and focus and emotions. And. Bah.
And she brought up the last the last skill you can learn is commitment focus. If you're not committed to the goal or focused on the goal setting process, it won't work. Yeah.
And like I said, that's commitment to the condo. It's like. So like those are the, the, the, the main skills that you can develop that I was able to come up with through all the reading.
Like in this, there was a, an ass ton of reading in this because everybody has like an opinion, an opinion on it. So like I basically went, um, more scientific approach and I like looked at studies that they performed in the eighties, nineties and two thousands and came up with Tim and his studies and stats. I do like data, not the data one.
And I'm just like, does it work? Does it not work? Okay. So now we're like, now that you know the skills, how exactly would you, would you set goals? What would the process look like? Right. Yeah.
It's basically, it's often described as a detached, unemotional process, but if you, you actually need it to be, if you leave out the sense of emotion, you're, you're not really going to succeed because that's coming from robot over here. If you do not like, if you, if you set goals that do not represent ourselves, like whatever your motivation, we set ourselves up for less satisfying experiences and the likelihood is he'll fail. Yeah.
You'll have apathy. What's the point? What's the point? Okay. So the first way goal setting is a tool to enhance wellbeing.
What was I talking about? Oh, how to set goals. Okay. It's a tool to enhance wellbeing, like everything in life to me.
Anyway, everything's a tool. Money's a tool. Free time's a tool.
Eating's a tool. A goal setting's a tool. Sleeping's a tool.
Sleeping's like, they're all tools. To get you where you want to go. That's just how I view things.
Money, money, money, money is a tool. Credit is a tool. Most of the time people set goals that they, because they think they will make them feel good in some way.
But so much of the goal setting guides to fail to consider the emotional ramification of the goals we set. If you don't make them right. If you set like, for example, a financial goal that requires you to work 80 hours per week for like eight years, that's not sustainable.
Which is like what a lot of people are doing in the current financial environment. Especially when they're trying to pay their debts down or they're trying to like, you know, side hustle to get their emergency fund set up. You can do those for short terms of time and that's actually good to do that hustle initially.
But like that's when, if you look into the FIRE movement, the financial independence retire early thing, a lot of people, one of the biggest like things that keeps people quit or like miserable during the whole process. And like, you should not be miserable for extended years of your life. Like it's ultimately the goals that are succeeded.
And this has been proven through 40 years of research. The ultimate goal of the goal setting is happiness and well-being. Yeah.
So if you're miserable for 30 years, like how many people do you know that like, hey, I'm going to sacrifice, I'm going to set a goal to get divorced this year. That's generally that would be bad. But if you're in like, but then like every situation, every situation, if you're in a miserable marriage, setting a goal that I'm going to get divorced this year might actually be good.
So it can actually bring you well-being or happiness. Like everything's circumstantial, you know, when people say peace. And if you approach the second point, if you approach goal setting as an expression of yourself, that's super important as well.
So you have to consider how our goals represent who we are. So you'd like, so again, investor, know thyself or. Yes, we talk about that all the time.
But it's so it literally is literally the foundation point for everything in finance. Like missing that piece, that might be why you're struggling. The biggest example that the ratings that I did came up with is there's like countless number of illustrations of people who climb the corporate ladder to get to the very top.
And they were miserable because miserable despite achieving, they achieved the goal they set out, but they were miserable because the goal they set out didn't represent who they were. That's exactly what I'm struggling with the condo. Like I was literally following like the blueprint of life, the rat race, the whole thing.
And then, you know, getting real estate, working the government job, going to college. Like I didn't want to do any of that, honestly. And then after I built and I had all my money tied up in all this shit, I'm like, fuck, I don't want to do any of this.
Like after we realized that we want to be traveling, we want to be nomadic, we want to whatever. I'm just like, dude, I'm like literally anchored here with all this crap. And if I get rid of it and we can liquidate it and get rid of downsizing everything, we will have enough money to literally be financially free, which was the whole reason I was doing any of that anyway, was to make the money to give myself the financial security.
