You’re making decisions every day. Most are trivial but some will have lasting implications in your life. Keep watching to see how decisions are broken down, what influences decisions, and learn techniques to evaluate scenarios to make the best decisions.

It's estimated the average adult makes 35000 decisions a day. Assuming you’re awake for 16 hours of the day, that’s an average of around 2187.5 decisions an hour, 36 decisions a minute, or a decision every 1.65 seconds. Through these decisions and the actions following these decisions, you carve out a path for your life.

When you think back, what were some of the toughest decisions you had to make? Was it about what job to take, which school to send your child to, or what home you chose to live in? Or was it about going through with a certain medical major medical procedure or figuring out what care home your elderly parent will live in?

You are solely responsible for your life’s choices and decisions. From your actions to your perspectives, taking full ownership of your decisions means that you are completely free to guide the course of your life. You can decide to rise above circumstances. You can decide to not be limited by your restrictions. You can decide to create the results you want. Now, the question is how.

Yes, there are tons of possibilities available. Yet making decisions doesn’t have to be a haphazard or debilitating process. Having a method to evaluate circumstances and make decisions based on fundamental principles is a huge advantage. Let’s take a more detailed look to better understand decisions and learn some techniques to help you make the best decisions.

What is a Decision?

The dictionary defines a decision as a conclusion or resolution reached after consideration. The world “resolution” provides a perfect context for what the goal of decision-making is. It means you’ve examined a particular situation or circumstance, taken into account different considerations, and made a choice as to what course of action to take.

Regardless of the situation, decisions are made to reach the desired goal. Even though there are principles to follow to make the best decisions, there isn’t a one size fits all solution for every scenario.

Different Types of Decisions

Desired or positive decisions will look and feel different in different situations.

Reactive vs Proactive Decisions

There is a big difference between making reactive decisions vs proactive decisions. When you make reactive decisions, you are reacting to events that have already happened. In making proactive decisions you are anticipating future events.

Which one do you think you have greater influence over? There is no way for you to go back in time and do things differently so when things have already happened, all you can do is make decisions to mitigate further undesirable results from occurring. In making proactive decisions, time is on your side as you have time to think and consider different outcomes. You have the luxury of identifying the results you want, making decisions, getting things in place, and making preparations to give you the greatest chance of achieving desired results.

Conscious vs Subconscious Decisions

Each individual operates from three different levels of mind; the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind. Decisions can be made from each of these levels of mind. Let’s define these three levels of mind first before we explore examples of decisions made in these places.

According to an article by Susanne Rice titled: Subconscious vs Unconscious: The Complete Comparison:

The conscious mind is defined by our thoughts, actions, and awareness.

The subconscious mind is defined by the actions and reactions we realize when we think about it.

The unconscious mind is defined by the deep recesses of our past and memories.

Let’s take a look at getting ready for a workout.

In the conscious mind, you make a decision to complete a certain set of exercises that target your legs. You do three sets of squats, three sets of deadlifts, and three sets of calf raises. The decisions are straightforward and you are aware that you’re making the decisions.

In the subconscious mind, you don’t realize you're tying your shoe without looking until you bring your awareness to the action. It’s completely automated and built into your muscle memory from the thousands of times you’d tied your shoes.

Let’s take a deeper look at subconscious decision-making. But before we do that, let me pose a question. Have your decisions been made for you already? I don’t mean this in a facetious or hypothetical way. I mean this in an actual sense:

You have grown up and gone through experiences in your life. There have been times when you’ve felt fear, anger, shame, guilt, or other negative emotions. These instances will often leave an indelible mark on your psyche and subsequently influence the way you make decisions. You will sometimes act based on certain decisions you’ve made but you don’t know why you make those decisions.

For instance, imagine you grew up in a household where your parents were always right, where you weren’t entitled to have your own opinion especially if it was different from the opinion of your parents. The times that you expressed your thoughts or opinions about not wanting to do something they suggested, they yelled at you, guilted you, and even threatened you.

It even got to the point where they would reprimand you in front of your teachers, coaches, or even relatives, simply because you weren’t “an adult” and they were. After having this happen time and again over many years, it becomes deeply ingrained that having an opinion different from what an older person or authority figure expressed would be met by a barrage of verbal attacks on your person.

There was never any sort of conscious thought of how this was affecting you or shaped how you interacted in the world. To you, it was simply the way you grew up, the way your parents were. The deepest access or awareness you had to the impact of these experiences growing up is that whenever it happened to you, it didn’t make you feel very good. Over time, you were just numb to it and chalked it up to your parents’ personalities.

Now, as an adult, whether it be at work, in hobbies, or in any sort of social interaction, you find yourself gravitating toward very outspoken, opinionated people. Even when you feel you’re being treated unfairly, taken advantage of, or even abused, you will keep your mouth shut and not say anything.

When you’ve been the one that’s doing the most work on a project, you stay quiet and let someone else take the credit. When you’re up for a raise and you’ve done significant work that’s helped the business, you don’t even receive a 1% raise because your outspoken boss says that you don’t really exhibit leadership skills.

In this example, your subconscious decision to not say anything is causing you to constantly get the short end of the stick in your life. Yet somehow, this feels “right” to you. Sometimes, you make subconscious decisions that may not be the right fit for a particular situation because you’re simply falling back on how life has trained you.

No one intentionally makes a wrong decision. Decisions are often made for them already and they don’t know why they’re making them, even though the decisions could be detrimental.

The good news is, that you can be deliberate about your decisions. Even the subconscious ones. However, it first takes awareness that a dynamic exists, and it takes a very intentional training regimen to create a new decision-making algorithm.

For instance, when you were growing up, you just loved to eat. As a matter of fact, your closest friends would have challenges to see who could eat the most in the shortest amount of time. Over time, these led to certain health issues.

Your subconscious decision would be to overconsume whenever food was available. Now, for fear of making your health conditions worse, you’re forced to evaluate your decisions before you subconsciously decide to finish everything available. Over time, training yourself to practice restraint will allow you to catch yourself, resulting in decisions and actions that lead to better health.

Conditioned Stimulus vs Conditioned Response

In the example of classical conditioning with Pavlov’s dog. The story goes that Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov observed that his dogs would salivate whenever they tasted meat.  He also began to notice that his dogs would salivate when they saw his lab assistant’s white coat. To further investigate, he also blew a whistle each time the lab assistant brought meat in for the dogs. Eventually, the dogs formed an association that when they heard the whistle, they would salivate.

In this scenario, the unconditioned stimulus is the food and the unconditioned response is the salivation. The conditioned stimulus would be the whistle and the conditioned response would be the salivation. The dogs were trained to salivate when they heard a whistle.

Decisions can be conditioned as well. Let’s say a college student had a good thought and she felt happy. Then she started to carry a clicker with her and she’d click it every time she felt happy. Eventually, an association would form where clicking the clicker would make her feel happy. She was conditioned in a way where whenever she wanted to feel happy, she would click the clicker.

What Underlying Factors Influence Your Decisions?

As you can see, there are different types of decisions characterized by what sort of mental space you’re in. Another aspect to consider is what underlying factors influence your decisions. If there is an ideal goal to be reached, and decisions are being made according to that goal, then the question is, “What makes this goal ideal for you or for another person?"

Language is a fundamental factor in how decisions are made. If you speak English, there are pronouns for men and women. However, in Chinese, there are no pronouns for gender. When an English-speaking person is making a decision, there is an aspect of gender taken into consideration when decisions are being made.

Even though there may not be gender pronouns in Chinese, there are so many different terms for members of your family. For instance, you would address your maternal grandparents with different terms than your paternal grandparents. Your father’s mom would be Nainai, and your father’s dad would be Yeye. Your mother’s mom would be Walpole and your mother’s dad would be waipo.

Because of distinctions made in language, this also influences cultures and culture can influence decisions as well. In Chinese culture, for a very long time, boys were favored over girls when a family has a child. This is because if a family had a boy, they would be able to carry on the family name whereas girls would not be able to. The sad truth is that in the past and even today, although much less prevalent compared to before, there would be a practice of aborting the pregnancy or killing the baby if it was a girl. This was culturally accepted and understood by everyone.

In America, where values are different, aborting a pregnancy just because of the sex of the fetus would be considered inhumane and abhorrent. Right now, there is a big conversation in the United States regarding the legal standing of abortions and this is also based on religious beliefs as well.

Past experiences will also influence decisions. For instance, if you’ve started a business in the past, you put all your savings into it and it ended up failing, you might be averse to starting another business again based on the response of the world and those around you. However, if your support system around you didn’t make you wrong for failing and encouraged you to take your lessons and try again, then you may not be so averse to starting another business.

The physical location you’re making your decisions also matters. If you’re in a loud crowded place where distractions are happening or a place where every two minutes someone is trying to get your attention, that would affect your decision-making. With distractions around you, you wouldn’t be able to think clearly enough to take into consideration the possible outcomes or consequences of your actions.

A perfect example of this is deciding whether to drive after having a few drinks at a party. If you’ve been having a good time at a gathering and after a night of drinks and socializing, it may not be the best time to make any decisions. The first decision that should not be made is whether or not to drive. Of course, the answer is to not drive, for the safety of yourself and others. However, the alcohol has put you in a not clear, inebriated state. In this scenario, even deciding whether or not to drive is an important life decision.

Whenever you’re making decisions, especially decisions that could have long-term implications for you, people you care about, and even your organization, it would be best to take a moment, in a quiet, undisturbed, non-emotional state, not under the influence of any substances, to consider how these factors may be influencing your decision and the eventual outcome of your decision.

Survival Mode

Another scenario where you don’t want to make decisions is when you’re in survival mode. It could be any situation that could trigger a fight or flight response in you. For example, if you have bills due, if you’re suddenly attacked or mugged by someone on the street, or if you’re in a heated argument with someone, it will trigger a fight or flight response in you where you’re just trying to survive a situation.

This is not a healthy place to be and definitely not a healthy place to make decisions. When all of your physical and mental faculties are being dedicated to surviving a situation, making big decisions is not the ideal thing to be worried about. You wouldn’t be in a clear state of mind to choose a job, decide whether you want to marry someone, buy a home, or make any decision that will affect your personal well-being.

If you’re not prepared for a situation if at all possible, the first thing to do is step back and think. If this is not possible, then you have to do whatever it takes to survive the situation first before making any sort of decision.

The proactive decision would be to undergo training. In simulated scenarios where you’re put into life-threatening situations, enough repetition would cause the fight or flight response to go away and allow you to think clearly and make good decisions. This is what’s known as stress inoculation.

For instance, if an armed attacker came to your office, you’d be scared for your life! You would want to run away or hide so you won’t get shot. If that option wasn’t available, you would have to try and fight the attacker and incapacitate him somehow.

This is why offices will make you go through training so that you’re aware of what to do in this sort of scenario. Another example of being proactive is soldiers training for war. In a life and death situation where you’re being fired at by enemy forces, you can’t freeze up and not be able to make the right choices that will preserve the lives of fellow soldiers and allow you to protect whatever you're trying to protect.

No Method Leads to Reactiveness

Aside from understanding the different types of decisions, there are possible factors that may influence your decisions, you see how important planning and being proactive is when it comes to making decisions. It literally could make the difference between life and death.

By having a strategy or method to fall back on when you are making decisions, and practicing this strategy to the point of being stress inoculated, you set yourself up for desired outcomes through your good decision-making.

Some fundamental principles to keep in mind in your decision-making practice would be to take care of the most important things first, begin with the end in mind, and look to understand the situation and others before trying to get others to understand you.

A method used in the military to decide and take action is something called the OODA Loop.

Developed by the United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd, the OODA loop was created to give military personnel in the field a way to successfully decide what needed to be done and take action.

OODA is an acronym that stands for Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act. When out in the field in a combat situation, the first thing to do is:

Observe what is happening. What directions are attacks coming from, what is the condition of your battalion and what is the condition of opposing forces? Basically, you’re gathering as much information as possible from which you will make your decisions and actions.

Next is:

Orientate yourself. Once you’ve observed and gathered the information you needed, you need to see how this information is significant and how it will come into play.

Then:

Decide. Make a decision on what needs to happen and what actions need to happen to achieve your aim.

Finally:

Act. Take action based on your observations and decisions.

These steps are repeated as many times as necessary to achieve your goal.

Although originally developed for military use, this method of observing and taking action can be applied to non-military situations as well. The interesting point is that in the same way you’re going through your OODA Loop, the people you’re interacting with or engaged with are also going through their OODA Loops. It is this interaction that plays out to decide who will have achieved a successful outcome.

Steps to Making the Best Decisions

The OODA Loop is a useful methodology, especially when decisions have to be made quickly in stressful, live situations. However, when it comes to making non life or death decisions, having a series of steps to refer to will help you make the best decision and set you up for subsequent steps to achieve your goals.

The first step to accomplish before any decision-making can happen is clearly identifying the goal to be achieved. Knowing this overarching goal provides the reference point through which you will filter your decisions. After all, you’re not making decisions just for the sake of making decisions. You’re making decisions along the process of achieving or accomplishing something.

Once you’ve identified your goal, a great mnemonic to help you remember the steps to make the best decisions is RADAR.

R - Research

Research is considered the information-gathering stage of making your decision. You want to have as much relevant information as possible. Sometimes, you may not be the subject matter expert in a specific area of consideration but you can still go out and talk to people and see how different parts will come together to achieve your goal. Site examples of what types of data to gather and how to gather them.

Examples of specific data to be gathered include quantitative data and qualitative data.

Quantitative data could include revenue and costs, money amounts. Ratings, Prices, Quantities, and measurements that use time. They are definite measures and can give a clear picture of what happens in a numeric or quantitative way.

Qualitative data include reviews, comments, opinions, observations, features, or ratings.

There are many methods available to gather this sort of data. Various tools and apps are available online and range in price from free to a price determined by how in-depth of an answer or information you're looking for.

Depending on what your goal is, it may simply be observing people, observing yourself, or simply even engaging in conversation with someone to get feedback on the information you’re interested in.

