Have you ever wondered how to actually achieve your goals (No we are not talking about setting a goals or SMART goals) and progress towards your promise land ? Everyone goals are different be it mocking up your idea, be it speaking your idea to your potential customers, getting your first 10 customers, be it increasing your sales to 10x, be it start spending some quality time with your kids, be it getting to shape, be it visiting a new country and meeting new people! What it would be If you are like me bugged by an entrepreneurial thought, plan A-Z, overwhelmed by the amount of tasks in hand, struck on prioritising them and at end of the week you ask yourselves holy shit, I haven’t yet progressed on my goals?! If it’s you then go ahead and read on if not please close your browser and you might thank me for saving your time, because this blog post is only for the people who have goals and have hunger to do more (sorry if I have offended you)
Let’s address some Myths:
1. Multi-tasking
Todd Herman uncovered this beautiful & shocking insight to me. Todd claims that Gerald Weinberg came up with a framework for calculating the amount of time that is been wasted on switching between projects.
If you work on one project you get 100% of the time for it, if you add one more project to your day (lets say now you wanted to check emails in between doing your project) then you essentially lose 20% of your time on context switching, it gets worse if you add one more project and make it 3 projects (Let’s say you wanted to get into a meeting about another project in your company) in a day you lose 40% of your time in context switching between projects. Let’s say if you add one more project and make it 4 projects (Now you really wanted to read about something which your marketing colleague shared with you on a weekend) in a day and you lose 60% of your time in a day. See how you only have 40% of your time on a day when you do 4 projects in a day? If you work 8 hours a day and when you do 4 things you lose more than 4 hours by just context switching. Remember how many times our wife have to repeat something she said while we were watching TV / reading? We cannot do multi-tasking, our brains are not programmed for that. Yes, I know you have lot of things to do in a day and cannot do only one thing in a day, I would suggest to have a block time, where you block your time say 1.5 hours just for that project alone and don’t do anything other than that (Yes, not even checking emails, attending phone calls), block time for writing emails, block time for calls, block time for writing your blog post, block time to spend quality time with your partner, so now you have progressed on your project and I typically block a day completely just to progress on a task which is going to have a massive push towards my goal.
2. Living Intentionally
As an Entrepreneur, you have a dozen of tasks on your plate every day which keeps you busy all the time but knowing intentionally what tasks would lead you to your goals and what can be delegated to your team provides a lot of clarity.
Why this blog?
I wanted to share my journey towards reaching greatness (Yes it’s a moving target), but what stopped me doing it for past couple of months is I never set a deadline for this blog and I was doing multitasking and under the influence of procrastination over months, I never created anything and was doing nothing productive for past 3 months. Obviously getting this blog post out to public is a great first baby step for me. I admit that my instant gratification monkey is taking over the wheels from my rational thinker and stopping me from writing this post (Watch this TED talk about instant gratification monkey 🙂 ). So what has changed now and how did I get back to my schedule ?
Framework
1. Cultivate habits
Remember your thoughts become actions and your actions become your destiny. We can somehow compare our mind to a computer, it takes input, process it and creates results. Our mind operates in the same way, if we fail to control our input to our mind we are failing to control our results. It all starts with our belief system. I need to believe that I can achieve greatness in life. I needed systems in place so I can control what goes into my mind. The only way is to create habits.
Take baby steps in creating habits, Introduce new habits one at a time and it usually takes 66 days to create a new habit, So start one today and you can definitely feel the difference.
I started to form habits around my goals, I spend 10 mins speaking to myself in front of the mirror after I woke up, I usually say to myself about what challenges I am about to face the day and knowing what challenges you are about to face sets the day on the right tune. For eg. When I wanted to write this blog post, since I am very new to create content, I get all negative thoughts, like (No one is going to read this post, Even if people read its going to be useless to them, etc.,) to stop me from writing it and procrastinate. I overcome this by asking why should I write this blog post and that simple answer is I need to share my journey which sets me on the right path. I set 75 mins to block time to start any task and would do only that task (in the block time no emails & no calls) usually I complete it within that period. If not I would take a 5 mins break and then continue with my next 75 mins block time. In the afternoon, I spent 75 mins reading about something new or doing some creative work. In the evening, I spent most of my time with my princess and my family. After dinner, I spent 1 hour in reading books or listening to audiobooks. I believe that creating habits is the first and foremost step in the pursuit of greatness.