But the obligation that came with it was is literally so soul crushing. And that's another thing I'm struggling with the condo. It's like it feels like a giant knot of like obligation.
And I'm pretty sure I have like trauma blocks around the whole thing. So like the second point, like a prime example of the second point that I'm sure almost everybody can relate to is goals that we think we should have. But these goals are driven by societal demands, such as my neighbors have good hedges, so I should have good hedges.
So those are super hard to stick to because like the societal norms don't necessarily apply to you unless you're one of those people where status in society is super important to you. But most people generally aren't that. And I could honestly tell you what you are based on your personality.
And like I think the biggest illustration of this point is throughout the readings, it was a lot of times people actually have subconscious goals that their parents wanted them to have. And they actually didn't set the goal for themselves. It was family oriented goal setting that they didn't even know about or think about.
Guilty. If you don't choose for yourself, somebody else chooses for you, whether you realize it or not. So make sure to set goals that are like are in line with who you are.
You have to know yourself, which is if you don't know who you are, that's your low hanging fruit. And your goal is to actually figure out who the heck you are. I mean, I've always known who I know, but there's a lot of people like my mom's a really good example.
She literally doesn't she doesn't know. It's cray cray. The third point goal setting is a way to meet our own expectations.
So like again, if you go back to society thing, like if you buy a house because that's what you do in this society and you're meeting the societal expectations, that probably is not going to work. Your house is probably either going to be a shithole or you're not going to have enough money for it because you're not really doing like the thought process. It's either going to cause stress or disappointment.
If that if that is what you're experiencing, that is a sign that that was for the wrong reason. So it's super duper important to reflect on how each of the goals that you're actually planning and setting fit you, not society, not your family, not your significant other. It's goal setting is a individual task.
You know, you can set goals for like the family. Yeah. Like we have commingled goals, but we have also individual goals.
But even when you're like thing, even when you're setting goals for the family, it still has to come from an individualistic point of view because it won't. You have to contribute. So like our goal is we want to have enough money to travel.
So but like we said, so that's our that's our family goal. But we're approaching that from the individual society. I'm going to do the investing and the whatever.
And I work on the condo. Do the work on the condo. That's going to get us more money to put in investing.
So we have the same goal, but we have like our own individual pathway to get there. That's that's how we've actually made it work. Whereas if I suck at working on the condo, I could give a shit.
He's so bad at like the finishing touches. And that's pretty much where I'm at with everything right now. Like, he's so bad.
I let him paint the one bathroom. And I regret that from the day it happened, because it like I had to stand it that way. He had drip rolls everywhere.
I was like, oh, my God, what the hell? Like, can you not see? I don't understand. And then like when it comes to the investing stuff, like I'm sure you've heard me say time and time again, if you're on the email, you know, that's not me doing that. Like, I don't care about the news.
I don't care about the economic crap. I don't care about keeping up with that stuff. But I care about the overarching like process and foundation pieces.
I'm really into that. I'm into the finance component. I'm not really into like the what is it, the news upkeep.
Well, there's market news that comes out all the time. And that's like he is completely fine doing that. And he actually enjoys like pulling that data in.
So data, data, data. That's why he does that. And I do the condo.
But they OK, what they found went off topic there. But what they found in 1999 paper I was reading is that goals are driven from sources outside of ourselves, more often than not, produce anxiety and may lead to feelings of guilt because you're just you feel guilty towards yourself. You feel guilty because you're like, why am I not having success or why do I not feel like this is success? And that's when you start having those existential things creep in where you're just like, is this it or is this how I'm supposed to be feeling? No, that's a sign that you're freaking doing the wrong.
So like there's a few questions to ask yourself. So are the goals in alignment with what I know about myself? If you don't know yourself, that should just stop listening and go know yourself. Yeah, go do that.
Are my goals actually coming from me is a super important one. You're like that. You literally have to think about this because there's a lot of things that subconsciously happen.
Like I said, there's family pressures or. I think the really big example is like if you're in a family of lawyers and you want to be like something else and you're really pressured to become a lawyer, like you should realize at some point that that desire to be a lawyer might not actually be you. It's probably your parents like living by care.
