Jay Papasan:
Hey, folks, welcome to the second half of 2025. Can you believe it’s already been half a year? I know like a lot of you, I just get my head down, and then I look up, and I can’t believe how much of the year has flown by. It’s rarely that time moves slowly for me these days, it feels like it’s always moving fast.
This episode is all about asking this question for you. Where are you in relation to your goals? You started out the year with a big vision for 2025, and then you went out, you started chasing that vision, you got busy, do you know where you are today in relationship to your goals? A lot of you are probably a little off track. I know I am. Some of you may have kind of drifted completely off course. I have in some areas. And the other reality is some of us, you get so busy, our life happens, that’s just something unexpected, unplanned for happens that you have to adjust. And you hit autopilot on most of your goals months ago, and you have no clue where you are today. It’s just that Waymo car is driving you somewhere and you have no idea where you are.
So, that’s the reality. By mid-year, most of the people we see in The ONE Thing organization are off track. And I think that’s pretty normal. It’s very rare for people to look up, and they may be hitting a goal, but a lot of their goals may have been neglected or forgotten by the middle of the year because life is complex, business is complex, things change, the things you thought were important in January are no longer important, or the things that you believe were important then are still important, but they’ve just gotten lost in the shuffle.
And the reality is, I talked about this back in episode 490, the relationship with your goals, there’s two consequences. Goal drift, where you veer off course and you really aren’t sure where you are in relationship to your goals. And here’s the challenge with that. When you know the goal, but you don’t know where you are in relationship to it, you can’t course correct, right? You’ve drifted off and we have to figure out where you are so you can bridge the gap. And the other one is unconscious quitting. And that’s the saddest of all. So many people show up in January in our trainings and they’re like, “It’s Groundhog year again. I’m right back where I started last year because I got busy and I just forgot.” This other goal, maybe I was pursuing one thing really well, but this other thing just got lost in the shuffle.
It happens. You get off course and we can help you course-correct. People unconsciously quit, and we can help you consciously reconnect to those goals. But the truth is when we drift, we need a compass. When we unconsciously quit, we need a system, we need a framework for getting back on track and getting back in connection with our goals. And that’s the RESET process, R-E-S-E-T, all caps, it’s an acronym, of course it is, we have lots of those for you, but it’s a process we’ve been teaching for at least seven years in this organization. It’s a proven way around the middle of the year to reset our focus, to reset our goals, to reset our activities so we can get back on track around the things that are most important to us.
So without further ado, let’s dive into the RESET process and you can use this mid-year episode as a chance for you to reset on your 2025 goals and get back on track or even raise them if you’re nailing it this year.
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
So, before I dive into the actual process, I wanted to tell a story, a success story around it. Years and years ago, we worked for many years with a very large biomedical firm on the West Coast. That’s all I’ll say because we never got permission to actually use their brand. You know, big companies, they do billions in revenue. They’re a name that you may have heard of. If you’re in the industry, you certainly have. But we worked with their executive team to help refine their goal process, make them a little bit simpler, a little bit clearer, and we worked with their sales teams to give them more focus and better results.
And one of the stories I got to hear, and it was my friend Michael, who I even had coffee with a few times over the years, he was a ONE Thing fan, he was part of the training program, and he was a part of a team, new to it, that was actually in their bottom quartile. They had about 30 teams in this medical division, and they were in the bottom quartile. And they were rounding the quarter well past where we are today. They were in Q3 looking at Q4, right? So, they are going to the very tail end of the year. They’re in the bottom quartile, which doesn’t feel good. You never want to be at the back of the pack, but they brought The ONE Thing tools to their update before they went into the last quarter.
And Michael shared with me that they decided, as a group, to use the focus in question, and they didn’t just focus on one product to sell. Like that would have been really cool. Like, “Hey, we chose. We’re gonna get behind one product. We’re gonna put all our focus into doing the best we can.” They even went further. They were doing one product and one customer, which blows my mind. But they went all in on this one approach with one customer. And guess what? They went from the bottom of the pack to, I believe, number two or three in the entire company.
