Ep. #279: Mark Murphy on Why You Need to Create “H.A.R.D.” Goals Instead of “S.M.A.R.T.” Goals

If you can make people think about what is the end that’s now the thing that gets them motivated and makes them think about how their present activity is impacting this future state and that future state, like in your Tesla example. Feels a lot more real.

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And if for whatever reason, they’re just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let’s get to the show. Hey, Mark, thanks for taking the time to come on my podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. This is a topic that I’m personally interested in and have read a fair amount about.

And also something I know that it really resonates with a lot of my readers and listeners. It’s something I get asked about fairly frequently, actually, to create more content, whether it’s stuff like this or write articles or books or whatever about goals, which I am obliging, but I do have a new book.

Book coming out soon that does have some of my thoughts on goals. So I’m looking forward to this discussion, cause I’m going to poke you with some of that, some of my ideas and see what you think and how they align with yours. So let’s just start at the top. So the book is hard goals.

Obviously hard is an acronym that is meant to supplant smart goals, which is the acronym that most of us have heard about. And when most people that have done a bit of reading. On goal setting. That’s where the discussion usually goes. So why don’t we just start with what is hard and HRD acronym?

What is that? And what are hard goals versus smart goals? And why are you not a big fan of the smart goal system? 

Sure. So let me take that question first. So smart goals, have there’s pluses and minuses to it. to them. And one of the minuses goes back to their creation. So smart goals really first emerged in the 1950s and late 1950s.

And it was the era in organizations very commanded control, man in the gray flannel suit, and we have to color within the lines and don’t do anything too crazy. It was all about keeping people on track with what we wanted them to do and not let them get too far outside of the normal boundaries.

So not much has changed. So it’s 

Mike: basically school. 

Exactly. And that’s the, to understand smart goals, it’s important to understand their origins because, yeah, we had a general as president. We had Eisenhower. It was a, it was a very stay within the lines kind of time and smart goals, the idea that we want things that are specific, that’s fine, measurable, all good, achievable, realistic, and time limited.

Now, no real problem with putting a time limit on things, but the essence of smart goals became the idea that we don’t want goals that are too crazy. We want them achievable. We want to make sure they’re realistic. We don’t want people, doing these big crazy moon shots. We just want, Pick something that’s normal and when you start to put it in those terms, what quickly becomes clear is that the late 1950s is not 2018 and this is an era now where.

A, you don’t find, major goal setters, whether they be great athletes, CEOs, entrepreneurs, take your pick. You don’t find those people setting goals that are achievable and realistic. The late Steve Jobs was famous for saying, we’re going to do something to put a little dent in the universe.

That’s not achievable and realistic. That’s very much the opposite. And when we started doing research, my team and I on smart goals, what we found was that smart goals had basically zero correlation to achieving big things at the end of the year, essentially, pick your favorite CEO or entrepreneur, walk up to them and go, did you set a smart goal?

Was your goal achievable and realistic? And I go no, it was, everybody told me I was insane. Elon Musk once described starting Tesla as idiocy squared. Nobody wanted to start a car company. That was idiocy. And starting it with electric cars, that was, he called it idiocy squared. That’s the opposite of what a 

Mike: And you’d argue underfunded as well, right?

For a car company, exactly. 

And when we started to look at these goals, we said listen, the great achievements we’ve all had. We’ve all had achievements of which we’re proud, whether it was, take your pick, put yourself through college, running a marathon, even quit smoking, doing whatever it is you did.

Every one of those great achievements of which we’re proud are. They’re not achievable and realistic. They were difficult. They put us a little emotionally on edge. They forced us outside of our comfort zone. They made us maybe even a little anxious or at least a little bit nervous. And with every one of those great accomplishments, we look and we said, this is the opposite of achievable and realistic.

So when we began the hard goals project, first thing I did is said What’s missing? If we know achievable and realistic are the problems here, what are the questions we really should be answering? And that’s where I came to the hard goals idea, standing H A R D standing for heartfelt, animated, required, and difficult.

And essentially those were the four big questions that I found when people were Failing in their goals, whether it was the New Year’s resolution that they abandoned, 35 days after New Year’s, or it was the big company goal or the personal professional goal that they just let fall by the wayside.

Never really hit. It was heartfelt. They were not answering the question. What’s my emotional attachment to this goal? So many people set goals because. I I should probably lose 10 pounds this year. Really, are you that emotionally connected to it? Doesn’t sound like you’re that passionate about it.

Everybody’s doing it and you hear that there’s no emotional connection to this goal and what we found was that people who achieved their goals. Oh, they are connected. This is a passion thing for them. This is not just something they ought to do. This is something they have a deep emotional attachment to.

They have dreams about it. They think about it. This becomes much more than just a hobby. This is something that consumes their mental energy. Also, their goals tend to be animated, which means that they’re so well described that they could show their goals to anybody, a stranger off the street, and the stranger would understand exactly what that goal looks like, what it’s going to take and how cool the end result is going to be.

And there were a number of reasons why. The animated part, the visual part of this, writing it down, putting it on paper became so important. And part of it was just neurologically, the more you write stuff down, the more it becomes cemented in your brain. The more you experience it, it hardwires builds up those neural connections, but also partly it was, it forced us to really think through what am I doing here?

What is this goal really about? And, one of the signs that we saw that. Pretty much predicted somebody was not going to do well with their goal is when it was just a one off tossed off sort of thing, like I’m going to lose 10 pounds round numbers were always a dead giveaway that nobody, somebody had really not thought clearly about the goal, when they can show you the.

Here are the genes that I put on eight years ago and haven’t been able to get in since. And this is a picture I made of myself finishing this marathon. And this is all my friends standing around me. And this is what I’m going to be able to do. And this is what my life is going to be like. And here’s me playing with my kids that I’m not able to do now.

Then it’s clear that they’ve put some real thought into it. And. That’s again, a signal that this is something more than just a tossed off little thing for them. And then the required and difficult, required was all about urgency. One of the big hallmarks of most people’s goals is that even if they come up with a good goal, a nice goal, there’s still a tendency to pull the this is a good goal.

I like it. I’m, I, I feel some passion for it, but I’ll start it next week. The minute we utter those words, I’m going to start it next week. We pretty much know this next week is never going to come. Because next week there’s going to be something else. I can’t really start the goal right now.

I can’t lose that weight right now because, holidays are coming up. And then it’s going to be Christmas. And well, New Year’s, you can’t start a diet on New Year’s. And then pretty soon we’re going to be at Easter. Oh, don’t forget Valentine’s Day. And we come up with reasons not to start the goal.

And when people had a high sense of urgency listen, I’m, this isn’t the next week goal. I’m going to create the goal, but then. There has to be something that I can do today. If my goal, if I come up with a goal today that says I’m going to run a marathon maybe I’m at the office and I don’t have running shoes with me.

And so it’s hard for me to say, I’m going to realistically go for a run. At the very least I should be able to go into the hallway and do 50 squads and at least say, you know what? I’m doing something. I feel such a sense of urgency for this goal that I have to start now. I cannot let this go another day to get going on this thing.

