The one habit that is changing my life, set systems rather than goals

it was at a really low moment of my life when my wife taught me a lesson about systems and goals that changed my life forever so we were sitting at this old busted Ikea table this was before the business before our kids before we even got married and I was complaining because I was feeling ashamed about gaining a bunch of weight after surgery and I was just kind of feeling like a fat loser so I asked her why do you think I'm having so much trouble losing weight she got a little annoyed and she looked

me in the eye and said because you don't want to lose weight I said what of course I want to lose weight she said if you had wanted to lose weight you would create a system to make sure that it happened because you haven't you clearly don't want it so stop complaining about it it was like a slap in the face and it's really why I love her I was looking for somebody to Pat me on the back and give me a hug and say it's gonna be okay and what she gave me was what

I actually needed which was a reality check the truth is I had talked about losing weight I complained about losing weight I even tried to lose weight but I never actually set my life up to lose the weight three things happened after that day number one I lost 100 pounds number two I stopped complaining about what I didn't have I either went for it or I let it go and number three I started creating systems rather than focusing on goals when I started getting serious about creating systems of daily or weekly actions I started achieving

every goal I set in fact I don't even consider a goal serious unless I have a system around it so today I want to share the five-step framework I use to set the systems required to achieve any goal step number one set the goal the holes are still important you have to know the direction you're going in order to take the steps to get there you could have the most optimized way to drive to New York but if you truly want to fly to Hawaii then your system is useless this is what a lot of

productivity YouTubers get wrong they'll tell you the perfect way to use notion or how to set up your browser to optimize your tabs but that's not going to help you find customers for your business or get a raise at your job what's the point of being productive if you don't know where you're going the goal is a way for you to sift through the noise and figure out what you really want if you don't have the goal you're going to be lost now your goal doesn't have to be I want to earn a million dollars

or I want to lose 20 pounds it could be your goal is to explore different career paths in a particular field or learn as much as you can about coding or marketing what's important is that you are clear of the direction you're going it's important that you have a goal but the substance of the goal can be just about anything the key is that it is something you currently don't have which will make you do something that you currently aren't doing so let's say that I have a goal to get 25 new people to join

my gym now move on to step number two form a strategy and there are two questions that I want to answer here number one what has worked for you in the past and number two what has worked for others in the past so for my goal signing up 25 people I'm going to look back and find a time where I signed up 60 people in six weeks and what I did then was talk to as many people as possible and have my consults as quickly as possible how did I find the people I was using

Google ads I was doing Facebook ads so if I want to achieve that goal again I could try that same path as a starting point the second thing is what has worked for others in the past is there anyone in your industry that has succeeded despite the odds what did they do differently find out what it is and write it all down for my goal of signing up 25 people I have a few friends in the industry and a couple of them have had success despite some of the lockdowns so I found out that they

were creating documents every single month that they would offer to new people to get them on their email list and once they're on the email list they emailed them regularly so I'm going to write all that down what has worked for me what has worked for others and then create my strategy number three take the one-time actions first so these are the things that you do once that pay off forever so I'm going to ask myself questions like where could I spend money to solve this problem what could I change about my environment what could

I eliminate where could I find groups of people that have solved this problem and just hang around them a lot of times you can solve your problems and get to your goals just by taking one-time actions I especially like spending money to solve the problem this is why I'm constantly buying coaching from experts because the experts will give you the feedback that will move you forward in a way that you couldn't figure are out on your own so with my goal of getting 25 clients I could hire a coach I could join a group of

people with the same goal I could make a bet with a friend that if I don't get 25 clients by this time I'm gonna give them ten thousand dollars but what I ended up doing was hiring a marketing agency that could help me with my ads to bring in more people and because they're the experts they are going to bring in the people for me and if they don't bring in the people then I'll just go find a better one step number four create a system for daily or weekly action this is really where the

rubber meets the road you need something that you can do every single day and every single week that will move you forward towards this goal ultimately wanting the goal is not going to get you there so what I love to do is to take a step forward every single day so I'll use my journal to create a daily checklist of things that I need to do to get to that action so for my goal of getting 25 new people I am going to talk to five people every single day if I do this every day

it doesn't guarantee the goal but I know that I'm moving forward towards that goal if you had a goal of losing weight you might want to hit your nutrition numbers every day and work out every day and get to bed by 9 pm every day if you did those things every day I would say the chances of you losing weight if you had weight to lose are going to be pretty high so what are the daily or weekly things that you can do that will move you forward towards this goal if you don't do this

step then you will not achieve that goal this is really the system behind the thing but it all falls apart unless you do step number five commit to action your plan is meaningless unless you do something so I like to use a rule called the 10 30 100 rule so the first 10 days of your new daily actions your goal is to figure out if this is something that is sustainable so for my goal of getting 25 people I have to talk to to five people every day in order to get 25 new members so

five people every single day I'm gonna commit to doing that for 10 straight days and I'm gonna be a hundred percent compliant during those 10 days I'm not going to miss a day if I do I will start over and the point here is not to get to the result although you may get some results the point is to see if this is something you can sustain in your daily life if you can do something for 10 days is less than two weeks if you can do it for 10 days then you can probably do

it for longer if you can't do it for 10 days then you need to find a new set of actions and try something new that you can sustain as part of your daily life so this is just a test those first 10 days once you finish the 10 days assuming that it's something you can fit in your life now we focus on getting you some sort of progress and that is the next 30 days so those 30 days you're going to continue those daily actions and I don't commit to doing a hundred percent ninety percent

is okay so if you miss one day a week or one day every two weeks that is okay but you're going to commit for the next 30 days to see if you can get some sort of progress you're not going to get the result but you're going to get some sort of progress so if my goal is to sign up 25 new people and I'm talking to five people every day and I do that for 40 days so the first 10 days plus another 30 days I do that I'm gonna see some sort of progress

I may not sign up 25 people but I might sign up two or three and I might have started some conversations that wouldn't have happened otherwise so now I've done this for 30 days I've started to see progress and here's the thing about human psychology once you see progress then you are motivated to do more and that's when I commit to the 100. you can completely change your life in a hundred days so if you take those daily actions and then you do them for an additional 100 days then even if you're only 80 compliant

like you're not even 100 you're 80 compliant you will start to see major progress towards your goals so that's the 10 30 100 tool if you really want to commit to those daily actions you've got to follow that rule and if you fall off at some point go through this whole process again start over again with a new set of actions or adjust your actions and then go through that 10 30 100 rule again if you're new to this channel my name is Jay this channel features one to two videos a week with topics around

Business Health personal development and other fun experiments in living if you enjoyed what you saw please consider subscribing stay focused stay curious and keep showing up we'll see you in the next one [Music] foreign [Music]