How I Achieve Ambitious Goals

 

How are ambitious goals achieved? Can this skill be taught?

This question drove Chris Sparks to create Team Performance Training, a twelve-week program where he teaches a small group of executives how to multiply their output, build high-performance architecture, and systematically ship projects faster.

In this free training session, you'll learn how Chris applies his Four Ps of Goal Achievement to make sure that his goals become a reality. You’ll walk away with a sense of clarity and an action plan for achieving your wildest ambitions in 2021.

Video recording above; audio, resources mentioned, and full transcript below.

Transcript:

Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity

Chris: Hey guys. Welcome to “Achieving Ambitious Goals.” My name's Chris Sparks, I'm going to be your host for today. We are the Forcing Function. At Forcing Function, we offer peak performance training, where our mission is to deconstruct excellence. Our primary offering is one-on-one executive performance training. We work with ten founders, executives, and investors at a time, and we're actually excited to offer, for a second time, Team Performance Training, which is our twelve-week group-coaching experience. This is where I teach you my system for peak performance from the ground up. So today with the goals, this is the foundation that everything builds upon. This is a condensed solo version of what a Team Performance Training session would be like.

In Team Performance Training, we pair you with fifteen executives who are on a similar path for peer feedback and immediate implementation of these principles. I like to think of it as an executive MBA, where everyone around you, what they've done, the companies they've founded, what they've invested in, where they've been featured, is a little bit intimidating, but realizing that everyone else is just as intimidated by you. That a rising tide raises all ships. So if this is something that interests you, if you have some ambitious goal for 2021, I hope you will consider applying. You can learn more at teamperformancetraining.com. Those applications are open for the next twelve days, because our kickoff session is three weeks from today on February 17th. I'll share some more info on that at the end.

Today's logistics: so, I'm going to be talking to you guys for forty minutes as far as the presentation goes, but this is not just a put your feet up, kick back, relax. No, this is hands-on. This is interactive. I am going to be looking for you to immediately put this into practice. My goal is for you to walk away where half of the universes where you fail to achieve your goal no longer exist. Right? Think about that. All the possibilities that could happen with this goal you have set, that half of the bad outcomes are no longer possible after this hour. That is my goal for today. So, let's say that your chances of achieving your goal were twenty percent. Well, let's remove half of those eighty percent failures. Now your chances are sixty percent. Maybe you're really confident, you've already done a lot of work, you're already at eighty percent confidence. I'm gonna get you to ninety percent confidence. Think about how much that's worth, where half of the time you don't achieve this most important goal for you this year no longer exist.

At the end, I'm gonna leave about fifteen minutes for Q&A, so if you have any questions you can see the Q&A function at the bottom. Click on that to submit a question. And we are going to be asking the questions on your behalf which have been upvoted the most, so if you see something, like, "Oh, that's a great question, I'd like to know that," upvote it so it gets to the top. A reminder: we're not taking questions via the chat. If you have a question, please ask it via the Q&A.

That being said, I am going to be leaning heavily on the chat for holding you accountable for putting this into practice. I'm gonna be pausing, I'm gonna be looking at you awkwardly and waiting while you iterate on your goal, while you make it better. So the chat is the place. If you have any comments, anything you like, anything you want to share, anything you're working on, chat is the place.

If you have to leave early, no worries. This is being recorded. Because you've registered, you have access to that recording and the full transcript. We'll send this out on Friday, two days from now.

So, first. Why "achieving ambitious goals"? Why is this the topic? I just think it's so timely, given where we are. One month into the year, I think of this as the Trough of Sorrow. Or maybe it's the Pinnacle of Disillusionment, where coming out of the gate, right, the first two weeks of the year, the gym is the busiest and at this point people are realizing that, "Oh, just because the calendar has flipped everything isn't going to change, I actually need to change myself, change my habits, change my systems if I want to have different results in the new year." And, you know, one month in, we've collected some data. It's a good time to revisit. Is this still something that we want? Are we willing to put in the costs to achieve this? It's a good time to check in and make sure that that's still the case. So, given where we are in the year, I thought this was a perfect time to take a look at the goals you set for the year. If you haven't, now is a good time. And let's make these goals more actionable, more trackable, more specific, so we can increase your chances of achieving them.

So let's start there, then. Why set goals? How do I think about goals in general? I really like the metaphor of a frame. Right? Imagine I'm taking a photo of you sitting at your desk right now. Everything behind you. That changing the frame, right, if I lean into the camera, if I lean out of the camera, a little bit more perspective, that the frame wherever you put it excludes everything outside of the frame. It's an artistic form of drawing your attention to what matters in this whole universe. And I like to say that focus is seeing the object of your focus in everything. Everywhere you look, you are reminded of what you are trying to focus on. And so goals act as this frame to exclude everything which is irrelevant from your focus. It draws your attention, it puts your blinders on, and this is incredibly helpful, because our attention with this frame in place is now spread amongst fewer objects, each with a higher average importance. Right? The things that we pay attention to on average are more important, are more in alignment with our goals, and thus anything that is not my goal is a distraction, and so I wanna make that harder to pay attention to.

I don't think anyone has put this better than a writer by the name of Robert Fritz, who studied the creative process, where he says, "It's not what the vision is, it's what the vision does." That what your goal is is less important than that you actually have one, because just having something to go after puts you into motion. He has this concept of creative tension, where if you have a realistic view of where you are in this moment and a clear vision of where you want to be, that generates creative tension, where one of two things needs to change. Either you need to change where you want to be in the future, or you need to bring your current version of reality closer to that vision. It's like a rubber band. That tension has to resolve itself one way or another.