The final part of the goal, the difficult, was actually the most counterintuitive piece of this whole thing. There was a theory of goal setting for many years that You want goals that are of moderate difficulty that, and this is where, smart goals really came from with the whole achievable realistic stuff, is that we don’t want goals to push people too hard.

But, interestingly, what we found is the exact opposite, and there’s actually a body of 40 years worth of research on difficulty in goal setting. And, What I found was that we found the same thing that when people’s goals are difficult, their performance starts to elevate that when you pick an easy goal, and you hear this with sports teams all the time they play down to the level of their competition.

That tends to be true. And many of us perform down to the level of whatever challenges we have that day. It’s incredibly easy for somebody to half sleep, walk their way through the day. I got six meetings and I go through them and I’m not giving a hundred percent in these six meetings and I got a few other to dos I gotta get done, but it’s not really pushing the envelope.

I’m not stretching myself here, but when people set goals that are outside of their comfort zone, and I’m not talking about You take somebody like me, who’s a very slow runner. And all of a sudden say, my goal is to run a four minute mile. Okay. That’s physically not going to happen. But if I pick a goal that is going to push a bit outside of my comfort zone, not.

Not insane, but 20, 30 percent outside my comfort zone. Now what happens is it actually engages my brain more because it forces me to learn things. It forces me to activate my brain. It’s not like driving to work in the morning where, most of us are in a trance like state on our daily commute.

We’re not paying attention to the cars around us. We want to be more like we’re driving on a racetrack where. Oh, yeah, I got to pay attention now. This is we’re moving faster than I’m normally driving on a normal road. I got to pay attention. I got to anticipate the turns. I’ve got to be aware of my surroundings and that’s how we want our goals to be, where we have to learn new things.

If I want to, for example, on. Your plans, for example, the, you talk about, okay, we have to rethink the diet. When I read some of your articles it’s making me learn things. I didn’t know that before. Oh, I have to think about this. I have to dig a little more scientifically into this.

Oh, here’s really how testosterone works in the body. Oh, I do need to understand the nuances of this. What’s interesting is the more we engage our brains by having to learn new things, the more invested we become in the goals. And all of a sudden the goals start to take up a bigger piece of our daily mental consciousness.

And as a result, we end up giving more effort to the goal and our performance gets better. I didn’t set out to pick a battle with smart goals per se. And in fact, at the end of the day, I don’t care much what kind of methodology people use, as long as they answer the four questions that, hard goals is all about.

If they can answer those four questions, the heartfelt, animated, required, and difficult, put it on to whatever form you want to, get rid of achievable and realistic. But if you want to put it on a form that has, SMT, just get rid of the A and the R at the top of it. Totally. As long as you’ve really thought, 

Mike: or I guess maybe it depends how you personally perceive what is achievable and realistic.

Take Elon Musk, what he set out to do. Obviously a part of him did believe it was achievable. If he truly believed it wasn’t achievable, he wouldn’t have wasted his time with SpaceX or Tesla. But yeah, I do agree with that. I would say if the average person is, if their definition for those words comes down to easy and comfortable.

Yeah. It’s probably not very helpful. 

And that’s the thing, the, and you make a great point, which is that, for, let’s say pick a marathon goal. All right. If a real legit runner, an elite runner is setting a goal and they say I want to run a three hour marathon. No, come on. You can run it in two hours and 10 minutes.

That should be pushing your envelope. Whereas for somebody else. Five hours, maybe pushing their envelope. So it’s very much a relative phenomenon that for us, for each of us, you know, for Elon Musk, yeah, all right. He had been one of the co founders of PayPal. He was clearly not a neophyte when it came to starting, monumentally disruptive businesses.

He had some idea what he was doing, but for somebody else, it may be, Opening up a deli and that may be their version of being 20, 30 percent outside their comfort zone where there is some uncertainty. Yes, it’s very much for each of us. We’ve really got to do some thinking about where is our comfort zone and how do we take ourselves, half a step beyond that.

Mike: And pretty much stay there for as long as possible. I think that’s a skill or at least if nothing else, it’s, you just have to have a high pain tolerance, the more goals that you want to juggle and the bigger, the things that, you want to do, I think the more, it’s super cliched, but it’s true, right?

The more comfortable you have to. Become just being uncomfortable you have to spend 80 percent of your waking hours doing things that are daunting and where you are very uncertain and you’re not sure how it ultimately it’s going to go and you’re doing a lot of things that do not come easily necessarily even if it did come easily.

What you’re trying to output, you’re trying to achieve does not come easily anyways, random commentary, just throwing that out there for people that if you can, I think, if we’re using sports as pushing outside of your comfort zone, of course, is there’s, there are corollaries to sports and weightlifting and whatever.

And that’s take endurance sports in particular. That’s more or less what it comes down to. At the elite level, the people that win are the people who can just suffer the most, essentially, like the runners that win, the cyclists that win and you can find a bunch of professional endurance athletes that say exactly that really is the guy or the girl that wins is the one who just doesn’t stop, can just push through all the pain.

And there’s, I think some similarities in goal achievement as well. If you, especially if you’re going to go for difficult goals and most, especially if you’re going to go for Elon Musk level goals. 

Yes. And that’s, it’s an important point. And one of the things that keeps people going is that, if you think about a mediocre goal.

Okay, my goal today is, let’s pick something, absurdly achievable. Alright, I want to stay below 2, 100 galleries today. Okay, I’ll just pick something nice and numerical. And, okay, that’s pretty easy, and fine, I do that, get to the end of the day. Yay. Woohoo. I don’t feel any rush that there’s nothing about achieving that goal because it’s mediocre.

It’s, I tell, always tell people, listen, if you, if your goal doesn’t require a change to daily behavior, it’s not really a goal. That’s just, Daily activity. And the problem with that with these kind of weak goals is that I don’t get the emotional payoff for that. Whereas if I set a hard goal, something that is going to push me, there is a bigger payoff for that.

For that. And that’s one of the things that, when you talk about the elite runners, the endurance athletes, for example, it’s not that they’re masochists. It’s not that they look at and say, I want every day to be misery. It’s that the payoff they get from the misery of the 30 mile run.

It’s the payoff for that is so significant that it ends up fueling the next long run that they go on. And that’s the thing that. A lot of people who, set mediocre goals don’t realize is when they achieve those goals, which are easy to do, obviously, they, there isn’t a real rush that comes from it.

And one of my tests is always, listen, if you make a list of the five or 10 biggest accomplishments you’ve had in your life, you want this next goal to be As big and as powerful and as prominent in your mind as those goals were. So if your biggest accomplishment let’s say physically was running a marathon.

Then you know what you want this next big goal that you set, you want it to be as prominent in your mind, in your memory as that was, because the payoff from that is going to stick with you. For potentially forever, and you are going to need that to fuel the work that you’re doing on a daily basis.

