Links Mentioned:
• How to Set Goals and Achieve them wit...
• How to use Atomic Habits to achieve y...
• How Joe Pulizzi used this 5-step goal...
• I Asked Seth Godin What He Really Thi...
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Ash Roy's Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Ash Roy: Every year on the 1st of Jan I'd set myself goals, and by the 15th of Jan, they were buried in my goal graveyard.
Brian Tracy: When you write a goal, it's like programming it into your subconscious mind.
Ash Roy: So, I decided to do something about this, and I went through the archives on this very YouTube channel.
James Clear: The goal cannot be the thing that's making the difference.
And so the question is, well, then what is it?
Ash Roy: And in this video, I'm going to share insights with five experts.
Joe Pulizzi: It's the next thing I'm going to do. Help me get to that goal that I just read.
Ash Roy: Who have achieved considerable success in their careers.
Seth Godin: The goal can be our North Star. Okay, I needed to change my practice.
Ash Roy: What I found and what I reveal in the video is goal setting alone isn't enough.
Victoria Labalme: Some of the most successful creative endeavors didn't start with complete clarity or a goal or a plan. They started with a wisp and a glimmer.
Ash Roy: Welcome back to our ongoing series on goal setting and achievement. All of these videos are excerpts from longer conversations, which you can find in the playlist that I'll link to in the description below and in the comments.
If we haven't met before, I'm Ash Roy, an ex-banker with a CPA and an MBA, and I love helping small business owners like you to grow their businesses and their brand using digital marketing strategies and productivity solutions that actually work. Let's do this.
Okay, first up, we have Brian Tracy, who shares a remarkable story about how doing one thing every single day completely transformed his life.
He went from being homeless to having achieved all of his goals. And I can speak from experience and confirm that this actually does work because I tried doing the same thing every day for a whole year, and it really did transform my life in 2023. Now, I don't know why I fell off the wagon. In 2024, but I'm going to pick up this habit again in 2025, leave a comment below if that's something you want to commit to doing.
And by doing that, you'll be holding yourself accountable publicly. Okay, now let's hear from Brian Tracy.
Brian Tracy: I remember when I was poor and living on the floor of a friend's one room apartment and I was reading a magazine article and it said, if you want to be successful. You have to have goals. So, I took a scrap of paper and I wrote down 10 goals and I promptly lost both the magazine and the list of goals.
But in the next 30 days, my whole life changed.
My goals were to increase my sales, increase my income, have my own place to live, have a fixed salary and so on. I lost the paper, but they all just came true. And I remember I said, there's something going on here because, uh, here I was, lost, alone, knocking on doors, living, uh, from day to day and so on.
And then I wrote down the goals. And my whole life started to change.
Ash Roy: So, as you can see, the power of writing your goals down every day is absolutely transformative. I highly recommend you try doing it. Next up, we're going to hear from James Clear. So, James argues that it can't possibly be the goals that make the difference because people who get on the podium at the Olympic games.
And the people who never make it to the podium have the exact same goal. So, it can't be the goal that makes the difference. He says it's something else. I'll let James explain.
James Clear: So, this comes from someone who, I was very goal oriented for a long time. You know, I would set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, or the weight I wanted to lift in the gym, or how well I wanted my business to do in the next quarter.
And, um, I realized that sometimes I would achieve those goals, but a lot of times I would just flop around and fail. And, uh, I was like, well, if I set all these goals and I only achieve some of them, clearly setting a goal is not the thing that determines whether or not I make progress and you see that in a lot of areas, you know, like every candidate who applies for a job has a goal of getting the job, but only one of them actually does.
Every Olympian who has the goal of winning the gold medal. Um, and so this is true in many domains, which is that the winners and losers, so to speak, have the same goals. And if the people at the top of the podium and the people who aren't even on the podium have the same thing that they want, then the goal cannot be the thing that's making the difference.
And so the question is, well, then what is it? And I think that it's the habits and processes and systems that precede the goal, the process before the outcome.
Ash Roy: Okay, so Brian Tracy talked about the importance of setting goals and James Clear explained that it can't just be the goals that helps you to achieve success.
There has to be something else involved and he talked about systems and processes. Well, next we hear from Joe Polizzi who explains how he built his own system to go from being broke to selling his business for 15 million dollars within the time frame that he set for himself. This story was truly remarkable.
