Jay Papasan:
Imagine for a second walking up to a complete stranger, getting down on your knee, and proposing marriage. Sounds absolutely crazy, right? Well, that’s what most of us do with our goals every single year. We start from this cold start, a brand new idea, no dating, no courtship, and go right straight to marriage. And it absolutely doesn’t work. That’s why so many people quit on their goals as early as mid-February, often earlier.
Today in this episode, I’m gonna hopefully show you a better way. The world does not need another way to set goals. What we need is a way to have a relationship with our goals. So, we’re revisiting probably one of our most popular podcast of 2025. We’ll call this edition, Goals: A Love Story, because this week is Valentine’s week. And we want you to have a lasting love story with your goals. And there’s a process for doing that, and we’ll share it with you.
Now, this whole idea of getting married quick, we all know people who do that. I think my parents got married six months after they met. Wendy’s parents, like 3 or 4 months. That was a different age. People were going off to war. It happens. And those marriages lasted a long time. My parents were married for 60 years before my father passed away, and they were happy the whole way.
So, it is possible to have love at first sight, but that’s not what the research says. On average, most people spend two to three years of courtship before they propose, and those that do tend to have longer, happier marriages. So, what does that look like in goal setting? How do we make that work for us when it’s a brand new year, we do want a fresh start, but we want to achieve our goals? We’re gonna break it down in this episode, Goals: A Love Story.
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Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
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Jay Papasan:
So, here’s the problem most of us find us in the position of trying to solve again and again and again. Every January, we kind of start over fresh. We’re not setting goals based on where we’re going in the distant future. This year is the next logical milestone on my longer journey. We’re kind of wiping the slate. Maybe last year wasn’t the ideal year, and we’re really starting fresh. And that’s a little bit like the snap proposal to a total stranger. That’s where most goal systems begin. This idea that you’re going from zero to total commitment with nothing in between. No courtship, no nothing.
And the reality is – and there’s so much research – most people are ghosting their goals by the second month of the year. Think back to the last time someone ghosted you. Maybe it was someone that you met at a party and you were excited to meet and they just never called. Maybe it was even a friend who just stopped responding. Being ghosted sucks.
Now, if we were to interview your goals and ask them what kind of relationship you have with them, what would your goal say? “Hey, they were hot in the beginning, but man, I don’t hear from them much anymore.” That’s kind of the truth for most people. They have all of these goals, they write them down, they post them on social media, but often by the end of the first quarter, heading into May or June, if you ask them where they were, they would have trouble finding them. They would have trouble remembering them.
You’ve heard me talk about goal drift and all of the other challenges. Well, that’s what happens. We get distracted. We don’t know how to have a relationship with our goals. So, let’s just play with this metaphor a little bit more, and then we’ll talk about how to live it right.
So, when you did meet that special someone, you met him at a party, I met my wife at a birthday party, before the party was over, I asked for a phone number from our friend. I was like, “I wanna get to know this lady.” That’s how it is for most of us. We see someone, we’re interested in them, and then what do we do? We go out on a date. And then, at that date, you’re like, “Wow, I’m gonna text them. I’m gonna call them.” Wendy and I would send emails from work. We saved them all. Our kids will be really embarrassed someday to read them. It’s like, “You wrote this stuff at work?” “Yep, we did, because we were falling in love.”
And we went on many, many dates. And it took me a little over a year to propose to her. And then, we’ve gone now. ANd now, we’ve been married, gosh, 26 plus years. And we’ve created frameworks for staying in touch and staying in relationship. If you’ve heard, we’ve established a date night after our second child was born. And in the last 14 or 15 years, because we established a ritual, a regular coming together for our relationship, I believe we’ve been on more than 750 dates. I’m proud of that. That’s my number one relationship, and I’m putting regular investments, regular time together to make it happen.
My partner, Gary Keller, often says, “‘Kids spell love, T-I-M-E, and so do your goals.'” Are we spending time with our goals, so that we can stay on track? Now, one little piece of evidence before we leave this metaphor behind, there was an Emory University study of over 3,000 people, and they found that couples who dated three or more years were 50% less likely to get divorced. So, this idea of building the relationship that creates the greater commitment, it’s not something to snooze on. So, how do we do that with our goals?