Somebody who runs and never gets any better and never has any sense of accomplishment from it. And every day is painful. Yes, that’s that bordering on masochism, but when they’re doing it and they say, you know what I had a run or I ran that race that I never thought I’d be able to do. And now here I am.

And I crossed the finish line. Dang, that’s going to keep me going. And now I want to do another one of those. And that’s the kind of funny quirk you see of people who set these ridiculous goals is that once they do it, They often come back to do it again or do something bigger and do the next thing, because they got such a rush that from that sense of accomplishment was so big that now it fuels their next endeavor.

And that’s, looking at an Elon Musk, it was okay, I had one monumental. That was boy, that PayPal thing. That was a rush. Now what comes next? Or Bill Gates. All right. Microsoft. That was a rush. He didn’t now leave. He left Microsoft, but he didn’t sit around and go now let’s just take it easy and eat bonbons on the couch.

No, he said, you know what? Okay. I did Microsoft. That was cool. That was a rush. Now, what else can I do? Oh, I know let’s end poverty in the world. Okay, let’s go after that one. And you find with many of these really ambitious goal setters, whatever the discipline is that they get addicted to the sense of accomplishment.

It’s so big that they want to do it again and they don’t let 

Mike: up. Yeah. I think there’s also something to be said for that people. We don’t necessarily have to even say Elon Musks or Bill Gates, but just everyday people that are maybe you’d say they’re overachievers of sorts, learn to really enjoy the process of striving for things.

Kind of what is it? Cheeks and mix. I held McKaylee cheeks and mix. I can’t pronounce his last name author of a author of flow, right? Where he talks about goals in the context of a flow state. And that obviously. If you are working toward a goal, you already have some of the prerequisites of flow there, and a lot of people find that’s why they enjoy work.

If we were to say, work as act activity with purpose, not necessarily what you get a paycheck for, but you have a goal that you’re working toward and you know the, that certain people, they find that the goal in the beginning justifies the effort, justifies getting going, but then in time, the effort.

Justifies the goal where the effort is a means or really an end of itself because it puts them in that flow state that’s, achieving it is the feeling of triumph is fleeting, regardless of what you’re, what you’ve achieved, it’s never as good to get to the summit as you picture it, at least that’s been my experience, regardless of what that summit is.

But if you can find some meaning in the struggle along the way. I think that’s for me, at least even a higher purpose for goals and it’s not even so much about what the goal is it’s if it’s simply like for me again, speaking personally, I enjoy. envisioning things in my mind in the future and making them a reality.

So that could be, I could do a lot of different things, a lot of different types of work. I could work very hard at just because I enjoy that process. It’s not only health and fitness. That’s not the only, in fact, In my life, health and fitness is important, but there are things that I actually care more about than health and fitness in terms of what’s going on in the world.

For example, there are a lot of things I could do if I weren’t doing health and fitness. And then there could be random things that I could do simply because I think it would be, Hey, it’d be cool to, if I could envision some future outcome, that would be fun. And then, okay, so now the game is how do you conform present reality to what in your mind, right?

Yes, exactly. And, and it’s interesting because when you talk about flow, one of the pieces of that is finding something that we’re on the edge of that incompetence, right? Where we’re not fully there, but we, when we’re learning, when we’re stimulating the brain, when we’re on that edge, what, I would talk about is difficult.

They would talk. The edge of a competence it’s we’re teetering on there. And when, where we have one foot in the known and one foot in the unknown. Exactly. And what ends up happening oftentimes is that starts to increase our, the more we learned, the more we. Delve into it and we explore it and we go this is actually I’m learning some pretty cool stuff.

There’s other pieces of this. I enjoy it. We’re actually also increasing our intrinsic motivation and, it’s hard after a while to find enough extrinsic rewards. If I do the X, Y, Z, if I go through XYZ workout, I get a treat. That. That fades away pretty quickly, but 

Mike: yeah, I never liked that advice or, never even tried it myself.

Cause it just seemed nonsensical to actually literally reward yourself with little treats, like you’re a dog or something. 

And that’s the issue is that, there’s a ton of research that extrinsic motivation, those kinds of little treats, whatever they’re much less driving have much less motivational force than an intrinsically motivated something that.

You actually develop a passion for it. You want to learn it because, huh, this is pretty interesting. I actually like doing this. And oftentimes that when we’re forcing ourselves to really deep dive deep into a topic to really explore it when we’re on the edge of incompetence, but now we’re doing it.

Getting competence. We’re gaining competence. We’re gaining insight that actually fuels our intrinsic motivation. And then it becomes all consuming. And that’s where we want to be with a goal, which, it means that you’re obviously not going to have 30 different hard goals over the course of a year.

There’s only. You may have, 30 accomplishments or 30 mini goals that stem from this one big hard goal. But that’s the other thing you tend to find is that there are these big goals. Yes, they have all sorts of little pieces that stem from them, but it’s that intrinsic, when it’s intrinsically motivated, there’s only so many things that a person can be really engaged with fully and, A better part of the day, so we might have a couple of those really big things throughout the year, but it’s it gives us focus.

Mike: Yeah, I would say you have to have a very large appetite for effort and chaos to try to take on. Just even a handful of actual big goals and trying to work toward them at the same time, you have the four burners theory, right? So if you’re healthy work, you have a friends and family. And I find it personally, it takes a lot just to have big goals and just those areas, just one, one or two big things, maybe in each of those areas to work toward it maxes me out in terms of if nothing else, in terms of my.

My time and energy. 

Yeah. And and one of the interesting things is going back to the intrinsic piece of this is that for each of us, our wheels, our balance, our four burners, they’re not always going to be equally split. And for some of us, work is much more all consuming for others. It’s the friends piece for others.

It’s the family or the help, whatever the pieces are, for some people, things like spirituality become a very Prominent piece of their lives for others. It’s non existent and it’s part of this goal process. Interestingly, really forces us to think through which of those pieces really are important to me.

And which of these am I going to incorporate? Which am I going to prioritize? And if the work piece is a really big piece for me Einstein was fairly famous for having an almost singular focus. He did not have a superb relationship with his wife. It was fairly Business like transactional, very transactional.

And yet, can we say the guy wasn’t fulfilled? No, I think he had some pretty big, hard goals and, made a pretty big, made his own little dent in the universe. And for each of us, when we really. Do this kind of thinking we’re talking about with our goals, what you set as your goals really reflects what you prioritize as a person and who you want to be.

And that forces this deep thought about where do I, is it health? Is it families work? What are the things that we really want to do? And when you can tie your goal to that, who you are as a person then this Makes all the difference. It gives you that much more energy to go pursue this goal.

Mike: Yeah. And, speaking of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, what’s your thought on, it seems like to me, at least in my experience, some people are just inherently more intrinsically motivated than others. And what I’ve seen is a lot of it comes down to many people are out there wondering, talk about passion, right?

So they don’t feel passionate about anything they never have. They have no idea. What they could feel passionate about, and they’re just completely lost and confused on it, looking for something they could be passionate about in my experience. And in my opinion, I think the problem more is it’s like the person who’s all who’s been in a string of bad relationships and still thinks it’s not them.

