This will be a long read, but I promise that you will leave this with newfound clarity and an objective execution plan.
For the past 3 years, I’ve been obsessed with human psychology and understanding what drives behavior, and I’ve been trying to understand what separates people who succeed at an impressive level, and people who fail.
And really it comes down to productivity vs burn out. Allow me to explain…
Humans think that they are really good at controlling the choices they do, most choices are made subconsciously and by the limbic system (primal functions and emotions part of the brain).
We are more driven by emotion than rationality, and that is why having a Mission vision in principle is so important, but is not enough…
In order for you to move forward with your goals, you need to be productive, you need to execute on what moves the needle every single day… And the same limbic system can be our greatest enemy because it feeds on instant gratification, that’s why we choose to be in bed for a bit longer instead of going to the gym for example, and why people are so obsessed over Instagram likes.
And in life, Business, everything significant requires long term thinking and delayed gratification, for example, reading a book now can be a harder and more boring task than play PlayStation or watch a movie, but one will benefit you long term, and usually people like Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos for example, people look at them as “they are psychopath” and people cannot understand their behavior, because most people do not understand delayed gratification.
However, on another note, this is an extreme level so I wanted to find a balance between both, and the sweet spot, because what makes most entrepreneur fail, alongside with not being productive is the fact that they burn out, it’s really good to post on Instagram #Grinding And #4amWorkout but in reality that is just stupid.
I’ve seen people killing themselves overwork, managing 8 businesses, networking, posting on youtube, Instagram, creating a blog post, and countless meaningless actions and I know a lot of people who work 80 hours a week yet they are no near to success, and no matter what you do, if you do something for 12h every single day, you will get tired of it…
And honestly, the more I learn about different business tactics and strategies and facebook ads strategies, and all that, a successful business can be broken down into a simple basic formula
Great product/service + Marketing + Sales = successful business.
So how we do this?
1. The Action
Identify what are the actions you need to execute every single day that would drive tour business, or your goal forward. Ex: if the goal is making money, how many sales calls you can make a day, and do that.
2. Set realistic expectations.
Will power can only take you so far, and when creating a goal if you focus too much on the goal you will get blinded by it, instead, have a clear vision at what you and to accomplish and focus at one step at a time.
3. Daytime compartments
While having a long term thinking, you also need to think at each day as you “day 1” and after you create your long term goal you need to reverse engineer what are the daily tasks you need to execute to reach that goal.
Go to Trello, and create a vision board, and you should have your vision board set like this:
Day – > Week – > Month – > Quarter – > Year – > Lifetime Goal.
and for each card, you chunk down from the Lifetime goal to the actions you need to execute daily.
4. Execution
And you need to execute on it every single day and make a habit out of it.
And creating a habit goes down to 3 things, Trigger, Action, Reward.
If you think about Pavlov’s experiment on a dog, that after conditioning, every time he rings the bell the dog would salivate even without the food.
Humans are the same, for whatever action you think is hard to execute, the first time doing it will be painful, the first week, will be painful, but all the sudden you will train yourself and form a habit and all the sudden is not painful anymore.
And you want to have a trigger, that will allow you to take that action, for example, if your goal is to meditate every day, as a trigger you can light up an incense stick, and then meditate, and then you can reward yourself with a treat of something you like.
Then you want to execute on that to the point, that it becomes second nature.
Nice post!