Personal Goals for Busy Lives: The Renaissance Approach

1. Introduction: Have you ever set personal goals and never followed through with them? Or maybe you celebrated New Year's Eve and then the following day got all excited, promising yourself that you're going to eat better, lose weight and make more friends. Only to then reach September and realize you didn't none of those things. Well, let me make a confession. I used to be that person. I used to do exactly that every single year. And no, I'm not proud of it. Not only was I not following my passion to become a better version of myself, it also felt like time was just running past me to be honest, I felt like time was flying by and I didn't know what I was doing in the meantime until one day I thought there has got to be a better way of doing this. After some trial and error, I came up with what I call the Renaissance approach to following your personal goals or New Year's resolutions. It really works well for both of them. In this course, we're gonna go through exactly what this approach entails, mainly combining the Renaissance view on life and knowledge in general with well-established product management techniques used in big tech companies such as Amazon or Booking.com. To go a little bit more in detail, we're going to cover the following topics. Why you should set personal goals? What is the Renaissance and what is a renaissance person diversification. How do you identify your goals given three axes of work metrics and in crime mentality, or how I like to call it setting goals in a healthy way. Next, we'll look at creating your personal roadmap, a way to plan what we want to achieve without getting overwhelmed. We're going to cover how to get help to stay on track, but also improvements in your social circle, how to handle changing goals. And last but not least, reflecting on the work that we're doing in order to better understand what motivates us personally. I'm currently in my second year of applying this approach. And here are some of the effects that I've noticed. First and foremost, it improved my outlook on life. I feel passionate about my daily life. Even on the Monday's that never seem to end. It greatly improved my self-confidence because I truly believe I became a more interesting person over the past few years exploring very different passions. I feel that time is passing more slowly now because I have a lot more milestones throughout my life. And I also get to celebrate these milestones more often. And let's face it, who doesn't like a good celebration? I truly believe that the pandemic is a time I will finally remember as some of the best years of my life. And I honestly attribute this to only working on myself and improving my life from within. If this sounds interesting to you, then I hope you'll take this class when we will go over how you can send exciting goals in an achievable way in order to improve your daily life. I hope to see you in the next lesson. 2. Why Set Goals: Hello and welcome. I'm so glad you decided to join me. Let's kick things off with why you should set personal goals. Before we start, let's get one thing out of the way. If you feel like you do not want to set any personal goals or New Year's resolutions. That is a perfectly valid choice that you can make. The personal goal Police will not come busting down your door, asking you in the middle of the night, where are your personal goals? Not at all. Although it has to be said that having personal goals does not make you any better than people that choose to not have them. And the reverse is also true. Now that we've got that out of the way. In my opinion, the number one reason why you should look into setting some personal goals is because they have the amazing potential to improve your life. Assuming that you take a practical approach to setting them and achieving them as well as always to keeping your mental health in check. For myself, one of the biggest motivators to get into setting New Year's resolutions and setting personal goals as well as trying to achieve them more frequently, was Dan Pink's talk the surprising truth about what motivates us? He says that personal satisfaction is actually driven by three things autonomy, mastery and purpose. Let's look a little bit more closely at what these mean. Autonomy means we want to decide what happens in our lives. We want to feel like we have control, like we have direction in our lives. In other words, we want to be self-directed. Mastery simply means we have the urge to get better of stuff. We want to improve ourselves. We're probably the only inhabitants on earth that have the concept of good, better, best, and that intrinsically motivates us to always, constantly improve ourselves. This is why people practice playing instruments in their spare time, even though they are arguably not good at it, and they're also not getting any monetary incentives from it. Getting better at things is in itself satisfying to human nature, and I believe this is true across the board. And last but not least, purpose means we want to contribute to something larger than ourselves. We want to leave something behind. We want to leave a legacy behind in the world when we're no longer here. To summarize, autonomy, mastery and purpose are the three drivers of personal happiness, even if it might not be immediately obvious. And to be perfectly honest, I think Dan Pink really hit the nail on the head when he identified these three pillars as the key to personal happiness. And of course, this already gives us some hints as to how we should go about setting personal goals for ourselves. Okay, so now that we got that out of the way. Well, now what? Well, I could always tell you. That's it. Go out into the world and be self-directed practice until you mastered something. And don't forget to also make an impact. But fear not. I am not going to do that. I think this is just an initial foundation to what we're going to discuss later on. And while I fully agree with Pink's presentation on how he understands personal happiness, I do think that everyday life actually presents unique challenges