Another way of thinking about this, if you guys ever saw the "Spot The Difference" pictures, where the two pictures are very similar but there's a few differences. Maybe one has a sneaker on the bed, and the other one has a boot, or on one side it's a Dali painting, on the other side it's a Matisse. Very subtle differences. Well, this is the same idea. If you know where you are now and you have a clear picture of where you want to be, you're just spotting the differences between those two pictures, and bridging that gap creates these goals. These are the things that I need to do. They are instrumental toward realizing this vision.

So, I love this concept of a North Star. We're hiking, we're lost, we look up at the North Star and this helps us to reorient in the right direction. And I think that's what goal setting is all about, is where are we orienting ourselves to? What is the general direction that we're heading? It's very important to differentiate the difference between speed and velocity. I think culturally there's far too much emphasis on moving quickly and not enough on moving in the right direction. Right? Velocity is speed times direction. So we can either move faster, or we can move in a more accurate direction. That this ability to orient towards where we want to go maximizes our velocity. Think about the opposite of this. What would ... The worst thing in life could be, is just running as fast as we can to achieve something we don't even want. Or doing something that's not leading towards our goals as quickly as I can. 

That's why velocity is so critical, because I believe that we can achieve anything. I don't mean this in a motivational, inspirational, you know, Tony Robbins-type sense, is that the only thing that is between us and our goals is becoming the person who is capable of achieving those goals. Right? The skills, the knowledge, the habits, the systems. As we put these things into place, the only thing that prevents us is the laws of physics. Right? We can achieve anything. So the worst would be to achieve something only to realize we didn't want it in the first place.

I talked about this in the last training that I did, if you guys were there, on peak performance behind the scenes, where I talk about achieving the four-hour workweek lifestyle, or achieving some semblance of fame, where I wanted to be in the Fortune 500, or living on the beach of Thailand and just waking up with my feet in the sand every day. Achieving something and realizing, "Oh, maybe that's not what I wanted after all." And that was a, you know, a little bit of a waste of time to go after something so hard that I didn't even want in the first place. And so this framing allows us to shift from "Can I do this" to "do I want this," because we can achieve anything.

Now, I want you guys to get the most out of this, and you are going to get the most out of it if you have a goal in mind. So I'm going to pause here. If you haven't already put it into the chat, remember to use "panelists and attendees" so I can see them. Pick one goal. I recommend picking one area of your life. So maybe that's your career, maybe that's your life mission, how you have impact. Maybe that's your health, maybe it's your relationships, maybe it's learning your goals. Pick one area, and then pick your one North Star in that area. The framing is, if this was the only thing you achieved all year, the year is a success, no matter what else happens. So I am going to pause here, and I'll wait for you guys to put some goals into the chat.

So, some of the goals that I'm seeing so far. Growing audience of subscribers. I think that if you have a dedicated audience, you can do anything off of that. You can build any business, you can create any form of impact. Starting businesses. A great time, now that we've realized that maybe the universe isn't as much in our control as we thought it was. Exiting company, creating income from side hustle. These are excellent. I would frame these in terms of what is in our control? What are the inputs? Diversifying income to be financially independent. Incorporating teachings into a class. Creating a secondary source of income. Being a medical entrepreneur. Moving to a new city. Creating written content on my expertise area. 50k revenue per month. Enrolling a thousand people through my habits program. Defending my thesis. Ten new clients per month. Building my life around health and well-being. Becoming managing director of the oncology business. 

These are some great goals, guys. And here's a spoiler alert, is just by writing down your goals, you are forty percent more likely to achieve them. Right? Something that lives in our head is very unlikely to happen. Right, so remember my promise, that I am going to increase your chances by fifty percent. So, we're already eighty percent of the way there, just by writing it down. So keep them coming.

Why put things in the chat? So, you will by externalizing these goals make them real. They no longer will live within your head, and you are putting into practice what we are talking about today. I think that our improvement speed in anything is proportional to the tightness of our feedback loops. So that's what we're going to be doing today, is generating very tight feedback loops. You're going to be writing and rewriting this goal, refining it, making it more resilient, so that by the end this goal will be even better through this iterative process by the end. And because I am doing this live, I haven't really planned as far as what goals I'm going to talk about. If you have your examples in the chat, I'm going to give you direct feedback on how you can improve your goal. So hopefully that's a selling point on why to share.

With my line of work, I am talking with a lot of successful people every day. They are telling me what they want to achieve, and I'm fortunate to see down the line, three to six months, were those goals achieved? Did they accomplish what they set out for? And it's always a surprise to me that there are so many goals which aren't achieved because there isn't that level of commitment and intention up front. Someone says they want something, but their actions don't align. Either they haven't put into the effort, or they haven't really defined what and why they're going after. 

And so at this point, some of you guys might know from my poker background, I like to place bets. I think that life is the product of our bets. And so I am willing to bet that I could tell you which of these goals are going to be achieved and which aren't. Right? Who I'm going to be talking to again in a few months, and you're telling me about how ridiculously successful this was, and you're already moving on to the next one, and how many people are still waiting to get started. Not to call any of you out, but that it is so clear and obvious to me by the way of how these goals are defined what is going to be achieved. So today I'm going to be sharing what I'm looking for as far as what makes a great goal which is going to be achieved, and this way you can put it into progress, into that you can implement it right away, and thus all these goals will be achieved.

So I call this "The Four Ps." So, the first P. Purpose. What are you trying to achieve? Payoff. Why do you want to achieve it? Plan. How are you going to achieve it? Progress. When are you going to achieve it? Right? The questions. What, how, why, when. I'm going to go through these in turn now. So, purpose. What are you trying to achieve? We already talked about the benefit of externalizing it, is once something lives outside of your head, it's clear. You can't overwrite it. Because we have the tendency to just pat ourselves on the back. To backwards-rationalize anything. And so if our goal is not real, it's not explicit, it's not well-defined, it's very easy to tell ourselves that we achieved it, because how will we know if we achieved it or not? So I like to say that if you have a clarity, if it's very specific what you're going after, this illuminates the most direct path to your outcome. Right? Remember the Spot The Difference. If you have a very clear picture of what you're trying to achieve, you can visualize it, you know if it'll be achieved, that illuminates the fastest way to achieve it. You won't be meandering this whole time.

