Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
This is the first episode of February. And guess what also happens in February. Some of us love it, some of us hate it, but yes, it’s Valentine’s Day. Whatever the case, we’re going to talk about having a relationship with your goals in honor of Valentine’s Day.
Now, what does that even mean? I think for most of us, if we’re being really honest, if you had to post your status of your relationship to Facebook around your goals, you’d probably say it’s complicated. Because that’s what it is. It is complicated. Because none of us have been taught kind of a proven way, not just to set goals, like that’s fine, but how do we actually have a relationship with them? How do we date them? How do we build trust and relationship that we’re not only gonna do the things we say we’re gonna do for those goals, we’re gonna be there for them? What does that even look like?
Most of us start the year, we’re all excited, “Yes, I’ve got my big goals.” You might share them. You might share them with your team. You might share them on social. And we know that life shows up. Even on an average year, people get sick, job descriptions change, the competitive market, the landscape changes, and over time, we all have a tendency to drift a little bit. We lose track of some of the things that we said we were going to do. And if you drift long enough, you will lose track altogether.
And what happens then is you come around to January of next year, and it’s a little bit like a merry-go-round. You’ve gone all the way around the world in this big circle, and you’re kind of starting at the same place again. We didn’t do all the things, or even any of the things we thought we were going to do. Doesn’t mean we had a bad year, but we didn’t really stay engaged with our goals.
If that sounds like you… And frankly, in our business, we see lots and lots of folks that are high achievers that often lose track of their goals. They accomplish a lot because they’re doers. They just go out and do stuff. They get stuff done, but they didn’t get the stuff they meant to do done. If that sounds like you, we’re gonna explore that today in this episode on having a relationship with your goals.
What does it mean to have a relationship? Now, I’ve heard a quote for most of my career, and I looked it up, and it’s been attributed to Zig Ziglar. It’s been attributed to an author and a physician named Dr. Anthony Witham. I think I’m saying his name right. But depending on who you consult for the quote, “Children spell love T-I-M-E.” That ultimately relationships that last, a lot of that is built on spending time together and doing things together.
Now, I remember back in, I think it was 2018, I was teaching a class with my co-founder, Geoff Woods, called How Billionaires Set Goals. And it was one of those riffs that kind of stuck and it kind of turned into an aha. And what I said, kind of accidentally, was the world doesn’t need a new way to set goals. The world needs a way to have a relationship with them. Because in our business, what we see, those people who figure out how to have a relationship with their goals actually achieve them; whereas, most of us just can’t really get out of the gate. It just, it doesn’t work.
And if you look in the self-help books and all the literature online, look at all the stuff on SMART goals and New Year’s resolutions and the Pomodoro method and like, you name it, there’s like a thousand productivity books and they’re all about how to set goals. There is very little out there around achieving them and staying in relationship with them. I mean, frankly, if you took all of those self-help books and posts and blogs about setting goals, you could probably cover the surface of the earth with just those pages. Like, there’s a lot on that and there’s a little bit about staying in relationship with, sticking to your goals. How do we do that?
Now, let’s talk about relationships. Think back to the last time you had a serious sweetheart. When you really want to have a relationship with someone, there’s kind of a natural progression. Maybe there’s some flirting, there’s the inevitable fear pangs about like, “I’m going to ask this person out,” you go on dates. And if, kind of, love is striking and you’re really attracted to someone, what do you want to do? Like do you want to wait 12 months to see them again? No. You want to go on dates. You want to see them. Like, “Hey, what are you doing next weekend?” You want to keep it going.
And the natural progression in a relationship, you go from flirting and getting to know each other to dating, and eventually you get to this thing called commitment, where you become committed to that individual. And it might end in “I do” or some other variation, but that kind of progression – from flirting to dating to commitment – that’s kind of normal in relationships, in our love life.
And remember, this is a Valentine’s edition, even though we’re a little bit early. For most people, and I’ve said it again and again, there’s all this research, most people who begin the year with a big goal, this is that Strata research, most people will have abandoned it by February. That’s not a relationship. That’s like, at best, a summer romance, right? It’s just a fling of some kind. No, that’s just one or one and a half months of attention. That’s not enough.
