This past weekend I went back to Los Angeles for a quick trip filled with everything from friends to family, work to leisure, and then jumped on a red eye back to NYC that led straight into a full day’s work.
The main reason for doing so was my Godson’s Baptism.
But while I was there, only 2 months since I had left, I noticed something permeate through every interaction, every conversation I had among all strata of my relationships.
And that was this notion that my experience and growth has been exponential in a linear world.
I believe rightfully so. I’m at Columbia Business School, investing effort and money, while sacrificing other opportunities. It better be worth it.
I felt it definitely is. My elevated thinking despite exhaustion from traveling, my enthusiasm for the potential–for the future, and my stories from the past two months compared to others highlighted the stark difference of a good world I left to the amazing world I jumped into.
The overwhelm is reaping rewards.
The fact is that my friends, families, colleagues, back home are great. The point rather is to demonstrate the additional velocity with which CBS has propelled me.
And that’s the focus of this week’s post: Quarterly Review Yourself
It’s hard to measure your accomplishments as you go about life day to day. Much like a child who seems to grow but a few millimeters at a time seems to be nearly the same height as yesterday. But, when that child runs into an aunt during the holidays, “My how you’ve grown so much!” typically resounds.
In Your Life by Design (by one of the most kindhearted, giving, connected men I know Curtis Estes), Estes discusses how to live a life by design.
- A life is significant when filled with positive moments that intentionally pull a person towards his/her vision
- Negative and meaningless moments leaves a person feeling unfulfilled
- Goals are beacons that navigate use, clarify the opportunity and direct the actions to take
- Goals are like tension in rubber band: stretch to achieve them, but not too stretched or will snap
- Goal setting
- Emotionally compelling why aligned with your vision
- Must be SMART
- Balanced and integrated across all of life’s areas
- Linked to rewards or consequences that drive to completion
- Move you toward your ideal day
- Strategy 1: Why
- Highly talented people can feel unfulfilled because set goals by reflex rather than through a compelling why
- With a big enough why any activity can be meaningful and motivation
- Goals aren’t meant to merely assign a quantitative measure to achievement but rather to provide necessary fuel to sustain the motivational fire
- Those who constantly revisit their goals, altering them to better support their vision and core values are more fulfilled
- Well-integrated life means more productive and the world applauds that
- Highly talented people can feel unfulfilled because set goals by reflex rather than through a compelling why
- Strategy 2: SMART goal formula
- Specific
- Measurable
- Action-oriented (taking steps even if small towards the vision)
- Results-oriented (if the result doesn’t inspire you, pick a different goal)
- Time-bound
- Strategy 3: integration of all areas
- Overachievers often invest time in 2-3 areas and ignore the rest, leaving them unfulfilled
- Make sure each and every goal integrates with entirety of vision
- Health, relationship, financial, professional growth, reputation, community contribution, fun and hobbies, spiritual and personal growth
- Update goals often: long term (3 years) and short term (30 days)
- Overachievers often invest time in 2-3 areas and ignore the rest, leaving them unfulfilled
- Strategy 4: Rewards and consequences multiplier
- One of best tools to keep oneself accountable is with rewards and consequences
- Consequences: move you away from what you do not want in life
- Rewards: move you closer to what you want in life
- Good way is to “go public”: announce your goals to mastermind
- Publicly compels you and gets their “buy-in” participation
- We must create structures that mirror these penalties and rewards
- Sometimes self-imposed accountability
- One of best tools to keep oneself accountable is with rewards and consequences
- Strategy 5: Designing your ideal day
- Ensure your schedule supports your goals and activities
- Ideal schedule vs. Current Schedule vs. Planned schedule of tomorrow
- Look at hours breakdown, see how aligned activities done are to ideal and where you can make adjustments
- Envision ideal day, use all senses when envisioning
- Eliminate/outsource as many low quality activities and replace with highest fulfilling activities
- Don’t buy into hype/pressure to need something exotic or sensational to experience lasting change
- Consider an ideal schedule for weekends too
- Every activity you do either moves closer or away from ideal you
- Create a “To Not Do” List
- Actions you’ve identified as not a good use of your time
- And therefore eliminate, delegate, or reduce them
- Daily schedule is a daily ritual, spend 5 minutes the night before to set it up
If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll notice quite a few overlaps. Great, you can see how I’ve #applied my own readings and lessons into my life. Perhaps you are doing the same.
To add more value to Estes’ points, I would offer one more point, one more system. He mentions reviewing goals often. Well, being SMART, S stands for specific….so I set quarterly and yearly reviews to review my life: in which I review how my actions, meetings, activities, books read, ideas considered, and experiences gathered accomplished, aligned with, or failed to meet goals I set at the prior quarter’s end.
Why quarterly and yearly? Well this is where my life as a former auditor comes in. Public companies need to report their progress on a quarterly and yearly basis. It is how investors lump and compare performances. So as earnings are released and discussed on periods ending 3/31, 6/30, 9/30 & 12/31 so too do I batch my personal reviews.
Simply, I ask:
How did I do in working to achieve my goals?
Often goal oriented people (myself at one point included) take too narrow a view on the goals. When it comes to KPI and bonus payments in companies, I can see the desire to meet or beat them. But when it comes to the personal life, a warmer and kinder relationship should be taken with goals.
Goals are beacons that guide your life
Goals are an end. Only by breaking down the goal into small steps, into the means can you identify what you should do. Read 5 books in 3 months is a great goal, and one I’ve often set. But, what matters to achieving this goal is not the end, but rather the means: in order to read 5 books, I need to spend 30 minutes a day reading books!
From there, the goal comes naturally. However, what is hidden in this which emerges when I break it from ends to means is the fact that I need to be able to find, on a consistent basis, 30 minutes of my life to dedicate to reading books. Do I have the means to do it? Do I have the triggers to remind me? Do I have the right community to support me?
And therein lies the beauty of the quarterly review. You have a system put in place to check in on your actions you’ve taken, the goals you’ve set. You have the ability to change whatever it is you desire, from working out more/less to spending more time with friends/family, to sleeping more. Any goal is just as important as the rest and should entail all aspects of your life: career, relationships, personal development.
These goals should merely direct you towards a path that you desire rather than the precise actions you should take.
Much like the lighthouse, the goals reveal the dangers of a certain trajectory by highlighting how close or far away you were from achieving that goal. And ultimately, your destination is not the lighthouse, nor is it in the attainment of one goal. Rather, it is to pass by the lighthouse–to meet and surpass that goal–as you navigate towards the next one.
So yes, goals are critical. Goals must be reviewed intermittently. And these reviews can bring to light differences you yourself failed to acknowledge/appreciate because of comparing just day to day differences. But the most important aspect that underlies the whole process is:
Goals are merely lighthouses, guiding you towards your next one.