It will be your goal that determines what sort of information to gather and the method you’ll use to gather this information.

A - Analyze

After gathering relevant information, you’ll move on to the analysis stage of the RADAR decision-making method.

At this stage, you’ll want to identify your choices. In most scenarios, you will have more than one option to choose from when moving towards your aims. It’s important to know what those choices are. By being as specific as possible, you will have a better grasp of what options are available to you.

When you are proactive and you plan, you have time during your analysis stage to consider how a decision will affect you. What are the benefits of making one choice versus others? What are the drawbacks or detriments or choosing one option and not the next?

It’s important to know what you will absolutely not compromise on. Whether it’s something you won’t give up or action you won’t take, you have to know where you stand and what line you will not cross on your path to achieving your goal.

You also want to be certain about what you’re making a decision on. For example, let’s say you’re a fine cutlery vendor, selecting a restaurant to have an important lunch meeting with a potential client. The food at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in a sketchy part of town is incredible. However, if you're trying to make an impression and showcase the kind of establishment that your cutlery is used in, it wouldn’t be the best decision to go to the hole-in-a-wall restaurant. In this example, you’re deciding on whether you want to build a good relationship on a more personal level or whether you’re trying to make a good impression on a new client on a business level.

SMART-C to Qualify Your Decisions

By now, it should be clear that not every decision is one that is worthy of being chosen and acted upon. Before making any decision, it should be evaluated and qualified. Does it check off all the boxes of SMART-C?

SMART-C is a way to qualify and evaluate decisions, actions, and goals. As was covered in our last series of videos, SMART-C is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Timely, and Consistent.

By filtering your decisions using SMART-C, you determine whether a decision will At each step, are you being specific? Can you measure outcomes so you can track your progress? Is your decision actionable? Is it something you can act on or will it be an ideal that remains in your head? Are your options relevant and realistic to your overall goals? Are there timelines associated with your decisions? Is there an element of consistency between what you decide and what you’re looking to accomplish?

By using SMART-C to qualify your steps, you ensure that your decisions and actions will actually move you forward instead of just living in your head and not being implemented.

7 Deadly Sins to Qualify Decisions

In addition to using SMART-C to qualify your decisions, utilizing the 7 deadly sins, yes, those 7 deadly sins, are also a great way to filter to qualify your decisions. When you’re making a decision, you should ask yourself if playing into one of these sins is serving you in making your decisions.

The 7 Deadly sins come from Roman Catholic Theology and are considered by the faith to cause other sins and immoral behavior.

The 7 Sins are:

Pride

Greed

Lust

Envy

Gluttony

Wrath

Sloth

If your decisions are driven by any of these sins, you’ll want to question whether proceeding with this decision is helpful for your development and progress towards reaching your goal.

One useful way to utilize SMART-C and the 7 Deadly Sins as a way to analyze a decision is to think of SMART-C as the angel or voice of reason on one shoulder and the 7 Deadly Sins as the devil or voice of unreasonable temptation, on your other shoulder.

For example, you meet your friends at a bar and they start buying girls drinks, trying to impress them with how much money they can spend on drinks. You contemplate throwing your hat into this game because your pride is causing you to feel inadequate because you aren’t spending as much money buying these people's drinks. This is an example of how even just one of the 7 sins can influence your decisions and the motivations behind your decisions. Another example might be wrath manifesting itself in the form of rage, or greed in the form of hoarding buying and hoarding sneakers. You should be aware of these innate behaviors that reside within us and the positive and negative effects they could produce.

D - Decide

Once you’ve weighed all your options you’ll want to commit to a decision. By making a decision, you're able to focus your resources and efforts. You’re coming into this step knowing that you’ve done all your due diligence, considered benefits and drawbacks with the relevant information available to you, and committed to a choice.

A - Act

Execute your Choice. After making your decision, take action on your decision to move you toward your goal. Of course, when taking action, you don’t want to simply take action in any sort of haphazard way.

You want to have very definite steps to execute your plan. If you have a specific goal, have measurable milestones to meet along the way to achieving your goal. This allows you to not only reverse engineer the steps you need to happen but you also have clearly defined metrics to track your progress towards that goal.

R- Review

Evaluate Outcomes. See what sort of outcomes resulted from your decision and subsequent action. Be able to have specific metrics to compare your results.

It is a rare occurrence when decisions and actions go exactly according to plan. As a matter of fact, failure happens more often than success does. Despite the fact that it never feels good to fail, failure is life’s greatest teacher if you can take lessons away from the experience.

When you make a decision and it causes you to fail, the first thing you want to do is revisit the goal that you set for yourself. What results did your efforts produce and how close were you to the original goals? Or did you only later realize that the goal was a little too far-reaching or it wasn’t specific enough or relevant enough.

If you accomplished the first few steps of RADAR, you can’t have failed that severely. Even if you did, you’ll want to review both what went well and what didn’t go so well. Of the things that didn’t go well, what was in your control and what wasn’t within your control? The outcomes that didn’t go well that were in your control are the items you want to take your lessons from.

It is from this set of outcomes that you’ll want to focus your efforts on correcting and improving. By learning these lessons, you’ll be better prepared and equipped for decisions you have to make in the future.

Decision is Not Action

At the end of the day, decisions are important not just by themselves. They’re only valuable if you put action into your decisions.

There’s a fun riddle that illustrates this. There are three frogs sitting on a log. One of them decides to jump in the water. How many frogs are on the log? You might initially say the answer is 2. However, the answer is 3 frogs. Just because the frog decided to jump in the water doesn’t mean he actually did it.

Conclusion

Today, we defined what decisions are. We also went over different types of decisions as well and what factors might influence your decisions. We also discussed the importance of having a plan or method to making decisions by introducing the RADAR method, and how decisions don’t have any value if there is no action behind them.

You will be making decisions for the rest of your life. Be sure to keep practicing being proactive in making your decisions and reflecting on them so that you can make better and better ones as life goes on.

Thanks for joining us today and we’ll see you next time on the Modern Wisdom Guide.

Time. It’s a thing that we attempt to enjoy, manage, race against, and slow down. It’s something we can absolutely hate or absolutely love. How we use it determines whether we experience joy or pain. In regards to goals, it’s a guideline we use to track our progress.

Today we’ll be discussing why the element of time plays such an important role in achieving goals.

Time is a precious resource. Time is a component of life that can never be recovered or taken back. If you utilize it wisely during the process of accomplishing your goals, you will have a much smoother, more efficient, and ultimately enjoyable experience.

Definition of Time

According to the dictionary, time is defined as:

1. The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.
2. A point of time as measured in hours and minutes past midnight or noon.

Time is Not Unlimited

Have you ever thought about what you’d do if you could live forever? The possibilities of what you’d be able to accomplish and experience would be virtually limitless. Although it’s interesting to entertain the notion of having an infinite amount of the most precious resource, time, we are all bound by the constraints of a limited time on earth.

In the cosmic scheme of events, our lifetimes barely register as a blip on the timeline. In this limited duration, we are given the opportunity to utilize our time however we choose. It would be wise, whatever our objectives, to use time as effectively as possible.

That being said, there must be a purpose to achieve or a goal to attain to make the time count.

Know What You Value

What is considered valuable in life varies from person to person. For some, raising a family is most important. For others, career, money, or travel may be the most important. Some may be happy surfing every day while others will only be happy if they can afford the huge house up on the hill or command the respect or adoration of millions of people.

If the aim is to live the ideal lifestyle as you define it, it would be wise to use the limited precious resource of time to work towards that goal. To determine if what you say you desire is what you truly desire, ask yourself the following questions:

Who is the person you want to be?

What sort of lifestyle do you want to live?

When would you like to achieve your goal?

Where would you be, what physical location would you like to be at after achieving your goal?

Why is it important to you to achieve your goal?

How will you go about achieving your goal? What is your plan?

In order for you to have a clear direction on how to best utilize your time, you would have to have your goals clearly defined. By setting a schedule and timeline for yourself and consistently reviewing your progress, you demonstrate to yourself that you’re truly dedicated to moving towards that goal with your consistent, and relevant actions.

Time-Bound Goals

After identifying your goals and making sure they’re specific, measurable, actionable, and relevant, you’re ready to set realistic timelines to achieve your aspirations. Setting these timelines gives you the best shot at achieving your goal. In case things don’t work out, you’re still able to recover and pivot towards the desired outcome. Your timeline should have a start date and end date. This allows you to break down large tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks to ensure you put in the work it takes to achieve your goal on time.

You’ve only got 24 hours in a day. If you’re serious, truly serious about putting in the work to achieve your goal, you need to have tasks prioritized to ensure trivial tasks don’t overtake what needs to be done to achieve your long-term goals.

Whatever you’ve set your timeline at to achieve your ideal goal, give yourself a reasonable and realistic margin of error to allow for…well…humanity. Unforeseen obstacles and circumstances may arise that you’ll be forced to address in order to move forward. It could be anywhere from 10% to 25% time on top of your additional timeline. With this newly updated time, define the milestones you’ll need to reach by specific intervals to get a pulse on your progress. By tracking your progress at regular intervals, you’ll be able to see if you’re behind, on, or ahead of schedule and adjust accordingly.

For instance, let’s say you want to save $6000 over the next year to pay a down payment for a car. After your living, food, utilities, recreation, and other monthly expenses, you’ll want to set aside $500 a month for the next 12 months to achieve your goal of $6000.

However, just to be safe, you’ll probably want to add 25% to that timeline, so 3 more months, just to give yourself some space in case unforeseen events or bills come up.

You can check every three months that you’ve set aside $1500. If you’re behind, you know that you’ll have to save a little more in the following months to catch up. If you’re on track, wonderful. If you’re ahead of schedule, see if you can save even more so you have a larger down payment to reduce your monthly payments on your new car.

By setting a timeline to achieve your goal, setting up regular intervals to track your progress, and having precise, measurable milestones to reach, you set yourself up for successful results.

Where you don’t want to be is 12 months down the road trying to scramble for $6000 because you didn’t have a plan of action to save for your new car. Or, you would just have to give up on your goal because you just couldn’t bring yourself to create a plan and stick to it.

The Nature of Time Keeps Everyone In Sync

When working with a group of people, time is what keeps people together. Time is objective and definite, giving everyone in a group an undeniable metric to work off of.

Goals are set, and so are scheduled progress meetings. By scheduling these meetings and deadlines, a space is created for communication. Because everyone is there, and proper expectations have been set, everyone in a group is able to communicate openly and transparently. Feedback can be given between team members to move the team forward toward the shared goal.

Utilizing a bit of time each day to keep everyone in sync and make sure everyone is on the same page builds trust if everyone knows they are supported, heard, and appreciated.

Time Makes Decisions for You

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time”, is a quote from Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace.

What a powerful statement! The question you have to ask yourself is, “Are these warriors working for me or against me?” If you have a plan with a set timeline and you’re putting in consistent effort in relevant tasks, these warriors are working for you to help you achieve your goal. It’s as if you have a team working with you to help accomplish your goals.

However, if you have no plan, no timeline, are not taking consistent action, and not checking your progress, then patience and time can be the most ruthless and unforgiving warriors you’ve ever gone up against in your life.

It has been said that “time makes all decisions for you and time always says no.” Whatever you are after, whatever you’re hoping to achieve, attain, or experience, if you’re not putting in the effort, time will ultimately always deny you. This denial could come in the form of resources, opportunities, or physical or even mental health.

I’m sure you’ve experienced something like this before, where you failed to plan or take action and you lost out on what could have been a life-changing opportunity. Everyone has. The key is to not let time slip away and to really get a hold of how you spend your time so you live as rich and fulfilling a life as possible.

Time is Relative

When asked to describe his Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein said, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

An hour is a set unit of time and nothing changes that fact. However, depending on how that unit of time is being spent and what the context is, that hour can take on very different meanings.

You could spend an hour at the club and the time will fly by but if you’ve been sitting there for the last hour waiting for the receptionist to call your name at the doctor’s office, time seems to slow to a crawl.

When you are setting goals and taking action on those goals, the tedious nature of working through details, trying to get things right, or learning things can make the time seem quite slow-moving. It may even seem like barely any progress is being made.

However, the time spent putting forth a sincere effort working on a worthwhile goal is more than just the time being spent at that moment. The knowledge and experience you’re gaining start to compound along with the knowledge you’ve already gained. This expands your knowledge set and improves your ability to bring these lessons to other areas of your life.

Not to say that time spent in the club is good, bad, right, or wrong. Everything has its own rewards. You’re honing your social skills and dance moves at the club. However, the price for that may include a hangover the following day. If this is something that is acceptable to deal with, and you find value in that, by all means, every activity has its place.

Regrets

At the end of the day, you’ll rarely regret the things you’ve attempted and failed at but you will always regret the things that you’ve never tried at all.

Regret is such a painful emotion. This is because inherent in the context of regret, there was a result or outcome you really cared about that didn’t come to fruition because of your actions or lack of action. You know, as much as you wish with all your heart, you can’t turn back time. You very rarely get a do-over. On the same token, your mistakes and failures often turn out to be your greatest teachers, expanding your context and preparing you for success in future endeavors.

Our hope is that you understand, as early as possible, time truly is precious. Take a commanding, active role in setting meaningful goals for yourself and work hard to achieve them. No matter what, you will never regret working hard for something that is meaningful to you!

Conclusion

Author and Speaker Michael Altshuler said it best when he shared, “The bad news is that time flies. The good news is that you’re the pilot.”

Today we discussed the concept of time as it relates to goals. Because you don’t have an unlimited amount of this precious resource, it’s important to understand what you value most in your life. This will guide you in how to most effectively set your goals, and spend your time living a life that’s most fulfilling to you.

By managing your time and setting start and end dates for achieving your goals, you intentionally and purposefully utilize your time. Not only do you avoid having time to make unwanted decisions for yourself, but you bring time and patience to your side to create the results you want!

Finally, we implore you to start making the effort to manage your time. Regrets are a part of life but not all of them have to be necessary if you plan and take action confidently!

