I’ve realized that the people I meet typically fall into one of three buckets:
- People who don’t think about their goals.
- People who do think about their goals but take no action.
- People who think about their goals and take deliberate and unrelenting action towards achieving them.
Typically I find that people in the second bucket don’t take action due to fear and uncertainty, which results in obsessive thinking about those goals. Obsessive thinking sometimes disguises itself as productivity to many. But remember, activity ≠ productivity.
It’s important to know that people in the third bucket are usually just as scared and afraid as the people in the second bucket, but are able to put that aside and take the first step.
But what about the people in the first bucket? I’m always surprised by the number of people who don’t have an answer to where they want to be in the next five to 10 years. Those people in the first bucket can at least transition into the second bucket by putting deliberate thought into their long-term goals and break that down into smaller, achievable goals to steer them in the right direction. I like to think of it like product development: you have a grand vision of what you want the product to be (in this case, “Future You”), but you start by identifying the core features that make your product special.
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