So like what we've come up with that that that section, that's the second section. So like how to how to set goals like, well, you have to know yourself and set goals from a I don't want to say a selfish perspective because it sounds bad, but it needs to come from a selfish perspective, self-focused perspective. So if you know yourself and you set goals that are pertain to you on an individual level, satisfaction, a higher chance of success than if you have goals that are set from different circumstances.
No. So the third subset subject matter I came up is how can we best achieve goals that we have set? And this is there's a process. So many.
This is the process you read in like every book. So many self-help things out there. I can't even tell you the number of websites I went to.
And they're like, please sign up for our newsletter. I'm like, no, thank you. I'm good.
No, good. But the first one's the smart. Yeah.
Everybody like if you look in a goal setting, first thing it pops up everywhere is going to be the smart, the smart process, specific, measurable, actionable, attainable or whatever relevant and time specific. Those five S.M.A.R.T. It's so smart. It's so clever how they did that.
Was that sarcasm? It is specific. Be as specific as possible when setting goals. Look at the why, where, when and how of a goal.
What do I want to achieve? How do I get there? When should I achieve this goal? Yeah. So you can't be like, I want to lose weight. You have to say, I want to lose 30 pounds by the end of the year or something like that.
It needs to be specific. But it should be achievable. So 30 pounds is not necessarily achievable.
You start. I would start with 10. So like a specific goal that I would like to lose 30 pounds, but I'm going to start with 10.
Well, you can have that bigger vision and then you can say this year I'm going to focus on the first 10, whatever, whatever. But if we do this to money, this is probably going to be more relevant where everybody wants to save the thousand dollars for your emergency fund or the what I would do if it was coming to emergency fund and I was just starting out, I would actually have a more specific goal of I want to save $50 in January. And then when January came around, if I say $50, awesome, then I would set a February goal.
I want to save $75 in February. But you have your longer goal as being the thousand dollars by X date and then you break it into your monthly. And that's where that measurable you need to make it measurable and you need to actually have it time oriented.
I mean, it all plays in itself. It's not really you kind of do this all together. Well, I guess like what I what I found when I was reading this, I was like, I what I do really, really well, which I didn't even know about until I was reading this is like when I set goals, they're not grandiose goals.
It's literally like I want to have $50 saved by the end of January. It's a simple, simple, specific. Like I can achieve it.
Yeah, if you make them small, really, really good at that for whatever reason. That's why people get so addicted to to do lists or they'll like be writing on a to do list and they'll add things to the to do list. They already did to check them off because that's kind of like a win celebration.
You need to have those mini micro like achievements to feel good, to boost the esteem, because if you have it like a year is the first time you're going to be like, I succeeded or failed. You're going to set yourself up for like blown expectations and then your self-esteem is going to take a hit and then you're never going to try to set goals or achieve anything ever. And then you're going to be miserable and unhappy.
And it's just bad. We changed what we were going to do. Measurable is the second one.
Have a goal that can be quantified. That's super, super duper important. You can't have like an opening to go like I kind of I want to travel like what? I want to retire.
You don't have a number set in mind. We need something that's quantified. Yeah, it's easier to track your process.
Like, do you have to simplify this to the point where you can track your process on an hourly or daily or weekly basis with however you want to do it? And the thing with with this, I know I quit smoking. It was an hourly basis. Just so you know, I'm not smoking a cigarette this hour.
Wow. I did not know that it was really difficult. Yeah.
But you do need to have the numbers in place that you can break it down into small steps, for sure. So that's the S and the M. A is achievable slash attainable. It's a goal we set need to be grounded in reality.
Like you can't say I want to be an Olympic athlete whenever you can't barely make it from the like, say, the couch to the kitchen without breathing hard. That's not really attainable. You know how many years they put into it? And if you literally are the person has like four hundred thousand dollars in debt and you want to be a millionaire in like a year.
I mean, there are ways you get really aggressive, but like the chances of that, probably not because the behavioral components are not dialed in. That's probably not achievable. Attainable for said individual.