Thanks for joining us today and see you next time on The Modern Wisdom Guide.

Today we’ll discuss why being specific is essential for purposefully and intentionally moving you towards your goal.

Being specific in your goals offers valuable advantages. Your time and resources are utilized efficiently, your targets are clearly defined, and distractions are minimized because you’re focused.

When you’re able to be specific in your goals, the process of achieving them progresses in alignment with your objectives.

What Does Specific Mean

The dictionary defines specific as:

Clearly defined or identified.

Why Is It Important to Be Specific

Taking action is the biggest step you can initiate when you’re trying to achieve your goals. This makes sense because nothing happens if you don’t take any action. You don’t influence your world if you don’t take any action. As important as taking action is, however, just randomly taking action won’t necessarily move you towards successfully achieving your goals.

Let’s take a simple, real-world example. Imagine you’re at home and you want something to eat. You’re really starting to get hungry and your stomach is making loud growls to let you know you can’t wait much longer. There’s no food at home so you’ve either got to go grocery shopping to prepare food at home, get take out, go to a restaurant, or order something from any one of the food delivery services available.

Taking some sort of action is absolutely necessary if you’re going to satisfy your hunger. Is it enough to say, “I’m hungry? Is it enough to say I want food? Will getting in your car and driving without a set destination help set you on the path to satisfying your hunger? Of course not! You could be driving for hours, wandering around, and all you’d be doing is wasting time and gas. After all that, you still wouldn’t have satisfied your hunger!

I was just being facetious in this example but doesn’t that sound silly? The lack of specificity makes this course of action sound so ridiculous! So in your case, what would you do? You’d figure out what you’d like to have and what you’re craving, decide which option of getting the food you’d like to go with, and then head to that destination to order your items so you can eat!

You see here that by being specific, you are able to satisfy your basic urge to eat. Not only that; by being decisive and action-oriented, you were able to satisfy your hunger in an enjoyable and pleasurable way!

Like any task or goal, you’re trying to accomplish, being specific allows you to be clear not only in the next step but also in the next series of steps towards accomplishing your goals. You wouldn’t decide to get food and then not get off your couch. You wouldn’t get in your car and not turn on the engine. You wouldn’t get your food and just leave it on the table. Everything is very clear as to what steps you’re supposed to take and what comes next when you can be specific about what you’re looking to accomplish.

Being Specific is Nothing New To You

You’ve done it countless times. You’ve been specific with your objectives and achieved your goals more times than you can imagine in the simple act of getting something to eat to satisfy your hunger. In this example, there is no hesitation, no questioning as to, “will I be able to get the food?” Or “will I be able to eat it? Why?

You’ve successfully accomplished getting food so many times, that the small motions involved don’t even require a second thought. It has come down to simply making a decision and taking action.

Why is it that with certain things, you’re able to be very clear and specific? While with other things, you can’t seem to get a grasp on exactly what needs to be done? Often, not being able to get specific about goals boils down to a lack of familiarity. By definition, if you’re trying to accomplish something new, you’ve never done it or experienced it for yourself before. How do you know what to be specific about if you don’t even know what needs to be done?

The good news is unless you’re trying to reach some sort of new scientific breakthrough, that new thing you’re looking to accomplish has most likely been accomplished before. The first step is doing some research to find what information is accessible to you. The resources available to you are immense! From information online and coaches to classes and videos, there is a wealth of experience and insight available to help you come up with a plan to achieve your goals.

By defining your goal or defining what it is you want to accomplish, you can start to look for the information out there. See what order and what sequence things have to be accomplished in. Then create a plan for yourself and start taking action based on your plan and action steps.

How Do You Set Specific Goals?

The whole purpose of being specific when it comes to setting a goal is to be as clear as possible on what you’d like to accomplish. A helpful exercise is to answer the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions. A good tip is to physically write down your answers with a pen and paper.

Asking “who” identifies which individuals need to be involved to help you reach your goal.

Asking “what”, you define the goal or task you’d like to accomplish.

Asking “when” holds you to a timeline and keeps you accountable for moving forward towards achieving your goal, despite what obstacles or distractions may arise.

“Where” helps you define your goals if a location component is present.

“Why” clarifies a deeper motivating factor for wanting to achieve your goal. It’s the reason for and spirit of achieving your goal. A good practice is to ask yourself “why” three times to get to the heart of why accomplishing this goal is important to you.

“How” helps you outline the steps for your success. Answering this question, you’ll start to see your plan forming, and the action steps begin to reveal themselves.

By answering these questions, you will gain greater clarity regarding your purpose for achieving the desired goal and have a clearer idea of the specific steps to accomplish your goal.

Being Specific is Innate

The thinking, writing, and planning involved in defining your metrics may take some time at the outset. However, defining specific metrics to track and measure your progress really helps to smooth out the process moving forward and sets you up for success on the back end.

Being specific may seem tedious at first. It may even seem unnatural. The fact of the matter is, that being specific is actually innate. You’ve been doing it since the day you were born, taking a specific action, crying, to get attention so your mom feeds you. Have you ever seen how determined a baby is when learning to turn over? The baby keeps kicking and trying and reaching its arms out this way and that until he’s able to put all the pieces together to finally flip over.

The same goes for when the baby is learning to crawl and walk. All of their actions are focused on coordinating their arms and legs, controlling their balance, getting back up, and trying each time they fall. Although this baby obviously doesn’t know anything about being specific or setting goals, the baby does have something to do. It has to move! By trying new things, gaining strength, and slowly putting the pieces of coordinated movements together, the baby starts being able to crawl.

Humans have an innate understanding of being specific and an incredible ability to learn!

Reasons Why Being Specific is Difficult

If this is really the case, that we have an innate ability to focus, be specific, and learn, why is it that you find it so difficult to be specific sometimes when setting goals and tasks for yourself?

The fear of missing out is a big reason. We currently live in a time where we have more information available to us than at any other time in history. Social media allows you to see what people all over the world are doing, the things they have, where they’re visiting, and what they’ve accomplished. So many options look so incredible, that it’s hard to decide on any specific one.

You want to experience all of them so badly, that you can’t decide on any one of them and you end up pursuing none of them. The irony of this is, that instead of not being specific and decisive due to fear of missing out, the only way to experience more is by being specific, working on one thing at a time, and focusing on taking something to successful completion or implementation.

You may also experience analysis paralysis from all the available options. Trying to weigh the pros and cons of each course of action or waiting to see what others do can set you on a path to nowhere and a future of being stuck. This happens frequently but you never hear about experiencing analysis paralysis from lack of being specific because there are no results to show for it.

Another big reason you find it hard to be specific is that being specific keeps you accountable. Laying out definite, specific plans sets firm targets for you to meet. It removes any option of coming up with an excuse to not achieve something. For instance, what if work said that you have to come in but they don’t give you a time or a schedule. How do you know when you’re supposed to show up? What will you be doing there and what is the expectation of you when you are at work?

Being accountable to yourself is the most difficult. If you have a side hustle that you’re working on, and you don’t set a specific timeline or schedule for yourself, you most likely won’t get anywhere. There are no specific goals to reach, no specific timelines to follow, and no consequences felt.

You may think that goals and being specific aren’t that important and it’s not that big of a deal to not achieve or not accomplish. However, what’s tricky about learning and accomplishing goals is that the timeline is often so stretched out that you don’t feel the effects of not achieving until much later when it’s too late or takes too much effort to change.

Desire Clarifies Specific Need

Going back to the hunger example, why do you think that action, and more precisely, specific action was taken so quickly? First of all, hunger becomes unbearable after a while and if it’s not satisfying, you can’t think about anything else but eating. If you’re watching this from someplace in the world where food is accessible to you anytime, you’re able to identify what you want to eat and go take care of it immediately. You can even get food directly delivered to you from the comfort of home.

When setting the specific goals you want to accomplish, the element of desire is a powerful motivator to take action. You literally have to have a hunger to achieve a result because there’s no letting up until you reach the goal. When the desire is present, the specifics work themselves out because of your relentlessness to reach an objective.

After identifying and clarifying a specific goal you want to achieve, ask yourself why you want to achieve this goal. Once you’ve identified your reason why you absolutely must achieve this goal, you’ll find it easy to identify specifics.

CONCLUSION

Today, we discussed the importance of being specific in setting goals and tasks. Being specific keeps you focused on what needs to be accomplished, making the most efficient use of your time and resources.

Being specific in your goals is an innate behavior that you’ve had the ability to call upon since the day you were born. What you’ve been able to do naturally and organically for your physical survival, and can also be called upon to achieve your personal, career, or any goal you identify.

To help you set specific goals, answer The Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions about accomplishing your goal and you’ll be able to gain clarity on the specifics of achieving.

Finally, identify the why, the reason that it’s absolutely essential to accomplish this goal, and find the hunger to keep driving you forward.

Like eating is necessary for life, accomplishing your specific goals is essential to living a fulfilling life. We believe that wholeheartedly and we believe in your ability to achieve that!

Thank you for joining us today and we’ll see you next time on the Modern Wisdom Guide.

If you’ve ever been employed at a firm or large company, you’re familiar with tracking your progress, making sure deliverables are in on time, or pulling any one of a variety of reports. As a matter of fact, this is something that you revisit daily, if not multiple times a day.

What’s the purpose for all this tracking and having a pulse on activities happening within the firm? It’s to make sure that goals are being accomplished and that everyone is contributing to meeting larger company goals.

If you’re trying to accomplish things in your own life, outside of your job, you want to move towards your own personal goals in the same way. Namely, by taking consistent action on tasks relevant and related to your goals, and of course, measuring your progress.

Measuring your progress is arguably the most important activity you can perform aside from taking action when it comes to reaching your goals. By having a reliable gauge of what’s being accomplished, you’ll always have a pulse on the effectiveness of your actions, and what sorts of adjustments are necessary to drive forward towards your goals.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE MEASURABLE

According to the dictionary, to measure means:

To ascertain the size, amount, or degree of (something) by using an instrument or device marked in standard units or by comparing it with an object of known size.

OR

To estimate or assess the extent, quality, value, or effect of (something)

Both of these definitions imply that if something can be noticed, whether an effect, quantity, change, or phenomenon, then it can be measured. They also imply that there may be things we aren’t yet able to measure because we either don’t notice them or don’t have the sufficient technology, insight, or education to do so.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO HAVE MEASURABLE GOALS

When you set goals for yourself, take action, and fail to meet your goals, it’s most likely because you weren’t tracking your progress. You may have been taking consistent action, working hard, and working on relevant tasks. However, if you weren’t tracking how you were doing or you weren’t measuring your progress, how would you know when you’ve reached your goal?

On one hand, you may have been working for a significant amount of time and not made any progress. On the other hand, you may have been doing such a great job on something that you reached a milestone early. However, instead of moving forward to the next task towards accomplishing your goal, you overproduce in one area and underproduce or do not even start on the next task.

Imagine that you opened a bubble tea shop and you made an initial investment of $150,000. You took out a loan, borrowed some money from family and friends, and built out a storage space with all the required equipment.

First of all, if you don’t have goals for the shop and you’re just there to pass the time, your business will most likely not last very long or end up costing you a lot of money. However, if you have set goals that you’re working towards, you can measure and keep track of your sales. You’d have a clear gauge of how much you need to sell at given times to break even in six months.

If you’ve invested $150,000 and you want to break even in 6 months, after rent, cost of goods, wages, and insurance, you’d have to have at least profited $25,000 for the next 6 months to break even. If you wanted to break that down even further, and assuming you’re open 7 days a week, you’d have to profit about $893 a day to break even in 6 months.

With clear targets and timelines broken down into monthly, weekly, or even daily goals, there is no question as to what action needs to be taken. Your actions will be in alignment with your goals and you’ll always know the right direction to take.

KEEP YOU FOCUSED

Having measurable goals keeps you focused. You know what your running costs are and how much your profit is for each item. Of course, you’d want to make sure you sell as much as possible so that you can make your money back and turn a profit faster. Having a target and being able to measure your sales keeps you focused on the task at hand.

By being able to review your sales each day, you see which items are the most popular, what time of day the most sales are being made, you start to see trends over the course of weeks and months, and most importantly, you can make adjustments to how you’re running your operation to be more efficient, profitable, and enjoyable.  You’re able to clearly see the progress you’re making. This gives you clarity in regards to what needs to be accomplished and in what timeline.

In larger, more encompassing goals that have a lot of moving parts, measuring progress provides feedback and reassurance that the work being done is making a positive impact and moving you forward towards your goal.

Imagine if you didn’t have a goal of how much you wanted to sell each month. Each day, you go in and put in your time. if you make sales great, and if you don’t make sales, oh well. If someone asks you how your new shop is doing, you’d tell them, “I dunno.” That would not be a healthy place for you or your business to be in.

However, imagine if you’ve got sales goals or sales targets to reach monthly. The first few weeks are really busy as you’re learning and settling into the flow of everything. Then one day, after you’re in the flow of things, you take a look at your sales goals and see that you’re exceeding your targets! You feel so good and it just makes you want to keep improving the store and for you to push sales!

Having precise goals that are defined by measurable metrics such as time, money, or other quantifiable metrics keeps you focused. Distractions and unexpected events won’t throw you off course. Instead of being constantly reactive, having clearly defined and measurable goals allows you to be as proactive as possible. You set yourself up for success with measurable goals!

HOW DO YOU MAKE GOALS MEASURABLE?

To make a goal measurable, it should be able to be tracked with objective metrics, such as time, money, and other standardized units of measurement. Objective metrics are an important point because they are universally understood and accepted standards of measurement.

When it comes to your own personal goals regarding health, finances, or starting new habits, using objective metrics allows you to accurately track your progress. Take a weight loss goal for example. If you say that you want to lose weight with no further information, you’re bound to fail because there’s no timeline to lose the weight and no set amount of weight you’d like to lose.