But also, you're not giving yourself this wiggle room. I think of wiggle room as the leak in the ship. You give yourself a little bit of wiggle room, and this will sink the entire enterprise. And so it has to be super, super specific. And so how you will know if your goal is specific enough is if someone else, an objective third party, could look at your goal at the end of the year and say, "Yes, you achieved it" or, "No, you haven't achieved it." There's a binary criteria. One, zero. Yes, it's obvious you achieved it. No, it's not obvious you achieved it. 

So, you know, some of these ... Like, sorry I'm gonna call you out, don't mind. Generating a second source of income. Is that specific enough? Like, if you made a dollar on something else other than your primary source, did you achieve that? Defending your thesis. Is that really clear to you what that means? Creating written content. How much content? Expertise area. What is that expertise area? Being a medical entrepreneur. How will you know if that's achieved? So you can see how if it's so vague and broad, it's not clear what you're going after, it's not clear if it's been achieved. This is why at the beginning you want to be very clear at achieving what you want to achieve, right? Being specific about this outcome.

So I'm gonna pause here. This is where the chat is very useful. I'm going to be setting a timer for one minute thirty seconds. So hopefully you have something to write on. Maybe you have a notepad, maybe you have an open document, but just type some thoughts. No bad thoughts here, this is just to get things out of your head. I'm gonna ask you a couple questions to reflect on, and we'd love you guys to share in the chat what comes up for you.

So, first question. What is your desired outcome with this goal? Describe it to me. If this goal is achieved, what happens? How will you know if it's achieved? Is there an even, is there a number that's hit, is there something that's specific where you go from that zero to one, where yesterday I haven't achieved this goal, but now I have? How will you know? Finally, let's say that you've achieved your goal. It's done. I'm handing it to you on a platter. Like, you didn't even have to do anything. I waved my magic wand, here's your goal, it's been achieved. What's different? Look around. What is different about your life, about your business, about your career? What is changed? What is this outcome you're going after?

So I'm setting a timer for a minute thirty. Right it down. If anything you feel called to share, put it in the chat. I'm happy to give some feedback.

All right, guys. Just the beginning, just thanks for being brave enough to share. I'm gonna comment on these just to kinda illustrate. So, "looking at Dashboard Report and seeing a thousand people have signed up." That's very clear whether it's happened or not. You have a kind of separate goal which maybe is worth considering separately as far as how the experience was for them. Right? Receiving a certain number of messages from people who've taken it, seeing the impact that you've had. 

And here, "reaching two thousand a month from coaching" is very clear. Either you've made it, two thousand, or not. We're going to get into, you know, what is that ... Do you need to have every month? Is it you want to have one month? Is there a certain point beyond which it's two thousand every month? Right, being very specific with this. We're going to get to deadline next. 

"A real, rapidly-growing business." You can see this is a little bit vague. 

But, "hitting one million subscribers." This is pretty specific. Thinking about what are the actions that you need to do in order to hit those one million subscribers. We're going to work backwards on this next. What's different? I'll be able to make specific decisions. I would think about these, the actual decisions that you're looking to make. 

"Two written articles, three to five pages on health professional mental exercises." So are these articles published? What's the quality level, what's the result that comes from that? Let's imagine those articles are published. What happens? 

"Financial freedom, not being dependent on day job or career, no money-related anxiety." Can you be a little bit more specific about if this is true, what does financial freedom mean to you? Is there a number that you're trying to hit? Is there an ability you're trying to have? 

"100k in savings." This is 100k in your bank account? 

"Score highly on the GMAT." What's that number? How many times are you allowed to take it? Right? 

"Launch a new product." What does it mean to be launched? Is it one million in revenue just on this product?

"Set up to be a product leader within the organization." What does a product leader mean to you? What does that unlock?

As you can see, the more specific you are on this the clearer it is what you need to do to get there.

The next step is payoff. So, why do you want to achieve it? And this one is kind of sneaky, because I see people pick goals, either something that their friends are going after or culture tells them it's important, they haven't even thought about, well, why is it important? And the thing is the more you have conviction that what you're going after is worth going after, you're more likely to persist when it gets uncomfortable. Because if you are achieving anything that is worth achieving, and all of these goals sound very worth achieving to me, it's going to be uncomfortable, you're going to have to do things you don't want to do. You're going to have some mini-failures along the way. And you're going to need to persist long enough to harvest the gains. That's why it's important from the onset to be very clear why you're doing what you're doing. And usually we get into flow, we get more inspired, more excited the higher the bar that we've set for ourselves. So, make it challenging. Give yourself permission to go after something that's a little bit hard, that feels a little bit out of reach.

This is what generates some intrinsic motivation, is that we're going after something that we want for its own sake. I find that intrinsic motivation is way, way more sustainable than extrinsic motivation. So an example being difference of running a marathon versus running because you enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that it gives you, where as soon as the marathon ends, someone who's only training for the marathon stops running, because there's no other reason to do so. It's the same thing of, "Okay, I have a weight loss bet, and I need to lose a certain number of pounds by the end of the month." Well, as soon as the bet's been achieved, the pounds seem to come back on, because that reason has been removed. 

So, we're thinking about very long-term time horizons, right? Continual improvement for the rest of our lives. It's important to tap into this intrinsic motivation. Why does it matter to us? And you'll know when you're on the right track with the payoff, that this goal is both really exciting, like you can't wait to even just try it, but also a little bit scared, that you might not be able to achieve it, or that it's going to be hard, it's a little bit out of your comfort zone. That's that Goldilocks zone that you're looking for, a combination of exciting but scary.