S.M.A. R is relevant. Focus more intently on the subject of why is the goal something you actually want to achieve or does it stem from external pressure? That's big. We've discussed that.
Literally the foundation. That's four of them. The fifth one is time specific.
Create a clear yet achievable time scale. Deadlines maximize the reward versus time component. Fucking hate deadlines.
Be explicit about the time span or deadline. For example, change end of summer to a specific date. So like we were saying, like I want to lose 30 pounds by the end of the year.
I want to have the condo down by the end of March. I really like the more time specific and attainable goal. But I want to lose five pounds by January 31st.
See how that specific goal is more attainable. And like when you when you lose five or seven pounds January, you'd be like, hot damn, I'm the hot shit. I'm two pounds up and where I want to be.
Well, so that's the that's the smart. That's the smart thing that they're like most of the people talking about. I came up with a few other things.
Like I found that someone agrees with me. Write down your goals. Like don't just think I'm writing down actually put pen to paper or writing.
Yeah. Finger to keyboard. Yeah.
Yep, yep. It may seem like an unnecessary additional task, but there's a certain super amount of value in actually writing it down. When you write down your goals, you actually will think carefully about the steps involved to get there.
And the very act of writing something down improves recall. Well, and one of the things I was looking at and having a physical reminder of what you want to do. I was going to say before Tim hijacked this and did it because I was too slow.
The vision board thing is huge. So it's like that encompasses your why and your goal all at once. And if you put it on your freaking wall where you see it all the time, you're going to hit both of these birds one stones.
You wrote it down, you image image, divide it, and then you're going to be seeing it on a regular basis. So it's like every time you're thinking about like not or spending that money on that coffee, you can look at your vision board and be like, do I really want this coffee or do I really want my goal? And be like, all right, it's going into like the savings jar. If you have it in a place, some people do it on like the screen of their background.
You can go into like Pinterest and type in like money, vision boards and stuff. Cats on. Yeah, you like that.
She's being crazy. That's really helpful. The next one is like we literally were just discussing like he put plan into action and review it regularly.
Like so rather than saying I want to get a promotion, you break it down into in the next four weeks, I will commit to taking on a project I haven't before to show the higher ups that I'm the shit. Well, I was actually interpreting this one kind of as like for the condo. If you have a really far out goal, you should like assess where you're at, because it's like you can make a trajectory and then realize you need to pivot a little bit to go this direction to stay aiming at that north star point. Because if you get too far off track, then counter backing, the reason I like the reason I like the smaller goals actually is because you can review it more often. If you have like, I want to lose 30 pounds in 2025, how often are you actually going to like review that as opposed to I want to lose five pounds in January? It's there. I don't know.
That's just that's just me. Another tip is to keep it specific and review your process. That's my issue.
I go too big. So you have you see like the last three were review your progress at some at some point in the progress, progress, progress, your progress. But if you keep it specific, specific specificity, is that the word? Sure.
It's super duper important. Like if you have a vague blanket statement, that's you're not going to be it's not going to happen. So I want that's why we said rather than I want to like I want to lose weight this year.
That's like what the money examples. Oh, I want to I want to save money this year. Yeah, that's super vague.
It's like, what does that mean? Like, does that mean? But if you specifically say I want to cut back my coffee expenditure from $550 to $250 in 2025? That's pretty specific. That is very specific. And then it's like if you come up with like skipping every other day, so you're not going cold turkey.
And then like, so you have that specific goal, then you have like, how am I going to save the $300? How am I going to save? And so if you come up with if I just cut out, okay, I'm going to skip Starbucks on Saturday, two cups this week, that'll save me $12, or whatever. I don't know. I'll put a coffee maker in my office.
And that's the biggest way like, seriously, like, literally, like, I've found like, like, for example, the sauna blanket, it seems a little ridiculous, but like, it costs $90. I thought it was 70. I think it was 90.
Oh, with shipping, with shipping, it costs $90. But for me to actually have access to the sauna at the gym, it's like an additional $30 a month. So like, after three months, the blanket will pay for itself.