However, if you say that you’d like to lose 10 pounds in the next 5 months, now you have a specific weight loss goal and a specific timeline that you’d like to accomplish this. You can easily track this on a monthly basis where you lose 2 pounds a month, or even on a bi-weekly basis where you lose a pound every two weeks. Having specific and measurable targets to meet along the way to accomplishing your goal makes it so much more engaging. Also, seeing your progress will make you want to continue taking action to move forward. It’s a positive feedback loop that gains more momentum with each go-around. To take the measurement even further you could track your caloric intake as well as calories burned from exercise to move forward towards your weight-loss goal faster. Once you see the benefits of measuring your progress, you’ll find it fun and exciting to keep yourself accountable for achieving your goals.

MEASURABLE GOALS KEEP YOU ACCOUNTABLE

Accountable?! Oh no, the dreaded “A” word!! Am I saying that you actually have to be responsible for doing something? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying! Being accountable to someone, even if it’s just yourself, helps to keep you on track.

There is no one that operates in a bubble, completely isolated from engaging with the rest of the world. As a matter of fact, anyone watching this is heavily engaged in the world. You watch programs on different platforms, explore things that interest you, and engage with others of similar interests. Either directly or indirectly, you interact with others.

Because of your engagement and interaction in the world, using objective metrics allows you to track your progress within a universally accepted framework. A second is a second regardless of whether you’re in Shenzhen, China, or New Orleans, Louisiana. A kilogram is a kilogram whether you’re in Bali, Indonesia or Paris, France.

This is important because building a habit of measuring yourself and your progress is actually building the habit of accomplishing goals. When you develop this capability over time, not only does your influence over yourself grow, but your influence and credibility with others build as well. As you repeatedly set measurable goals, track them, and accomplish them, you earn a priceless reward that no amount of money can buy; the confidence of knowing that you can create desired results!

MEASURABLE IN CONTEXTS

So far we’ve been talking about analytical measurements; having measurable goals and the importance of keeping targets quantifiable. We’ve also discussed the importance of using objective metrics with universally accepted standards of measurement.

Now, let’s go back to the second definition of measurement we mentioned at the beginning. That measuring could also mean estimating or assessing the extent, quality, value, or effect of something.  This is saying that instead of using numbers and quantities, measurement can be contextual as well.

For example, what if I asked you, how much you love your dog? You tell me that your dog is a part of your family and that you love your dog unconditionally because your dog loves you unconditionally. Would you love your dog any less if your dog always pees on your carpet? How about if your dog couldn’t contain its excitement and ended up biting your friend’s child in play?

Although you may not be able to put an exact number on how much you love your dog, you can look at the context of your experience with your dog and get a sense of how much you love him. Do you rush home from work every day to take him outside so he can pee and poop? Do you plan your schedule around making sure to get home in time to feed him? How much time do you spend every day taking him to the dog park so he can play? Do you take your dog to the groomers? How much money do you spend on him? Many couples have a dog before having kids. Is your dog as much a part of your family as your child? Do you love your dog like you love your children? Again, you may not be able to quantify the emotional love you feel for your dog. However, you can look at how much time and money you spend on his care to give you a contextual measurement of how much you love your dog.

MEASUREMENTS CAN ALSO BE EXPERIENTIAL

As we can see, context and actions taken in context can give you an accurate measurement of experiences. If your interactions and observations of a particular situation are positive, then your context forms a positive, safe, or desirable association with that experience. If those interactions and observations are negative, the context that forms around them is negative, dangerous, harmful, or something that should be avoided.

My favorite example of this is in horror movies where a bunch of teenagers sees the scariest, most dark, and eerie house you’ve ever seen and they decide, against all good judgment, to go in and explore. Obviously, the kids in the movie have never ever watched a horror film in their lives, otherwise, they’d know better than to walk into some abandoned haunted house where some crazy supernatural stuff is going to go down! If you saw a house like that, would your first instinct be to go exploring? Mine would be to get as far away from there as quickly as possible!

This reminds me of a saying, that youth is wasted on the young. What does that mean? In youth and early adulthood, you may not yet have had a wide breadth of life experiences. Because your scope is most likely limited to school, extracurricular activities, friends, and family life, you form your perspectives of life around those experiences.

However, in youth, there’s a vibrance, curiosity, vigor, fearlessness, and even recklessness that allows individuals to try new things, explore, fail, and get up and try again. As people get older, and they don’t have the right context to evaluate their experiences in adulthood, they tend to take more measured steps and be more averse to risk. If you look back on your life, could you imagine how different it would be if you had the right context to evaluate your experiences? Wouldn’t that curiosity, vigor, and fearlessness come in handy in a lot of situations in your life as an adult? For everyone, in their own way, I’m sure the answer is a resounding, “Of Course!”

This leads to the saying “If I could only go back to whatever age knowing what I know now…I would have blah blah blah.”

MEASURABILITY OF CONTEXT

Hindsight is a wicked tool. When you look back at events in your life, knowing what you know now, things that are so painfully obvious may have eluded you at an earlier time in your life. There are many correlations in regards to experiences that will give very accurate predictions on outcomes if you know what to look for.

For example, your grandfather was a doctor, and he always took your mom to the office with him. Your mom eventually became a doctor, and in turn, if your mother took you to the office as a child, the odds are pretty high that you will eventually follow in her footsteps and become a doctor as well. Constant exposure to the context of life as a medical professional colors your perspectives as to how life “should be” and that’s the way that life is going to be because that’s the only way that you’ve ever been exposed to.

Another example would be if you grew up in an abusive household. Your father or mother may have been physically or emotionally abusive as you were growing up. This being the context that you were constantly exposed to, you would naturally see this sort of behavior as normal, acceptable, and expected. So when you have a family, this is how you most likely will interact with them, if this is all you know. As the old adage goes, when you learn to interact with the world as a hammer, everyone else is a nail. When you grow up as a nail, you’re always looking for hammers.  

On the surface, these examples may seem to naturally happen in a very organic way. However, looking from the outside and understanding that there is a dynamic at work in regards to human behavior and developmental psychology, you can see that these outcomes could have been predicted with a high degree of probability. They ARE measurable.

MEASUREMENT IS NOT JUDGMENT

When there is education behind your observations, the contextual measurements of a situation can take on a whole new light. In the examples of the family of doctors and the family of abusive individuals, understanding how behaviors get replicated and repeated allows you to make a measurable prediction about what will most likely happen. As a matter of fact, FBI profilers utilize these measurable behaviors frequently in their work. By reverse-engineering these contextual measurements, FBI profilers are frequently able to find people with a high degree of accuracy.

Some may make a quick judgment to say that exposing a child to a stable profession is good and positive. Some may say that exposing a child to abuse is negative. However, the purpose of measurements is not for you to make a judgment on a situation. This is a really crucial point, so I’ll say it again. The purpose of taking a contextual measurement is not for you to make a judgment on the situation.

The contextual measurement is just an EVALUATION of a situation. The crucial point is to use that measurement, use that evaluation, and then take appropriate action towards creating an outcome that you desire!

In other words, how are you able to make a good decision if you’re not able to quantify or contextually measure the foundation, the basis, and the fundamental components of that decision? When forced to make a decision without focusing on fundamental, measurable components, people will most often fall back on emotions to make their decisions. Are they feeling good? Are they feeling bad? Whatever they’re feeling, that is what determines the course of action they take.

Emotions make people unreasonable. As a result, decisions made based on emotions will also be unreasonable. For example, if you’re out having drinks already acting sloppy because you’ve drank more than your limit, is it a good decision to drink more because you’re having a good time? Or, if you’re feeling sad because you just had a big argument with your significant other, are you going to skip work on the day that you have to give an important presentation to what could potentially be your company’s largest client? Do you only act when fear or anxiety kicks in because a deadline is a next day? Or can you take action, proactively, ahead of time because you know time is being measured and action was called for five days before the deadline?  What goal are you trying to achieve and how will this contextual measurement help you make a decision on the best course of action to move you forward?

At any given moment, you are working with a set of knowledge, context, and experience that you will base your contextual measurements on. Your perspectives and understanding of how the world works are determined by this set of knowledge. For the most part, you accept things as they are and don’t question whether things can be different or not.

There may come a time when you experience interaction or encounter a situation that you’ve never experienced before. At first, it almost doesn’t register because it’s unlike anything you’ve ever experienced prior. The interaction may only have to happen once or depending on the type of impression or effect it had on you, it may have to occur multiple times. This new interaction eventually becomes a part of your knowledge and experience set and you then begin to incorporate this experience into your contextual measurements.

For example, let’s say you grew up in a small town where it’s common to share things. There is an understanding amongst everyone in your small town, that if someone shares something with you or does you a favor, you will share something or return the favor the next opportunity you get. Then one day, you move to a big city for school or a new job. You’re still operating on the knowledge set that you had when you were living back in the small town. You do nice things for people and share the things you have, but everyone ends up asking you to do things or borrow things and they either never give it back or never return the favor. Most of the time, they don’t even say thank you!

Of course, after this happens over and over again, you make a contextual measurement than a judgment using your knowledge set, that people in the city take advantage of people and they aren’t nice. Everyone is a selfish person and there isn’t a sense of community. Is this an accurate statement? Or would it be fairer to say that everyone has so much going on and has so much to do, that there isn’t time to slow down and focus on the aspect of connecting through human interaction?

It is transformative when you come to the realization that your experience and knowledge set can be expanded. It is also transformative when you can put new experiences into context to make positive choices based on fundamental measurable components instead of on emotions.

In the abusive family example, let’s imagine for a moment that you are that person who grew up in an abusive household. According to a study conducted in 2014 by Christopher Wildman, an associate professor of sociology at Yale University 12.5 percent of children have been the victim of at least one episode of abuse or neglect by age 18. It has been confirmed that children who have experienced abuse or neglect are statistically more susceptible to physical and mental health problems in adulthood. They also face higher suicide risks and run into trouble with the law.

Over the course of the first few years of your life, there may have been a tremendous amount of reinforcement that it is normal for parents to be abusive. You may have gone through years of living life and having interactions influenced by this filter. Then, events in your life drive you to want to learn more and understand why you act the way you do. As you become further educated about the patterns of behavior and how childhood experiences form a foundation for how you view the world, you start to gain a greater understanding of the drivers of your own behavior.

You become more conscientious about your behavior and recognize patterns that lead to undesirable results, results that go against the ideal vision you have for yourself.

Through becoming educated about the dynamics of how your childhood in an abusive household influences your behavior presently as an adult, is it enough to be aware of?

Is it enough to have developed the contextual measurement to recognize when you’re about to set in motion a series of actions that will produce undesirable results? Is it ok for you to know that you’ll very soon be predictably hurting yourself or someone you love?

No of course not right? And this is the difference between a measurement and a decision. Just because you can predict something is going to happen is not the same as taking action to prevent it from happening. Ask yourself, is this the result I want? Will this move me forward toward my goal? Make a decision and then take the appropriate action. You’ll be surprised at how effective you can become.

FOCUSING ON POSITIVE

You will most often hear about negative situations in the news, crimes, conflicts, pessimism, and fear. Consuming too much of it can actually be quite toxic. When it comes to contextual measurements, what is presented most is simply a measurement and evaluation of a situation.

Presenting a judgment or taking a stand is often seen as being biased. Moreover, if a stand is being taken, or a judgment is made on measurement, it’s too far removed to affect you in any personal way. When it comes to taking decisive action to move towards a more ideal result, this rarely ever happens.

Now that you have been made aware of contextual measurements and you start paying a little more attention throughout your day, you’ll observe measurements, and subsequently, decisions are being made almost constantly. As a matter of fact, it is estimated that adults make around 35,000 decisions a day.

The challenge now is to start producing positive actions utilizing your ability to measure, both analytically and contextually. In the family of doctors, one would imagine there were many conversations of a parent or grandparent explaining medical concepts to a child.

This does not have to be limited to conversations between family members, or topics on medicine. It could happen between anyone, and the topic could be about producing positive and desirable outcomes. Here again, measurement comes into play as there needs to be a connection and openness to listen and understand before successful communication and positive action can take place.

Given the landscape of how information is presented and consumed, and how it has colored the way people make measurements of their world, this is a daunting task. The change in your world must start somewhere. It might as well be with you!

CONCLUSION

We discussed why being able to measure progress is absolutely essential to accomplishing your goals. If you’re able to measure your actions, you set yourself up to effectively track your progress, make necessary adjustments, and have clarity on what it takes to accomplish your goals. In addition, you’ll know when you’ve reached your objective because you have clearly defined what metrics define success.

We discussed how using objective metrics and universally recognized standards in analytic measurement helps you navigate the path to success within the framework of the world you operate in.

We also delved into context, something that isn’t often discussed when referring to measurement. We discovered that contextual measurement is the basis of the actions we take and explored how in spite of our circumstances, greater education and greater context equips you to be proactive in creating the results you want.

Finally, we challenged you with a call to utilize your analytic and contextual measurement ability for the purpose of affecting positive change in yourself and the world.

Thank you for joining us on the Modern Wisdom Guide.

DEFINITION OF RELEVANT

The dictionary defines relevant as:

closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered. Or Appropriate to the current time, period, or circumstances; of contemporary interest.

This basically means that if you have a specific aim or something that you’d like to achieve, your actions and goals for forwarding progress should be closely related to that achievement.

For instance, let’s say that you’re working towards a health goal of losing 20 lbs in the next 5 months. All of the milestones that you set should be relevant to your goal. Maybe you say that you want to lose 4 lbs a month each month for the next 5 months. Or, it could be that you meal prep for the days that you go to work. You could even add going to the gym for 45 minutes per session 3 times a week. All of these goals would be related to your overarching goal of losing 20 lbs in the next 5 months.

However, if you’re saying to yourself, I need to get a more fuel-efficient car to get to the gym. Or, I better spend 5 hours curating different music playlists for my workouts. Or more commonly, I better get some new workout clothes so that I look good as I’m posting my progress on Instagram. All of these things may seem relevant but ultimately, having a more fuel-efficient car, a great playlist, or nice-looking outfits for the gym have nothing to do with the actual work of lifting weights, doing cardio, and watching your diet to help you achieve your weight loss goals.