And that story of using The ONE Thing to reset, to refocus, using the time we have remaining to do the best we can, became the source of us going into that company many, many times because that was the evidence that it works. And that’s the evidence I’m giving you. We have twice as much time as that team does to reestablish our connection to our goals and hit them or even exceed them. No one expected them to go from the bottom of the pack to number two or three in the company. They did. And they did it with a process very much like I’m about to walk you through.
So, let’s talk about RESET. R-E-S-E-T. Of course, it’s an acronym, but it’s a five-step process for you to assess where you are in relationship with your goals, to evaluate what you need to do, how to simplify and refocus to get back on track. So, the R stands for reflect. The E stands for evaluate. The first E stands for evaluate. The S is simplify. And when we get to that step, it seems so kind of normal, but it may be one of the most important and it’s right there in the middle. The second E is establish, and this will be establishing our new specific goals. And the last one is time block.
So, without further ado, we’ll dive in. And if you decide that you wanna do this, you can run back, look at the time right now, you could run back to this moment, have your headphones in, and probably you could do this entire process in less than an hour, if not 30 minutes. It’s a great investment of your time to get really clear on the goals you want to pursue, what you need to do to hit them between now and the end of 2025.
Okay, step one is reflect. Reflection is a big part of what we do here at The ONE Thing. In order to know what we need to do in the future, we often have to learn from the past. What have we done? What are the results that we got? So, the questions you’re going to ask are gonna be around your activities, what you’ve done since January 1 until today. And we’re about a week into the third quarter, the second half of the year. So, I want you to pull out your goals from January. You have them somewhere. Hopefully, you can find them.
I know a lot of people who get to the middle of the year, they don’t even remember where they stored some of their goals. They had done all the work at the beginning of the year, but they got so busy and so much life happened. I put that in quotes if you’re watching on YouTube, life happened. And that’s not to diminish it, but I don’t know what to fill in that blank. Someone died, a baby showed up, you got a new job, you got relocated. Like there are all the things that happened, some unexpected, some surprises that are fun, some surprises that are not. They completely kind of blow up the best laid plans.
So, you’ve got your goals, take a look at them. Now, what did you actually set out to accomplish in 2025? Could you list it out? For annual goals, you probably shouldn’t have more than a handful, and you should clearly know what your number one is, but maybe you had a few more. Do you know what your goals were? Hopefully, you found them, or you know where to go. How are you doing? How are you doing? When you look at those goals, those aspirations that you set at the beginning of the year, how are you doing? And more importantly, how do you feel about it? Because how we feel about it might determine how motivated we are to change our relationship to those goals going forward.
So, one of the things that we teach people to do, and we devoted an entire episode to it, episode 483, Wendy and I talked about core values. A lot of the goals we set are a reflection of the values we have inside. And a lot of our ability to stay motivated, to persevere, change, do hard things around those goals is because they’re connected to our core values. So, if you are connected to those core values, you might be looking down and saying, “Man, this was like the third or fourth goal I wrote down in January. And I thought it was just kind of okay important.” Maybe it was a health goal, a weight goal, or maybe it was a goal that you had around maybe having some adventures because that was travel.
One of the things that you really value in life that fills up your cup so you can do everything else is travel and adventure, whatever that might be for you. But it got neglected. And you feel it. Often you feel the goals that you’re not achieving, that you’re failing at right now. You kind of feel them in your heart, right? Because they are connected to your heartstrings. That’s the whole point of getting in tune with our core values.
So Wendy, my wife, is very connected to hers. All of her goals on our 411, that’s our one-page goals for the year that you break down to your month and your week, are connected to her core values. She actually lists them under them. So, she did her quarterly kind of reflect and reset. She does this every quarter, by the way. And I came home, and she had all these index cards on our coffee table where we sit. And I could see the one color was her core value, and then she had written under them different index cards with the goals she was gonna pursue for the next 90 days and forward. And she was very purposeful about connecting the meaning behind the goals with the goals themselves.