for the everyday person. It's not really that easy to find a fulfilling hobby and most importantly, not get totally demotivated in the face of challenges. For example, let's look at autonomy. I'm pretty sure that anybody who has ever worked a 9 to 5 or a regular job can tell you it's so easy to lose yourself of self-directed ness. When will you have to go to the job? Every day. And most likely, somebody else is going to tell you what you need to do. Not to mention afterwards you have to go to the gym and clean your house and do the grocery shopping. Where's the autonomy in all of that? It really doesn't take a genius to understand why people go on autopilot and feel like they completely lose control over their lives. However, I really believe that this is where setting personal goals is going to help, and this is because a goal is going to be an activity or a set of activities that you pursue of your own volition, something that you dedicate time out of your busy life to achieve, something that you are doing for yourself and only for yourself. And let's be clear, it may not be a big thing. It might not be a big change. And I am definitely not advocating for you totally recalling your life. That really sounds more stressful than engaging. However, I believe that even dedicating 1% of your day to something that is not driven by outside forces like your rent being do your fridge being empty, will eventually compound to give you a sense of autonomy, the sense of being able to make decisions about your own life, to be self-driven and in the sense the most important chapters are the ones on setting your personal roadmap, as well as what types of goals you should be setting next. Let's look at mastery, and I have mixed feelings about this one because honestly, I think it's become a double edged sword. Don't get me wrong, I still fully believe that mastery contributes to personal happiness. However, I do also feel that in the past years it's actually become quite performative. And what do I mean by this? Well, open any social media app and you will find a lot of people simply performing their lives while at the same time marketing these lives somehow as better than the rest of us. And I've spoken to a few people who have goal or New Year's resolutions paralysis, and many of them mentioned to me that it's actually very difficult to get engaged or start doing it because it's not Instagram worthy or they're simply not good at it right away. And I wanted to bring this up because in case you feel like that, then trust me, you are definitely not alone. And this is why our section on metrics and incrementality really comes into play, because we want to reshape the way we think about our goals. Of course, I should set a disclaimer. Or is this really going to change your mindset forever and you're never going to feel jealous about anybody on Instagram ever again? No, it's really not going to do that. And if anybody promises you that, I think they might be lying to you. However, I do believe it will serve as a very good reminder and exercise that there are different ways of measuring progress and success beyond views and likes. And last by far, probably the most difficult to nail down given our everyday lives is purpose making an impact beyond ourselves. Because let's face it, it's really difficult to be a regular person and strive for a global impact or humanitarian impact all after fitting it into your day after your 9 to 5 is done. So how about this? When we talk about purpose, I think we can try to be micro ambitious. Let's make an effort to only focus on the improvements in ourselves, in our daily lives, in our outlook on life, instead of how close we are to winning a Nobel Prize. Ultimately, if at the end of this exercise and at the end of this course, you feel better about yourself, I'd call that a win. 3. What Is The Renaissance: In this section, let's look at what the Renaissance is and what does it mean to be a renaissance person? The word itself means rebirth in French, the Renaissance is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th century. And it's generally characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas and achievements of classical antiquity, the period is associated with great social change and touch areas such as humanism, art, science, architecture, navigation, music, and so on. A lot of the famous scientists, scholars, and artists that you've already heard of actually come from the Renaissance Period. Famous authors such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas More's surfaced citing and using ideas of the Greek and Roman thinkers before them in order to critique their contemporary government, painters develop new techniques studying light, shadow, and quite famously in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, the human anatomy. Other famous Renaissance painters include Michelangelo antigen, to name a few. When it comes to science, the Renaissance was actually a scientific revolution with many advances being made in the fields of mathematics in parallel with an increased emphasis on using empirical evidence in many other fields, new discoveries and theorems were put on really across the board, across all scientists. Astronomy driven by Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus, but also the invention of the first bookkeeping system by Luca Pacioli. In short, people were not only rediscovering the world around them, but they were also redefining what it is to be human. So what does that mean in terms of people? What does it really mean to be a renaissance person? Well, the self-proclaimed purpose of humanism was to actually create a universal person that combined intellectual and physical excellence and who was capable of functioning honorably in virtually any situation, this ideology was referred to as the woman universally, an ancient Greek Roman ideal. We often see this concept also referred as a polymath, an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge in order to solve problems. Now, I know that might actually sound a little bit intimidating, but don't worry, we're going to break it down into slightly more digestible bits. During this course, I talk about a renaissance person. I'm referring to someone that has more than one talent or pursuit of passion and enjoys all of them equally. These diverse and well-rounded someone that doesn't box themselves completely into one activity or area of knowledge and completely avoid every other aspect of human existence. Someone who is adaptive, even those situations might be on opposite spectrum. Someone that embraces the challenge of experiencing new things and has a positive outlook on how things might end up. Lastly, someone that has interests in knowledge and expanding their mastery and they make continuous efforts on actually achieving that. Let's go to the next section where we can look at how to identify the goals that will really turn us into a renaissance person. 