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Jay Papasan:
So let’s talk about the goal dating process. In our framework with The ONE Thing, in our training and coaching, we believe in the courtship, real or imagined, even if you’re starting, is a longer journey. But since we can’t go into the past and start dating these goals before, we go into the future. So, we start with this idea of, we meet our goals, we like our goals, we flirt, we go on dates, and then we make the commitment. That’s the natural progression of a healthy relationship. With our goals, we’re going to go into the future, so that we can extend this timeline.
So, we have the people that we work with write what we call a someday letter. The goal is to go out, usually around 10 years, and imagine what their world would look like if they were living their best life, right? Who’s still alive? Who’s not still alive? Are they still in their current job? Are they doing something else? Have they developed hobbies over those years? And the trick here is that 10-year gap.
I found for personally and with others that when you go out five, six, seven years, our logical brain just turns off. The spreadsheets fall apart. We know that these projections are just bunk. There’s no way for us to accurately predict what’s gonna happen in two or three years with the speed of technology and everything else, much less 10. So, that part of our brain quiets and we allow ourselves to do a little dreaming. And that’s really important because, now, we’re framing out our world as it might be possible.
And believe me, if you haven’t pursued something for a long period of time, we all believe so much more is possible in one year than in fact is, but we have no clue what we’re capable of in five or more years. You go out 10, and your whole world could have transformed multiple times. Nothing is truly impossible within the realm of possibility.
So, we go out in the future and we paint this picture. What are our relationships like? What is our work like? What goals are we achieving? What hobbies have we pursued? How do our days look? And then, we progressively work backwards. We backwards plan. And I’ve talked about this. We call it Goal Setting to the Now. How do we pull those future goals, which don’t have a lot of pull around us, like a lot of people have big dreams for the future, but if they’re still in the future, they don’t really influence our behavior. We have to pull them into the now. And then, we progressively help people set first five-year goals.
Based on your someday letter, the goals that are implicit there, what would you have to achieve in your personal life to feel like you were on track for that? What would you have to achieve professionally in your health, in your key relationships? You just go through the different goal categories and ask, what would be a milestone that if I hit it five years from now, that someday feels very possible for me?
And this, again, is not science. There’s a little art here, but again, because we’re looking at five years, we just need to be directionally correct. And that’s the key here. We are moving backwards from a future vision. If we just looked out, what do we do this year, there’s a thousand different directions we can go in because everything is possible if we’re not working backwards from something we clearly want.
So, we get those five-year goals that are aligned, and then we bring it back a little closer to the present. Based on the five-year goals, not the someday, we just go to those anchor points. Let’s say that one of my someday goals was to be running one marathon a year. Maybe in five years, I’ve set a goal to run a marathon, my first marathon. And believe me, anybody can train to be capable of running 26.2 miles, walking it, wheelchairing it, however you are mobile to get there in that period of time. But we take that five-year goal and say, what would I have to achieve this year to feel like I was on track for my five-year vision? So, maybe it’s run a 10K or a 5K. It doesn’t matter so much. But now, we’re in the annual goal territory.
Now, already, we’ve completely changed the dynamics. We’ve gone out 10 plus years and we’ve worked backwards to this year. And so, the goals that we’re setting, we have this long relationship with because we have this distant vision, and we’ve worked our way backwards and seen, how would we be interacting with the world, with our work, with our goals, in order to kind of make some of those things happen? So, we set these one-year milestones, we call them goals, but they’re just milestones towards our five-year goals, which are aligned with our someday vision. Do you see how that works? We just work backwards.
Now, the key part, when I talk about dating your goals is this next part. If you have clear one-year goals for your personal and your professional life, and hopefully you’ve worked them backwards using the Goal Setting to the Now process, you can build what we call as a 411.