So, the thing I see that we see as a company is that a lot of people get the steps out of order. Most goal-setting models begin with commitment. They’re going right straight to the, “Here’s the thing I’m going to do.” There is no dating. There is no getting to know you. So, there’s this idea that the thing that’s wrong with a lot of goal setting methods is that they go straight to commitment without a foundational relationship.
There’s all of this groundwork that we have to lay before we start setting annual goals, right? So some of that groundwork, doing the work of figuring out our purpose and our values, looking for our someday goals and our five-year goals, all of that pre-work to me is a little of that getting to know you stage. And now, when we look up and we’re setting a goal for 2025, we know that it’s in alignment with where we want to go, not just this year, but it’s on a direct line to where we want to be five years from now, which is in a line with where we want to be someday, which is in a line with our values and purpose. It’s just a whole way of flipping it around, but we’re actually getting the steps in order.
And then there’s just a simple process that comes behind it. We call it the 411. We have a simple one-page goal system where you have your annual goals, your monthly goals, your weekly goals, you’ve probably heard us talk about it, and we’ll go a little deeper later in this episode, where you, on a weekly basis, engage with your goals, and then you time block around it, right?
And time blocking is simply knowing this is a priority, it’s a big rock, it’s a 20 percenter, I need to make an appointment with myself to do that thing this week. And when you engage with your goals on a weekly basis, and I promise we’ll break it down, it’s only about 30 minutes a week. Think of it as going on a date with your goals. Over time, you are figuring out and dialing in exactly why those things matter to you. You’re connecting them to your future. You’re building a relationship with your goals. And the practice is in having periodic but regular meetings with your goals to assess your progress, to evaluate how you feel about it, and to make some distinctions about where we go.
But why should you care? So, I kind of want to walk through three ideas about why having a relationship with your goals is a better path, what we’ve observed and seen doing this for more than a decade now. And the first one is you get to avoid goal drift. Two, you get to avoid unconscious quitting. And three, you get to lock in accountability around those goals. So, it’s three things that are actually better about having a relationship with your goals versus just setting them and doing what most people do. So let’s dive into them one at a time.
So, first, you get to avoid what I like to call goal drift. What is goal drift? Goal drift is what I described at the beginning of the episode. You start out super enthusiastic, you are excited about the goal, but then life happens, right? And you have this new priority that pops up, or some emergency you have to handle, or maybe your boss tells you your job description has changed, or if you’re the boss, the climate and the work has changed, and the competitor landscape has changed, whatever it is, things happen, and you start to drift away away from those goals.
And because you’re not having dates with them and engaging with them, that regular, what we call the rhythm of accountability, you could go a quarter, maybe even longer before realizing you’re off track. That’s goal drift. It’s this idea that because we’re not engaging with our goals on a regular basis, we don’t realize that our aim has veered off and we’re actually moving in the wrong direction, and frankly, sometimes in the opposite direction of where we thought we would be going or we intended to go.
So, I’m gonna kind of tell you a story that I found a few years ago, and it’s actually the origin story of how we came to have GPS systems, global positioning satellite systems today. If you go back to 1983, it was September 1st, there was a famous flight, Korean Airlines flight, actually 007, nothing to do with the spy. But they left Anchorage, Alaska, and they were flying to Seoul, Korea. And it’s a tragic story. The flight never reached its destination. It veered off course and was mistaken for a spy plane in Soviet territory, and it was shot down. And all the passengers died. It’s like over 250, I believe. The passengers and crew all passed away because they lost track. They drifted off course.