And I would encourage you right now, when you look at your goals, like which ones are really connected to who I am and who I want to become? Because I promise you, those are the ones that if you don’t pursue, you’ll feel the biggest regrets. And the ones that you do pursue, you will feel the highest sense of achievement because they are very connected to your core values, in fact.
So another little trick here, you’re probably looking at your goals and you’re just like, “What else have I done?” So, one thing to do is flip through your calendar. Like I’m kind of a dedicated time blocker, so I can look at my calendar and it’s a pretty accurate reflection of my year. So, I go through a week at a time, sometimes a month at a glance, if you’ve got a bigger calendar and you can say, “Oh, wow, we did take that trip.” But it’s all the way back in February, and now we’re in July, and you just barely even think about that anymore. So, go through that.
Another hack that we teach in our workshops is open up your photos. You can type in, on iPhoto at least, you can type in January 2025, and month by month, you can see all the pictures you took. And a lot of the things that don’t end up on your calendar, but are actually important, are in your photos. That’s the thing like, “Oh, I don’t want to forget this.” So, you can kind of scroll through those as well.
And the point of this, part of our reflection is to reconnect to our goals. It’s, also, should be to recognize the wins, the memories we’ve already created for this year. And a lot of goal-driven people are so focused on the future, they neglect to reflect on the past. And when we neglect that, we lose connection with the things that we’ve already accomplished.
So, go ahead and pat yourself on the back. What were your biggest wins this year? What are the things that you know you’ll remember five years from now? There are things that probably in those photographs in your calendar, you’re like, “Oh, that trip to Portugal, that was exactly what I needed when I needed it. And man, we made some great memories there.” I’m actually reflecting on that because I did a trip to Portugal with Wendy right after a big event. It was kind of hectic. And when I was doing my reflection, I hadn’t completely forgotten it, but I’d forgotten a lot of the moments in it and going back through it really helped bring that to life.
So, you do your reflection, you’ve gone through your goals, you’ve gone through your calendar, maybe your photos, and I want you now to kind of narrow it down based on your feelings, your progress, what are the goals that still matter to you, right? This is kind of, you’re hitting the refresh button. You had this set of goals, hopefully you had a clear number one, how do you feel about your progress? You’re reconnected to them now.
Now, you can close your eyes and recite them. Hey, I said I was gonna lose this much weight. I was gonna grow my net worth by this much. I was gonna read this many books. I was gonna sell this many widgets. I was gonna raise my whatever. Like you have those series of goals around the things that matter to you that have now been refreshed. Are you really clear about the ones that matter most? And some of the ones that you’re like, what was I thinking?
Every year, mid-year, I look up and sometimes when I’m reflecting on my five-year goals, I go, “What was I thinking back then that I thought that I wanted that?” So some of them you may immediately realize when we get to simplify, “I’m gonna cut that sucker. I have no idea what drugs I was smoking back in January. I thought I wanted it. I can tell you today definitively, that was just me being curious. I was fad surfing. I don’t need that.” So, you are right off the bat in the reflection process. Hopefully, you get to narrow your scope a little bit.
The opposite can be true. Some of the things that when you look back, maybe you had a parent who fell ill, who now you’re responsible for or someone that you are caretaking for that you didn’t expect. And now, you have to actually narrow for different reasons or you have to add new goals. So, some of the unexpected things add to our plate, some subtract from our plate. Either way, the outcome here is that you are generally clear about the goals that you have in front of you. The ones that you may have drifted away from, the ones that you may have forgotten about, and maybe some brand new ones that you realize, “Man, I can’t believe this isn’t on there.”
So, now you have clarity around your goals for the year and we can move to the second step.