KNOW YOUR OVERARCHING GOAL

It can’t be overstated how important it is to be crystal clear about what you want to achieve. You’ve got to know your ultimate goal so you can have a target to refer to as you’re taking the action steps to move you forward towards your goal.

Let’s say that you’re in New York and you’ve decided to do a cross-country road trip to Los Angeles. Along the way, you plan to visit some of America’s most iconic landmarks. You’ve done your research, packed up your supplies and provisions, rented a car, planned out your itinerary of the locations you’d like to visit along the way and set off.

Starting off in New York, you visit Niagara Falls, and then you’re on your way to Chicago for a Cubs Game and Chicago’s deep dish pizza. After that, it’s onto Badlands National Park in Wyoming, then Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. The next destination is Jackson Hole Wyoming for white water rafting after which you’ll be heading to Yosemite National Park. Finally, you’ll head out for the last stretch of your trip to Los Angeles.

If you didn’t have a final destination or a plan or schedule as to how to get there, you’d be driving aimlessly just taking in the sites. You’d run the risk of running out of food, gas, or money. If you didn’t have a final destination and didn’t know where you were going, it would be impossible to know when you’d arrive. You could have been driving around in circles for weeks only to end up 30 miles from where you first started.

Like having a set destination, it’s important to have a goal or a target. In the last example where the person didn’t have a target destination, he was wandering aimlessly for weeks, which could have easily turned into months or years. There was no way to manage resources, time, or himself because he didn’t know what he was managing for. The craziest part about all of this and it’s interesting to note, he was not afraid to take action! There was nothing holding him back! Imagine the incredible things he could have experienced and accomplished if he had a goal to work towards and a solid plan!

KNOW YOUR TARGET REVERSE ENGINEER YOUR STEPS

Going back to the well-planned cross country traveler, once he had a target, he could basically map out all the steps it took to get from step A to step Z. Using maps for locations and calculating travel times, and google for research on what to do at different destinations, the traveler basically worked backward or reverse engineered his trip so that he could have the experience of a lifetime driving cross country across the United States.

He could always refer to his itinerary and plan to make sure that everything was moving in the right direction. Even if he got sidetracked for whatever reason, there was always something to refer to help him decide what was relevant to his trip and what wasn’t.

In the same way, when you have a goal, and a plan to reach that goal, you’ll be able to identify what sort of action and activity is relevant to achieving your goal.

In our cross-country road trip example above, of course, this wasn’t the first time that anyone has attempted this endeavor. After all, someone made the roads to connect all the destinations. There are signs to direct people on which routes to take, gas stations and food stops along the way, and even voice-assisted GPS that tells you when and where to turn. It may be easy to forget, but the modern conveniences we have at our disposal are pretty incredible.

Many of the goals you’d like to accomplish for yourself professionally or personally have been accomplished before and so there already exists a reference or template as to what steps are required and what is relevant to achieving your desired goals.

TIME AND RESOURCES ARE LIMITED

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel and that’s a wonderful thing! Much of the information we’re looking for is literally at our fingertips through a search online. Instead of having to spend tremendous amounts of time through trial and error figuring out what the pieces of a puzzle are, we can dedicate our time towards how to put the pieces together in the most efficient way.

Efficiency is a big consideration! It doesn’t matter what situation you’re in, or what you’re after, time and resources are limited. This is especially true when it comes to being relevant with your goals because you have to be realistic as well. Errors and things not working perfectly have to be built into your considerations because even with all the information available about how to proceed, it will be your first time going through this process.

Some of the questions you want to ask yourself are:

Do you know what metrics to keep track of?

Do you have a way to collect the information you need?

Does your timeline keep your goal and actions relevant?

An example of this is training for a marathon. For anyone that’s ever completed a marathon without training for it, you know how excruciating it can be when you haven’t trained, don’t have the right gear, and you don’t know what to expect.

If you’re trying to finish a marathon in a specific time, you want to keep a certain pace. Luckily, all you really need to keep pace is a stop watch or smart watch. What type of training schedule do you have and are you building up your distance? Have you allotted yourself sufficient time to get your body used to running 26.2 miles?

In regards to keeping training relevant, weight lifting, speed training, or vertical jump training would not be relevant to successful marathon training. For the marathon training example, all relevant actions just happen to be actionable since it’s all revolving around getting out and running the miles!

CHECK YOUR PROGRESS CONSISTENTLY

What determines relevance all depends on the nature of the goal you're looking to achieve. However, one constant across any goal is that progress and actions need to be monitored consistently. This way adjustments can be made and actions can be modified to stay relevant and on track.

When information is present, it is often presented as a snapshot, a data capture or a reading of a moment. However, when you start to piece those moments together, a more complete picture begins to emerge. You start to see trends telling a story of what is occurring over time.

By understanding trends, series of events, or patterns of behaviors, you’re able to not only anticipate events with a higher degree of confidence, but you’re also able to take the appropriate and relevant actions to move towards your goals.

Situations are always dynamic. It doesn’t matter if it’s on the scale of fractions of a second like in stock trades or chemical reactions, or decades like climate change, or millions of years like the movement of tectonic plates. Environments are always changing and checking progress consistently will keep your actions and goals relevant!

KNOW YOUR WHY

There’s a story by Heinrich Boll about a fisherman and a businessman.

One day a fisherman was lying on a beautiful beach, with his fishing pole propped up in the sand and his solitary line cast out into the sparkling blue surf. He was enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun and the prospect of catching a fish.

About that time, a businessman came walking down the beach trying to relieve some of the stress of his workday. He noticed the fisherman sitting on the beach and decided to find out why this fisherman was fishing instead of working harder to make a living for himself and his family. “You aren’t going to catch many fish that way,” said the businessman. “You should be working rather than lying on the beach!”

The fisherman looked up at the businessman, smiled and replied, “And what will my reward be?”

“Well, you can get bigger nets and catch more fish!” was the businessman’s answer.

“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman, still smiling.

The businessman replied, “You will make money and you’ll be able to buy a boat, which will then result in larger catches of fish!”

“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman again.

The businessman was beginning to get a little irritated with the fisherman’s questions. “You can buy a bigger boat, and hire some people to work for you!” he said.

“And then what will my reward be?” repeated the fisherman.

The businessman was getting angry. “Don’t you understand? You can build up a fleet of fishing boats, sail all over the world, and let all your employees catch fish for you!”

Once again the fisherman asked, “And then what will my reward be?”

The businessman was red with rage and shouted at the fisherman, “Don’t you understand that you can become so rich that you will never have to work for your living again! You can spend all the rest of your days sitting on this beach, looking at the sunset. You won’t have a care in the world!”

The fisherman, still smiling, looked up and said, “And what do you think I’m doing right now?"

Obviously what the fisherman considered important had a different context from what the businessman considered important.

The lesson here is to ask yourself not only what you value but more importantly, why you value what you do. This ultimately determines what is relevant to you.

Suppose you wanted to be a musical recording artist or pop star. You have no clue how to break into the industry and so you fall back on what’s familiar to you, going out clubbing.

You think that to break into the industry, you should party like how the artists party, and hopefully, some famous artist or producer will see potential in you and take you under their wing. This is one approach. Although not impossible, the odds of this happening are very low.

It would be more appropriate and relevant to learn about music, singing, dancing, etc and put together a portfolio of your work and look for an agency to sign and invest in you. Although speaking to multiple people in the industry and having them suggest this same course of action, you don't heed their advice.

This is when you have to seriously ask yourself, “Is becoming a recording artist seriously what I want or am I more interested in the lifestyle that they live?” There is a big difference. Actually becoming a pop star requires a tremendous amount of work with no guarantee of success. Living that pop star lifestyle is easily accessible if you have the resources and stamina to maintain that lifestyle.

Even in an example such as this, circumstances, desires, and goals change. As a result, what you consider relevant will change as well.

CONCLUSION

Today we talked about what relevant means and why having relevant goals is crucial for you to achieve your aims. By knowing what your overarching aims are, you’ll be able to take appropriate and relevant actions to move you forward. Having clarity allows you to reverse engineer your goals to take the right steps. Being aware that time and resources are limited and checking your progress consistently keep you on track towards your achievements.

Finally, having a clear and honest understanding of what you value will help you determine what is most relevant to you. This way, you’ll work towards goals that align with what’s truly important to you!

Thanks for watching today and we’ll see you next time on The Modern Wisdom Guide!

Goals have been a part of our lives since we were little babies. Our pediatricians would provide us with growth and behavioral milestones to track our development. Elementary schools would give us guidelines as to what abilities or skills we should have at different grade levels. In High schools and universities, how well goals were met were measured with grades which would determine whether we could advance to higher levels.

Although many of our early goals revolved around education, all areas of our lives have goals to achieve. It could be health, career, hobbies, finances, or even personal development. Having goals is an important part of successful achievement. There is no doubt about that. A particular aspect of creating goals that are often overlooked is to keep them realistic. Being realistic with the goals that you set for yourself will set the stage for the greatest chances of success.

DEFINITION OF REALISTIC

What exactly does keeping your goals realistic mean? The dictionary defines realistic as “having or showing a sensible and practical idea of what can be achieved or expected”. For example, if you’ve never exercised before and then you say, tomorrow, I’m going to do 100000 sit-ups. This is simply not realistic. It would be more realistic to say, after acknowledging that you’ve never exercised before, you’re going to do three sets of 5 repetitions of getting up from sitting in a chair.

Being realistic means that you acknowledge your current state, you’re aware of the resources in your environment available to you, and you acknowledge your own skill sets and capabilities. If there’s an opportunity to translate Japanese to English for a program from Japan, and you don’t speak any Japanese, then it would be unrealistic to say that you could be successful at this opportunity.

Another example might be purchasing a million-dollar home. What would be your plan for that? If you don’t have a job, no savings, and no experience in real estate, and you say, “it’s easy, just make a million dollars first then buy the house”, this is not realistic. It would be more realistic to say you’re going to get your real estate license, learn the market by representing clients in buying or selling houses under the mentorship of a real estate broker, and then save your commissions to put a down payment on a home with a mortgage you could afford monthly payments on.

No one is telling you to not have lofty and ambitious goals. As a matter of fact, it’s great to have lofty and ambitious goals. Just set yourself up for success by setting realistic goals for yourself to achieve until you’ve created an environment in which your ability and resources available to you make your lofty goals a true possibility.

WRITING DOWN YOUR GOALS

One of the most deliberate acts to achieve something is writing down your goal. Writing your goals on paper is the first step in transforming them from a thought into something tangible. You’re manifesting it into reality. A Dominican University of California study conducted by Gail Matthews, which we’ll post a link to below, demonstrated that people who have written down their goals accomplish significantly more than those who don’t.

New Year’s Resolutions are a perfect example. Have you ever been so excited about the new year coming around so that you can have a fresh start to make some positive changes in your life? We’ve all been there, saying to ourselves, “I’m going to get into the best shape of my life this year!” Or “I’m going to stop eating fast food cold turkey.” Yes, the prospect of “being in the best shape of your life” or “stop eating fast food” sounds exciting but without writing it down and without a plan you’re bound to fail very quickly.

As a matter of fact, only 46% of people who actually set a resolution and write it down, are still successful after 6 months. Merely 4% of people who had similar goals but didn’t set resolutions were successful after 6 months.

If you really want to accomplish something, make sure to take that crucial first step. Write down your goal. Not only does the physical act of putting pen to paper and sticking it somewhere where you can see it everyday make it real. It also allows you to be reminded of it consistently, and it makes your goal a relevant part of each day. In every single person’s life, there are simply too many responsibilities and distractions to keep something as meaningful and significant as a personal goal, lost in a mental pile in your head.

NOT OPERATING IN A BUBBLE

I’m not exaggerating when I say mental pile. Did you know that the average person has around 6000 unique thoughts per day? With so much going on in your head, and knowing that the brain can only focus on one thing at a time, making time and having concrete action steps scheduled becomes even more crucial for the successful achievement of your goals.

As much as you might like to think so, you’re not operating in a bubble. You’re not separate from the environment you're in and trying to act upon. However, many people make goals without taking certain factors into account and they unknowingly set themselves up for failure before even taking action.

In a perfect world, our own effort and grit would be all we’d need to achieve our goals. For certain things where achieving a goal solely involves our own efforts, the work that needs to be done is straightforward. Learning a new skill, getting back into shape, being a better spouse or parent, mostly involves us practicing and developing new behaviors. Unfortunately, for goals that require the interaction or participation of others to become successful, other factors have to be taken into account.

For example, if you were looking to start a business, do you have the money and time to commit to getting started and getting it off the ground? Do you have the right knowledge set to accomplish what you need to do? Is your geographic location suitable for what you want to achieve? Is what you want to do legal?

Let’s say you were in a particular state that has not allowed legal recreational use of marijuana but you hear about how lucrative this business could be. If your goal is to start a marijuana growing business, trying to establish it in your home state wouldn’t be realistic because of legal barriers.

But then you decide to relocate to Colorado where recreational marijuana use and starting a grow business is legal. Now the question is, do you have the knowledge to set up a grow operation? If not, who will you partner with to help you obtain and nourish your strains? Who will be your clients and do you have the avenues of transportation to transport your harvest to where they need to go?

You would also need to think about potential outside threats to you accomplishing your goal. How are your competitors? Do you have enough of a differentiation to bring value to your clients in a way that your competitors can’t?

As you can see, depending on what your goal is, you would have to have an honest assessment of your environment and what factors you’re dealing with so that you can successfully achieve your goal. There are a lot of things to consider.

REALISTIC IS NOT ANALYSIS PARALYSIS

What is important to remember is your intention and objective. All of this planning and consideration is for the purpose of taking action! I’ll say it again, all of this planning and consideration sets you up for success by setting realistic goals. In our video on Being Action Oriented, we discussed one of the main indicators that result inaction is Analysis Paralysis.

There is a crucial difference in considering factors to set realistic goals and analysis paralysis. In considering factors to set realistic goals, the intention and eventual outcome is to take action and move forward. In analysis paralysis, considering all these factors forms the basis for not taking action.

