It’s commonly know that a staggering 90% of all business fail in the first 2 years. Just like 90% of diets fail in the first 2 weeks and 90% of gym memberships won’t last 2 months.
Whatever the reasons may be — not being able to find clients, not being able to resist chocolate or not finding time enough to work out every day — every time you fail it all comes down to a much more brutal truth.
You gave up.
I truly believe that if you have unlimited time and motivation, you’d be able to achieve literally any goal that depends solely on you.
But you don’t have unlimited time. Most people can’t afford to try to take a business off the ground for 5 years, for example. Because they have kids and need to provide. Because they need to pay rent. Because of a million real things that might limit the time available to you.
Most people, though, still have time. Yet they give up, because they can’t find the motivation to work another day after trying for so long and seeing no results.
The craving for immediate rewards— that bar of chocolate, relaxing on the couch, having a salary to buy a new car and impress their friends — gets in the way of the sacrifices that still needs to be made.
And can we blame people who give up after working a thousand days without any visible rewards?
In my opinion, no. It takes a special kind of crazy to pull off huge goals.
You need to have that resilience if your goal is a big one, like building a profitable business, creating a large audience, becoming an professional athlete or musician.
Here’s how you do it.
Stipulate a BOLD and STUPID long term goal to keep things in perspective
First things first: what does long term mean?
If you’re thinking 1 year, I’m sorry. You lost.
That’s a symptom that you’re looking for quick results. That you don’t yet understand the insane amount of work your dreams require.
How do you expect to be a millionaire by next year if you’re broke today and never had that kind of money?
How could you possibly look like The Rock by next year if you’ve been sedentary and overweight your whole life?
It just doesn’t happen.
You need to switch the way you think about life. You still have a lot of time if you’re lucky enough to be born in the present day, even if you’re 50–70 years old.
I’m 28 and I know I still have 80–100 years of hard work and fun ahead of me before I feel like slowing down — if we don’t become immortal cyborgs by then, that is.
So why would I be worried about reaching my life goals by 30? Why would you? What are you trying to prove?
You long term goal must be something you’d need to work for 20, 30, 40 years or more to achieve. It needs to be something very clear and measurable.
“Spreading love” is a bullshit goal. Your long term goal needs to be something in the line of “Visiting every country in the world” if you’re aiming for a personal goal or “Starring on a Netflix series” if you’re trying to orient your career.
The beauty of having this sort of long term goal is threefold.
Orientation
This sort of long term goal allow you to orient every life decision towards it.
You’ll know what courses to take, when to save money and when to enjoy spending it, who to build relationships with and who to push back.
It gives you a north to follow, that’s why it’s important that your goal is far away and doesn’t change as you change along the years.
Perspective
Having a very far fetched goal lets you reverse engineer the steps to get there from where you are today and understand that it’s not something that needs to be — or can be — done fast.
It allows you to put the every day work into perspective and understand that it might not feel like it’s getting you anywhere, but that it actually aligns with your life long goal and it’s exactly what you should be doing.
Journey
Having this new perspective helps you see that you won’t be happy only once you reach your goal.
You’ll be happy everyday that you’re working towards it.
Even if your goal is to travel the world and today’s step is working hard on your 9 to 5h. Or you’re dreaming of building a startup that will have an IPO and today’s work is writing some content on your blog.
You’ll be able to enjoy these things knowing that each of them bring you closer to what your goal is.
It will help you remember that you are in control of your life.
How to find your long term goal
Your life long goal needs to be:
- Immutable, you won’t change your mind next year;
- Very difficult, so you know it’s worth it;
- Measurable, so you can tell when you achieve it.
To a lot of people, this life long goal has something to do with what they dreamed as a child.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s goal is buying the New York Jets football team, which is something very tied to his memories as an immigrant child in USA and feeling for the first time like he belonged.
My big, stupid goal is building a tower. Seriously.
I want to build a hotel/office building/shopping mall where people can enjoy happy moments of both leisure and working on their dreams. Where they can get inspired and have fun.
Silly, isn’t it? It’s probably an adult version of my dream of living in a castle as a child.
But I have no problem saying it. It’s a nice goal to orient me, but I’m not waiting for it to happen to be happy. It makes the journey enjoyable because I know I am where I need to be.
What was your dream as a child and what is the adult version that will guide you for the next 40 years?
Using the power of your life long goal everyday
Dreaming is not enough, though.
You need to work the steps from that utopia to your current day.
I like to use the method I picked from Gary Keller’s and Jay Papasan’s The One Thing. The idea is to look all the way to the future and understand the single thing you need to achieve it
- In the scope of 10 years
- 5 years
- 1 year
- 1 month
- 1 week
- and today.
And you do so by bringing it closer and closer to your reality and strengths
For example, my goal of building a tower sounds even more absurd when you realize I’m not the heir of a real state business, neither an architect or worker in the hotel industry, so I’m not at all inserted in that industry.
But I know that if I had a lot of money and influence I can achieve that goal.
So I work backwards from that. I look at what I have today and connect it to what I’ll need in the future.
Everyday I meditate on this goal and connect it to the single thing I need to do today.
For example, today my list is:
- In 30 years I need to have hundreds of millions of dollars to build my tower;
- To get that much money, in 10 years I need to have millions of dollars generated from my businesses invested in good assets;
- To grow my businesses to that point, in 5 years I need to have built some influence and connections;
- To have that sort of connections, in 1 year I need to be producing more content and reaching more people and clients;
- To produce quality content, in 1 month I need to publish 30+ pieces of content to understand what value I can provide to my future audience;
- To write that much, in 1 week I need to research and publish content that I think will help people for years in the future;
- To test new ideas, today I’m writing this article and maybe helping you.
That list changes. My strategy to reach my life long goal is not only built on people and influence, but also on building products, offering services and investing smartly.
For example, my startup — Proposeful — provides a lot of value to users for free, helping them present their proposals in a more professional way, for free. Because it allows me to map the whole industry and build sustainable businesses and audiences on top of it.
I also do consulting work in marketing and development for clients, which allows me to save money to invest in the future.
It’s a lot of different things to balance and sometimes today’s goal is working on a new feature or closing a client, but there’s always something to do and it’s always aligned with my goal.
And that’s the beauty of it, it becomes fun and exciting to decide everyday what you need to do. I’ve never felt unmotivated again after adopting this system, because it gives me perspective.
What if in 100 years I never manage to amass hundreds of millions of dollars to build my tower?
I wouldn’t care.
I’d have lived the best life I possibly could and gave my best each day.
I’d have enjoyed each part of the journey.
It would have brought me closer to amazing people.
And I’d have experienced so much more than if I had no clear direction to follow.
That’s why you need a big, stupid goal in your life.
I’d love to know what your version of this long life goal is if you decide to take up this method.
Don’t be afraid to share it with the world. Nobody will call you out in 40 years if you don’t make it. Do it for the benefits I listed here.
Remember it’s always useful to know which direction North is, even if you don’t plan to go to the North Pole.
Thanks for reading!