Plus, I don't have to waste gas. I literally can do whatever I'm doing, like on the computer, just in the blanket. Like it's so see, that was a goal that I actually wanted to detox more this year with sauna.
And so I said, Well, how can I best do this? Yeah, the best way I came up with is I can still do what I'm doing as long as I have a sauna. Here, let's go through this stick my little dinosaur arms out the holes and type. But here's the here's the thing, like sauna can be very boring.
And then because Tim is so introverted, and there's like always old men with their balls hanging out everywhere in there. Always. I don't understand the obsession with having your nuts on boards.
You're not you're supposed to put a towel down, which is really don't there's like, Hey, look at my nuts on this board. Like, that's cool. But the other why you don't have to pay extra for the thing.
But there's so many people coming and going and you have to deal with that. And then it's like you're you're just like, I want space. I want space, you can't get space.
And it's so expensive to get a full sauna. So this was like Tim was like, Well, how can I? How can I do this? And how can I do this? Like, what can I find as an item? Or how can I make this happen? affordably. And that was when he stumbled on a sauna bike.
If you keep asking yourself questions, you will get an answer to present it. So I took your input, though. I got infrared as well as sauna.
So proud of you. You do listen to me sometimes. I do.
Sometimes. Not very often. I keep stealing the blanket.
He's like, where did it go? She takes it. She gave me so much. I can't believe you spent money on something that we don't need.
And like two days later, she's like, I'm taking this. So that's fine. I thought it would use more electricity than it does.
So I'm okay. minimal loss. It's fucking awesome.
It's pretty amazing. So much. We're buying a second one for mom.
Well, me and my mom are doing a massive crazy detox right now. And snow screwed up the sauna. Now they're doing construction screwed up the sauna.
So I have to keep stealing Tim's blanket. Now this next point, I think is probably the most important of everything we discussed in this block here. The specific the specific goals with evaluation of your progress is important.
But I think this is actually more important reward yourself for your successes, but don't punish yourself for your failures. This is huge. This is huge.
Oh, look at your failures as learning experiences so that you can I mean, the rewards have to be kind of correlated to your goal. Like if your goal is to lose weight, and you're like rewarding yourself with chocolate, chocolate or cake. Yeah, so like if you're trying to save money, and then you go out and you splurge on something with that savings that was that was set up for emergency fund, like you're you're missing the point.
You need to like, like, oh, I saved I saved $1,000 this year. So now I'm going to go buy this like that's not the like, no, you need to be needs to be in line with your stuff and internal. I don't know, like, well, how I reward myself is like, because I have this, this, sometimes this belief that I'm not good enough.
So like, when I do something, I'm like, yeah, I am good enough. I'm awesome. Yeah.
So you'll hear Tim doing that talking like that very regularly. He gives himself self kudos, and he does it out loud because I don't do it for him. So like, that actually helps me.
I don't know, like, it helps me feel like I'm important. You got to do what you got to do. I need constant like, like, it's been found over and over in psychological papers that whenever you revel in positivity, it actually is more meaningful than if you don't.
Yeah. And success is directly correlated to like your esteem needs. So if you don't have the esteem need thing dialed in, I think what happens is those are the people who are like always trying to keep up with the Joneses are trying to like get kudos through external and you need to give it to yourself.
Like it's never going to be satisfied from somebody else because you're always trying to keep up with a moving like goalpost. That just doesn't work. But that will help.
Like I say, we wanted to save $50 in January. And at the end of January, it comes that we only save $35. Well, you don't actually want to punish yourself for missing your goal by $15.
Instead, you would be like, well, I actually did save 35. And be like, what went wrong? But how can I actually change what I have going on to reach the $50 or is 35 the way? Yeah. Maybe I overestimated.
Yeah. You might have overestimated, but you might want to just examine the process, examine the pieces and be like, oh, okay. I completely misinterpreted or underestimated that this was going to be this or this was going to be this.
And then be like, okay. It could be seasonal too. I didn't expect the gas or electric bill to be $212 for January.
So like I was unable to save like the, but then. Cause we just had that. So if you keep doing the $50 and you find out like the $50 is more feasible, like in the months where you're not paying a high heating bill, then you'd have to adjust your goals for 2026.