2. Treat everything as an experiment and experiments tend to fail. Don’t be afraid of failure
Treat everything as an Experiment, be it creating landing pages, clickable prototypes, writing blog posts, proposing your girlfriend(s), launching your first startup despite you know it has bugs etc., treating it as an experiment helps us to overcome the cloud of negative thoughts. Many times I had thought while writing this blog post that this post is not going to be noticed by anyone in the midst of tonnes of content that’s being created every day on the internet and so why bother to write this? I treated this as an experiment and said to myself it’s ok if no one is reading this post, I would collect the data on why no one is reading and fix it on my next blog post so the process is just evolving rather than just be afraid of failure of this post, I would keep iterating it till I reach my goal.
Please do treat everything you do as an experiment and if it fails, collect the data and iterate better next time continue till you reach your goal.
3. Know your limitations and plan your fallbacks
Yes, knowing your strengths and limitations forehand before starting out your task is a real life saver. How to identify your limitations? everyone has a limitation, we are limited by time, resources, money etc., Many people think that the limitation is just a perception or they even call it as a perceived limitation. Yes, I know for the fact that the perceived limitation is something you avoid doing because you fear to be bad at it. But these limitations can be overcome through mental processes which by its own a separate blog post. So let’s keep it simple, you cannot be good at something overnight so take those baby steps, you would be struck with limitations at first but keep practising it and one day those limitations would be blurred. But key here is the grind through when you are struck with limitations when I struck through those limitations, I would just take a step back and then listen to Dan’s youtube channel or Zig Ziglar motivational videos, for the matter of fact I have subscribed to few motivational youtube channels like the following:
They are the key to my motivation as it’s not permanent so as taking bath, hence I do it daily 🙂
Note: Dan Martell is one of the top Entrepreneurs in the world. He heavily influenced my writing through the frameworks he thought me.
4. Don’t ever compare yourselves with anyone in this world, you are unique
I have lived most of my life comparing myself to others (until very recently my mentor pulled me out), in school, in sports and in whatever I do. My belief system was completely wrong. I started to compare income, revenue, home etc., which unknowingly took the happiness in me.
Reasons why we compare ourselves to others: Biggest reason is we were taught comparison is the key to growing (Friends trust me it’s completely a wrong belief)
What does that change in me ? I realised that we cannot stop comparing because we need a metric to grow, I started to compare myself only to myself, I compare how did I perform yesterday and how did I perform today that’s it. Why should you compare yourselves ? because you get the data on how you performed today and what needs to be changed to reach your goals tomm. doing this comparison every day gives me the clarity on where I am struck and what areas I need to improve. Making this as a habit is definitely on my list.
Challenges to Overcome
1. Accountability Partner
Not every day goes as per the plan especially having a one year old kid, definitely there are days where I find my momentum and keep going, there are days where I would struggle to find my momentum, it happens, I usually keep myself accountable with the spreadsheet on how I progressed towards my weekly goal, but sometimes its just me and inner me tried to convince to play game, listen to music when I have to do the most important one so I report it to my wife most of the time so she keeps me in check and I don’t derail on any given day. It’s better to have an accountability partner whom you can share your progress and you can be their accountability partner and vice-versa.
2. Never Quit
Start again if you are struck and recharge soon (Don’t quit): I have already quit 3 times before completing this blog post and I continue to try again it till I complete this blog post. Here I am at the finish line. So hug it tightly and hang in there and never quit.
Would love to know how do you ignite your inner engine 🙂
I am pretty sure that you have achieved something in your life, be it selling your company, be it raising your kid, becoming a father, be a great husband, in pursuit of your dreams, getting your first customer, starting your company it can be anything, I would love to hear your thoughts on how did you handle your most difficult hurdles in your path on the journey towards your dream, please leave your thoughts as comments.