Now, important to this payoff is the cost. All of these goals have costs. Either direct costs, things that you need to do or invest in in order to achieve, whether that's your time, your energy, your tension, or direct financial investment, or the things that you can't do because you're going after this goal. Right? Opportunity cost. What you're doing at this very moment comes at the expense of everything you could be doing. That going after this goal means not going after other goals. So, thinking about what do you need to give up in order to achieve this? What are the costs you need to pay, and why is it worth it? It's going to be hard, it's going to be challenging, it's going to be uncomfortable, but understanding that it's worth it because the goal is so important to you. And if it's not that important to you, make it more important, because "It would be nice to"s don't happen. "It would be nice to have a side business." "It would be nice to read a certain number of books this year." "It would be nice to have a six pack." Good luck with that, right? This needs to be something that is important. You need to have something at stake.

So, question time again. Let's define this payoff for you. Why does this goal matter to you? What comes to mind? Just start writing. This can go really deep, so let's say we're talking about getting in shape and you've really defined it as, "If I lose a certain number of pounds or I exercise a certain number of times per week I'm going to have more mental clarity. I'm going to be more present in my relationships." Why does that matter to you? Just keep asking yourself "why" until you get to the value that you're trying to satisfy. Like, why does this matter to you?

Here's another one. Let's say this goal is achieved. Again, I've got my magic wand today, I'm being very generous. I've waved my magic wand, and now your goal has been achieved. What do you do next? You have a million subscribers. You have 150k from your side business. You have published your articles. What do you do next? What changes? What does that unlock for you? I find all the time that we set these goals for ourself and we haven't even thought about what we'll do when we achieve them. Because achievement is just the beginning, you're gonna keep going after other goals. So thinking about, you know, what happens next, it's really powerful.

Finally, I find that productivity comes from having something at stake. That if there is no cost of the status quo, right, you just keep doing what you're doing and nothing changes and that's great, well, nothing's likely to happen. Right? The status quo is very powerful. Remember the movie, "Taken," that we have this internal person who, someone is taken from us or the world is at stake, all of a sudden we recruit these reserves that were lying there all along, right? The right lever we can move the world. So have something at stake. This is what I call a forcing function. That if it doesn't matter if you achieve the goal, you won't achieve it. So put something at risk.

So I'm gonna pause here for a minute to give you guys a chance to write. To refresh, our questions are, "Why does this outcome matter to you?" "Let's say this outcome is achieved, what happens next?" "What's at stake? What happens if you don't do anything?" Let's get at that creative tension we were talking about, where if we know we need to achieve, and we see where we are now, and this line that we're heading on is not going to need to get there, it causes us to need to change our trajectory.

I like this, guys. "Being able to quit your job" that presumably is not in alignment with your values. "Being able to support people around you who you love." "Having some freedom, working on things that you find meaningful." "Helping others succeed." That's a big motivator for myself. Tapping into that sense of satisfaction, being a teacher. "Being with my future grandkids." "Relaxing." "My subjective experience of reality being a little bit better." "Creating more time." "Having more impact." Yeah. 

I do find, this gets back to externalization, that if you tell other people about your goal, they might ask you about it. We will jump through rings of fire to remain consistent in the eyes of others. So, a reputation is a powerful thing to have at stake. If this goal is important to you, leverage that.

Yeah. And just kind of visualize. Let's say that I don't do anything. What do things look like in a year? What do things look like in five years? Are you still stuck in a job you don't love? Are you still playing small? Are you still lacking the financial freedom that you seek? Are you still faced with this sense that something is missing, that maybe you're not achieving your full potential, maybe you're not fully satisfied with your life, maybe you're not able to be fully present or healthy, to you know, continue to be able to achieve your mission or continue to be with people that you love. Like, think about the pain or the suffering that comes from doing nothing. Right? That's the difference, of it is worth it to go after this thing because the alternative is too painful. Because the pain of non-action needs to be greater than the pain of action.

All right. Number three. Progress. When are you going to make progress on your goal? This is where I talk about the difference between goals and dreams. Everyone wants to be a rock star. No one wants to travel around the country in a crappy van eating pizza, playing bars of five people. You know, it's like you have your goal. Draw the line in the sand. Have a deadline. Understand what you need to achieve, and when. 

I think that nothing happens without a deadline. That that's the difference between an area of responsibility, right? Getting in shape, having good relationships, these are never-ending pursuits. But setting up a retreat with friends, reaching out to ten friends a week, reducing my body fat by five percent, changing my macros to have a certain number of protein rather than carbs. These are goals with deadlines. Writing a book is a dream. Having a first draft published by the end of the year is a goal. Right? That's the difference.

And when we zoom out really far in our lives ... I like these really uncomfortable twenty-five year timelines, where we can achieve anything, thinking about, "What's the next ninety days happening?" If I can get one percent to what I want to achieve in the next twenty-five years I'm on track. Isn't that really powerful? It's, I just need to be one percent of the way there. So work backwards from this deadline. You have something you want to achieve at the end of the year. What are the milestones? Three months in. So let's say end of March. Sixty days from today. Where do you need to be on this goal to be twenty-five percent of the way there? This is how you know whether you're on track or off track. What is your daily pace? What do you need to do every day in order to be making progress on this goal? Right? Ninety days gets us twenty-five percent of the way there. One day, today, gets us one percent to twenty-five percent. 