These two processes are approaching the same set of facts and factors with two different contexts. In goal setting, the context is being solution oriented and having a realistic view of what it will take to accomplish a goal. Subsequently, appropriate actions can be taken. In analysis paralysis, the context is being a deer in headlights, overwhelmed by all the considerations and staying stuck, paralyzed by all the things to consider. In one, your focus is on success through considerate action while in the other, your focus is on feeling overwhelmed and failure by default from inaction.

Examining these two contexts leads us to the most important factor in determining the outcomes of setting realistic goals. This most important factor is of course, you.

PLANNING FALLACY PHENOMENON

You could have the right context and intention to take action towards accomplishing your goals. You may have an accurate assessment of the environment, people, culture, and every other factor that is worth considering and you’ve set realistic goals based on your assessment. You’ve looked at everything outside but have you looked inside and made an honest assessment of your own abilities.

There is a phenomenon called the planning fallacy phenomenon. First proposed in 1979 by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the planning fallacy phenomenon is “the tendency to underestimate the amount of time needed to complete a future task, due in part to the reliance on overly optimistic performance scenarios.”

In other words, you think that you’re more accurate, skilled, and capable than you truly are and you assume everything will go as planned without a hitch. You already know, based on prior experience, nothing ever goes perfectly the way you planned. As Captain Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr, the American aerospace engineer responsible for the eponymous Law stated, “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

To address any setback you might experience from the planning fallacy phenomenon, set realistic deadlines for yourself and add a 25% to your estimated time. Know your overall goal and prioritize the smaller goals along the way to maximize your efficiency. If at all possible, use history as a guide to help you anticipate what obstacles you might encounter, either from what you’ve experienced or what competitors or people after the same goal may have experienced.

Being realistic with your skills and potential setbacks you may face during the process of achieving your goals is one of the biggest ways to set yourself up for success. Ultimately, there is one aspect about yourself you must be brutally honest with to have truly realistic goals.

HONEST LEVEL OF COMMITMENT

This specific aspect I’m referring to is your level of commitment. During the many obstacles, trials, and tribulations you’ll encounter on the road to success is how important it is for you to stick it out and push through in spite of all the difficulties.

In 1991, John Meyer and Natalie Allen introduced the Three Component Model of Commitment. Although they introduced this model in the context of employees committing to their organization, I believe the principles they introduced do apply to understanding yourself when setting realistic goals.

The first principle is Affective Commitment, where you feel a strong emotional attachment to your organization and the work you do there.

The second principle is the Continuance Commitment, where you weigh the pros and cons of leaving your company, (or give up on your goal). You may continue to move forward because you realize that quitting or giving up is more painful than pushing forward towards success.

The third principle is Normative Commitment, where a sense of obligation is keeping you at your job or keeping you pushing forward even though you’re having an unpleasant or negative experience in the process.

If your goal resonates so strongly with you, there is absolutely no way you will stop until you achieve that goal. It's important to understand what accomplishing this goal means to you and why it’s so important to you.

You may have heard the phrase before “know your why”. When you understand your “why”, you will have a better assessment of your level of commitment. This way, you will know whether it’s worthwhile to keep pushing forward towards success with this realistic goal, or revise your goal so that they have the most meaning or significance to you!

CONCLUSION

Today, we discussed what it means to have realistic goals. By taking the important first step of writing down your goals on paper, you take the first step in bringing it from thought to reality. We also discussed accurately assessing your environment for resources, skills, obstacles, and pitfalls will help you determine what goals are realistic so you don’t set yourself up for failure. Finally, we talked about the most important factor in setting realistic goals, you. Namely, having an honest assessment of yourself and your level of commitment towards achieving your goals.

By taking these points into consideration, you set yourself up for success because you’ve identified a set of realistic goals to take action and work towards. We believe in you and your potential.

Thank you for joining us today and see you next time on The Modern Wisdom Guide.

Hey everyone, welcome to The Modern Wisdom Guide. In today’s episode, we’ll be talking about consistent action and why consistent action is a crucial element in high achievement.

Who This Video is Not For

But before we get started. Let’s go over a few groups of people that this video might not be for.

You Resist Planning:

If you’re someone who resists planning, this video might not be for you. You’ve been told to plan all your life and it’s gotten to the point where being told to plan sounds like a broken record. However, if you are actively, intentionally resisting planning, you’re making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for you to be consistent.

Procrastinator:

If you’re a procrastinator that likes to enjoy your free time and wait until the last minute to take care of important tasks, this video might not be for you. It’s difficult for procrastinators to take action on a consistent basis as they’ve developed a tendency to save large, involved tasks until the very last minute to be done in very short bursts of time. This pattern of behavior doesn’t allow for the benefits that can be reaped when work is done on a consistent basis.

Being Reactive:

Are you a reactive person, someone that doesn’t take action until a person or situation forces you to act? Do you put yourself into a situation where your car breaks down before you fix it? Are you a person who knows that the refrigerator is empty before you go grocery shopping? If you require this sort of external stimulus before you take action, this video might not be for you.

Immediate Gratification:

Finally, if you’re someone that needs to see results instantly and lives in an environment of requiring instant gratification, then this video is not for you. We will be talking about big accomplishments and goals that are generally realized over a long period of time, not just within minutes, hours, or even days. As the adage goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and your biggest visions for yourself won’t be realized in a day either.

Consistent effort creates the right foundation to achieve big results over time. The more consistent you are in your actions, the greater your chances of achieving the results that you’re after. It doesn’t have to be a massive, earth-shattering result, it could be as simple as getting up earlier in the morning. It could be writing a schedule. It could even be remembering to take all your medications.

Consistent action is what sets you up to make massive changes in your behavior so you can do the work it takes to reach your goals. So, if you’re a procrastinator, if you’re someone who needs to be constantly motivated by some external factor or someone that requires immediate gratification, this video is not for you.

Definition of Consistent Action?

What does it mean to be consistent in your action? The dictionary defines being consistent as “constantly adhering to the same principles, actions, form, etc”.

The keyword here is constant. Having continued and persistent action over time.

Wherever you’re at in your life right now, it’s the culmination of your actions and inactions in the face of circumstances that you’ve encountered. If there are any specific areas in your life where you’re not feeling content with how things are turning out, it’s due to being consistent in a way that you may not have intended.

In this video, we intend to share insights into why consistent action is so important, reasons why consistent action isn’t being carried out, and suggestions on how to incorporate and implement consistent action into your life to move towards desired outcomes.

What is Consistent Action?

Consistent action is performing a task or working on a skill on a regular, ideally scheduled, basis. When there is consistency, there is a degree of proactiveness involved. There is an intent to create a scenario where production, practice, and refinement can happen. An expectation is created for all involved which allows roles to be created and clearly defined. Specialization can happen and further development and innovation can occur.

Consistent action creates an opportunity where you notice details that you may not have noticed or paid attention to before. When you become aware of these details, all of a sudden you can start incorporating or refining subtle nuances in what you’re working on.

An example of this might be a master sushi chef or Itamae. In the process of becoming a sushi chef, you start off at the very bottom, being a cleaner at the establishment.

After 5 years of working under an Itamae, the apprentice is promoted to making rice. As each sushi establishment has its own recipe, the apprentice must learn to achieve the perfect balance of rice, salt, and rice vinegar in making the sushi rice.

Once the Itamae is satisfied with the sushi rice-making skill of the apprentice, a promotion to wakiita will occur where the apprentice works closer to the Itamae and is responsible for such tasks as preparing raw ingredients, grating ginger, preparing blocks of fish, and slicing scallions.

During part of this training, it may even involve giving hand towels out to patrons. The handtowels have been soaked in extremely hot water so it can get to be a painful task. They have to be able to handle this hot water before being able to handle fish.

After further years of training, the wakiita will be advanced to a full-fledged Itamae capable of running his own establishment. By the time a sushi chef has been doing this for ten years, can you imagine the amount of subtle or tiny details that they’ve learned to observe?

Honing a craft like this consistently over the course of years, sometimes even decades is what creates masters of their craft.

Another example of the power of consistent effort is investing money. Imagine a person starts to invest in stocks or a specific fund starting from their first job. They consistently set aside some pay from each paycheck to invest. If they end up working for 30 or 40 years, a consistent investment like this could mean that when they retire, there will be millions of dollars for them in their retirement fund.

The Crucial Element of Time

In the last two examples of the sushi chef and investing, the critical element of consistent action is time. By performing a specific task or action over a longer period of time, they were able to build upon earlier steps to achieve a final result that would be hard to imagine when they first got started.

In this current age of technology, we have all been trained to embrace instant gratification with the absurd paradigm that being good at something is about investing the minimum amount of time and effort.

Posts are made to be liked on social media. In fact, social media itself is a form of instant gratification. The instant gratification created in social media is scientifically designed. It happens with the immediate release of dopamine as soon as that “thumbs up”, or even “thumbs down” is clicked.

But the granddaddy of immediate gratification is, of course, Las Vegas, the dream and possibility of a lifetime’s worth of income with a pull of a handle. Everyone is hoping that they’re lucky enough to have just the right timing to be able to cash in on something that will yield dramatic rewards.

If you’re one of those people, you are always looking for the next new thing or next big trend to get in early and cash in on. What most people fail to realize is Apple didn’t have a meteoric rise to be the world’s most valuable tech company in a couple of years.

As a matter of fact, to think that Apple could compete against a behemoth like IBM at the time would be considered laughable! It took time, patience, forging ahead even on the brink of bankruptcy, and consistently innovating and refining until they claimed the spot as the world’s most valuable tech company.

Patience is truly a virtue. Can you develop the patience required to practice something consistently for years and years without seeing results? In the music world, Bruno Mars is a perfect example.

He started performing with his father's group when he was just 4 years old, going on stage in Waikiki in Honolulu, Hawaii to perform as little Elvis. He then appeared on other people’s songs, singing the hook or chorus. As time went on, he gained more and more experience in honing his craft, perfecting his signature R&B style.

One day, you might all of a sudden realize that they’re playing different Bruno Mars songs on the radio. You’ve become familiar with his songs and know many of them by heart. Seeing his performances and concerts all over the world, there is no doubt that he’s an international superstar. You might say that he took 25 years to become an overnight sensation.

So what is it that you want to achieve? Do you have the patience, and to a certain degree, faith, to practice something consistently for years or decades without showing results? Can you be so focused on your craft or diligently working towards your goal until one day, the preparation that you’ve been putting in for years allows you to recognize and take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?

If the answer is no, then you’ll want to sit down and do some examination into what you would be willing to consistently put work into as this will be the vehicle for your success.

Opportunity Costs of Commitment and Consistency

Almost every single person out there is not willing to put in the work for years to achieve a great, or world-class result. I know this for a fact. If you look around at your circle of friends, or even just the people that you spend the most time around, is anyone performing or engaged in some sort of work at a world-class level? For most people, the answer is no.

If you ask anyone what they like to do in their spare time, some common answers are to go out with their friends, engage in their hobbies, watch Netflix, etc. You would never hear anyone say that they are working on their craft. Why is that? Because all around us, marketing, social media, and entertainment have trained us to work most of the time to pay the bills, and have a day or two of enjoyment for weeks and weeks on end. Our ability to get that desired dopamine rush is consolidated into short moments…

In the little spare time that you have, you want to avoid thinking about your work and just have a few hours out of the week to yourself to enjoy the things you like to enjoy. You might not want to give up this time to work on something that will provide you with much greater rewards if you just spent some consistent time to develop, learn and grow. The fear of missing out is real and great.

What are you really missing out on though? Drinking with your friends? Trying to hang out to be a part of the cool kids? Playing video games? It’s so much easier to like social media posts and live a relatively stress-free life than actually put yourself out there and go through the sacrifices, delaying gratification, to achieve something great.

I remember reading an article about how there’s a place that has decorated its interior to resemble a realistic replica of the inside of a private jet. People can actually pay to rent out this interior for their social media posts. I get it. It was to post so that they could get likes for showing how awesome their jet-setting life is. The only thing was that this was completely fake.

I get it. And I’m not knocking anyone for wanting to be an influencer. But even for the true influencers out there, the ones that are actually getting paid and can make a living off their online social media presence, even they are putting-in consistent work. They have to be! Think about it. If they weren’t posting consistently, how would the influencer be able to keep a place in the minds of their followers? Why would their audience care to follow them if there wasn’t constant new content to look forward to?

These successful influencers are traveling to different places, engaging their followers with questions, soliciting opinions, and consistently giving their followers a pulse on their lives. With their consistent effort, as their content gets more refined and engaging, their subscriber base grows and they will probably get approached to do paid collaborations. At this point, these sponsorships and collaborations could bring them thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.

Any attempt at high achievement is never guaranteed. However, it is absolutely true that in order to accomplish great things and realize great aspirations, consistent effort is required. Sacrifices will always be made to deny yourself momentary immediate gratification to set yourself up for lasting success. When you make the choice to be dedicated, focused, and put in consistent effort, you position yourself for great achievements!

Consistent Action Requires Sacrifices

Consistent action, with a strong intent to achieve some great result, requires sacrifices. The sacrifices are in the context of the habits and behaviors that make you the person you are now. Tony Robbins once said, “In essence, if we want to take control of our lives, we have to take control of our consistent actions. It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives but what we do consistently.”

Your life as it stands right now is the culmination of your habits and what you’ve been doing consistently. If you’re not satisfied with some particular aspect of your life, then you’ve got to take control and change what you’ve been doing consistently to change the result you’ve been getting.

This is not easy. Ask anyone who’s tried to lose weight, quit smoking, stop drinking, or get back into shape. Let’s take losing weight for example. You’ve gotten to be overweight because every day after work, you like to get drinks with your friends. When you’re drinking, you like to have some tasty, but unhealthy food. After you’ve got a good buzz going, it’s time to wrap up and go home since you’ve got work the next day.