They don’t realize that they are the common denominator of all their bad relationships. Broken relationships. And similarly, if you have somebody who has become a professional dilettante of sorts, who’s dabbled in many things, but never really been able to get passionate, it seems to me where that’s more of a fault of the individual.

Can somebody, if you have people out there what’s his name Mike Rowe, I believe from the show dirty jobs, he had a good Ted or TEDx talk that I think it was the big one, Ted that I’d recommend people look up. He talks about just some of the lessons he’s learned on that show.

And you have, if you have people that can wake up excited every day to run a pig farm or make pottery out of cow poop, it raises questions like how does a person, how are they intrinsically motivated to do that? And it just seems that some people are. Maybe it’s a point of curiosity that they are able to, they want to engage in the world and engage with the world, whereas other people are, again is it a point of imagination or creativity or curiosity?

I’m not sure, but it just seems other people more just want to consume. They just want to. Be they’re looking for what can make them happy, what can make them passionate as opposed to how can they create happiness? How can they create passion wherever they are? Do you, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think it’s a great point. And it’s funny. One of our research areas has been looking at proactivity and one of the things, when you, I heard a guy say almost exactly what you said a minute ago. He said to me, I’m not sure where to go in my life. I’m back on my heels, trying to wait for something to get passionate about.

And the phrase that kind of thinking just drives me batty. Because one of the things we found is that the people who have intrinsic motivation, there’s nothing passive about it. They don’t sit back and wait to get passionate about something. They’re out there constantly doing stuff. And Even the more stuff they do, there’s a couple of things.

One, the more stuff they do, the more chances they have, the more areas of exposure they have to find something that really flips the switch for them. That’s one. Two, though, is, and we see this even when we’re surveying employees and organizations, that the most engaged employees, the happiest employees are those that say, You know what?

I’m able to find something interesting in every task I do. Yes, it’s not always some tasks are worse than others. Some parts of this stink and I don’t like doing them, but you know what? I’m able to turn my brain on and find something interesting. What’s something new about this? What’s something I didn’t know before?

And looking at, or 

Mike: maybe a better way to do it, right? What’s a faster, more efficient way I can do this boring stuff in Excel. 

Exactly. And, whether it’s making pottery out of, cow poop or it’s doing the boring task in Excel. Maybe there’s a better way to do it.

Maybe if I think about it a little bit, maybe I, this isn’t. It doesn’t have to be the world’s worst activity ever. And it’s the willingness to look at a task and say, I’m going to reframe this a little bit, rather than using a lot of negative speak. And I’m going to say, there’s always things, this is just awful.

And going into it with a defeatist attitude. If we actually force ourselves to say, you know what? I’m going to find one thing there’s, I know probably this is not going to be my favorite activity ever, but I am going to go in here and find one thing that either I think is interesting or that I didn’t know before, or that I can find a better way to do it.

I’m going to find some kind of efficiency. If I go into it to look for that one thing, I’m going to start to force myself to look at the world a little bit differently and get. More interested in other things. The other wrinkle in this of course, is that, and this is sometimes there are people that take the intrinsic motivation a step too far, and they frame it so much that if you’re not in love with it, then it can’t be a thing that motivates you.

You have to be in love with the thing you do. I remember reading one of the Big books on happiness. And the author was describing a woman who loved the literature and she loved literature so much that she decided to go get her doctorate in literature. She goes to grad school and the work is so intense that she finds that her love of literature is fading because now she has to do so much of it in such hard work that she says, this is no longer interesting to me. And, I look at that and I said the problem with this is that everything, even if you are passionate about something, and this goes back to an earlier point you made about the willingness to suffer through the tough times, is that there’s nothing you’re going to love to do.

You may love weightlifting. But you know what? There are going to be days where the last thing you want to do is roll out of bed, go to the gym and lift weights until you break a sweat. It’s, that may be the least appealing thing in the world on any given day. Just because you’re passionate about something does not mean it’s always going to be fun.

And. That’s where, sometimes I’ll see people take the intrinsic motivation so far that they’ve forgotten that yeah, you’re supposed to have a deep emotional connection to it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to go work. You think that every endurance athlete loved every 30 mile run they were on?

No, of course not. And that’s the, it’s a balance act. We have to go into these. Tasks go into this work to really find something interesting that we’re passionate about. And at the same time, except that we’re, there are going to be days where we’re going to need that passion, not to make it always fun, but we’re going to need that passion to push ourselves through some of those tough days where it’s just the last thing in the world we want to do is go.

Lift weights or go for that run or do that Excel spreadsheet. But we’re doing it in service of this bigger, more important thing. 

Mike: Yeah. I think leaning on passion too much, almost just it becomes procrastination. It becomes just an excuse to not do the work. 

Yes. Yes. And that’s that, that the people that say I’m.

I’m waiting for something to get passionate, waiting to be inspired okay, you’re waiting a while. Exactly. Cause at the end of the day, the only person that’s going to really inspire you is you, and you have to be out there looking for that thing. What’s something that you can get enough mental energy invested into that.

You can use it to propel yourself to bigger and better things. And it may not instantly just, fall into your lap. It may take a while and may take work to go dig for that. 

Mike: Absolutely. Speaking of procrastination, what are your thoughts on that? How do we get better at not procrastinating?

So one of the things that we found works well Is to break your hard goal, whatever that, that kind of big thing is that you’re going for, if you break that into bite sized chunks. So I’ll just go back to the marathon. Cause it’s an easy example. If I say I want to run a marathon 12 months from now.

All right. I know I need to be able to achieve 26. 2 miles 12 months from now. So I break that in half and I asked myself, all right, what? Do I need to be running six months from now in order to stay on track for that 12 months target? So let’s say I say all I need to be able to run 10 miles six months from now and that’ll keep me on track for me The first 10 miles is the hardest the next 16 actually flow pretty easily from there So then I break that in half again, and I say, all right, where do I need to be?

Three months from now in order to be on track to hit my 10 miles at the end of six months and my 26 miles at the end of 12 months. And I keep breaking it down until I can answer the question. What’s the one thing I can do today that is going to put me on track to achieving five miles at the end of the next three months and 10 miles at the end of the next six months and 26 miles at the end of the next 12 months?

And whatever that is, maybe it’s go for a mile run today, maybe it’s do 50 squats in the hallway, whatever that thing is, the critical element that we found distinguishes a lot of effective goal setters from others is that they always have something that they can do today that isn’t going to enable them to say, Today was a successful day.

I took a step. I don’t have to run 26 miles today. That’s not the goal. The goal is 26 miles 12 months from now. But I need to do something today in order to keep the pressure on and keep myself on track. And when you get in that habit, the single best exercise that I see people do is There’s a natural tendency in this day and age for people, when they wake up in the morning, first thing they do is they check their email.