411, if you’re old enough, remember, you could dial 411 and get information, right? It is the dope on whatever it is you’re doing. And we used to have these worksheets, and it would have your annual goals at the top, your monthly goals in the middle, and at the bottom, it was four spaces for four weeks. And we just continued this goal setting to the now process. We would write our annual goals, personal and professional, at the top and then each month we would ask the question, based on where I am today, what do I have to accomplish this month to feel like I’m on track for my annual goal? And then, we work backwards from the month. You see how this works? Based on my monthly target, so if I was gonna run a 10k, maybe this month, I’m going to commit to run three days a week and hit this mileage by the end of the month. Awesome.
Well, now, my weekly goals have to line up with my monthly goals. So I’m going to say I’m going to run on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a long run on Saturday. That will help me get the mileage this week to keep me on track for my month, which is on track for my year, which beyond the 411, this one page kind of heads up display for your goals is aligned with your five-year goals and your someday goals.
So, this 411, you have all of your goals broken down from annual to monthly. I know some people who do it quarterly, that’s up to you. And then, weekly, so that each week, they’ve framed down these tasks. They’re always activities. A great way to think about the 411 is you have milestone target at annual, milestone target at the monthly level. By the time you get to the week, it has to be an activity. Because those are the things that we’re gonna put on our calendar.
I can’t timeblock just the idea of something, de-stress. No, but I can time block, meditate for 30 minutes, right? I can’t time block complete 30 chapters this month and this week is five. I can put five writing days on my calendar. If I’m trying to close 20 sales by the end of the month, I can time block this week X number of appointments with clients, X number of TCPA-compliant phone calls to clients or past clients, the activities that lead to the monthly goal that lead to the annual goal and so forth. We call that document the 411.
In reality, most of us don’t keep four weeks. It doesn’t really matter. I keep one. I’ve been doing it. Gosh, I think I’m close to 1,300 weekly practices on this. The muscle is strong with me because the first thing they did when I joined Gary Keller’s company, it was hand me a blank 411. It said, this is how we track our goals. Bring this to your meeting every week with your manager, and y’all will discuss it.
Now, the beauty of this is every week, it only takes about 20 or 30 minutes to update your goals. It might be a longer process to set your someday goals and your five-year and your one-year, but once you have those in place, 30 minutes a week, blocked on your calendar, you can have a date with your goals. And that date has a very, very specific framework. We look at our goals and we ask, based on what I said I was gonna do last week, how am I doing? How do I feel about it? Did I do the things I said I was going to do? Based on that, what do I need to accomplish this week to be on track for my monthly goals?
And we go through this framework and we make adjustments. If last week, you were supposed to build five widgets and you only built four, and this week you’re supposed to build five, well guess what? You need to maybe build six to get back on track. That’s how achievers catch up when they’re behind. They don’t just keep trying for five and achieving four. They raise the activity until the outcomes start to line up with their goals. That’s how you get on track. And these little adjustments keep us from going way off track. It just takes 30 minutes. You look at your goals, and then you time block your commitments.
Now, the 411 is not a to-do list, folks. This is where the 80-20 rule really comes to play. The 80-20 rule or Pareto’s principle says that 20% of our activities will yield 80% of our results. That is kind of the founding principle of The ONE Thing book, that the few will dictate many outcomes. In fact, if you keep taking the 20% of any activity, you will get to one activity. What is my one thing this week for making that happen? And that is often the repetitive tasks that we do for our professional success.
That goes on our calendar. It goes on our calendar first, and everything else has to fit around it. And over time, we can build rituals, we can build habits and systems to make those things more secure. But I usually advise people, pick your most important goal. That is the goal that you first put on your calendar, and you want to really protect that at all cost. And over time, it will become normal for you to do that thing.
Research says 66 days to form a habit, that could be 66 repetitions. It’s a little bit kind of loosey-goosey there, because sometimes it happens faster, sometimes it happens longer. But what we want to do is build the habit, build the system, the ritual for continually, repeatedly, reliably doing our 20% activities. They will not fill up nine hours a day. They often only occupy maybe as little as 30 minutes a day and that’s the 30 minutes that we want to protect at all cost.