This is converting our long-term objective into a default daily action. Right? There's a lot of power in that. Default. We have a system in place so something happens daily. It becomes a habit. So this is like, we take something that is really far off, really abstract, and bring it into the here and now. And this is what creates what we call internal coherence, where our short-term actions are aligned with our long-term goals. This is what gives us the feeling of satisfaction, that we're moving forward, that we're growing. And think about the opposite. That what we're doing, our day-to-day, is not in alignment with those long-term goals. We don't feel like we're moving forward. That is the thing that we want to avoid. But this internal coherence, a feeling of making progress, creates a positive feedback loop. Progress creates more progress.

So this is why we work backwards, this is why we create these milestones so we know we're on track, this is why we set a pace of, "Hey, if I need to write a certain number of words by the end of the year, I need to write a certain number of words every day." Right? Convert it into a short-term habit.

This is where I talk about the concept of a forcing function, that we named our company after. So a forcing function is to draw one's awareness to something, to elevate it to consciousness. And I think the Jedi mind trick of goal achievement is bringing your awareness to your goal. Where am I? What progress have I made? What is the next step? That the more we can be aware of where we're at, where we're going, where we're heading, we will automatically improve. Right? This is the concept that if we improve, it's because we measured. Right? We improve what we measure, or we improve just by measuring. So we are unlikely to improve, make progress towards our goal, if we don't track progress. So to make sure that you're tracking.

And so, I recommend having both numbers, metrics. Having something that you can clearly define, that you can put a number on it, see if that number is going up, but also track your feelings. Track your efforts. Track your results. Journal about it. Have conversations about it. Share with others, share with friends, share with strangers. The more opportunities, the more viewpoints or perspectives you have on what you were doing and how it's leading you to where you want to go, the more that that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, everyone has their lag measures. So let's say lag measures is having a certain amount of revenue. Right? "I want to have a million in revenue this year." Well, that's a lag measure. Revenue is harvested from seeds that were planted earlier in the year. So let's create these lag measures to lead measures. So with sales, maybe it's needing to talk to a certain number of clients. Maybe it's needing to run a certain number of ads, to publish a certain number of articles. Right? There are things that you do now that lead you to what you want to achieve in the future. So making sure that you have some lead measures that you're tracking so you can see whether you're on the path to your goal. Because how will you know if you're on track or off track if you never check in?

I call this the improvement loop. So, at any given time I'm either planning what am I going to do, experimenting, doing, executing, tracking, reflecting. How did that go? What did I learn? What did I gain? What were the results of that? Feed that back into the plan, and you can see this loop. The faster that I go through this loop, the faster that I improve. But people don't plan, people don't track, people don't reflect. And so how do you know if you're making progress? It's critical that all of these parts of the loop are completed.

So, number three. Progress. I'm going to give you guys an opportunity to write and reflect on this. First question: what is your deadline? You have your goal, you know exactly what you want to achieve. When is it going to be achieved? If I message you on this day, is it shipped? Is it out in the world, is it real? If it's something that's a little bit outside of your control, can you bring that to something that's completely in your control? You've published a certain number of articles, you've talked to a certain number of potential customers. Like, what is that deadline that this is going to be completed by?

And then we work backwards. What are the milestones? How will you know when you're halfway there? How will you know when you're twenty-five percent? Seventy-five percent? What are those checkpoints along the way so you know whether you're there?

Think about when you're back in college, university. The classes that only had a single final exam, what did everyone do? You wait until the last week, and all of the work of the whole course is compressed in that last week. And what you want to create is a weekly quiz, that all the time you're checking in, you're spreading out the efforts across the year, across the goal period, that you're always moving forward because this is how you see those opportunities to accelerate, is by acting. And so by having these regular check-ins on progress, these milestones, you ensure continual progress. So when you're checking in, how will you know when you're on track? What are the metrics that you're looking for? What will it feel like to be making progress? How will you know if you're making progress? How will someone else know if you're making progress? And when are these check-ins going to happen? Are you going to sit down at the end of the month, at the end of the quarter? What are you going to do? There's things you're going to check. 

I'm gonna give you guys a minute thirty to reflect on this. The whole goal here is I want this goal to be a continual awareness for you. So what are you going to do to keep this goal in mind?

Let's see some deadlines, guys. Let's see some stakes. I know what you're trying to achieve. When is it going to be achieved?

A good example, Jonah. Full-year goal. So, "A hundred people enrolled by March 30th." Again, the tendency is just to cut the number in a quarter. I'm not saying you're doing this, but is this a continuous thing you're doing the whole year? Maybe this is not a goal you're doing the whole year, but let's say this is. So you'll be able to look on March 30th and say, "All right, I'm at sixty, either I need to work harder on it or I need to change my approach." Or maybe you're at 150, and you can set the goal higher. That's the importance of having this milestone in place, is it allows you to check in and see whether you're on the path.

At the end of year, having your secondary income be twenty percent of the income for your job. Assume you have a number in place there. So implemented the plan, have identified the plan ... We're going to get to the planning part now, so maybe this will come into focus, but I would encourage you to think about, you know, how will you know if the plan has been implemented? If there were someone who didn't know what the plan is, could they say, "Yes, you implemented it," or "No, you didn't implement it"? What are you—how is that income being made? What do you think it's going to come from? Is there a way that you can track whether what you're doing is making income?

Subscribers. We're going to get into the plan. What are you doing? What are the actions you're taking to hit those subscriber marks? How are you going to change course if you're off this track? If you're behind?

Weekly checkpoints with an article draft. Edited version for distribution by month two. So writing is a really cool one. So who are you sending this article to? That's an easy way to create a checkpoint, is, "I'm going to send you what I have each week." Edited version for distribution by month two. So that would mean at the end of month two it's gonna be distributed? Where is it going to be distributed? What point does it need to reach before it's distributed? You can see how being very specific with this allows you to do only the things that are going to lead to your goal, because our history, our default is just to find ways to justify what we're doing. It's like, "Oh, I'm editing." "Oh, I'm writing." Well, is it moving towards publishing? Is it taking it towards something that you can distribute, that you can send to someone else? That's that direct path that I'm talking about.