They go on their phone, they go through social media. And what’s happening when they do all of that is they’re essentially, and I know it seems like I’m overstating this, but they’re essentially giving up control of their day to the world around them. They’re saying to people in their email, they’re saying to people on social let me see what’s going on with you all and what you’ve sent to me.

So I know how to feel. Whereas the most effective people we see are the ones that say, you know what? I’m not going to turn on my phone just yet. Before I do anything else, I’m going to sit down for five minutes, maybe with a cup of coffee, and I’m going to ask myself one question. What’s the one thing I need to accomplish today for this to be a successful day and before I think about email or chat or whatever it is, I normally check before I do any of that.

I’m going to take control of my day. What’s the one thing I need to accomplish today for this to be a successful day? And then I’m going to make sure that no matter what else happens today, I do that today. Thing, whatever that thing is, I’m going to get that done. And if they do that, what ends up happening is they get a greater sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.

We’ve all left, the office at the end of the day or finished our work day and looked at ourselves and God, I know I, I did work today. Like I broke a sweat, I did whatever, but. Did I actually accomplish anything? The thing we see amongst the most successful people, regardless of their particular profession or endeavor, is that they don’t have that feeling because even if it was only one thing they did today, they did that one really important thing.

And that’s what drives them. And that becomes the key to really overcoming procrastination is if you stare at a to do list of 50 things. Yeah, it’s going to be pretty easy to procrastinate, but not all of those 50 things are particularly important. There’s usually one thing that for this day to be successful, we got to get that one thing done.

And if we do that, you know what, we’re going to be in great shape for the rest of the day. And that goal, that 26 miles, that’s going to take care of itself. We do enough squats and enough one mile runs that turn into three mile runs that turn into eight mile runs. Eventually, we’re going to hit that 26.

2 miles. But it’s not so much the 26. 2 as it is finding that one thing to do today. That’s going to drive us. 

Mike: Yeah. And just to that point, I highly recommend anybody listening to read the book. The one thing if you haven’t, it’s very much about that and has some other good advice as well, but no I, I.

Operate in the same way. Usually it’s more than one thing for me, but there are, let’s say three to five things every day that I’m like, I need to make sure that these things get done and yeah, sometimes other stuff gets in the way. There are urgent things that need to be addressed. And that just is what it is.

If you know how it is, you run a business, sometimes your days are not your not your own, but. For the most part yet, sticking to that operating basis and then making those things, the priority, of course, doing those first. So if I am going to be pulled off into other things, hopefully I’ll at least have some or all of the one things done before I go off into other directions.

And that’s really 

hit a huge point, which is that, yeah, even if your day goes completely haywire, if you’ve at least made a dent in Those couple of big things. Then you’ve actually got some space. Most of us have a little bit of space in the rest of our day that, yeah, I can go where there can be some fires that need putting out and there can go some little haywire things or some cool opportunities, whatever, but.

If we can focus our day first and foremost, not on the emails, not on the other stuff, but really on focusing on what are our goals and do one or two things in that in service of that, yeah, then even if the rest of the day goes a little bit haywire, you can still leave the day. And the day thinking, you know what?

Yeah, it got a little crazy there towards the end, but I got some big things done today and I’m still on track. I’m not falling behind. I’m still on par on pace to go hit my big goal. And just that feeling, that sense of control, that internal locus of control that I control my destiny. There’s always something we control and even finding an hour a day.

To exert that control becomes a powerful thing. Absolutely. 

Mike: Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or. Advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth, so if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at MuscleForLifeFitness, Twitter at MuscleForLife, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. You speak in the book about how we tend to value the present more than we do the future, and you talk about discount rate in terms of procrastination.

Can you explain a little bit about that? Sure. 

So one 

Mike: of the things that 

happens is that we often do a poor job of kind of thinking about what we’re going to need in the future. So we discount the future heavily. And so it’s it’s, I’ll eat the chocolate cake now. It’s not that big a deal.

And yeah it’s, this isn’t going to have that big an impact on the future. And I, I can’t see the future that clearly anyway. So I got loads of time. The future is just. It’s fuzzy. And it’s in, if we use a financial example, if somebody gave us a hundred dollars now versus 120 a year from now yeah, okay, I’ll take the, I’ll take the a hundred dollars now and that the gap between the hundred dollars now and whatever it would take to make you take the future amount a year from now that’s the discount rate.

So one of the reasons that people. Engage in bad behaviors is that they have a, they don’t think clearly about what this means for the future. They have to say, ah, the future I’m discounting that so heavily. And, it would take me 400 a year from now to offset the 100 now. And one of the things that.

We find is that a, and this is one of the reasons why financial services companies are starting little bits at a time, much slower than I would like. But they find that if they can force people into. Saving a little bit that, the save more now philosophy that, listen, I’m going to take away some of the, you’re going to get a raise a year from now, but I’ll make you a deal rather than giving you that raise and money.

I’m going to put that into a savings account for you. And people are much more likely to say. All right, yeah, sure, you can put my future raise in a savings account for me, a retirement account, because I don’t dis I don’t value the future all that highly anyways. Let me go do some bad behaviors now, eat the chocolate cake, and follow that with a glass of scotch and a cigarette, because at the future, it’s Who knows.

It’s a, future’s not that important. 

Mike: That, that’s the whole, that’s the whole nudge argument. The book, who wrote that? The book Nudge the Soft Paternalism. How much do we want in the, in this case, it’d be, the government and, but also companies to do what they feel is or to limit our options to what they feel in a way that they feel is best for us.

And anyways, it’s a whole nother discussion, but. That’s an ongoing discussion and there are valid, I think, arguments to be made on both sides. 

Oh, absolutely. And one of the things we found is if you can do some of this to yourself you can put little nudges in place that require you to take some actions now and value the present.

And this goes back to the animating part of goal setting. One of the reasons that. People who are good goal setters, they tend to create such vivid pictures of what they want to achieve in the future is it’s a way of making the future feel closer. It’s a way of making the future feel more here and now and 

Mike: more literally more real.

I think there’s something to be said for that where you. You come across it, take someone like Nikola Tesla, right? Who had an incredible imagination where he could build machines in his mind that he said looked just as real as anything else. And he would build these machines until they worked in his mind until he actually saw them working in front of him.

And then he knew what to do. Like then he would just go through the motions actually in the. Physical universe of what he architected in his mind. I think that’s an extreme example, but yeah I agree that. And again, I’ve come across this with a number of people, especially high achiever types that have very vivid imaginations and they’re what they envision to them is very real.

Like they can see it in its details and they can see how it works. And yes, it’s not there yet, but that doesn’t, Discourage them at all in their mind. It’s already done. Now they just have to go through the motions of putting it here in reality. And that’s almost feels like to them. It just feels mechanical.

At least half of the work, so to speak, is already done. Like they can already see it. They see they know how it works. They know what all comes together. Now they just have to do it. 

Exactly. And that’s a big part of this. I did an exercise with a group of managers one time, and I said, I want you to imagine that you’ve just been given 250, 000 tax free in your retirement account, what would you do with that?