Okay, step two is E for evaluate. You’re gonna look at those goals and we’re gonna go a little bit deeper into them. So, what is the gap between where you hope to be and where you are today? So, if you were going to go out and like, one of my goals is every year I try to set a goal to read 50 books, and when I’m halfway through the year, guess what? I should have read about 25. When I did this reflection for myself, I’m behind by about four books. That does not seem like a lot, but it takes me a month to read about four books.
So, I look up, I’ve got six months of runway, and I could either stay perfect for the rest of the year and maybe end up two to three books short because there’s two weeks I give myself grace for, you know, 50 books, 52 weeks. So I have a little extra time there that I could make up, but I will have to be very purposeful about selecting books that I can read in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t need to go grab, you know, a 900 page novel just because I can, or I’ll have to just realize that maybe I’m gonna fall short. And the goal of reading books is not to see how many I read, but to see how much I can learn.
And most years I do fall short for that very reason. I refuse to read really short books just so I can say I read a number of books. I still try to read for what I need. You heard about me talk about that in the quality inflation episode just a week or so ago. But when you read for what you need, I am trying to learn, I’m trying to grow, I would rather take my time and maybe fall short of the goal but the bigger goal is still clear to me. So I’m evaluating that goal, that’s the context.
Another one, I’ve committed to doing 52 podcasts this year, I have to have one for every single week. When I look at where I am today, compared to where I should be, I’m actually up seven. Yay. So some of these you’re gonna be behind, some you’re gonna be ahead, and you have to ask the question, “Based on that, what do I have to do between now and the end of the year?” And that’s the evaluation process in a nutshell.
Hopefully, you’re not evaluating more than, like I said, five or six goals. Those are the ones that resonated with you in the reflection. They’re the ones that you want to hold on to and you have to ask this question. But now you’ve identified the ones that matter, and you’ve identified the gap between where you are today and where you want to be.
And the other thing is we’re going to establish priority. Like when we talk about what it takes to close the gap, does it require you to be all in or just your attention because you forgot. That’s usually the two categories. Like, “Man, if I just pay attention, it wasn’t a big goal, this is just gonna happen,” or “I have to be a little bit more enthusiastic and all in on it, I’m gonna have to give it more resources.”
So prioritize the goals that you have left. Do you have a number one? Awesome. If you could only knock out one of these this year, which one is it going to be? If you can still hit another goal after hitting your number one, what would be the second one from this list that you would really wanna push for? And now, you’ll have maybe those six goals numbered from one to six. You’ve got them in priority order, and you kind of know where you are in relationship to the goals.
So part of the art of this is you might be on pace for your number one, because it’s been your number one. You’ve not neglected it. You’ve kept it front and center. But some of the other goals that are also important, maybe around your life, your health, your relationships are lagging. You now can look at them based on their priority and the gap to goal and say, “Look, I’m not that far off on my number two. So, I just need to be more disciplined around keeping my appointments with myself, doing what I said I was going to do. But for me to hit my number three, I’m gonna have to make some big changes.”
So, you’ve done a little bit of the evaluation, you’ve scored them in your mind like, this is kind of on track, this one’s going to take a lot of work, this one’s going to take a little work, and you have them in order. If you’ve got that together, then you’re ready to go to step three. But first, let’s take a quick break. And on the other side, we’ll dive back into the reset process.
Step three, the third letter of reset is S, and that’s for simplify. And this is where we’re going to start saying no to things formally. You’ve done the evaluation, you kind of have a sense, maybe in the reflection and evaluation, you’ve done a little pairing, but this is where we get our scissors out, right? The core idea of focus, the whole idea about making decisions, hard decisions is actually cutting stuff away. I think the core etymology of the word to decide has a lot in common with the word scissors, right? Is to cut away. To choose is to cut away everything else. That’s also how our focus works with our brains. We’re not spotlighting the one thing we’re looking at so much as blacking out everything else. That’s simplify. What can we clear out of the way, so that the things that remain get all of our attention and resources in focus?