And yeah, don't underestimate a journal. I think of a journal—my journal is the keystone habit of my keystone habits. That I am keeping in mind my efforts and how they are leading me to where I want to go. I'm being grateful for those efforts and recognizing I am on a path, even if sometimes it's hard, even if sometimes there are setbacks, acknowledging that on average I am moving forward, I am moving in the right direction. And that's all it is, is small continuous action and improvement.

Okay. Finally, plan. This is what it's all been leading up to. Right? You know what you're going to achieve, you know why you're going to achieve it, you know when you're going to achieve it. How are you going to do it? And I find that this is something that people way under-invest in. And so, a good rule of thumb is take how much time you're going to invest in this goal. So let's say it's a workout goal and you're going to have three hundred hours of workouts this year. Well, spend at least ten percent of your time, thirty hours, planning out your workouts. If you are trying to grow your subscribers, all the things that go into that (publishing videos, distribution, commenting), let's say you're going to spend five hundred or a thousand hours this year, well, fifty to a hundred of those hours should be evaluating the actions that you're taking. Are the things that I'm doing the most effective way to move towards this North Star? That because our time is so limited, and everything that we're doing is coming at the expense of everything else, it is so high leverage to make sure that we're doing the right things in the right way. Spend more time thinking how you're going to accomplish.

So, just imagine, right. Why hasn't this already been achieved? Presumably something needs to change. Your habits, your systems, your priorities. So ask yourself, "What needs to change to make this goal a reality?" What puts you on the path? And a lot of these goals, and that's just our natural, are things that are somewhat out of our control. You know, hitting a sales number, hitting a subscribe number, hitting a revenue number, these all require someone else. And so, bring it back to our actions, to our inputs. What is in our control? What if we do it regularly, ideally on a daily basis, will make the score take care of itself? If you write a certain number of words, if you publish a certain number of videos, if you talk to a certain number of customers, you don't need to worry about sales or subscribers. Like, that will take care of itself. So bring it back into your control.

Here's a final one that I like a lot, is, you know, I don't want to wait the entire year to see whether I succeeded on my goal. I want to know now. So how do I do that? I predict the future. I simulate it. And so I ask myself, "Let's imagine I'm at the end of the year and I haven't achieved my goal. What could have caused that? How did I fail? Did I fail to put in the effort? Was I doing the wrong things?" Like, if I can imagine these failure modes, I can prevent them. And so, think. Like, let's say you don't achieve it. Why? Is there anything you can do now to make that less of a possibility? Can you create more accountability? Can you create more stakes? Can you iterate on the plan? Can you block off time in your calendar? Tell friends that you're doing it? Have some sort of commitment mechanism that you need to ship for. A public launch. Think about how can you ensure that you succeed. What can you do now to create a plan that makes success inevitable?

So here's your questions. Last one. First, what do you need to do to make this goal a priority? Right? Another way of thinking about this is, how would someone else know it's a priority for you? I like to say that your schedule is the best indication of your priorities. So if someone is looking how you spent your time, they would say, "Yes, that is a priority for you." Do you need to be investing here? Do you need to be raising the stakes? Like, what makes this goal a priority for you?

Second question, what do you need to give up to make this goal a reality? What are the things that you want to do that you can't have, because you want this more? Right, life is a giant buffet. You can't eat everything in the buffet. Everything looks good, but you need to give up some things that you want in order to get other things you want more. What are you going to give up? How are you gonna ... You know, this time doesn't come out of thin air. If you're going to be investing more into this, what aren't you investing in? What are you putting down? I like to say, "To pick something up, make sure you're putting something else down."

And think about it. Like, are you willing to pay those costs? Are you willing to be that uncomfortable? Are you willing to not spend as much time doing something else you like? Like, is it worth it?

Last question. What does a day look like where you stay on track to your goal? Imagine it, and visualize it. A day where at the end of the day you're putting your head on your pillow and said, "Yes. That was great. I'm really happy with the way I spent my time today. Like, I am on the path. Like, I've done what I can in order to put myself in a position to achieve this." What did that day look like? What did you do? What did you not do?

Okay. So, Andre. "Get a head start on weekly goals early in the week and early in the morning." Let's make that more specific. Let's put some time on it. Right, so it's maybe your top goal, you're setting aside an hour at 9:00 AM on Monday morning to work on it. Like, there's way too much wiggle room, what a head start means. Early in the week, early in the morning, more specific is better. It's hard to beat the forcing function of specifically blocking off your time on your calendar. So, hey. Let's say it's writing, 'cause that's an easy example. For me, I wanted to write an hour every day. And so, if I'm not writing an hour every day, it's very clear what I need to change in order to make progress on that goal. I need to block off that time. I need to honor that time, I need to treat it as sacred. Well, let's say that I was writing an hour every day, and I'm still not making progress on my goal. Well, clearly I need to iterate on what I'm writing about or how I'm writing or how I'm publishing. Right? That allows me to get to the how, rather than the what.

But the first thing to control for is being specific about inputs. What am I going to do? What am I putting in? What is my effort?

Power hour. Love power hours. Every morning, schedule it in. When are you scheduling it in? Do you want to add someone else to the calendar invites, they know you're doing it? Do you wanna check in after you've done the power hour that you've done it? Do you want to share your work? Right? There's so many ways to reinforce this to make sure it's automatic.

"Check in every two days on how my progress is going, that I can be reminded of that deadline." So, what does that check-in look like? Are you looking at your analytics? Are you putting it into a spreadsheet at some point? Are you in a group with other YouTubers who have a single goal, and you can create a little bit of positive reinforcement, make it a game? Define what that check-in means. Where is that reinforcement coming in?