Like I know it's the cold portion. So I'm only going to save $30 because I'm expecting a higher utility bill. I do hate that electric is not a consistent, consistent payment.
But you'd like to reward yourself. Like, okay, I saved it. So I saved $30 in January when it was super cold.
My heating bill was super high. That would be a good way to actually spend that positively. I actually was able to save with a higher than anticipated bill.
And you feel good about it. And then you just reassess and be like, okay, I have to actually tweak my plan. Like when it's cold out, my savings is going to be less than ideal.
Like my ideal $50. Yeah. Like sometimes it's about accepting an external circumstance.
You can't change back to the stoicism stuff, accepting what you can't change. But if you would have calculated, I would have hit my goal had the cold not happened. That's really good to know, because that means you're not the failure.
But that's also a slippery slope as well, because if you don't reward yourself and you I would have hit my goal, but this circumstance happened. Like I can see like some people actually make an excuse every month for $30. I would have hit my $50, but I had coffee was on sale.
No, no, no, no, no. It can't be a thing. It just needs to be like the equations of the piece of the puzzle.
And then be like, okay, so if this is something I can't rely on because I'm using my electric bill is like the thing I'm relying upon because the weather impacts that I need to actually take the money from something different till it works for you. I mean, you need to figure out what works for you. I never would use that.
I would plan for it's cold. I'm planning for a $300 bill. Well, and again, if you're new to planning, you will definitely have a lot of these like, oh, I didn't think about that.
Oh, I didn't think about that. Oh, I didn't think about that. The more planning you do, the more you're able to see all the variables that go into something and be like, oh, okay, I know this is going to happen.
I know that my car registration is due once a year and it just happens to be in that thing. Or I know the sewer bill is due quarterly and that's an expensive. Prime example was when I was planning for living in the van in the 2022 and we were in the van for five months.
Like I thought I had it all figured out and then she's like, well, what about insurance? And I was like, oh, I didn't think of that. I have a great example about this. So like Tim wanted to make me a present and he built me this table in the basement and he's like, oh, excited to show me about it.
And I looked at it and I was like, did you measure the doorway upstairs? And he was like, it's like, of course I measured the doorway. What do you think? I'm a fucking idiot. It didn't fit through the door.
I was like, I was like, cause I just looked at I have really good visual spatial recognition and I was just like, are you sure? So we had to take the top of the table off. He was so upset. It was horseshit.
And he was so mad because he gets so mad that like, I see stuff he can't see. It's not the stuff that you can see. It's I get so mad whenever I fail.
I'm very hard on myself with failure. So that's why this is super important. Like, don't punish yourself for failure.
If you're like me, when I mess up, that's like, it ruins my whole day. Yeah. He broods.
He broods really hard, like really hard. It could be something simple like that. Like if not, like, okay.
The measurement was 32 instead of 34. It was because if you look at a doorframe and has that bump in, he measured on the bump out, not the bump in. And I made like that much of a difference.
Seems like a simple thing where you wouldn't bother you. That bothered me for probably two days. And I wasn't even an asshole about it.
I was just like, did you measure this? Because like, we can't take it upstairs and I don't want to take it up the stairs. But the table was sick. So I was like, yeah, my table is sick.
But then I punished myself because I was like, oh my God, how stupid. I feel bad a lot of times because I'm the person that like has such awareness of the landmines that like, I ruin people's parade. And I'm like, no, I'm not trying to ruin your parade, but I don't want you to have to lug this up the stairs and then have the hurdle after you've put more effort in to realize it's not going to work.
I want you to have that awareness so that you can like navigate it beforehand so that you don't have that hang up later that makes you quit. I'm not trying to discourage people from trying. I'm trying to help them not like have a problem.
Okay. So like the smart goal system and like rewarding yourself and don't punish her for failures. Those are good ideas.
But here I have additional tips that I came across when doing the research. The first would be to prioritize your goal. If you have multiple goals, you have to actually decide which ones have the highest priority.