And so, we’ve done the reflect, we’ve done the evaluate. Now, we have to do the hard work of the horse trading around who are going to be the winners and losers among my goals this year. Where was that being realistic? Where was I not? What can wait?
So, the first question is, are there any clear goals that you can abandon? It’s the lowest priority. Maybe it’s not just important to happen this year. It is a priority, but if I don’t do it this year, it doesn’t actually have an impact, a negative impact that matters to me, and I’m just gonna move it to next year. I’m gonna delay that goal. So you’re not just deleting it per se, but you are delaying it. So, the ones that are just not important, now or in the future, you can just delete. The ones that are important but maybe not now, you might be able to delay.
It’s kind of like horse trading again. I look up, I’ve got one of my goals, and it’s around the number of times I do paid public speaking appearances around the one thing. I love doing keynotes. It’s a chance for me to get into a company, get to know them, deliver a message that actually helps them connect with the book, kind of like I was sharing around the biomedical company, the idea that these ideas can make a real difference for not just an individual, but a company gets me really excited.
And so, I look up and I’m about 30% of goal at mid-year instead of 50%. So, I’ve got a 20% gap. And when I look at the reality from the evaluation, most of the kinds of keynote speeches that I’m asked to do are booked, usually, at least, two to three months in advance. So, the reality is I don’t have six months to hit that goal, probably have two to three months. And that won’t be a small effort for me to get completely back on track. It will probably be a big effort because I would have to do more outreach, more advertising, better conversion in order to hit that goal.
So, I have to evaluate that again. Is this one I’m just going to simplify or deprioritize or am I gonna go all in? And I, frankly, was very much on the fence. That’s not income that our business depends on. It’s kind of that lumpy kind of income that’s hard to forecast sometimes that we get to have as a bonus. And a lot of that is the money we give to charity. So, it feels good but it’s not one of those things that people’s salaries are being determined on right now.
So, we look up and we just have to make the effort. What I ended up doing around that goal is, you know what, it was more important for me to hit the goals around the podcast because so many of the leads I get for that, those keynotes come from people who listen to this or read our newsletters. So, I’m gonna focus on the top end of the funnel, and I’m going to simplify, and I’m going to deprioritize me actively going out and trying to get those speaking engagements.
That’s an example. It’s a little bit of trading. So maybe I’m investing in my future by building the top of the funnel, and I’m in a sense, maybe sacrificing some of my present. That’s the kind of horse trading you’re gonna have to do when you simplify.
Another thing you can do, and this is big, we have a four-by-four workshop that we focus on this for four days, 45 minutes, and really try to create some huge clarity for people. Your calendar does not reflect your goals. That’s true of almost anybody who’s listening to this because there’s a bunch of stuff on your calendar that is completely disconnected from your goals.
Think of all the meetings that you attend that you could not connect to any goal that’s on your goal sheet. There’s stuff that you do that just happens because it’s part of our lives. We go to the PTA meetings, we go to the church or our synagogue, and that may be like, did you set spiritual goals around doing that? Maybe you did. I find very few people who do. You have the lunches, the breakfast, the things that just show up. Some of them are recreation and fun, and you plan on doing them, but you don’t set goals around them.
So there’s a lot of stuff, and some of it’s important, and some of it is not, that clutters our calendars. And so, just at a really high level, what are the things that you could just stop attending and stop doing that nobody’s actually going to notice. That’s a hard question. You would think, but I’ve been doing this for so long. What does happen? Well, maybe you should experiment. Are there things that you feel like are commitments today that you can also reduce your time commitment?
One of the big things that we teach people and it’s called decrease. Like we have the 6D method where we walk people through. Like, can you decrease the 6D method where we walk people through, like, can you decrease the frequency of those meetings that you have to attend? Instead of going every week, maybe it’s twice a month, maybe it’s once a month, right? And we get the same outcomes without taking all of that time.