And yeah, it's—I see people a little bit hesitant to talk about the things that you're going to give up. This is so common, is we set these goals, and we're like, "I wanna do everything I did last year, but a little bit more. I want to add on these other things." And in order to accomplish something, we need to put something else down. So, decide what is not quite as important as this thing you're doing.

So let's bring it all together, and then I'm going to give you a quick overview of Team Performance Training, and hand things off to the Q&A. So I know some of you guys are going to have to jump, no worries. This is going to be recorded and sent out on Friday. And if you have any other questions based off of this, happy to support you. Just hit 'reply' to that email, and we can answer any questions that you have. 

So, bringing it all together, how you will know which part of your Four Ps you need to focus on. If you have your what, your purpose in place, you will feel a sense of clarity. You will be focused on what you need to do. If you're lacking clarity or focus, come back to, "What is this outcome?" Can you make it more specific?

Second, your why. What is your payoff? And you will know that you have a really good payoff, something that's valuable to you, if you feel motivated, if you feel excited, if you feel a little bit scared but in a good way, but most importantly that you have conviction. That you are confident that what you are doing is the best thing that you could be doing, and that it's worth putting other things aside.

Third, your when. How you will know that you are making progress. Right? You will notice that you feel a little bit of a sense of urgency. It's something that you need to take action on today, and you reflect on it. It's like, "Yeah, this feels really good that I'm taking action towards my long-term goal." You have this internal coherence, and you'll know that you feel consistent, that you're showing up, that you're excited to show up, that you're curious what's going to happen today. That's what that progress is, that's that positive feedback loop that feeds on itself.

And then, finally, your plan is your how it will be achieved. And I love this term from psychology, of 'expectancy,' where expectancy is, "Do you expect you will achieve this goal?" And there's two parts to this. One is, do you think you can achieve it? And this is putting a number on it. It's like, "What are my chances of achieving it?" Put a number. Let's say I'm sixty percent. What can I do to improve my plan so that now I'm seventy percent confident that I can achieve it? Eighty percent? That you can through this simulate a process, improve your plan so you don't need to pay tuition for failing on it. You can make, improve that plan now.

The other part of expectancy is like, does that feel good for you? Is it exciting? Is it worth it? You expect that what you are doing is going to lead you to where you want to be. What, where, why, when, how. Purpose, payoff, progress, plan.

So, I'm going to be taking Q&A, about five minutes. I've some great questions in there. If you want to hop in, add another question, or upvote the other questions so that I can make sure I ask the questions you guys most want to hear about.

So, I just wanted to give you guys an opportunity to learn a little bit more about what happens behind the scenes with Team Performance Training. For Team Performance Training, we are optimizing your productivity, scaling your mission, helping you perform at your peak. So this is a twelve-week group coaching experience where I show you how to implement the most important parts of my peak performance system. This is about putting principles in action. Like I say, it's like, knowledge is not what's holding you back. You don't need to read more books or articles. You already know what to do. How are you living these principles? This is all about removing your barriers to action. And I've had five hundred coaching conversations with some of the most successful executives in the world, and these are the things that I have found most critical for achieving your goals, for being successful, for living a life full of freedom and purpose. I wanna teach you everything I know, and then put it into a format that allows you to take action.

You're gonna be immediately taking action. That's where a lot of the time is gonna be spent, is this two-hour training session, I'm gonna give you some of these concepts, kinda like today. We're gonna sit, we're gonna work on them together. You'll get immediate feedback from me, but most importantly you're going to be getting immediate feedback from others like you, who are going through similar challenges, who have similar aspirations, and you're gonna help illuminate each other's blind spots, help reveal your biggest opportunities.

It's like, I think our best moments are gonna come from who else is in the class, 'cause there's gonna be some really successful people. The goals from last time were crazy. Crazy, some of these goals. I'm gonna be sharing some of them with you guys via email, what people achieved the last go around. And we have two hours every week for twelve weeks. That means twenty-four hours of coaching with me and some very successful peers. Like, the progress is incredible. So you know, who's this for? If you're a founder, if you're an executive, you're an investor, you're working on something meaningful. If you want to be accelerated on putting something into the world that needs to be there, or reaching the next phase of your life mission, I hope you consider applying. So those applications are available for the next two weeks, and the course kicks off in three weeks on February 17th.

All right. Now we got some awesome questions in the Q&A, so I want to see if I can get through a few of these. And so if you have to jump or I don't get to your question, no worries. My email is chris@theforcingfunction.com. Email your question over, and I'll be happy to answer it offline.

First question is from Andre. "How do I track the quality of my output towards my goal, versus just the quantity? I can track revenue, but it's not something that I'm always in control of." Great question. So, thinking about what are the things that will lead to this goal? Right, so if revenue is the goal, what does a day that we make progress on revenue look like? Is it talking to a certain number of customers? Is it writing a certain number of words? Or you can move further up the funnel. Is it getting people to sign up for a newsletter? Is it time spent iterating on the business model? It's gonna depend on the phase that you're at, but think about what is in your control where you can point and say, "I have done something that I believe will lead me towards this output goal." 

And that's the power of the progress check-in, is that we're seeing if our efforts are leading us towards this realization of our vision. That's that second part, is like, first am I putting in the effort? What counts as effort? But second, like is what I'm doing having the results that I want? You need both in order to have progress.

Question from Ken. "Do you have any suggestions about how to identify metrics on soft stuff, i.e. understanding of a particular topic?" So, I like to think about keeping the end in mind. So having some sort of deadline or performance. So in this case, if this is teaching a class or giving a presentation, it's like, what does this learning or understanding unlock for you? It seems like you might need to get back to this purpose and payoff, as far as if this is achieved what happens next? And so if you have that clear picture of what this abstract intangible thing is getting at, you can have a better idea of if you're progressing towards that vision.

