How To Balance Health, Personal, and Career Goals With The End In Mind

Dreaming up your ideal day ten years from now is an inspiring (and scary) exercise. You write down where you are, whom you are with, and what you do and feel in their presence. A common belief is that goal setting should only be focused on hard career achievements with the assumption that personal and health goals will just fall into place once money issues are resolved — wrong. Near the end of 2015 I was fortunate enough to snap out of my career inertia to come to terms with this reality.

While money is indeed an enabler in life, not giving health and personal goals an equal emphasis will actually catch up to limit your financial success and worst of all, limit your ability to find fulfillment. Personal and health goals can be just challenging to conquer as career goals and thus, should be treated with the same value of respect and importance.

By analyzing your ideal day in 2026, I will walk you through what goes into identifying health, personal, and career goals and then, we will backwards to break down your ten, five, and one-year goal milestones.

The Building Blocks of Health, Personal, and Career Goals

Everyone has different ways of defining what building blocks make up our foundational health, personal and career goals.

Below are the building blocks I most believe apply keeping in mind that there may be more building blocks that I left out. Most noticeably, everyone is going to have a very different method on what tangible goals dominate each building block. All in all, it is crucial that you take a stance on what is most important for you.

• Diet
• Exercise
• Spirituality
• Family
• Relationships
• Personal Growth
• Contribution
• Money
• Business

Within the building blocks of diet, exercise, and spirituality, I believe that eating a balanced diet, staying light for my triathlons, and meditating, make up most of what being healthy means. Someone else might dismiss spirituality entirely as a building block of health, and believe that weightlifting and strictly following a high protein diet are what fulfill a good diet and exercise plan. There isn’t one correct answer here, it all depends on what you value.

Personal goals are another great example where someone might define a great personal life as one that involves travelling, meeting new people, and being single while someone else might believe in the opposite and define getting married, not leaving their city, and keeping their friends circle tight as a more fulfilling personal life.

By looking at what your ideal day looks like, it should be obvious what your building blocks are. Take a moment to define that.

How To Dig Out Goals From Your Ideal Way Of Being in 2026

Declaring how your respective building blocks break down health, personal, and career goals define how you believe life should be lived. This is massively important to master before you can start to execute on them.

To make them actionable of course, you need to make them SMART Goals. Making them specific, measurable and putting a time limit on them are essentially what starts to make them real. By having defined what goals were important to me, it made it a relatively seamless process to extract specific goals from my ideal day narrative, — here is how I did it.

My ideal day emphasized health and spirituality primarily in the morning as I went for a run, did yoga, and went for a presumably health brunch. I then started to think about what SMART Goals I could work towards to excel my life in these areas. Running 40 triathlons by 2026 encompassed this beautifully as running balanced out with swimming and biking is the ultimate satisfaction for getting my day started. Triathlons usually run from March to October so doing one every 2 months or so are quite doable especially if I can combine travelling with it.

I emphasized public speaking, philanthropy and operating/investing in various companies in 2026. To make these SMART, I have declared that I want to do my first Tedx and/or paid speaking engagement before 2016 is over. Through my company I might want to commit to a quarterly charity event or initiative or even look at tinkering with my business model to encompass a charitable component. If I am going to invest or operate different companies outside of Tangoo, I’ll need to start advising companies in different industries, especially ones that get me excited such as dating, social media, travel, and education.

How To Work Goals Backwards With The End In Mind

By now you have successfully visualized an ideal day in the future and then been able to identify its building blocks and how they convert into SMART Goals you can act on. But yes, 40 triathlons in 2026 sounds understandably intimidating and perhaps a little far-fetched so how do you make it a little more digestible? You work backwards and break it down to your five and one-year goals. I simply cut the 40 in half so by 2021 I will have 20 triathlons under my belt and in 2017 I’ll have conquered my first complete one! A combination of linear assumptions and some intuition should be enough to help you identify what things you need to start to accomplish to work towards those 10-year goals.

Put in respect of career goals, if I want to have my hand in a bunch of interesting companies in the future I obviously need a couple wins myself to build credibility and wealth. This means setting steep revenue targets and aggressive financial goals I can reach either with one company or with a variety of projects and consulting or investing initiatives.

There are many ways to reverse engineer goals and I can only offer the way I did it. There is no perfect answer and keep in mind that goals will self-correct along the way so don’t stress about trying to find a perfect formula. The key here is that you are shooting for the stars and you have actually thought through how that might look like — a term I like is a Moonshot. Think of this as the concept of shooting to be 10x better than the status quo where it’s 10x more satisfying to accomplish but not 10x harder than if you shot for the norm. If you don’t shoot for something bold and ensure you have looked deep within you to make this educated guess, you’re going to settle. Our body and minds are designed to be comfortable and safe so if you leave things on cruise control, your altitude in life will plateau.

If you can force yourself to do the above exercise, you will be in prime shape to line up your 90-Day Goals. 90-Day goals are special because it’s the magic number that allows you to get granular with the necessary habits and commitments required to accomplish your goals without worrying too much about unexpected life changes occurring. The second quarter of 2016 kicks off in just under a week so even if you didn’t get around to setting your January goals, here is a fresh start for you — look out for an article next week on how personal growth experts around the world approach 90-day goals.