Now, back in 1983, the way planes navigated before GPS systems, is they use a system of radio waypoints. And so, they… actually, it’s a lot like the old sailors, they call it dead reckoning. And if you know where you are precisely, you can measure how far you’ve gone, and the wind, and the rotation of the Earth, all those things and say, “Based on how much time I’ve been traveling north from Anchorage, Alaska, I should be right here.” And sailors navigated the globe back when they just had a compass and sextant and did that. It’s actually not a bad way, but it depends on this idea of knowing your fix, where you started, and having waypoints along the way that you can say, “And yes, that is Mount Etna. That’s where we are. We’re off the coast of Italy. Boom, we’re on the right course.” So, the fix of where you started and the waypoints along the way became important for navigating over distances.
What happened with the flight 007 is they actually began their journey by missing a waypoint. They did not come close enough to the radio signal. And boom, they actually began their journey five degrees off. Now, that’s a pretty big deviation. And so, you start off five degrees off track and then you travel hundreds of miles, they actually ended up 130 miles off of its original flight path, which is how they ended up without waypoints to guide them in Soviet territory, mistaken for a spy plane and shot down with missiles. It’s a true tragedy.
Now, those waypoints, if you can get it now, that’s the metaphor. If you were navigating and you didn’t make the mistakes that happened early in that flight, you would know where you started the year, that’s your fix. And each week becomes a waypoint where you check in and said, “Hey, I started and we were generating $50,000 a month in recurring revenue. And now, we’re six weeks into the year, six waypoints into the year, six goal check-ins into the year,” or for the purposes of this episode, “six goal dates into the year, and we’re at $52,000 in monthly recurring revenue, or at $48,000.”
But now we have our where we started, we know what’s happened since, and we can make course adjustments. If we’re a little bit behind, we can accelerate our activities to get back on track. If we’re a little ahead, frankly, I don’t decelerate unless people are in danger of burning out. I’m just like, we’re ahead of our goals because you know something’s going to happen. So, the outcome of that tragic story is it probably saved thousands and thousands of lives later from ever making similar mistakes.
So checking in with your goals isn’t about perfection, but it is about maintaining a connection, a relationship with them, so that you can catch small deviations before they become big deviations. By checking in, we can course correct, and instead of goal drifting, right, drifting way off course, we can get back on course and actually hit the target.
Now, that’s the first big idea, but we’re about 15 minutes or so into the episode. I think this is a great time to take a short break. I’ll come back, I’ll walk you through the two other reasons you should care, and then how to follow a process to have a relationship with your goals. I’ll catch you on the other side of the break.
Welcome back, ONE Thing family. I started off with this idea of having a relationship with your goals. We walked through what that meant. We also talked about why you should car. And we talked about goal drift and the danger of it and how in real life it can lead to tragedy. And frankly, if your most important goals are being ignored, the tragedy is that you’re not pursuing them and you’re not making progress. And that’s your life, right? That’s your life and you’re living.
Now, the second big reason you should care is you avoid unconscious quitting. I alluded to this at the beginning. When you start drifting, there’s a point where you just lose track altogether. And it’s this idea that because I’m not checking in, I am just gonna, at some point, forget where I said I was going. We would never do this if you hopped in the car to go somewhere else, right? You would have where you started, where you’re going, and the GPS would be pinging you to take a left here and get on this highway there until you could drive across the country that way.
Just by course correcting along the way and navigating in the short term based on your long-term goal. But when you don’t have any connection to the original goal or where you are in your progress, you have no way to course correct. And at a certain point, we just abandon the goals.
And I can tell you, hundreds, if not thousands of people have come to our training company, and when you interview them and talk about, “Why are you here?” and “What is your biggest challenge?” they talk about this idea of, kind of, like Groundhog Day but for the year. They feel like they’re repeating the same year after year where they’re working hard, they’re striving, they have all the big ideas, and they’re just not making the progress that they would like. And a lot of that is that for most people, as early as February, they’ve just kind of put their original goals in the rear view mirror, and they pick something that maybe is more immediate. They strive for that.
So, unconscious quitting in the absence of those dates with our goals, we just forget. Who was that person? Who was that goal? We had a couple of great dates, but why did I lose track? We never stayed in touch. We lose touch and, eventually, they get abandoned. And frankly, I would say a huge majority of goals are actually abandoned through this unconscious quitting. We didn’t consciously say, “That’s not a goal I want to pursue.” We just kind of lost track of it.