Here's Joe Polizzi.
Joe Pulizzi: First of all, thank you for for bringing that up because my goal setting is has been so important to my career and writing things down and then making sure that I'm doing the right thing. So, as I would read my goals, and I had usually 6 to 8 goals that I would review. Uh, first thing in the morning before I got started, and then before the end of the day, and I will ask myself, okay, am I doing the things during the day?
It's the next thing I'm going to do help me get to that goal that I just read. And that's why I love doing that first thing in the morning because. You get involved in email, you get in social media, you get in your phone, and you're very inefficient with your time. You might be unproductive. You might do some things that's not going to get help you to reach that goal.
Because as you know, I mean, 2008, my wife and I were broke. We didn't have any money. Throwing out a silly goal, egotistical goal, like, you know, 15 million in seven years is ridiculous. When we had nothing at the time. But reviewing that in the morning and then before, um, going to sleep at night was important because the brain does magical things when you sleep, whether you believe it or not.
I believe that. And so that I would wake up with all kinds of amazing ideas out to review that goal. And I would make decisions. So that we accomplished those goals. So, yeah, I mean, it's so strange how that happened. We couldn't make the 2015 number ash because the timing was just that we just weren't there with the revenue and profit numbers then, but we started the process in 2015 and then we had our, you know, the, the letter of intent in November, 2015, and the deal went through in June of 2016.
So we were. We were one year off. We were six months off, but I tell everyone record your desires, review your desires on a regular basis, and then remove all the things that are in your way that are not helping you achieve your goals,
Ash Roy: record your desires and review your desires or your goals on a regular basis.
That's what Joe Polizzi did. He mapped his actions to his goals and he achieved them within six months of his target date. That's remarkable. Joe Polizzi used his goal like a North Star. And interestingly enough, when I asked Seth Godin what his approach is to goal setting, here's what he said.
Seth Godin: Where goals are really helpful is they can act like a compass.
When the terrain changes, when the system shifts. The goal can be our North Star and say, okay, I needed to change my practice. Why? Because my practice isn't getting me closer to that. I want to go closer to this. And so if your goal is to make 3 million, great. Okay. I got that. What's your practice that's going to incrementally create value, which will lead to an asset, which will create value, which will lead to an asset.
Now, if it turns out that those assets you've been building, right. You have a small cable TV channel. Oh, cable TV channels are worthless now. You need to build a different practice if you want to get to that goal you said you had. So we don't want to change our goals very often. We don't want to change our practice very often.
But sometimes we have to change one or the other because the world has shifted.
Ash Roy: So what happens when the world shifts? How do you decide how to pivot? How do you figure out your new goal, your North Star? Our next guest, Victoria Labalme, has spoken to some of the most successful people in the world, and she found something surprising.
She found that a goal sometimes starts with a wisp and a glimmer. Here's Victoria.
Victoria Labalme: What happened is, is I was going around the planet working with different leaders, C suite executives and companies like Starbucks, Microsoft, PayPal, working with entrepreneurs and people appearing on Oprah stage or Ted or PBS, all these top people with multi-million dollar businesses.
I found there's this disconnect between how they got to where they are and this goal clarity plan mentality. And so, what I discovered is this truth. Which is some of the most successful creative endeavors didn't start with complete clarity or a goal or a plan. They started with a wisp and a glimmer.
And Risking Forward is all about how we follow that and how we can achieve extraordinary success even if we don't know exactly where we're going.
Ash Roy: Okay, so there you have it. Setting your goals is the beginning, an important beginning, but it's only the beginning. You've got to build habits, like James Clear explained, and systems, like Joe Polizzi explained, that hold you accountable to your goals.
As Seth Godin said, your goal is a North Star, but you do need to adapt your goals depending on changes in your environment. And as Victoria explained to us, your goals sometimes Start with a wisp and a glimmer. So here's my question for you. What are your goals for 2025 and beyond? Let us know in the comments.
And I promise to respond to every comment within the first 48 hours of this video going live. And don't forget to check out our playlist on goal setting and achievement. There's lots more where this came from. If you found this content useful please share it with somebody else who you think might benefit.
Every share and every comment goes a long way and we really do appreciate your support. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.