And there were people, we divided them up or the room and one group we asked them to just draw a picture. What would you do if you had 250, 000 tax free in your retirement account, what would that mean to you? We wanted to make the number high, but not so high that they would say, I’d give the middle finger to my boss and quit my job like that.

That’s not an allowable answer. So the other half, we said just write down what you would do. And it was funny that when the people. Who really drew out the pictures. They really gave a deep thought what they would do with the money. We then tracked their retirement savings habits over the next eight months.

And the people who had drawn a vivid picture you know what, I’m going to take a three weeks off and I’m going to spend that with my grandkids. Or I’m going to go, you know what? I am going to invest in that little place sitting by the ocean. I’m going to, whatever it was. Their thing was over the next eight months.

They ended up saving anywhere from 30 to 50 percent more, they gave up the Starbucks, they started to put a little more into the retirement account than the people who didn’t go through that real visual exercise and the big. Aha about this. Wasn’t that, drawing a picture or doing anything like that is magical.

It’s rather that the people who sit down and intensely figure out what they would do with that money. Money’s nice, but money’s not a money’s a means to an end. If you can make people think about what is the end. That’s now the thing that gets them motivated and makes them think about how their present activity.

Is impacting this future state and that future state, like in your Tesla example, feels a lot more real. And that’s, that was the big aha of that study. It’s eh, drawing a picture, fine, whatever. If you don’t think about it, it’s not going to help you, but. If you give deep thought to what does that future actually look like?

Now you’re actually going to want to go do it. You’re going to be a lot more invested in going after it. 

Mike: Yeah. I’d say create it to the point where you feel excited about it. Like in, for some people that might require. More details or less. I think it probably just varies individual to individual.

Like in my case, I don’t go into a great amount of detail in terms of what am I envisioning? It’s more conceptual to me where I’m like, once I have the concept and I really feel like, yes, that’s a thing. I want that. That’s enough for me. I may or may not include, the color of the I’m not really into big into material things, but it may or may not include the title of the book, I have an idea for a book and I really see how this could fit it and how it can work and how I can make it very successful.

That for me is enough, 

exactly. And it’s an important point. You flesh it out to the point where you get that emotional attachment to it. When you’re emotional enough about it, that it’s influencing your behavior. Yeah, it could be a stick figure. It could be a book title. It could be whatever, or it could be, Da Vinci, whatever it takes.

That’s the exercise. 

Mike: And that’s exactly right. That’s the litmus test. I like it. So let’s talk about creating a sense of urgency because that of course is. Whatever necessity levels, the mother of all invention, right? And that’s something that I’ve always been cognizant of and tried to improve is that’s 1 of the things is improving my is increasing my and maintaining a sense of urgency and resisting the lure of.

Complacency, and of course, this is a huge part of accomplishing anything, right? 

Yes, exactly. And that’s where, when it comes to urgency, there’s a number of things. Part of it is we just have to realize first that. This procrastination thing is a very big danger that this is a one of the biggest risks we face and goals is saying, I’m going to start it tomorrow.

So a 

Mike: couple of things. Number one, I would say it’s almost in life, right? Because you do that enough. And eventually you wake up one day and you wonder, how did I get here? Like, why? I had a very different idea of where I would be. Be at this point in my life or what I would have to show for myself or, things that I can be proud of or whatever.

And I have nothing like that. That’s where it goes. 

Exactly. And so part of it is, to your point, it’s, we need something that we can get going on today. And this goes back to what we were talking about with that passive versus proactive. I’m going to go find something. And one of the big hurdles and well hurdle, but also a differentiator between the effective goal setters or the high achievers in general versus everybody else is the willingness to say, There’s something I’m going to do today.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, but I am going to make some progress today. And that technique I mentioned that cutting in half technique that I’m going to take the 26 miles, break that in half six months. Okay. Break that in half three months, break that in half one month, break that down to a week, break that down to today.

Being able to find that one thing that I’m going to accomplish today becomes absolutely critical because when you get, and this is so important when it comes to goal setting, if you give up the day, if you don’t have one thing that you can do today to start the goal, Process, it starts to feed into that procrastination.

I’m going to start it tomorrow. Today. I’m just going to plan. If we don’t make that a thing, if we don’t write it down, 

Mike: or it doesn’t even go there, or it’s I don’t know what to do. 

Yeah, exactly. And that’s where, when somebody is at a loss for what, I don’t have any goals.

There’s nothing I want to do. Then we have a deeper issue, which is. Step one is we got to take everything we’re currently doing to make an inventory of everything we’re presently doing in our lives. Okay I pick the kids up and then I go do this and I maybe do a little workout and then I go to my office.

All right we need to go through everything we’re doing right now and pick one of those areas of all of these areas. Which do you dislike the least? All right, let’s start there. And. It honestly takes sometimes a ratcheting down prize. We have to just interrogated and dissected and dissected until we can say, listen, this is the part of my life.

I dislike the least. So what can I do? All right let’s pick, maybe it’s a piece of work that we’re presently doing. Okay. What could we do as a goal that would be 20, 30 percent better than we’re doing right now? And the interesting thing is 

Mike: you may end up or even how can you do more of the things that you like?

And how about less of the things that you don’t like? Is that possible? Yeah. I think of job crafting. Have you gone through that workbook before? Yes. Yep. Absolutely. So yeah, anybody listening if any of that, but we’re talking right now, if any of that resonates with you, check out job craft, he’s probably jobcrafting.

com. A good little exercise to go through that can help with exactly what we’re talking about. 

Yes, exactly. So what are those pieces that if I could give up a couple of pieces from my current job or three things that are two things that I’d like to do more of. All right. My first question.

Hard goal may actually be somewhat pedestrian. It’s not going to be climbing Mount Everest. If I don’t have any passion for some big thing I’ve got to start somewhere and developing a habit of goal setting that, you know what? Over the next three months. I’m going to develop two other people on my team, and I’m going to delegate these four activities to them.

And that is going to be my focus. I’m going to set this as a goal. I’m going to get rid of this work, because if I can get rid of these four tasks, this is going to enable me to spend more time on these two things that I really do perfect. That now starts to build a habit of goal setting. And that’s it.

One of the risks when I wrote Hard Goals, one of the risks of it was what if there are people that look at this and say, I don’t want to do a hard goal. I don’t have anything. There’s nothing big. I don’t want to go be Steve Jobs. I don’t want to go climb Mount Everest. I don’t want to do that stuff.

The reality is that and you mentioned this earlier, hard is going to be relative. What may be hard for, the person who climbs Mount Everest is different than for those of us that aren’t going to climb Mount Everest. So it’s, it is relative and we do have to start somewhere because if we can develop that habit of goal setting and goal achievement, more importantly, then what ends up happening is The goals I set next year, they may not be, I want to delegate for activities.

Now it may be, I’m going to go get that promotion, or it may be, I want to go take on this new kind of work, or I want to go get this degree, maybe something much bigger, but we’re not going to get there if. We’re stuck in that in between place where I don’t even know where to start. 