I want you to be a conscious quitter, not an unconscious one. That unconscious quitting is the stuff of regrets. That’s where you show up January next year and go, “I didn’t start that side hustle,” “I didn’t do the thing I wanted to do,” “I didn’t write the great American novel,” “I didn’t find the person I was gonna be in love with.” whatever that big goal is that you would set out the year to do, and there’s regret. And then we start to lose confidence in ourselves. When over and over again, we say we’re going to do something, and we don’t, that’s the stuff of self-doubt.
So, number one, we avoid goal drift. Number two, we avoid unconscious quitting with all of its cost. And then, kind of number three, more of a positive, those weekly check-ins lock in accountability. And accountability just means total ownership, right? How does that happen? It’s a weekly date with your goals. You get to pick the format. You get to pick the time. You get to do almost everything, but I’m advising, and I’ll go through the pro tips in a minute, that like the frequency matters.
If you go once a quarter without checking in you can drift a lot. You can drift so far that you forget. But if you’re checking in regularly, you’re having those weekly date nights, boom, you get to course correct, you get to make conscious decisions about whether you stick with it or you quit, you get to stay engaged, and that is ownership, folks. Everything that you need is actually within your control. We can’t control the outcomes that we get from our activities, but we get to control where we aim our focus and where we invest our time.
And I’m not talking about 50 hours a week. I’m talking about 30 minutes. That check-in shouldn’t take more than about 30 minutes on average per week. You know, even if it feels like you’re always overwhelmed, that there is 30 minutes you can buy back every single week. There is 30 minutes that you could get up a little earlier and take this, have a date with your goals. There’s 30 minutes that you could, instead of going out with everyone for lunch, you could have lunch at your desk and check in with your goals. You are in control. Success requires your participation and so does failure. Ownership is yours.
Now, that’s how it works for an individual. We wrote about this in The ONE Thing. When you as an employer, as a leader, are checking in with your people once a week, oh my goodness, the studies that we found… and this was for a bi-weekly check-in, okay? This was just sending an email update on your progress from your goals to another person. You know they’re gonna ask, “How did you do the last couple of weeks, Jay?” “Well, here is where I started two weeks ago and here’s where I am today.” That simple accountability check-in, which is half of what we’re actually recommending, those people were 76.7% more likely to achieve their goals.
Not complicated, but incredibly effective, right? So, you can start the year without goal drift, without unconscious quitting, and you can lock in accountability through a very simple process, which you should have 100% control of.
Those are the three reasons you should care about this. So if you haven’t bought in now, I don’t know what else to tell you. But what is the actual solution? How do we do this, Jay? Well, here you go. It’s really simple. You’re gonna go to your calendar and you’re gonna block off 30 minutes every week. You’re then gonna look at the goals that you set at the beginning of the year and ask the question, how am I doing? What did I do this last week or this last month towards that goal? How do I feel about it? What were my results?
We call this the evaluation stage. You can now say, “You know what? Doing that thing, whatever it was, building widgets, was effective. Maybe I’ll try doing this thing and see if I get better results.” It allows you to course correct. Maybe I can start making bigger gains every week if I just change my technique. And we get that feedback loop on a weekly basis.
So, we timeblock 30 minutes. We look at our goals. We look at our progress. We evaluate how we feel about it. What will we do differently? And then, we set goals for the following week. We’re not looking out in the great distance. We’re saying based on our annual goals, we have monthly goals. And based on our monthly goals, what do I have to do this week? And that has got connection to what you did last week. And now, you’re looking forward. “Hey, I’m supposed to build eight widgets a week. I built six last week. So, next week, I’m gonna try to get back on track and build 10. And I’ve netted out the same over two weeks, even though I fell a little behind because Junior got sick,” I had to take a day off work, whatever that was, or I just needed a mental health day, whatever it is. You now get to course-correct.