4. Diversification - Identifying Your Goals: In this section, we're going to look at how we can go about identifying your goals. This process aims to answer the question, if I had an ideal year that was incredibly productive and I got to do everything I want to. What would I have achieved by the end? It seems like an easy question, right? Well, not so fast. While it's true that we want to answer that question, we also want to approach the problem space from the perspective of a renaissance person. More specifically, usually when we try to answer a question such as this, we tend to stay well within our comfort zone and don't get me wrong. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It's a perfectly natural knee-jerk reaction, but unfortunately, growth doesn't come from our comfort zone, so we have to step outside of it with our aim being to expand our knowledge and expand our skills. Now that we've got that out of the way, keeping in mind the idea of the polymath, I suggest that you try to choose goals within three distinct categories, physical, artistic, or creative and professional. Let's look a little bit more in-depth at each of them to understand what they mean starting with physical. Well, I think this is the most straightforward out of all of them. You should try to have at least one goal that involves you're doing some type of exercise or some times of physical activity. Maintaining physical health is a very important aspect of life and it can also greatly improve our mental health. It will also help you be more energizing order to pursue your other goals. So in case you were thinking about skipping this goal, let me reiterate that maintaining good physical health in the long run is the best investment in yourself that you can make. And in case you are stressing that is going to be too difficult for you to do. Don't worry, we're going to cover how to set these goals in a healthy way in the next section on metrics and instrumentality, to give a little bit more insight on some of the goals that you can choose. I'm going to use myself as an example. I used to be a very, very, very bad swimmer to the point that I used to joke that I can swim until a lifeguard gets to me. In my first year of practicing the Renaissance approach, my physical goal was actually to become a better swimmer so that I could feel comfortable in the water without using any sort of flotation device. And since I actually managed to achieve my goal of first-year, the second-year physical goal is actually a continuation of that. Namely, I challenged myself to go to the mid-level swim classes for all year round, which basically means that you can swim multiple repetitions of 200 meters in one hour. And this definition simply comes from the swimming pool that I go to. And I do have other physical goals that are adjacent to my main goal. But we're going to talk about these more into the next section, where we talk about how we measure progress. So now that we've discussed our physical goals, let's dive into our creative or artistic goals. In this category, I really want you to go out of your way to find out what artistic pursuit you can discover and enjoy examples of areas that you can explore a range from crafts or as I like to call them, things that you can make with your hands, such as pottery, sewing, painting, sculpting, drawing, to writing, which can be fiction or journaling, essays, poems, even starting a blog or a newsletter to any one of the fine arts such as singing, dancing, or perhaps taking on the drama stage. None of these creative or artistic areas are better than the other. And I really want you to look into them and figure out what really speaks to you in the moment. And as always, I can give you some examples of goals that I set for myself, which included making quilts, starting a YouTube channel, and creating online classes. I also have goals around writing short stories and potentially illustrating a children's book. Lastly, let's look at your professional goals. And perhaps I should start with a disclaimer. I named this category professional. But that actually might be a weasel word because in reality, this category mostly focuses on skill that require mental exercise to acquire. And it can also cover a wide range of activities. For example, learning how to code and a new programming language, taking a class on project management or perhaps getting an industry certification. I personally like to align this category. What would help me most in my career? But truthfully, you don't have to do that if you don't want to, perhaps you would want to use this category more as an opportunity to re-brand your career or tried to break into a new field. And as I've done so far, let me give you some examples of goals that I've set for myself in this category, I have a goal to read a few books that will help me in my product management career, as well as taking classes on software system design. Another goal is to study French, which you can argue that probably can also go in the artistic category. But I choose to put it in the professional category because I think it'll help me further my career. To briefly summarize, you should have at least one goal in each of these categories. And if you start with only three goals for the rest of the year, that is a perfectly good start. And in fact, it's better than not starting at all. And of course, nobody is stopping you from adding more categories for your personal roster depending on your preferences and inclinations. For example, you could potentially add a social dimension to your goals in order to motivate yourself to get out of the house and do more social things, such as wine tastings, guided tours, meetups and so on. You can add as many sections as you want, but make sure that you don't weasel out of the three core categories that you should cover as these really are, in my opinion, the cornerstones of becoming a woman when either selling. In this section, I also want to touch a bit on passion or lack thereof. 