There’s also a really crazy setting on Google calendars, you may not know about it, called fast meetings, where you can very simply decrease the amount of time you spend in those meetings if you can’t change the frequency. So, an hour meeting would become 45 minutes, and a 30-minute becomes 20 minutes, right? You would be amazed how much you can get done if you reduce the amount of time you give to it. And I’m gonna hit that button again, when we talk about constraints a little bit later.
So, what are the goals that we can delay into the future? What are the goals that we can just delete based on the evaluation we’ve done? And after that, is there other stuff that we can simplify in our calendars to make room for the things that we are committing to? And I’ll tell you, in those four-by-four workshops that we do, in four days, we generally give people back four hours a week. And that’s on the low end. We’ve seen people get much more back. So you would be amazed on average, how much clutter is in your calendar. I’ve said it before, it is time for your schedule to get a manicure, right? We need to trim up those rough edges and start looking really sharp. And that’s how we’re going to get to our goals.
So, at the end of this step, simplify. You are even clearer on the goals that you are saying yes to, and that clarity around the goals that remain after the end of this process, and the things that you can cut to make way for them, that allows you to say no to the other stuff because in your reflection, these handful of goals, maybe it’s two, maybe it’s three, maybe it’s only one, you’re like, “I will regret not doing this. I’m going all in on this thing because it matters to me. It touches my core values. And it’s still within reach when I look at it. Even if it’s hard to believe, I’m going all in.”
When you say yes to something, it makes it so much easier to say no to everything else. I say that all the time, but we need to hear it all the time because our yeses actually are nos. We are saying yes to something, means that we are not doing a lot of other things with that time, and that means that we gotta be clear about our yeses. So, we’ve done the first three steps. We’ve gone through reflection, evaluate, and simplify. Now let’s go into the next step, which is called establish.
Okay, step four is establish. What we’re gonna do here is you’ve got your remaining goals and they’re in priority order. Let’s just pretend that you’ve got four big goals that you’re committed to. You’ve got a work goal, you’ve got maybe a finances goal, you’ve got a health goal and something else, maybe a hobby that you really, really want to stay committed to and stay connected to. Awesome, you’ve got your four goals.
On each of them, when you look up and you realize you’ve got a little less than six months to go, we have to now make a commitment. We have to answer this question. What is the one activity that I can commit to that would have the biggest, biggest impact? What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, the full question to help me hit that goal? What is that one activity?
I’m saying activity very purposely because we’re not trying to have the goal. I want to lose seven pounds. What is the activity that you can commit to that will help you lose that seven pounds? So, one of the goals I am still committed to is I set out at the end of this year, I thought I could lose 10 pounds and keep those pounds off this year, I’m gonna feel really great. And I’m a little bit behind schedule. Started out great, got to about month three and remember that trip to Portugal? Well, you know, when you travel and you drink a little wine and have an extra dessert, like that doesn’t exactly keep you on pace for the weight goals that you had.
So I look up and the activity that I have been doing, but maybe not getting my full attention is my meal prep. What I know is if I’m really committed to meal prepping at the beginning of the week, that’s the activity, I can control the number of calories in general that go into my body. I’m 55, I weigh a little over 200, and I need about 2,500 calories for my lifestyle. So 2,500 calories a day, if I can get that below 2,000 or at 2,000 for the rest of the year, I’m good. So, meal prepping with that in mind, two super disciplined meals so I can maybe go on a date night on a Wednesday night and not really count every single calorie and all of the carbs and fats and proteins on my plate. That’s the goal.
And when I get loose around that, I start to stray. So you want it to be the 20% thing. And for me, I’ve identified for me to maintain the weight that I like, it’s not just the working out, it starts in the kitchen. And for me, it starts with a meal prep on Sundays. Very specific. And we want it to be specific and accountable. That’s the best possible goals. And for me, I’m trying to meal prep meals that will get me in around 2,000 calories a day. Do you see how that works?
