How to set yourself goals and achieve them

The best goal is a goal you didn't set yourself. That sounds strange until you look at what most guys are trying to do with their week.

You want to become a software genius, get amazing at seduction, master another sport and build a business. You also have a job. Where exactly is all of this going to happen?

A list of twenty goals doesn't give you twenty times the drive. It gives you twenty things competing for the same time. You order them by priority, give a little effort to each, and keep all of them hanging around in your head. My approach is to eliminate much more of that list and take the few things that remain seriously.

In this episode, I used my plan for 2021 to explain how I do that. The individual ambitions belonged to that point in my life. The useful part is how I organised myself to work towards them.

Daily discipline comes first

The first goal in that plan was daily discipline. Before any business goal, before learning to code, before anything else, I wanted a schedule I would actually follow.

Why? Because without that, what do you have? You can have a phenomenal idea and spend the entire morning getting ready to think about it. Then it's lunchtime. A few hours later, you're done for the day. Your idea hasn't become any more real.

For me, daily discipline meant getting up at the same time and sticking to the schedule I had set. It was an umbrella goal. Every other goal depended on my ability to execute the work I had planned.

You need to be honest about your available time. There are 168 hours in a week, but your job, sleep and ordinary responsibilities use a substantial amount of them. Write the work into the hours that remain. If the plan only works on a week where nothing else happens, you've already got a problem.

Give yourself time to think

The next part was mindset, reading and review. I described what I wanted as tranquility through reductionism and long-term compounding.

What do I mean by that? I want to work on things that matter over a long period. I don't want every new excitement to dictate where my life goes. Something seems incredibly important this month. Will I still care about it in ten years? Sometimes the honest answer is no.

Reading and writing help me examine that. Writing forces you to put the thought somewhere you can look at it. Reading gives you something to think about beyond the ideas already going around in your own head. Universal Laws contains much of the thinking I apply to this process.

But you also need time to step away from execution and review the direction. You can work very hard at going south when you intended to go north. Doing more of the same won't fix that.

I put time into the week for thinking and review. Look at what you did, what you learned and whether the goal still makes sense. When you're deep in the work, it is easy to lose sight of where you're going. A review gives you the chance to notice before another month disappears.

You have to manage yourself

Fitness and physical condition were another part of the foundation. If you feel terrible and have no energy, every other ambition becomes harder to pursue. Taking care of yourself belongs in the plan.

So does enjoying your life. In that episode, I talked about setting aside time each week for something fun. It could be a sport, music or another activity. The particular activity wasn't the point. I wanted some time away from working on the same things every day.

You can't solve an impossible schedule by deciding to sleep three hours a night. You are going to have to manage yourself. If your goals require you to ignore recovery indefinitely, reduce the goals. A plan you burn out following isn't much use to you.

That is why the foundation came before the more glamorous ambitions. Discipline gave me a way to execute. Reading and review helped me think about the direction. Fitness and physical condition helped me sustain the work.

Choose something worth continuing

One of my business goals at the time was to make products and learn to code while doing it. I wanted to solve a problem people cared about and learn enough to build an initial product independently.

I wasn't setting myself the goal of becoming the best programmer in the world. I wanted to be capable of making the thing. That distinction reduces a vague ambition to something you can actually work towards.

The longer-term question matters just as much. Are you building knowledge, a skill or something useful that you can continue developing? Or are you constantly chasing the next short-lived hit of excitement?

Look at your goals with that in mind. Cross out the ones that don't deserve a place in your week. Put the remaining work into specific blocks and leave yourself time to review it. When you discover that part of the plan isn't working, change that part and try again.

You don't need to become a different person every January. You need fewer goals, a week that gives you time to work on them, and the discipline to follow through after the excitement has worn off.