When you’ve been doing this for years on end, it’s hard to change this behavior. Imagine telling your group of friends that you’re going to start going to the gym. At first, they might even start laughing at you or cast doubt upon you by saying, “let’s take bets on when you’ll be back drinking and eating with us after work.” (If you have friends like this, it might be worth it to sit down and seriously evaluate how much time you want to spend with them).

The sacrifices that you’re going to start making are in the context of the person you are now, the person that is just getting started on this journey to accomplish something. You are denying your current self, the person you are in your current state, and the comfort of an established routine. You are choosing change and change will always be uncomfortable. You might not have ever been in shape in your life. You might not have ever even stepped foot inside a gym before! As a matter of fact, you don’t even know how to work out!

You get to the gym and start warming up on the treadmill for a few minutes. You walk a quarter-mile. It’s not much, but it’s a quarter-mile more than you would have walked if you went out drinking and eating with your friends! You don’t even know what exercises to do so you just start picking up some weights, the heaviest ones that you can handle, and start lifting. Your form is completely wrong and if you continued to do it this way, it could lead to injury.

The next day, you just decide to go home after work. On the second day, you notice that your body is absolutely sore but you decide to go back to the gym. You set a plan to go 3 days a week and you start keeping track. One week passes, then two, then a month, then three months. Up to this point, you’ve been consistent and have gone to the gym a total of 36 times. You notice that you're starting to slim down a bit and in certain areas, you can even see a little definition in the muscles!

Because you sacrificed the comfort and pleasure of old behaviors and took consistent action towards accomplishing a goal, You’ve established a new habit and behavior. Your health improves dramatically. In fact, it goes so well that even your doctor said that if you continue, you’d be able to stop taking 3 of your four meds.

When you have something worthwhile to work towards, the rewards and accomplishments will make your consistent effort absolutely worth the sacrifices!

Consistent Action Maintains Relevance

There are many areas in your life that are competing for your attention. Your family, career, social obligations, health, and personal development are all demanding to be the top priority in your life.

Have you noticed that what you plan for and are consistent at maintains its relevance in your life? You go to work when you’re scheduled to go to work. If you’re lucky, it’s a job that you love. If not, you may have a side hustle that you’re working on that you’d eventually like to turn into a full-time gig to support yourself and your family.

You’re already trained to go to your job. Of course, because if you don’t, you won't get a paycheck! However, if you’re not taking consistent action with your side hustle, you won’t gain the traction you need to get it off the ground generating income. Sure in your mind it may be a priority, and you have the intention of making it a top priority, but without consistent action, it will always just remain that, a side hustle.

Another example of relevance maintained by consistent action is sports. If you’re a star basketball player with tremendous talent but you only show up to practice when it’s convenient for you, do you think you’ll maintain relevance on the team? Probably not. As a matter of fact, you might get kicked off the team for not taking the team seriously. The same would go for a coach. If you’re a coach and are supposed to show up to each practice but only show up to games, you probably don’t have relevance or influence with the team.

To keep yourself or anything you’re involved in relevant, consistency is the key.

5 Tips to help you Be Consistent with your Actions

By now, we have a good sense of why consistent action is important. We also understand that in the midst of naysayers, distractions, and sacrifices, taking consistent action over time is an essential component of high achievement. Now, how do you incorporate and implement consistent action into your life to create and sustain your desired outcomes?

1. Be Clear with Your Intent and Goals

Before you can take consistent action in something, you want to be very clear on what you want to accomplish. Whether it’s losing weight, learning a new skill, starting a side hustle, or getting into a new profession, you want to be very clear with what you are trying to achieve.

Something important to remember, especially if you’ve never accomplished this goal before, is that you don’t have the proper context or experience to truly grasp what you’re trying to accomplish. You’ve seen people become successful at what you’re trying to be successful at. Try to talk to them, get some insights on the process of what it took for them to get to where they are today. How long did they take? Were they intentional or did things just happen by chance? If they don’t mind, ask them to share a story from their journey.

When you can present yourself as someone serious about achieving something, most of the time, not always, but most of the time, people will be very willing to share how they got to where they’re at.

Figure out the reason why you’re doing this. During the obstacles and challenges that you’re bound to encounter on your journey, you’ll be referring back to your why very often.

Set a deadline for yourself. A lot of things are out of your control. The mistake that most people that fail at trying to accomplish a goal is that they spend too much time and effort on what they can’t control. Instead, focus on what you can control and set a deadline for yourself. As major and lasting change doesn’t happen overnight, think of what you want to accomplish and set deadlines for yourself.

2. Plan out Tasks that Support Your Goals and Follow Them

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, it could take a really long time or a relatively shorter time. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll want to plan out tasks that support your goals.

Why does planning help you with being consistent? Well, how can you be consistent at something if you don’t know what you have to do? There are simply too many things to keep track of in the day to remember every single thing that you have to do. Often, sitting there trying to remember what tasks need to get don’t, only leads to more sitting and thinking until nothing actually gets done.

Not only that. Give yourself the best chance to be consistent by being honest with yourself. Acknowledge that you don’t have a superhuman memory and write things down in a schedule. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You could use the Getting Things Done system or even more simply, use the calendar and reminder apps in your smartphone to schedule tasks that you’ll visit at least once a day.

One of the biggest advantages to this is that you won’t have to dedicate your mental capacity to remember things if you have them written down. This frees up your mind to reflect and mentally process your actions to refine them even further.

3. Review Your Progress Daily and Weekly

Reviewing your progress daily and weekly based on the schedule that you set for yourself is so crucial. Doing this, it allows you to consistently have a pulse on your progress and you’re giving yourself feedback in the form of the scheduled reviews.

There will be times when you’re ahead of schedule and other times when you’re behind schedule. Reviewing your progress daily and weekly will help you make adjustments to how you’re working towards your goals. Have you ever been in a school where your teacher only lets you know how you are doing at the end of every quarter or semester? I’ve seen examples where a progress report of a student comes back at the end of the semester saying, “they need to work on their reading comprehension”.

Well, wouldn’t it have been nice to know way earlier on at the beginning of the semester instead of at the end when grades are already in and there’s nothing you can do to change this? This is why it’s so crucial to have a pulse on your progress.

4. Keep Yourself Accountable to the Process first Before the Result

When you’re starting off on your journey and looking to learn something new or accomplish a great achievement, sometimes you might be so focused on the goal that you forget this is a process.

You’re not working on accomplishing something. In actuality, you’re working on growing into the person you need to be to accomplish that thing. To be fair to yourself, keep yourself accountable to the process of consistent forward action. Don’t stress yourself out by saying, I’m not there yet, I haven’t achieved it yet. You’re discounting and not giving yourself credit for the time you’ve put in and that you’re continuing to put in.

When the world is conspiring against you to keep you the same, do yourself a favor by being kind to yourself along the process of consistent action. Keep doing this until you’ve gained so much knowledge and experience that the world starts to conspire for the new self that you are working to become.

5. Reward Yourself for Your Consistency

Finally, reward yourself for your consistent action. When you act consistently and are making forward progress, treat yourself to something. Having a positive association with completing tasks positively reinforces this behavior so that you’ll want to continue being consistent.

Of course, if you’re trying to reach a diet or health goal, don’t reward yourselves by eating all the things you used to eat before that got you into this situation in the first place! Find a reward that is in alignment with the successful achievement of your goals through your consistent actions.

For instance, if you’re trying to lose weight and you’ve been successful with going to the gym and staying disciplined with your diet, treat yourself to a delicious meal at a restaurant you’ve always wanted to try that follows the guidelines of your weight loss plan.

If you’ve been working on putting together a blog or a YouTube channel and you’ve been consistent and diligent with putting out great content, treat yourself to some outdoor activity and a change of scenery to refresh your mind.

The greatest reward is that you’ve been keeping at something long enough that a new habit forms and consistent action become a part of you!

CONCLUSION

Today we discussed why consistent action is a powerful practice in the pursuit of high achievement. If you are a person who is content being a procrastinator, needs constant motivation to take action, or must have immediate gratification in any task you do, then this video was of little value to you.

However, if you are willing to put in a committed and consistent effort, have faith in the process of deliberate action, and are willing to persist despite sacrifices, you have set yourself on the path to higher achievement.

By having clear intentions, planning and scheduling tasks that support your goals, reviewing your progress on a regular basis, being accountable to the process, and rewarding yourself for consistent action, you will be able to incorporate consistent action into your life.

Thanks for watching today and we look forward to seeing you next time on the Modern Wisdom Guide.

Are any of these statements true?

- You’re not happy with your life.

- Things aren’t going your way.

- People don’t trust you.

There might be a simple explanation.

Hi, this is Mike with the Modern Wisdom Guide.

I’d like to talk to you about a debilitating failure in your life. It's the reason you’re not happy with how your life is progressing, it's the reason people don’t trust you... it’s ultimately the cause of your missed opportunities. These negative results stem from not being action-oriented.

Let’s get a few things out of the way…

Do people call you ‘lazy’? What is lazy? By definition, lazy is ‘unwilling to work or use energy’. You just don’t want to do things…for yourself or others. If you don’t experience a feeling of anxiety or stress when something needs to get done, you might just be lazy.

Imagine you walk by the kitchen and you see a sink full of dirty dishes. Food has been left out on the counter and is starting to attract ants and roaches. Instead of walking over and washing the dishes, dumping the food, and cleaning the counter, you just grab a drink from the fridge and plop yourself down in front of the TV. Basically, if you know there’s something to do, but choose not to do it, not from malice, but just choose not to do it, you’re probably lazy…and if you are lazy, this video isn’t for you.

Are you an irresponsible person? Irresponsible by definition is ‘lacking a sense of responsibility’. And Responsibility itself is ‘the state of being the person who caused something to happen’ or ‘a duty or task that you are required or expected to do’. But with ‘irresponsibility’, you do NOT have a sense of duty to something which is required of you. You may not be aware of your responsibilities–especially if things have always been done for you– or you are aware of your responsibilities and your promises to do your duty but choose not to do them instead. These ‘empty’ promises mean nothing more than the words being said and are then forgotten. If you are truly irresponsible, you are oblivious to the things which need to be done, the responsibilities. They aren’t even in your thoughts, not on your radar, it’s as if they didn’t exist. That being said, if you are irresponsible, truly irresponsible, this video is not for you.

Are you stubborn? The dictionary states Stubborn is ‘having or showing a dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something, especially in spite of good arguments or reasons to do so’.

You don’t do something or even take action to prevent the successful completion of that responsibility because you don’t believe in it even after it is proven to be right or true,

You might even have malice or vindictiveness behind this detrimental decision.

You might be adversarial to others and utilize a key position you control or block the progress of others in spite of your own well-being.

This basically means you don’t give a crap what is expected of you and you don’t care what happens to you OR others; basically, maintaining your stance is more important than the good of everyone.

Let’s go back to those dirty dishes.

Someone in your family left those dirty dishes in the sink.

You make a decision to teach this person a lesson at the cost of the health and hygiene of your family and the cleanliness of your home.

If this is you, and you consistently make these kinds of decisions and they are acceptable in your life, then you are probably stubborn and this video is probably not for you.

For people who are ‘truly’ lazy, irresponsible, or stubborn; action is not important, not even recognized, or something to wield as a weapon. These people usually behave in this manner because their environments and support systems enable these unproductive and basically detrimental behaviors…for these individuals, good for you, if you are living a productive and sustainable life while not being responsible to take action for yourself or others, God and the universe has blessed you and the knowledge and introspection we’ll offer in this video probably won't help you.

But, if you are conscious of missed opportunities in your life, if you are aware of difficulties, in particular, your inability to take action…then this video might be for you.

Let’s talk about being action-oriented…

Action is the fundamental building block of success.

In all probability, the biggest reason you’re not achieving the results you're seeking n in your life is you’re Not Action-Oriented.

Something needs to be done and you just don’t do it.

In order to CORRECT THIS, you need to NEED TO IDENTIFY THE CAUSE of this behavior.

You’ve got to PAY ATTENTION  TO INDICATORS.

A seemingly harmless, but DEBILITATING INDICATOR is believing you’re LUCKY.

Having a Lucky Mindset

Actually believing you’re lucky, in other words, having a lucky mindset, is operating with an oversimplified focus that luck is the most important factor when any sort of success happens. You acknowledge that other factors are involved to a certain degree, but the emphasis, the primary reason that success occurs is luck.

Some individuals actively believe they’re lucky, you can find these people pulling the handles of slot machines in Vegas. But most people don't even know they’re operating with a lucky mindset; these people can be heard saying things like ‘the virus won’t affect me or my family’ or “things always seem to work out for me in the end”.

Someone with a lucky mindset might say, he’s so lucky to have such a successful business. She’s so lucky to have such a loving family. He’s lucky he’s so healthy. There’s a focus only on the result or outcome. There’s little to no acknowledgment given to the amount of work put in over a period of time to bring about a successful result. Without acknowledging the work it takes to make something happen, people operating with the lucky mindset sabotage themselves with a false expectation that great results come easily and quickly.

When you’re operating with a lucky mindset, you do the bare minimum of work you THINK it takes to accomplish something, sometimes no work at all believing that praying will make things happen. There’s also an underlying belief that every single step will proceed with a flawless execution the very first time without any need for practice or preparation.

If you’re operating with a lucky mindset, you have an idea for something important and become fixated on the dream of a ‘perfect’ outcome. It could be a business opportunity that could make a lot of money. It could be a weight loss plan that promises an amazing transformation. You become entrenched in a daydream about how successful your endeavor will be but the steps to get there and, of course, the actions it takes to ACTUALLY achieve this end never happen.

A trademark of having a Lucky Mindset is being so convicted of the impact of positive thinking, that simply thinking positively and believing that you are lucky, is enough to bring great results. You sit there with no physical action having a firm conviction that positive thinking and belief in your luck will perfectly accomplish the countless steps it takes to achieve a successful result. You’re convinced thinking positively and believing that you are lucky is reason enough to do nothing and to leave everything up to chance…because it was meant to be. You believe that through positive thinking and belief in your luck, you guide chance in your favor at every single step to have things fall into place perfectly without having to take action…because you’re just that good.