Maybe it’s a little nerdy for you, but I’ve been doing it for a long time. And that’s how it works for me. The more specific you can be, the clearer the activity you’ll need to drive that. And for me, I need to drop my calories by about four to 500 a day on average. And that should get me to my goal, knowing there will be other travel and cheat days there. But if that’s the average of my days, I’m gonna be in great shape.
Now, you look up and you’re like, “Dude, I’ve got this goal. I’ve now got less than six months to do it. And my mind is breaking. I just don’t believe it’s possible.” So I wanna talk to you about something I’ve written about. Way back on the TwentyPercenter, that’s my little Friday newsletter that we do is connected with The ONE Thing, I wrote about the power of constraints. And I got to write about my favorite movie of all time, Jaws, which is going through its 50th anniversary this year. And if you know the movie Jaws, chances are you’ve seen it. I’ve seen it, I think like 30 times now. But the shark was called Bruce. That’s what they named the big mechanical shark.
Well, what they didn’t plan for when they were building this giant animatronic shark that was supposed to eat people and swim through the ocean is they forgot about saltwater. So, the moment they put it in saltwater, it started short circuiting because they did not make it saltwaterproof. They made it waterproof, different things. So immediately started malfunctioning and Steven Spielberg had a real problem. This was supposed to be the star of the show and he had to because his constraint was, “I have a giant mechanical shark. I have a budget and a schedule I have to keep. How am I going to shoot a movie with a broken shark?”
So what happens in the movie is we have the music, dun-dun, dun-dun, right? Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. You have the music–thank you, John Williams–and then you have the viewpoint of the shark without seeing the shark, and sometimes you saw the thing. So, most of the movie, we have the idea of the shark and not the shark itself, which actually is one of the things that makes the movie great. We’re more afraid of the thing we can’t see than the shark when it actually comes out of the water.
And so, the thing that was actually his constraint was the thing that actually made the movie great. And there is research that backs this up. So, there was a 2018 study that I dug up and it’s called a meta study because they looked at a bunch of other studies. So, I’m not gonna pretend to pronounce these correctly, but the authors were Acar, Taracki, and Knippenberg the three authors of these papers, and they looked at 105 different studies on the impact of constraints, constraints around time, resources, staffing, money, you name it, whatever the constraint is, this is the limited thing that we’re giving you and how that impacted creativity and results.
And what they found was, and I’m now quoting, “Individuals, teams, and organizations alike benefit from a healthy dose of constraints.” Limited budgets, resources, time, and even experience can actually work in our favor. Limitations lead to innovations. That’s the headline. That’s the bumper sticker. Limitations lead to innovations. When you look up and you say, “Man, I only have X amount of time, less than half the time I thought I had to achieve the goal,” what’s amazing is your brain can unlock things that you did not think were possible. That’s where a lot of our big ideas come from is some limitation we didn’t expect to have, and now we have to see our way around it.
So trust that these constraints might actually lead to some breakthroughs for you. It definitely makes it more challenging, got to acknowledge that. Maybe it makes it a little bit less probable, but the idea that you have less time to give this goal should spark some creativity in how you approach it or increase dedication to what you clear out of the way to make room for this goal.
So, the outcome of establish is you now know the activity, hopefully activity singular or activities that you are committing to to make that goal happen. And you can go through all three or four of your goals and identify and establish this is the new one thing for making that goal happen. And with that in place, we can move to the final step, step five.
Step five of the reset process is T for time block. When we have our intentions on our calendar, all that’s left for us is to live our schedule. You know, my coach, Jordan Freed, he’s our head coach here, he talks about, how do we get it out of our clouds, out of our unconscious mind and onto our calendar? That’s what we’ve done. We’ve gone through this whole process to clearly figure out what it is we need to do between now and the end of the year to get back on track with those goals that matter to us. And now it has to hit our calendar.
And if you remember the book and repeat it again and again, getting it on your calendar, it makes you about three times more likely to do it. Those people who had a clear intention, who set aside time, they knew what they were doing, when they were doing, where they were doing it, it was on their calendar, they look up and they become close to, I think, 91% more likely to achieve those things, versus like 38% for people who just said they were going to do it.