So, the 411 is your date with your goals. You update it, you update your goals, and then you make sure that your calendar reflects your goals. Over time in my coaching and in my training, I’ve said and I truly believe, if you show me your calendar, I can tell you what your priorities are, and I can probably guess at your values as well. Because how we invest our time is reflective of the goals that we’re actually focused on. But if we’ve allowed ourselves to kind of ghost our goals, then just any old thing will show up. It’s whatever’s urgent, whatever’s red hot, which is why so many of us are so stressed out all the time.
So, breaking this down, the fundamental date with our goals begins with a 30 minute date every week. You look at your goals on the 411, which will have your annual goals. And based on those, you’ll have monthly goals. And based on those, you’ll have monthly goals and based on those you’ll have weekly activities to make those monthly targets happen. And then you’ll look at your calendar and say does my calendar reflect my goals? If it doesn’t, you cancel. You move some things around. “Hey, something’s come up. I’m behind on a deadline. I’m gonna have to push. We’ll have to take a rain check.” People do it to you all the time, but that’s the navigation. We get clear on what has to happen in a short period of time, seven days, in order for our monthly, annual, and farther out goals to happen. And then, we really focus on this tiny window of time, this one week. And when you do that, you have a daily kind of check-in with your goals.
Now, I’ll go back to dating Wendy. We sent emails to, we didn’t have cell phones back then. We sent emails almost every day. We called each other almost every day. I’m gonna add one more layer to this process of dating your goals. So, before I tell you how to flirt with your goals, let’s take a quick break, and on the other side, we’ll break it down.
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Jay Papasan:
All right, welcome back, folks. Let’s talk about flirting with our goals in between the dates. Now, the most impactful habit we’ve ever helped our clients form in our training and in our coaching at The ONE Thing is what we call goals before phones. We challenge people every morning before they could look at their phones, most people, it’s their alarm clock. They turn it off or hit snooze and as soon as they’re awake, they’re in their social media, they’re in their emails, they’re in their text threads, all stuff that doesn’t actually lead to a goal achievement. If anything, it gets us emotionally worked up and into triage mode of trying to do lots of unimportant but urgent stuff.
But when we look at our goals, you look at your 411, what did I say I was gonna get done this week? And based on that, what do I need to focus on today? We get clear about what we need to say yes to. It takes about five minutes, folks, maybe less. You look at your goals and you ask, does my day reflect what I need to do today? And then, we make those tiny adjustments. Five minutes a day. I’ve seen this absolutely transform careers. So, it’s a two-part process, dating your goals. You’re gonna do it 30 minutes a week with the 411. We have it in our free resources on our website, download it, use it, learn to use the process. It’s incredibly powerful. Pair that with time blocking, and frankly, you can become unstoppable.
And between those little dates with our goals, 52 times a year, once a week for 30 weeks, you’re gonna kind of flirt with them. You’re gonna look at them before you get lost in our digital lives, just three or four minutes every morning. And here’s the trick. When you know what you’ve said yes to, it’s really easy to say no to the other junk. But most of us get caught in the maelstrom of our email and our text, and we lose track right away.
And again, on a very simple level, we’re ghosting our goals. Remember how that felt when someone ghosted you. We don’t wanna do that. We wanna connect with them even in a tiny way every day and for about 30 minutes every week. That’s what we call having a relationship with your goals. And those tiny investments of time, if you added it up, it’s like less than an hour every week, right? Just a few minutes in the morning and 30 minutes maybe at the end of the week.
When do you do that date? For me, I like to do it on Sunday mornings. It tends to be quiet around my house. My wife and I do it together. We sync our calendars. I know people who do it the very last thing before they leave the office on Fridays. Some people do it on Saturdays. The point is, have it done before Monday shows up. That’s one way to make the Sunday scaries go away, because now instead of this ambiguous void of chaos and tasking, you’re kind of clear about the handful of things, and it’s never more than a handful, that are truly important. And the relief you feel when you do them, it’s really kind of liberating, because your task list, your to-do list, will never get shorter. But there’s only a handful of things that truly matter in the long run.
And if we can make progress on those, we tend to feel better about our days, better about our weeks, better about our months, and better about our years. It adds up small investments over time in micro adjustments.