The odds of continuous perfect outcomes at every step with perfect timing are virtually impossible. No one is that lucky. Unfortunately, individuals with Lucky Mindsets don’t understand that Success is the result of both luck and more importantly, consistent hard work. It is the intersection of opportunity (luck) and ability (action).

Imagine a sliding scale that shows success as a combination of luck and hard work. On one end of the scale is luck. On the other end of the scale is hard work. People who operate on a lucky mindset will sit more towards the side of the scale where more luck and less hard work is the cause of success. More realistically, successful people will sit farther toward the scale where success is more from hard work than from luck.

The main distinction between consistent hard work and luck is that the choice and ability to work hard is within your control while luck is completely out of your control. Through your actions, you act upon your world and environment. Having a purely lucky mindset is about giving up your ability to influence the world with a belief that your desired result will magically happen.

There may come a time when someone with a lucky mindset takes action in some way that gives them a positive step forward towards their goal. If they can do this enough times and make the connection that taking action brings desirable results. The conditioned stimulus of taking action combined with the conditioned response of desired outcomes will wean those people off the lucky mindset. Eventually, they’ll see that they generate their own luck in the form of opportunities that arise from taking action.

Fear of Failure

If there is a great result you want in your life, and you successfully understand and get past operating solely with a lucky mindset, the next limiting indicator you’re not taking action is being consumed by a fear of failure. This fear of failure prevents you from taking action because you think what you do will fail and you'll be labeled a failure.

Like a lucky mindset, as well as all of the ‘indicators’ in this video…The irony in being consumed by a fear of failure is that you fail by default because no action is ever done on your part to influence success!  An example would be a runner who is so scared that he'll lose the race, doesn’t even cross the starting line, and therefore loses by default.

Failure is inevitable, it is a fundamental building block of learning. Failure is when the universe holds us accountable for our actions, inactions, and inabilities and reminds us that what caused a particular failure is what NOT to do in future performances. Failure is an integral part of every process! The bigger the goal or achievement, the bigger the failures you’ll experience along the way.

If you have a fear of failure, somewhere along the line you were probably made to feel embarrassed, ashamed, guilty, or belittled for not meeting an expectation. This probably happened very early in your life. At this impressionable young age, a negative association with failure formed powerfully and quickly without someone there to provide a positive context for why some event had an undesirable result. As such, this created an aversion to taking action on issues that make you accountable for negative results. Unfortunately, this aversion also keeps you from taking action on issues that could generate great success and reward.

The richest and most fulfilling experiences in your life are full of failures and setbacks along the way. Instead of having a fear of failure, give yourself grace and let failure become your teacher! Get up and try again. Your future self will thank you for learning from failures and being smarter, stronger, and more successful for doing so!

Procrastination

If you’ve made it this far and you finally get over having a fear of failure, you’ve started taking action and moving forward. The next indicator I’d like you to be aware of is procrastination. Procrastination is waiting until the last minute to take action which leads to failure.

Instead of front-loading tasks and taking care of everything as soon as you become responsible for them or well before the tasks are due, someone who procrastinates will backload their tasks, addressing these tasks without a responsible grasp of the time or effort it will require to complete properly. Not only do they address responsibilities at the last minute, they also unrealistically expect an acceptable result if completed. You leave for work at 7:59 with full knowledge work begins at 8, having an unrealistic expectation of the time it will take you to get there and your ability to address any reasonable problems along the way which might delay your progress. This is also known as ‘setting yourself up for failure’.

Procrastination transforms a desire to do well and good intentions into a frantic and stressful attempt to save yourself from failure. Instead of allocating a reasonable amount of time to the pursuit of excellence and success, procrastinators are scavenging time from other obligations and compromising excellence for survival. The lesson here is ‘speed is the enemy of accuracy’, or in other words, if you’re trying to get something done in a fast and hasty manner, you’ll be sacrificing accuracy as a result.

Procrastination is a behavior that starts off with you saying to yourself, “maybe if I wait long enough, I won’t have to do this” or “if I wait long enough, maybe someone else  will do this for me.” It’s a passive attempt to avoid responsibility. Some people do this because it makes them feel in control, making others wait for them; some are just going through psychotic states, playing video games before school; and some just have an ignorant overestimation of their own ability to get things done.

Procrastination will always set you up for failure. Procrastination puts a strain on relationships, responsibilities are compromised, trust is broken, respect is lost and animosity follows. Simply put: people can't count on procrastinators. It leads to a lack of trust because people will start seeing they can’t depend on you to perform good work. Procrastinators often fall into a spiral of self-deprecation, often losing sight of higher achievement. Any way you look at it, procrastination will always lead to failure.

Waiting until the last minute to do things doesn't make obligations go away or make them less important. It makes important future obligations the failures of your past, creating a habit and a running track record of failure. The remedy to procrastination is to set task-oriented deadlines for yourself and respect those deadlines. You’ll find that your respect for yourself grows as your respect for completing tasks grows.

Analysis Paralysis

After overcoming a lucky mindset, fear of failure, and procrastination, the last indicator we’ll be addressing that can lead to inaction is analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis is the state of being self-overwhelmed with a seemingly endless decision tree based on actual and anticipated results from facts that actually or are assumed to exist. This basically means that you’re thinking and planning so much, for every single possible outcome, that thinking and planning become more important than taking action. In fact, taking action isn’t even on the radar anymore.

In the most extreme cases, you wouldn’t feel ready to move unless you’ve thought out every single situation that could go wrong. This is absolutely debilitating. Weeks, days, years, and decades could go by thinking and planning without a single action that would move you even one step towards successfully achieving your goals.

You are operating under the impression that you have the ability to account for every single circumstance before you act. Without getting started you’re unable to collect real data points, feedback, and experience. Even with data points, feedback, and experience, trying to anticipate every single possibility of failure and success and solutions for each of their instances would be debilitating. Most paths to success are littered with small successes and failures. You would only know what modifications need to be made to your plan by taking action and receiving feedback on successes and failures. If you have never taken action or have never gone through experiences of overcoming an obstacle, how would it even be possible to anticipate what can, might, or will go wrong? It would be a decision tree from hell based on nothing but theory and conjecture.

For as much thinking and planning that happens in analysis paralysis, the actual implementation of this plan is not even a priority. Why? Because there’s so much to plan for there’s no time to take action! Analysis paralysis tricks you into believing that anything other than a complete plan will set you up for failure. You spend precious time, energy, and resources planning for something that you forget needs to be implemented. The action of taking action becomes more and more distant in your mind’s eye. What happens over time, analysis paralysis leads to the inertia of non-action that becomes exponentially more difficult to reverse the longer this behavior continues.

The best remedy for analysis paralysis is taking action. It brings your awareness to the present moment and keeps you engaged on what is working for you and what needs to get revised and improved. Planning should never be more important than taking action. So start taking action, and learn from the mistakes and failures that will inevitably come up.

EXAMPLES:

Now let’s examine how these patterns of negative behavior operate in the real world…

Learning a New Skill: Electric Guitar

Let’s say you want to learn to play the electric guitar. The first thing you’ll need is an electric guitar and an amplifier.

Then you’ll need to learn the basics of the guitar so you go onto YouTube and see that there is a virtually endless selection of videos teaching the basics of guitar. After a barely half-assed attempt to learn, you decide that it would probably be better to get lessons but then you keep putting it off because you don’t know what to look for in a good instructor. This is an example of analysis paralysis.

As you go along, dabbling, dragging your feet on putting off good, honest practice, you learn that there’s so much equipment available out there, tuners to be able to tune your guitar, locking tuners for your strings, music stands, loopers cables, more powerful amps with more features, and the list goes on.

You become overwhelmed and put things aside for a while. Days, weeks, months, years, and decades go by and one day you look at your dusty guitar in storage, if you ever even bought one in the first place, and think to yourself, yeah, I wanted to learn guitar once!

What indicators do you see? Having a lucky mindset, thinking, “how hard can it be? I just have to practice right?” You start practicing and of course, your fingers don’t have the muscle memory to play like the more skilled players you see on YouTube and you don’t want to try anymore because you’re just not getting it; you’re afraid to fail. Then you might get caught up in all of the equipment available and become overwhelmed then not buy anything. This is analysis paralysis. Finally, instead of practicing and slowly, consistently building your skill. You procrastinate. You just keep putting the learning off and eventually die without learning even the basics of guitar playing.

You can see those seemingly harmless thoughts will lead to seemingly harmless behaviors. These behaviors might not have a big effect on your life at the moment, but over time, these behaviors will lead to lost opportunities throughout the course of your life.

Going on a Date

Going on a date is another example. You’re sitting at a coffee shop and you see someone that looks like the love interest of your dreams. She’s sitting there doing some work on a computer and you make some observations. She’s using a Mac, you see that she’s drinking tea not coffee, and she has been texting with someone over the last few minutes and laughing as she messages. You think to yourself that you’re going to approach her and talk about how you recently read about how the Japanese Tea ceremony tradition started. Or you could talk about the newest MacBook Pro and the capabilities of the new chip and impress her this way. She’ll be so impressed with your technical knowledge and how cultured you are, that she won’t be able to resist giving you her number.

STOP.

You’re experiencing analysis paralysis trying to figure out the best approach and you get so caught up in your head about how different scenarios will play out, that you don’t even approach her in the first place. Instead of being in your head, come up with a very simple, one-step plan to approach her and start up a conversation. Simply walk up and say hello and carry the conversation from there!

Perhaps you did get her contact information and the conversation goes surprisingly well after you made a decision to say hi and be friendly and engaging. She agrees to go out to dinner with you next week. All week you think about the best restaurant to go to. You’re so excited to go out on a date with her. You’re so excited about the dinner date that you keep putting off making a reservation at your favorite sushi restaurant. On the 6th day, you call and see if there are reservations. But because you waited until the last minute, there are no reservations left. You procrastinate, thinking that you were going to be lucky since the hostess at the restaurant knows you and would be able to work her magic and get you a table. It turns out that the restaurant is just too crowded and there’s nothing the hostess can do. After not getting your first choice restaurant, you pick a time at a different sushi restaurant that comes in a close second according to restaurant ratings.

On the night of the date, your mind is already planning out how the conversation will go. You want this dinner to go so well and you want to win her over so badly that you’re again, trying to plan out all the ways that your date will love you. “What should I tell her about myself? Should I try to impress her with the school I went to? Should I tell her about all the people I know? Should I tell her about all the different places in the world I’ve visited?” STOP! Again you’re experiencing analysis paralysis or a fear of failure that they might not like you if they knew the person who you really are. Instead of being focused on what-ifs, start being present, being yourself. Be assertive and make it an intention to ask her a question as much as you like to talk about yourself.

Develop a sense of recognizing when these indicators arise. Catch yourself. It’s rare that you’ll have the companion of your dreams just walk into your life out of nowhere. Plan to take action at every opportunity. This is why you want to be proactive. The worst that someone can say is no. Know what you are looking for, and know what you want. If you want to be treated well, don’t stand for anything less than what you deserve. Have a plan on where you’d like to go and what you’d like to do on your date. Not only is it attractive to have a plan and lead, it also conveys confidence and the ability to accomplish things. Finally, it’s foolish to expect perfection for anything the first few, or realistically, the first few dozen times you do something. The main thing is knowing that failures will always be a part of getting good at something. Take your lessons from your failures and keep trying.

Getting a Job

Getting a job is one of the most important tasks that you’ll have in your life as this is what allows you to support yourself and if you want, eventually a family. This can be a very smooth, or excruciating process depending on your attitude and approach.

You may start off by searching or bookmarking available positions you see on a job posting site. After a while, you take your time and some of those jobs may still be there, but many won’t be. You only go through the first page of job postings and think that’s all the research you need. Although there are hundreds of jobs, you don’t feel the need to search further because you believe you’ll land a good job. Having a lucky mindset, you operate with the least amount of work and expect CRM results.

Working on your resume, you get so caught up in getting the perfect formatting, you almost forget that your goal is to find a job. Doubt creeps in because your GPA wasn’t very impressive and you think that any employer will see the GPA and refuse to even give you a callback. This is an example of fear of failure. You don’t even want to try for a dream job with great benefits, work hours, and pay because you have an unreasonable fear that your GPA has relegated you to jobs no one else wants because of your grade point average. Be assertive with your goals. If your goal is to get a job that you want, quench inaction from fear of failure by knowing what skills you bring to the table, according to the needs of the job.

When you get called in for an interview, you do your research about the company 5 minutes before the actual interview and then walk in trying to keep it all together and hope that the interviewer doesn’t realize that you were so last minute in what you needed to do. Instead of procrastinating, create a plan to narrow down 5-10 of your most desired jobs. Have a clear picture of what your skill set is and make sure that they match the required qualifications. For each company, know their competitors, and do your research prior to the interview to know competitors, what the company does, and some history of the company you’re interviewing at.

Being proactive and taking the time to prepare can give you such a big advantage when looking for and going through the action steps of finding a job. Not only will you be more confident because you know what you have to offer, but you are also aware that you are interviewing the company just as much, or even more than the company is interviewing you! When you take the right and consistent action to grow your skillset over time, you build more and more leverage for yourself to create the best outcome, landing an incredible job!

Conclusion:

We talked about why being action-oriented is a cornerstone of your success and how taking action allows you to be the initiating source for creating the results you want. We also discussed how not being action-oriented is causing you to fail and not experience the results you’re hoping for in your life. We also discussed how being aware of specific indicators, a lucky mindset, fear of failure, procrastination, and analysis paralysis, are the underlying causes of not taking action! Finally, we went through a few examples of how not being action-oriented sets you up to fail.

By taking action, you take back influence in your life. The more action you take, the more you begin to act on the world, instead of having the world act on you. It allows you to engage and collaborate in the world instead of always being at the effect of the world. When you're able to foster this influence through your actions, you’ll see that failure is just as much a choice as success is. Now you can choose and begin to create the results you want in your life.

Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time on the Modern Wisdom Guide!