So if you have like four or five things going on, you have to like rank them basically like, okay, the most important one is saving money this month. The second most important is investing money. The third most important is getting eight hours of sleep, whatever the case may be.
And I think a good example of this is like, if you're paying off debt, you have to prioritize which debts take priority. Now, there was an interesting thing in the reading. Like Warren Buffett had some dude write down 25 goals and he said, okay, which ones are the most important? He said, label the five most important.
So the guy labeled the five most important. He said, okay, now how would you approach this? And the guy said, well, I'm going to obviously put more attention into the top five, but then I'll take whatever time I have left over and apply it to the bottom 20. And Warren Buffett said, no, that's the wrong way.
You've figured out the five that you need to address and the other 20 you can ignore. Irrelevant. So here's something that I've read in a lot of the goal setting books.
Priority was the Latin word that was never meant to be plural. Think about that. There is a priority.
There is not more than a one priority. If you're prioritizing the priority, it is the one thing. That's why that one book, the one thing talks about the one thing.
And when we prioritize everything, nothing's actually a priority. So if you think about it through that lens, like you have to pick and choose. And then the other thing that people screw up here is they have their list and then they don't have a system set up or an environment set up that keeps them on track.
And they'll have like, say emails come in or somebody comes in and like triggers them and they're like, oh yes, oh yes. And then they like, you need to set time. And that's why everybody talks about getting up earlier in the morning or staying up later so that you have less distraction so you can focus on the priority and not have that bombardment or like turning your email off.
Because every time you get disrupted, it takes 15 minutes to get refocused. We are like computers. Reboot.
Okay. Number two. This we've discussed.
This is kind of redundant, but break your long-term goals into small pieces. That's huge. That's huge.
This is something I have expectations and I have trouble breaking them down into small things and celebrating the wins. Tim has struggles with the failure component. And it's not like it's you don't over identify personally with the thing.
But at the same time, if you ignore the failure, you never improve. Well, if the goal is too large, you're going to actually have paralysis. Yes.
Yes. And that's honestly what I'm dealing with with the condo right now. There's so much going on.
It's just bound to happen. Like you're going to get overwhelmed. You're going to have paralysis.
You have to have to break it into like for the condo, for example, like if she wants to repair the condo, well, we need to break it down into I want to do X in the master bedroom by X date. That would be the better way to approach rather than I just want to I want to do the master bedroom. I'm trying to be efficient at the same time.
And because I'm thinking about too much and I don't want to don't actually want to do this to be one thing. If I was like balls of the wall excited about it, but I'm not. So I have to actually default to a different process because I really don't actually want to be working on this on the way.
Almost, almost, almost. But it does actually feed into the goal that I want. So it's like I do want the money from it.
I just have to figure out how to get through the actual boring component. So like, for example, I would usually wait to go to Home Depot until I had like a list of 10 things. But it's like if I need that one thing to make progress on that one room, I need to just go because it's not really that far away.
If it was four hours away, that'd be a different story. But it's like literally 10 minutes. It's like, well, that actually like when we're in New Mexico with my family, it's super easy to do stuff because everything's like two hours away.
So you literally know what you're going for when you go because you don't want to drive the four hour round trip. The priorities change. It's very interesting.
So that actually makes it simpler for me. But they're like, I hate going to the grocery store. I'm like, I would be okay with just going once a month.
They have so much storage. But anyway, third, write down your goals that you must write them down. Like you can't think of them because if you think of them generally, they don't come into provision.
I really recommend the vision board because visualization really helps with the emotional piece, which you need to motivate you. It's easier to identify as well. Yeah, that too.
Then there's the commitment to the goals. Like Bob, what I mean by commitment is like what I just said, like we're going to work in the master bedroom. We're going to do the painting on the trim in the master bedroom by the 15th of February.
So if you have like a very specific commitment, I commit to doing X by X and then you sign it and you hang it or you put it somewhere where you can see it every day. That actually will improve your success rate immensely. The accountability component is I think the piece people are lacking.
I know that's mine. I need somebody like slave driving my butt right now for this. The next point would be focus on performance rather than on the outcome.
