Find Your Seed and Unlock Your Goals
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
Last Friday, a group of overly ambitious life hackers like me got together for a special edition of Seven60. In it, we mapped out our top five goals for 2018 and answered three questions about each one:
- What is your biggest barrier to accomplishing the goal?
- What action must you commit to doing daily to achieve the goal?
- What weekly outcome can you anticipate if you take daily action?
When I mapped out my goals, I saw a trend that led me to discover my biggest gap in achieving all my goals for 2018. And, I’d like to share with how this happened in hopes that you can discover your own trend.
As I looked at down my column of daily behaviors, I only saw two different actions: write and connect. The narrative goes something like this:
One of my goals for 2018 is to design and host a revenue retreat (think of it as a writing retreat but instead of writing we’ll be designing revenue streams). My biggest barrier to this happening is inspiring and activating enough entrepreneurial spirits to come along with me. The daily behavior I identified as critical to my success is connecting with others.
In fact, connecting showed up three times and writing showed up twice on my daily behaviors list. Then, this morning I realized that the secret of success is in finding the “seed” behavior and committing to daily action. Then, letting the other behaviors flow from there.
What’s my “seed” behavior? Here it’s writing. If I commit to writing and publishing daily, I’ll also fulfill my goal of connecting with others on a daily cadence as well.
Why did I add publishing to the goal even though it wasn’t necessarily part of my daily required behaviors? Because for the last 10 years I’ve been writing almost every morning in my journal. That’s where many of my posts begin, but that’s also where many, many more of my entries stay.
The good news: I’m used to writing daily. The super, scary (almost as scary as a Facebook Live) news: I'm pressing publish – not just on my website, but also on social media DAILY.
As you may know, I’m in the middle of road testing my rhythm for 2018 to see what it’s going to take to achieve my goals. And, I mean I am literally road testing as I’m traveling to Portland, OR and Monterrey, CA over the next 11 days.
But there’s one more thing I’m putting on my daily action list: failure. Not the kind you’re probably thinking of when I say that. But more like this kind: I’m committed to failure by way of typos, failure by way of possibly offending someone else's point of view, and failure by way of not perfect. These are the mindset tweaks required to fulfill my commitment of writing and publishing daily.
So now, it's your turn:
- What are the trends as you look over your goals, barriers, and daily required actions?
- Do you see a “seed” action rising from the rest? If so, what is it?
If you’d like some help sorting out your goals, barriers, and daily required actions, send me a quick email and let’s schedule 20 minutes to figure it out.
One more thing. I’m in the early stages of conceptualizing a revenue retreat, and I’d love it if you’d take time to answer just a few questions and share your ideas with me.