So, metrics. Obviously, you can track the amount of time that you spent on it, but with this, it's very important to be clear about what activities count. Right? The problem is we can rationalize anything in hindsight. So is there some way to test our understanding? Even if it's vague, you know, via a conversation with a friend. I find that something that's really important. This is where a coach can serve a great purpose, is that they can reveal where you're making progress and where your next dimension of making progress could be.

This is an anonymous question. "How do you handle sustainability? I could put out high levels of productivity in bursts, but I trade off on my health and social life." Yeah. There's a lot to unpack here. You know, first realizing that our life is a bit of a portfolio, where if we realize that one area of our life is out of balance, so maybe we're overworking, we're heading towards burnout and we're not seeing our friends or we're not sleeping enough, we're not eating well enough, we rebalance. We take a step back from the one area of our life that we're over-invested in and reinvest it into the others. I find this helpful to continually check in on my priorities and say, "Hey, is the way that I'm spending my time reflective of what my priorities are?" For me a big step was I made health my top priority, and so that means that I don't sacrifice sleep to get work done. It means that exercise first and then work. And so if you understand what's a higher priority, it helps to resolve some of these more tactical-level questions, is that you can just circle back to, "Hey, am I in alignment? What can I do to bring myself back into alignment?"

And yeah, I'm really, really emphasizing sustainability here. It's like, the results of any give day, the results of even this year, don't matter all that much. I am thinking about from the perspective of a lifetime, and so I want to be putting things in place that I can sustain throughout the rest of my life, hopefully a very long one, because that hour of compounding is so hard to overestimate. And so this might be in your case, where you are cannibalizing on your health and social life, to pull back. Give yourself permission to not move as fast. It's like, you'll find that if health is sacrificed then your work isn't as effective, or you're not as present in your relationships. It's ... There's so much here. You know, we tend to track, "Did you work eight hours?" But maybe if you exercise and eat well and sleep and you have something to look forward to in the evenings, you have relationships which support you, remind you of why you're here, why you're doing things, maybe you get more in those two hours than you would have gotten in the eight, because you're performing at a higher level. 

That's the difference between productivity and performance, is what can you have in place for your best self to show up? And that requires pulling back in something in order to get something that's gonna take you forward more.

Praisana: "Top tips for creating foolproof systems and discipline?" Short and tongue in cheek answer? No system is foolproof. Discipline is way overrated. My tip is to make discipline unnecessary, to make what you want to do easier to do, and to assume that your systems are going to break. Assume you're going to fail, assume you're going to fall off in your habits. How can you make it as easy as possible to get back on the path, to pick things up? If you're relying on your discipline, you're going to fail. You're doing it wrong. Motivation doesn't last, so this is why we come back to that reflection, why we come back to the checking in on progress. The more often we're bringing ourself back to the path, right, that's the practice, the more often we are moving forward. An over-reliance on discipline is fragile.

Annie asks, "What are your tips for finding the twenty percent of inputs that lead to the eighty percent of outputs?" Back through time. Track what you do, and at the end of the day or the end of the month say, "What were the things that I did that had the biggest impact?" Or look for surprise. I do find that that eighty/twenty is everywhere in life. It's everywhere if you look for it. So thinking about it, it's like, "What was the small thing that I did that had the big impact?" Where a lot of my clients come from the same few referrals, or a lot of subscribers in your case are going to come from the same few videos, or the same few traffic sources. So is there a way to double down on those types of videos or on those types of traffic sources? Riches are in the niches. If you strip out the eighty percent that doesn't matter and double down on the twenty percent that's having the biggest impact, that's the fastest path to accelerating progress.

Joseph asks, and I think this is the last question we're going to have the time for, "How can I avoid burnout? I have commitment, and I feel like I'm making efforts, but at the end I find myself burned out." I think this is the difference between happiness and fulfillment. There's a mistaken notion in let's say culture that if we're making progress on the goal, we feel happy that everything feels great. But this is what I hint at, this is why it's really important to understand your why, is that if you're going after something meaningful enough it's going to be hard. Right? There's going to be times where you don't feel happy, where you doubt yourself, where you're wishing, "Maybe I wish I didn't burn the boats, maybe I wish I didn't set my sights so high." And that's why it's important to have that conviction ahead of time, to be prepared. To know these moments are coming so that you can persevere through them.

And so that's why I think about happiness and fulfillment on this continuum, where if we're feeling burnout (and it's when, because it's definitely going to happen) come back to what makes us happy. Can we spend some time with people we love? Can we go outside? Can we eat something that makes us feel good? That realizing that this mood is temporary, but we extrapolate it out into infinity. And so if we feel burned out, if we don't feel motivated, that becomes a top priority. Take care of yourself. Get yourself back into a place where you can perform. The remarkable power of just getting a good night's sleep. Like, go to bed early. It'll all look better tomorrow. Journal about it. There's so many things that you can do to improve your feeling about what you're doing, and if you can get yourself back into a position to perform, everything else will take care of itself. So just ... It's like, giving yourself permission that if you're feeling burned out, deal with that burnout first. It's going to happen at some point.

Guys, I went over. I love talking about this stuff so much. My hope is that what we talked about today you put into practice. That you have a goal which is now more likely to be achieved than it was an hour ago. If I can support you, if I can give you feedback on your goal, if anything I said today was completely ridiculous and you disagree, let's have a conversation about it. I'm happy to continue that, I'm happy to accelerate what you're doing. Thank you guys so much for your time, for being here, for your participation, for your willingness to be vulnerable and to think about why we are here. Why are we here? Why are you here? What are you going after? It's worth thinking about.

Thanks, guys. See you next time.

 
Chris Sparks