So, that’s the framework, how to have a relationship with your goals. It’s a weekly 411 and it’s a daily flirtation, right? You’re gonna check your goals before you dive into the world and that will keep you on track. So, before we get to the weekly challenge, let me just break down a few of the benefits.
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I can think of three immediate benefits and they show up in a lot of my keynotes, especially the one around the busyness trap where we just caught in this cycle of tasking that never ends. There’s always more to do, we always feel behind, and we always feel like we’re letting someone, especially ourselves, down on a daily basis. It’s a horrible trap to be in that busyness trap.
So, the first one is goal drift. If you’re meeting with your goals on a weekly basis, checking in every day, a little flirtation, you don’t get too far off course. Remember when I talked about like if you only built four widgets last week, but we’re supposed to build five and you’re supposed to build five this week, the course correction is, well, I got to do six. How do I clear time and space to build six this week, so I’m back on course for my goals? Those little changes avoid massive deviations.
If you can remember my episode where I talked about the Korean flight that was tragically shot down, it only started five degrees off course. But after a few hundred miles, it was in a completely wrong country, which was how the tragedy happened. We need to check in and get back on course on a regular basis.
Now, for my business owners out there, why is this important? It’s not just important for you. It’s important to do this with your people. Nobody can get that far off course if you’re checking in with them every week. It just takes 30 minutes. Great! Show me your 411. How did you do last week? Based on that, how do you feel and what do you need to do this week? Great! What are your goals for this week? What’s your plan? What activities do you need to do? What is your goal? Awesome! Do you have time protected for that? Boom! On to the next.
Those little check-ins, you can find out, are they still addressing the priorities you expected them to? You avoid goal drift, your people avoid goal drift, you stay anchored to those goals, so you can stay on target. If people drift for too long, that ghosting becomes kind of an embarrassment, right? If I asked you where your goals were today, and we’re really not even out of the second month if you’re listening to this when it dropped, a lot of people might be a little embarrassed and like, “Geez, I don’t know.”
It’s the same way with our relationships. If you accidentally ghost someone, you can feel kind of embarrassed when you finally kind of timidly have to say, “Hi, I’m sorry, It’s your amazing disappearing–” fill in your profession, accountant, attorney, whatever – right? You haven’t contacted them and you know, you should have and the longer you wait the more resistant you are to actually doing it. Well, what happens there is people just quit on their goals and it’s not even conscious. It stays in the background for so long, they forget about it, which is how we get to kind of challenge number three.
If you’ve seen the movie Groundhog Day, it’s about a guy who keeps living the same day again and again and again. A lot of people end up, because of drift and unconscious quitting, they live Groundhog Year. This year seems suspiciously like last year, which looked a lot like the year before. We end up starting in the same place because we’ve drifted and ended up coming right back to the same place we were starting at. That’s how people feel like they’re kind of stuck, and they want to get unstuck.
And the key here is to start dating your goals, build a relationship with them, so you can stay in touch with them. And there’s only a few things that truly matter. You can actually knock those things out each day and each week to stay on track. So, we need to wrap this episode up, and I need to give you a challenge.
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My challenge to you for this week is to book 30 minutes with yourself this weekend, and I want you to look at your goals and just ask the question, based on my annual goals and what I would need to achieve this month, what do I actually need to get done this week? It’s just looking at seven days based on the context of your annual goals and where you would need to be at the end of the month. What do you need to do? Maybe you’ve neglected them for several weeks and you need to kind of make up ground, give yourself some grace. It’s okay, you can’t catch up on six weeks of non-action in one week, but you can start.
So, what’s the most important next step that you could do to kind of make progress? We say think big, aim small. So, just spend 30 minutes, analyze your goals, and identify the one thing you can do next week to get back on track. That’s your challenge for the week. I hope you’ve enjoyed, and I hope you will digest and start living this idea is that we don’t need to set more goals. We just need to have a better relationship with the ones we already have. Good luck, folks. We’ll see you next week.
Disclaimer:
This podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts and opinions of the guests represent those of the guests and not ProduKtive or Keller Williams Realty LLC and their affiliates and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, tax, or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or results from using the information.