We have a saying in our business when it comes to time blocks, “If you erase, you must replace.” Yes, life will happen, and you can erase or delete or cancel an appointment with yourself. But, now, you have to replace it and put it somewhere else in your life. Now, that process, 30 minutes a week, you’ve looked at your goals, you’ve looked at your results, you’ve evaluated and decided to make changes, you’ve set new goals for the week, and then you put them on your calendar, you’re done.
Now, if this process intrigues you, it’s free. You don’t even have to read the book. If you go to the1thing.com/free-resources, we’ve got everything in a bundle. You can download the 411 and this whole process that I’m talking about. I love it. It’s super simple. The 411 is just one piece of paper on one side of the paper where you write down your big goals for the year. And based on those annual goals, you set monthly goals. And based on your monthly goals, you set weekly goals.
We call that Goal Setting to the Now. We talk about it all the time on this podcast and in the book. Very simple process. Not many people talk about backwards planning or Goal Setting to the Now. That’s the heart of what we do, but it keeps things simple, and it allows you to just look at a week at a time, and trust that this week I am behaving in such a way that I’m actually not just in alignment with my weekly goals, but also my monthly goals, but also my annual goals. And if you’ve done our full package, you know that they’re in alignment with your five-year goals and your someday goals and your core values and your purpose because we worked backwards, we dated, we built that relationship before we made our commitment.
The theme here is it’s simple and it’s doable. No matter what current responsibilities you have, you have the ability to find 30 minutes to check in with your goals, get clear about what you said yes to, and guess what? I’ve said it before. When you know what you’ve said yes to, it’s so much easier to say no to everything else. You know what you’re here for. You know what your day is intended to do, and it’s a lot easier to avoid those junk emails and social media because you’ve got purpose attached to what you’re doing.
So many benefits. You make small weekly investments to stay on track, to avoid goal drift, to avoid unconscious quitting, and to bring accountability. It’s hard to ignore the things that you’re visiting with every week and that you just know, hey, I just keep saying I’m going to do this, so this week I’m just gonna do it.
Here’s some pro tips. We’ve been doing this a long time. Keep it simple, folks. It does not have to be a complicated thing. You don’t need to block giant blocks of time. Don’t create barriers to your own success. Now, I love spreadsheets. I like to complicate things. I admit that. I know that about myself. So, this might just be advice I have to give myself. But keeping it simple is the path. You don’t have to put tons of time constraints around it. You get to make all the choices.
And that brings me to number two. If number one is about minimizing the self-imposed barriers to having these goal dates, number two is to make them fit you. If you don’t want to use our 411 system, don’t use our 411 system. If you want to use a digital version of it, use a digital. If you want to use an analog version, use an analog. If you want to use Outlook or Google to do your calendar invites and time blocking, you use those. If you want to use a paper calendar, you use that. If you’re already making a behavioral change in how you have a relationship with your goals, don’t make lots of other changes. That’s a recipe for failure.
When people take on giant bundles of behavioral change, they tend to fall apart. So, if there are pieces that are already working for you, you don’t have to exchange them in the beginning. Our simple goal right now, the simple and the personal one, is for you to pick the tools that you are comfortable. Like I said, nobody needs a new way to set goals. You probably have them. What you need is a way to break them down on a weekly process and have a date with them.
So keep it simple, keep it personal. And then the last one is, just be regular about it. We talked about this. If you had a sweetheart that you were falling in love with, you’d want to have a date with them every single week, if not more frequently. I think the minimum interval that would actually bring maximal results is a weekly check-in. And I’ll admit, there’s been weeks like vacations, holidays, where you forget. But if you get right back on it, you have to play catch up. Now I have to evaluate two weeks or three weeks, but now based on that, I can set my goals for the next week. It’s not too hard to get off track.
Now, I’ll go back to that employer example. If you’re meeting someone every week, and you miss one, right? Life happens, they’re on vacation, you’re on vacation. There’s just not that much of a chance for that employee, that contractor, who drift that far from their goals that you agreed on or the SOP that you contracted them for because we’re course correcting more regularly. So the regular part is about the only thing that we’re going to define pretty concretely. I’m going to say a minimum of a weekly interval between dates with your goals. I promise you, you might miss a couple every year, that’s okay, but if you stick to that schedule your course corrections will be small and the work will be simple.