So time blocking is one of those surprisingly simple things that we can do that will actually have a huge impact on our results. The key here in establish, you came up with activities. You cannot time block outcomes, you can time block activities. So what you’re looking for is that 20% is going on your calendar. Because it’s a priority, it’s on your calendar, because your calendar reflects your priorities. It’s just a big circle out there.
We’ve gotten rid of some of the junk, we’ve cleared out some of the noise and simplify, and now when we look at our calendar, there should be firm time blocks around the things that matter to us between now and the end of the year. That’s maybe the longest process, is every single week you need to go out there and say, “Where’s the tiny amount of progress, either every day or every week or every month, that I’m gonna make between now and the end of the year?” And if those are on your calendar, you’ve got a much better chance through this reset process of getting back on track and achieving, or maybe even overachieving around those goals.
So, the one thing I’m gonna encourage you that’s not directly addressed, I talked about this, I’ve referenced this episode 490, it was on Valentine’s Day, how to have a relationship with your goals. Maybe the most important time block you could put on there between now and the end of the year is 20 to 30 minutes to sit down, look at your goals that you’ve just reestablished through the reset process, and look at your calendar and the time blocks that you’ve given and make adjustments just like this between now and the end of the year.
That 20 minutes a week for you to reflect on the last week and then project on the next week what you need to do to stay on track could be the most important minutes you invest between now and the end of the year because they bring you ongoing clarity. You don’t have a chance to get wildly drifted away from your goals. You can’t forget or unconsciously quit on your goals because every week you’re taking them on a little tiny date. So, time block the big rocks, the activities that will make it happen.
And if you could do one more thing for me, timeblock that reflection time. It needs to happen every week, ideally around the same time. For me, happens around 11 a.m. on Sunday, sometimes a little earlier. I love to start my week with clarity about my week, and I do it as a family.
So guess what? You’ve done the reset process. No more goal drift, no more unconscious quitting. What I hope you will find out is that this little bit of focused exercise, an hour, maybe a little less for you to invest at the middle of your year in a reset will put you on the path to achieving your goals for the rest of the 2025. That’s my wish for you.
So, here’s my challenge connected to this episode. I want you right now, if you’re driving, you had to pull over, I want you to calendar your reset. I want you to commit to 30 minutes, maybe an hour for you to listen to this podcast, maybe if you need to, and then go do the process. Remember when I told you to mark the time? Maybe I was at the three or the four-minute mark. You can go back to that now and then open up your notebook with your goals in it and start following the process. It’ll take you about 20 or 30 minutes, maybe a little extra time for the reflection, but this process does not take hours and hours and days. If you can find your goals and follow the steps that I’ve given you, you can very quickly reset your gear and get back on track for the things that matter most.
So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this RESET. It’s a very important process. It’s something that we do with The ONE Thing. It’s something that we do in our personal lives and it’s something that you can do for your work and for your home.
Next week, I’m bringing on my friend Pat Flynn. You might know him from the Smart Passive Income podcast, which is, gosh, one of the OG podcasts and it’s absolutely huge. Millions and millions and millions of downloads, millions and millions of lives changed. And he’s also one of the biggest fans of The ONE Thing. He had me on his show. We’ve gotten to hang out a few times in person. We’re part of the same mastermind and he lives this book at an incredibly high level.
He’s got his first book in many, many years called Lean Learning: How to Accelerate Your Personal Growth, and there’s so many connections between what he’s teaching around lean learning and The ONE Thing, he lives it, he breathes it, he thinks it unconsciously. So, next week is definitely an episode you don’t want to miss. My friend Pat Flynn will be talking about accelerating your personal growth with his new book, Lean Learning, and we’ll be making lots and lots of connections to The ONE Thing. I can’t wait to share it with you. 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, This podcast is provided without any warranty or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or results from using the information.