Mike: Yeah. And it probably, it’s pretty natural.

I’ve seen it many times working with many people over the years where it starts with personal fitness, it starts with getting in shape and then they gain, it’s probably just comes down to gaining confidence and self efficacy. And then. They go, Oh I got my body in, into a good place.

Maybe I can reach out into this other area of my life, into my work and get that into a better place. Oh, look at that. It’s pretty much the same process. I just learned some basic, simple principles and I just execute well on those over and things get better, huh? Maybe I could make my relationships better.

Oh, look at that. Like here. Three simple things that you just do these things well, all of a sudden your relationship is better. I’ve seen that many times. 

Yes, absolutely. And that is very much the part that, focus on the things that we can control. And it’s one of the reasons why fitness becomes such a good place to start when it comes to getting comfortable with the idea of goal setting and the practice of goal setting is that it’s something over which we actually.

Do have in relative to everything else in our life, it’s the area we have the most control, and it’s a wonderful place for that, because the more you start with an area over which you do have some control, the better off you’re going to be. You’re going to. You’re going to feel that, they’ve been doer efficacy.

You’re going to get that sense of confidence that, yeah, I can achieve things. And the more that happens, that it just feeds everything else. 

Mike: So what are a few ways that people can increase their sense of urgency? Cause a lot of people know that they know that if push came to shove, if they are pushed to the wall, they wouldn’t die on the.

The hill that they’re stuck on to mix expressions, that they know that. Yeah, they are just procrastinating. They just don’t feel like they wanted enough. And if they really wanted it, they, at least they tell themselves that they could do it if they really wanted it. Now they’re not doing it.

And they say it’s because they don’t really want it, but, I’m sure you’ve come across this a lot. How might these people might escape that trap and increase their sense of necessity, increase their sense of urgency. So they feel driven to do the things that they, Feel they should do. 

Yeah. So one is to take their goal and find one activity 

Mike: that they can begin today.

So like a day, that’s like the getting things done, right? David Allen get it down to the next action. Exactly. 

A second thing is to go back and revisit the. the heartfelt piece of this. Ask that question, why do I want to do this in the first place? But not just from a positive point of view, ask it from a negative point of view in that what happens if I don’t start this?

Who suffers if I don’t start this goal? And one of the things that Found works a lot is it’s easy. People are willing to sacrifice themselves. They’ll say, ah, if I don’t do this, fine. I’m going to, I’m going to still be fat. And I, may die of a heart attack, but I discount the future anyway.

So who really cares that’s, I’m 

Mike: an outlier. So it’s not going to happen to me. 

Exactly. It’s a, all that wonderful cognitive dissonance. And so it’s, that’s one thing, but when we ask it from the negative, who else besides me Is going to suffer if I don’t do this thing. What happens is it starts to put a little extra pressure on us emotionally to say okay, I guess I’m going to be, yes, I don’t care if I die of heart attack, but my kids might care if I have heart attack and I guess, hopefully.

I would be a selfish jerk if I don’t go do this thing to, go fix this issue and, do something just to start today. And sometimes in for somebody that is really suffering from an urgency problem it requires going back to the beginning of the goal. Why do I care? But not just what is it going to do for me, but Who suffers if I don’t get this thing done?

The third thing then is when you’re creating that animated picture that deep picture, sometimes going through the whole exercise again, I find when people are really suffering from a the procrastination part of it is, I don’t know, I’m stuck. I haven’t broken this down into bite sized chunks.

I don’t have my one thing to do today. My next action. Sometimes it is, I don’t have enough emotional attachment and sometimes. I just haven’t thought it through clearly enough. And sometimes going back to the original picture, when I crafted, okay, what is this thing? What is this thing actually look like?

I find that sometimes we were dealing with a sales organization where a company with about a thousand salespeople and about every year, about 24. 4, 25 percent of them would hit this big target. So they called it making trip. So if you hit this big number, they were a tech company.

If you hit this big number, then you got to go. Your big reward was you got to go on this trip. All right. So we looked at the people who were making the trip every year. They get to go to Jamaica for the big sales. Yeah. You hit your multimillion dollar target. And one of the things that we found was that.

The majority of people who hit the trip had a picture of the location sitting on their desk. Now, I looked at it and said, okay this is cheesy, right? It’s just a picture. So yes, trip is Jamaica, and great, you put a picture of Jamaica taped to your computer monitor. Feels hokey, but what is it about that was helpful?

What it did is it connected This big reward to their one activity every day. And what they had figured out is, listen, all this takes, the difference between people who make the trip and people who don’t ended up being about two cold calls a day. So I’m really down to the level now. Cause that adds up, right?

That’s hundreds of cold calls extra that these salespeople were making that the lower performers work. But if you broke it out, it was essentially two extra cold calls a day. And what they found was that. Just having that little picture of Jamaica or wherever sitting on their desk provided just enough motivation to when it hit 430 and they were starting to think about heading home for the day.

These salespeople would go, two more calls, two more calls isn’t going to kill me. It’s not the end of the world here. It’s just two things are going to make the difference. And lo and behold, you start to add that up over the course of a year, and that becomes the, the difference between selling 5 million and selling 2 million.

One of the exercises is that when you know your emotional attachment, you’ve maybe scared yourself a little bit, that Okay. I got to do this. There’s somebody else who needs to go to that needs me to do this thing. I go back to my picture and maybe I end up sticking it on my desk and I’m not sticking it on my desk because I necessarily want to say Jamaica, but because I want to connect Jamaica to two cold calls.

And that’s how we bridge the gap between the picture part of this and the what’s my one activity for today. If I can connect those two things. What we often find is that the difference between hitting your big goal at the end of the year and not hitting it really boils down to a couple of little behaviors throughout the course of the day.

It’s not that, Warren Buffett’s days are a million percent better than everybody else’s, they’re five percent, they’re ten percent better than everybody else’s. It’s just that you do that long enough and you keep at it long enough eventually, you’ll get there. Those, 10 percent differences every day turn into, it’s like compound interest, huge benefit down the road, but getting people to just do the little extra bit today.

That’s the key make those two extra cold calls today. And it pays off down the 

Mike: road. Absolutely. What about minimizing your costs? How does that play into sense of urgency and increasing it? 

Yeah, so one of the things that, that comes up with goals is that people think it’s going to take a lot.

They think it’s going to be painful and they think that the cost of doing this goal, I’m going to suffer so much. If I have to go this goal, this this is going to be so painful to lose this weight. You’re asking me to give up everything that ever tasted good in my life. And I’m just going to eat, cauliflower and water for the rest of my days. And they tend to put in their mind, they tend to blow up how painful it’s actually going to be to achieve these goals. And one of the things that we found with people is that when they can start to minimize those costs, and it’s not by saying maybe make cauliflower tastes good.

It’s by saying, listen, it’s actually not going to be that bad. If we don’t catastrophize the goal, if we don’t say I’m never going to be able to eat anything except cauliflower and water for the rest of my life maybe the costs aren’t really going to be that bad. What’s the one change I have to make today?

