Christopher Doiron
Jul 28, 2017 · 5 min read

From the last time that I wrote on Medium, July 8th, I’ve done quite a bit in terms of getting my shit together. I’m referring to the amount of goal setting I’ve been doing and just how “roll forward” it’s been. One of the biggest pitfalls that I’ve experienced when it comes to goal setting has been the number of times that I set a goal to work towards and end up branching off into a megaton of ‘To Do’ items.

What happens is that I spend more time just building a big list of To Do items and they branch off rather than being progressive towards the goal. Sure, I’m working furiously, but I’m working really hard to stay stuck in the same place. Just spinning my wheels.

This week I created a bit of a loop, where I would write out my goals, create a To Do list for the following day, then review it the next night. What ended up happening on my Snapchat was that I was able to see what items were constantly left behind, which ones were getting done, and how this progressed over a week rather than a single day.

Sound obvious, but it’s not always the case until you put the work in. The biggest thing I’ve noticed lately that reoccurs is how often we know what we should be doing, and often think we’re doing it, but how this actually doesn’t coincide with reality. I guess it’s hard to figure it out, if you think you’re actually doing something even though it turns out you’re not; Because otherwise, you’d simply start doing it instead of not doing it, correct?

When you realise that you’re actually doing it, it becomes obvious that you were not but are now. That being said, I think there are some tricks to figuring these things out. Some honest and practical ways to “fact check” yourself.

I use to think these were lame, but the truth is that we’re not at all built to be perfect and sometimes having a “safety” is better than trying to train ourselves not to hurt ourselves. It’s worth having fail-safes and other “checks” in place to keep us safe, accountable, in-line and on-time. The point of a successful life isn’t to become, necessarily, the best at what you do, but to have the best system in place to ensure you’re the best at what you do.

I mean really, what is a To Do list or set of goals if not a system check we put in place to ensure we’re operating efficiently and with specificity. That being said, it’s time to change my life. It’s time to stop trying so hard, and start doing. This doing however will happen in a passive control type manner by altering my personal values, habits, morals, goals and routines. I will create instead a system of controls aimed at ensuring my success and simply allow myself to follow suit.

For my follow-up thought, in the past week I’ve had my little routine and from it, I’ve noticed a few trailing objectives. I can see that both of them are the same goal from two different parts of my life.

Both financial, the first goal is to have a Personal Training business with GoodLife Fitness that is supporting my family. The second is to have other sources of income that support my personal development and help me help other people. Breaking both of these top-level goals into pieces, I know what day to day items I need to be doing.

For my employer career, I need to be running more lead generation. For my self-employment career, I need to be creating marketable content.

I wrote about something called Personal Progression Looping Oct 14, 2015.

What this stands for is finding a loop of activities that represent your consumption and turning it into the generator of content you intend to market. For example, I like to read books. Since I want to create courses online for people to learn new skills and ideals, the Personal Progression Loop would be:

Read a book. Get the idea of a course. Create a course. Realise through teaching what I’m lacking in skills. Read another book to develop myself…..

Get the idea of a course. Create a course….. etc

The interesting and difficult thing about where I am in my life right now is that my largest and widest loop involves me developing myself through any and all content, then forming opinions from it further developing myself to then in contrast require more learning.

What I need to do is have an output; Because I’m a perpetual learner.

The content I figured would be a personal blog. This is the stepping stone of finding my audience and building my confidence and skills. This then would translate into experience, opinions and knowledge of topics I could then write and teach about. Perpetuating this circle-jerk, I would work towards filling the digital class room of CADs Academy with my findings of life.

A philosopher’s dream to be honest. To have my own school of life.

This to say that I need to have a place to start and a systematic approach to obtaining said goals. I’ll continue with Snapchat on a daily basis to keep myself accountable. This will translate into a daily roll of activities and discoveries of myself.

I’ll then use these experiences to write blog posts. As a result of my daily routines becoming solidified and the blog enhancing all my abilities, I’ll have the energy to focus on other success systems.

I’ve already begun by initiating a 2-person book club. This will keep me accountable for my reading to keep my brain fresh with content for consumption and production.

I’m then going to produce weekly updates on the book content. This will turn into the new systems and ideals, because everything I know is from something I’ve consumed.

The objective is to create courses. Thus, I will need to create a list of courses I intend on developing and make sure that a part of my loops pour into them.

There are two ways that courses make sense to me. The first is to write them progressively. The second is to brutishly complete them as Minimal Viable Products. Developing them over time should be a manner of my own thought progress. They work themselves into existence inside my mind as I consume content. Then, when ready, I create a course as quickly as possible. This course is then marketed in a way that the public can consume to relay feedback which will be used to improve the course.

This ideal, taken from The Lean Start-up

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Well, I think that’s all for tonight. I know that I need to make sure I’m creating course material ASAP and that my Personal Training business requires better lead generation.

Both of these problems, I will administer my intuition. Oh, and put them on my vision board.

Published author and devil's advocate in philosophy, psychology, fitness and business.

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