Now, if we recap this episode, I don’t want you just to be setting goals this year. It’s February, it’s Valentine’s. I want you to have a relationship with them. I want you to fall in love with them so that you want to see them frequently, and the benefits are huge. No goal drift, no unconscious quitting, higher accountability, all of that adds up to you not repeating 2025 and 2026. You can get off of that merry-go-round and get on a highway to your goals.
Now, our weekly challenge this week, I’ll preface it, let’s talk about dating. I can’t remember, I think our kids were three and two or four and three, but Wendy and I were in the trenches. We had no family in town. So it was stressful for us and we didn’t have a lot of time to remind ourselves of why we had these rugracks to begin with, right?
And maybe you’ve been there if you’ve got small kids. And I think it was Gary who just said, “Well, why don’t y’all just have a date night?” And that was a pretty radical idea for two young people that were early in their careers. And so in the beginning, I think we started with a couple of months and we had to make a lot of adjustments along the way. We were trying to have a regular Friday or Saturday night date night. And when I talk about this in public, I’ll just ask all the parents, it’s like, what’s the problem with a Friday or a Saturday night date night? And everybody knows, like, well, where are you gonna find a babysitter? Because everybody else is competing for that time.
So, the weird evolution that happened is we started having date nights on Wednesday nights. Guess what? I’m recording this on a Wednesday. And guess what? I’ve got plans to have a fabulous dinner at my favorite sushi restaurant tonight for date night. But this is not the first time we’ve done it. We’ve been doing this for like a decade and a half.
I think Wendy tracks it. We’ve had over 750 date nights since we first started that tradition. We have a regular check-in for our marriage going on 25 years now, 25 plus actually, our 20th anniversary was this last year. And I do credit a lot of that for two entrepreneurs building businesses with that regular date night. We checked in, we reminded ourselves of why we were committed to each other, and we were able to course correct as we went along.
Now, my challenge to you is to start going on dates with your goals. your number one assignment when you’re done with this podcast is to go to your calendar and set a recurring 30-minute meeting with yourself to check in with your goals.
Wendy and I, if you were to turn on our security system and catch us at about 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning, you would see us both on our couch with our laptops and we’re doing our 411s. Wendy started doing this process before she even came to know where it came from. She just saw me doing it, said, that looks simple, that looks effective, I’m gonna do it too. Sundays for us.
There are people on my team, I think Chris Dixon, our director of training, does it on Fridays. He likes to make it the bookend of his week. The last thing he does is evaluate his week and say, what am I gonna do next week? And that allows him to just kind of check out for the weekend.
I have to kind of get out of the building to get mental space, which is why I do it on the weekends. But I know people who do it on Friday afternoons. I know people who do it on Saturdays. I know people who do it on Sundays like me. I will tell you that waiting until Monday morning is probably too late, because life can start happening as early as the moment your kids wake up on Monday morning, right? The moment your spouse wakes up on Monday morning, the moment you wake up on Monday morning, life can come at you and you can quickly lose sight of what you might’ve wanted to do. So it pays to start your week having this already done.
Set that reminder and start building the habit of having a relationship with your goals. I promise you won’t regret it. It might in fact be the most important investment you make in yourself this year is that 30-minute-a-week meeting with yourself and your goals.
Thank you for listening. Let’s talk about next week. I mentioned Chris Dixon earlier and guess what. Chris Dixon, our head of training, the person who goes out and does a lot of this training with our corporate customers, is going to join me in the studio, and we’re going to talk about the rhythm of accountability, living and having relationships to our goals, but in a team setting.
So if you’re a business owner and you’re like, “Wow, I’m doing this, but how would I do this for my people?” we’re going to go deep on that next week. Thank you for joining me this week. Go set that time on your calendar. Go set that time on your calendar. It’s time to start having dates with your goals.