I want to turn down the chocolate cake. But I don’t want to view that as a negative. I don’t want to view it as I’m losing something. I’m paying a price. Instead, I want to look at every quote unquote sacrifice I make in order to achieve this goal. I want to reframe that as a positive. Instead of giving up chocolate cake, Maybe what I did is I took a positive eating step.

I just fueled my body with something that is going to give it more energy than chocolate cake would. And by reframing some of the things that we do, in fitness, for example, okay, I know I’m going to have to exercise. Maybe I don’t view this as a painful, Our out of my day. This is going to hurt so much.

Maybe I instead view this as a chance to wake up my body and make it operate at a higher level of productivity for the rest of the day. Maybe I view this as you know what? Yeah, I’m going to sweat. I’m going to get some of those toxins out of my system and I’m going to make my skin look a little better by reframing some of the things that we often view as negatives And just, and I know sometimes people say, Oh, that sounds hokey.

I’m just changing the language. It’s all semantics. Yes it is, but semantics tend to be really important. And if we can, 

Mike: There’s a lot of research on that point alone that, some people are able to reframe stress in a positive light and not only. Do you see psychological differences as people you actually see physiological differences in how they respond to stresses people that view stresses as challenges positively versus, destructive forces respond physically different to the stress they produce more DHEA, which counteracts the effects of cortisol, which, of course, is one of the physiologically speaking One of the problems with ongoing acute stress, it’s you just have chronically elevated cortisol levels and that just wreaks havoc in the body, but yeah it’s not hokey at all. At this point, I’d say it’s actually scientific. 

And that’s the, and that’s exactly the point that the people that resist this, it’s, one of the reasons they’re having, they’re struggling with their goals is they’re unwilling to do some of these steps.

And the truth is that it sometimes is as simple as. Forcing ourselves to do it, even if we roll our eyes and go it’s just semantics. In to your point, yeah, it’s actually scientific. It’s there’s evidence that this stuff actually works, but we have to be willing to take that very first step and look at this and say, you know what?

This isn’t a suffering. This isn’t a giving up. This is a getting, how am I not giving up? What am I’m not giving up the chocolate cake? What am I getting? I’m getting. control. I am going to say, you know what? I’m not going to let flour and sugar control my day. Dang it. I am taking control of my destiny here.

Look at my willpower. And if I can give myself a little mental or even physical high five before I go to bed. You know what, I’ve just taken one big step that a lot of people haven’t taken, and this becomes an important part of really minimizing the cost, seeing whether it’s fitness, dieting, whether it’s delegating at work, whatever it is, viewing it, not as a punishment, not as something where we’re paying a price, but rather reframing it as a benefit.

Goes a long way to helping us view our goals much more positively. And that just gives us the motivation. 

Mike: Said, said, it’s funny. I just think of conversations like this and I’d say the self Development kind of personal growth space in general and wonder why isn’t this stuff taught in school?

Why is it instead? We’re taught to memorize a lot of pointless stuff in the end. We’re taught to pass tests that’s the majority of schooling for most people, which means absolutely nothing in the real world, and especially in today’s world. Whereas stuff like this is incredibly important and is In many ways going to determine the, it’s going to determine the type of life that you have and the type of person that you become.

And it was just going to affect more than just you. It’s going to affect everyone that comes into contact with you. And if we’re talking health, for example, those effects can ripple out to everyone in society. If we just look at it in healthcare costs alone, it’s just odd. It’s just odd. It’s on, it’s almost like our school system, which has its roots back in the turn of the century.

Industrial revolution it was made to create little compliant factory workers and remove people’s capacity for imagination and independent thinking and critical analysis. It’s defer to authority. When the bell rings, do this, when you’re told to do that, do this or do that. And when you’re told to think this, make sure you think that.

It’s well, it’s funny because going back to where our conversation started with the whole idea of, where we’re smart goals created, it’s very much the same thing, the whole idea of. Create goals that, that color within the lines. It’s very much what we’re doing in the school system. They, goal setting.

Even heck look at something like business school. The business school teaches everything except well, how to get ahead in an organization, but also they don’t teach sales, which is fascinating because. A large portion of any workforce is going to do selling in one form or another. And yet it’s the one discipline that they actually don’t teach.

And you look at schools, they don’t teach goal setting. They don’t teach stress management there. It’s instead, it is the color within the lines. It’s the very controllable. Easy to teach stuff and that’s very much a problem, which is why you see so many people struggle with this are, even from the fitness side, yeah, we do gym class, like it’s a, perfunctory little thing, but are we really teaching life skills for lifelong health or are we just getting the kids out of the classroom so the other teachers can have a coffee break for 30 minutes?

Mike: And it makes it harder to learn this stuff as an adult, especially if you have been taught a bunch of whether it’s explicitly or implicitly, you’ve been molded to fit molded in a very specific way. And now you’re trying to unlearn different patterns of thought and behavior that can feel almost hardwired.

It would be much easier. To learn this kind of this stuff when you’re nine years old, then when you’re 29 years old, and up until that point, all you had done is really towed the line and did what you were told to do, thought what you were told to thought. And and then you show up for to life and you’re wondering, so wait a minute, what do I do now?

Like how does this doesn’t, this isn’t exactly conforming to. What I was told it was going to be like, I’m, I can memorize things in past tests where do I get paid for that? What do I do? Yeah, exactly. Anyways that’s another discussion, but that’s everything I had for you.

So I really appreciate you taking the time. If you want to let everybody know about your book, where can they find it? And if you have another project coming up where can they find you and your work, where you, this is, you’re now on the soap box. Thanks. 

Sure. You can always find our work at leadershipIQ.

com, and you can find the book Hard Goals there. There’s also on that website, the leadershipIQ. com, if you go to the far right tab on our homepage, it says quizzes and research. And if you go under there, you’ll actually find a number of our studies on goal setting. You’ll find some quizzes on goal setting to see if your goal setting is up to snuff.

Thank you for listening. Consistent with everything we’ve been talking about today. And so lots of great free resources there that you can play both with goal setting and then with some of our other work too. My next book coming out in about a month or so is on leadership styles. So one of the things we find is that, there are leaders that are more likely to set.

Those kind of hard, audacious goals than others are. And it does impact goal setting is a critical part of what leaders do. Leaders who set big goals tend to get bigger performance. Now, sometimes you get the jerky leaders who go too far over the edge, but goal setting is one of those questions you have to answer, not just for yourself, but if you’re ever in a leadership position, whether it’s, in life, church, PTA, whatever It’s a big question.

You have to answer. Do I want to create goals that are going to challenge and push and help people grow and develop? And if you answer that the right way, it tends to impact your abilities as a leader too. So 

Mike: I agree. I’m looking forward to it. Thanks again, Mark. I appreciate you taking the time. This is a great discussion.

I think my people are going to really like it. This is the kind of stuff they’ve been asking for. So here you go. Awesome. Listen, I had a blast talking to you. So thanks for having me. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

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