If your goal is to save $50, like I said, and you only save $30, focus on your performance. As long as you did everything in your power and you only came up with $30, you'll have to reassess the goal itself, but focus on your performance because if you say, oh, I wanted $50 and I only made $30, I failed. Probably not going to keep that goal going forward because you tried your hardest, but your parameters were screwed up.
That just means the system is the issue. It's not you that's the issue. But if you know you, you'll know.
You'll know because you might have a little bit of guilt kick in or you might be like, no, I could have done better with this. If you say to yourself, yeah, I could have done better with this. You're the problem.
You need, well, don't take it so personally that you don't try, but you need to figure out how to remotivate yourself or maybe your why is not dialed in. That's how you know where your actual hangups at. Now, as a lover of efficiency, the next one is super awesome.
It's called habit stacking. I love habit stacking. So like one of the like people to say they wanted to have like one of the example they provide is I want to have better oral hygiene.
Well, you already have the habit of brushing your teeth. So if you just create a new habit that you're stacking on top that you're brushing your teeth and then you're flossing, you've actually fulfilled your goal and create a new habit. Okay.
If you're interested in habits, I highly recommend the book atomic habits by James clear. It's super concise. Like the audio book, I think it's like five hours long where most of them are like 20 plus when it comes to habits and the Q craving reward.
There's a specific pattern you have to go in. And then what happens is when you're stuck in a habit, you don't aren't aware of like the craving or the Q you go right to the craving and then you satisfy it. But in order to like change your habits or change your habits stack, you have to like go in there and figure out how to disrupt the circle and reprogram it and actually trigger all those things.
Otherwise the habit won't stick. It's a very, very interesting book. One of my absolute favorites, highly recommend.
I know one of the, like the new ones, like the newer ones when it came to like a financial responsibility for me was like, I have a not, not to say a full-fledged habit, but like when I need something, I used to go to Amazon. So I like, when I go to Amazon, I'd find a product. And now my habit stack is I go on team and see if there's this, the same product or a similar product.
Cause team is like 50% cheaper. I can definitely comment on the teeth brushing one here. So like when I quit working for the government, I stopped brushing my teeth because I stopped driving my car to work.
Cause I would brush my teeth in my car on my way to work. So it's like, if you take a thing out, you're like, Oh, this thing just never happens. So now I'm like, how the hell do I put teeth brushing? I've still been struggling how to freaking do that.
Cause I struggle with morning routines in general. So it's like, okay, let's go run an error. And then I'm like in brushing my teeth and think, although now what I've done is I actually literally have a toothbrush sitting next to my computer.
Cause it's like, if I see it, I remember to do it. So that's that. And then the very last one is to make your environment work for you.
So whatever your goal is to say, it's to save $50 a month. You can actually make your environment work for you by having a coin jar. As soon as you get home, you put all your extra extra coins in the jar or in this particular instance, you could actually have your shit set up through worthy.
So anytime you go to the store and you have like 80 cents left over, they'll take 80 cents and put it towards a new. Anything that you can set up that does it automatically for you so that you don't have that feeling of being taken away from you. Like you are literally, this is what the wealthy people do.
Things are set on autopilot. So you don't have to think about it. So you free up bandwidth for the stuff that you like.
Cause if you think about how often you shop, like the worthy thing's genius because if you think how often you shop and how often is your bill exactly a dollar, unless it's me pumping gas. I have an OCD about that. There's a lot of people that do.
But like, so if you go to the gas station, it's like say 34, 36. Well, that's what, if you have it set up with worthy, the 64 cents will automatically be applied to your savings. You do that say 30 days a month.
I'm sure people buy stuff 21 of the 30 days. You do that 21 times during the month. You're going to have probably half of your $50 set up that you didn't even have to think about.
Absolutely. So those are some other tips, other pointers. That's the end of the first part.
The second part, we'll go into why goals don't work. This episode went a little long, so we're breaking it into two parts. Today, we've covered the goal setting process and next episode will cover the most common reasons that people don't reach their goals.
So you can try to troubleshoot when you run into an issue.