5. Diversification - Finding Passion: In this section, I also want to touch a bit on passion or lack thereof, as we've now gone through the types of goals that you should be looking at setting. You've probably stopped and thought, well, what if I'm just not passionate about anything artistic? What do I do then whenever I hear this question, I cannot help but think about a saying from my home country of Romania that says both Davina, mankind, which loosely translates to appetite, comes while eating, and this is the case for passion as well. It is true that we all have some areas in which we are naturally better at. We're simply naturally more skilled in them. We tend to be passionate about them as well. However, this is only because these things, these activities come easy to us. We, it's not a challenge to actually pursue them. So let me present to you the hypothesis that passions can also be made. You don't have to naturally have them from the beginning. And the way that this happens is actually through knowledge. You simply cannot be passionate about something, you know nothing about. One of my favorite examples when talking about this is that of tax consultants. A lot of times you'll see these tax folks talk at college graduations about how they follow their passions and look how well they turned out. And yet here I am more than willing to pay a very hefty sum of money to anyone that can find me, a high-schooler or a middle Schooler that is passionate or even knows anything at all about taxes. So if there's no kids or teenagers that are passionate about taxes, and yet we have these adults that are telling us that they're really passionate about taxes and they're really well-off for it. What is going on? Are these people, some taxed, enthused aliens that came to earth? Or is it the case that their passion came along the way as they explored this field? I am pretty confident that they are not aliens and that it is the case that they have found their passion looking more into a topic rather than naturally being born with at first, they learned about taxes and they became good at doing all of the related activities. And with that mastery came not only financial incentives and rewards, but also the respect of their peers because they were good at what they were doing after also came more interesting opportunities to work on more complex projects rather than this simple tax filing at the end of the year, they're expanding their knowledge and working on their mastery. They actually became passionate about something they initially thought they didn't really like it all. And this is exactly why I am encouraging you as well to step out of your comfort zone and try to look into something that might not speak to you immediately. And I can assure you, this doesn't mean that you won't enjoy your time and don't get me wrong. If you try something for a while and you totally hated, nobody is asking you to pursue that in the long term. It just means you tried it and next time when you set your goals or New Year's resolutions, you're going to choose something else. But who knows? Maybe you choose something that you weren't really sure about in the beginning, but you actually discover that it's a cool new hobby that keeps you entertained and engaged. And that is really the outcome we're all hoping for when doing these exercises. To briefly recap, you're going to set your goals over three axes of work, physical, artistic, and professional. Next, let's look at how do we actually go about defining our goals in order to make them achievable. 6. Metrics - Concepts: And now that we've taken the time to discuss how to diversify our goals and actually identify them. In this section, I want to take a little bit of time to discuss how we can go about defining our goals in a way that is easy to track, but also gives us a more healthy perspective on the progress and the work that we're doing. And I specifically wanted to include this section in this class because I truly believe it's one of the things that is keeping people from achieving their goals, overcoming challenges is exciting and keeps people motivated. However, if you're already challenged all the time in your day job and you get home too. More challenges to do at the end of the day that can easily become overwhelming. And in the end, you'll feel demotivated, not very happy, and you might just quit. You can see how this can easily become a problem. This is why we need to be smart about how we define our goals, but also how we track success. First, let's talk about our girls being smart. We want our goals to be specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. I think the previous section on how to identify the goals is going to cover the relevant parts, so we're not going to touch on it here. And in the next section when we discuss roadmapping, I believe that will cover that time-bound element of your goals. That's why in this section we're going to focus a lot more on the first three-dimensions. But before we really get down to the nitty-gritty details of how to track and define your goals. I want to spend a little bit of time going into two sets of concepts that are actually very frequent in product management, namely input and output metrics, sometimes also known as leading and lagging metrics and base goals versus stretch goals. Let's start with input and output metrics. On input metric is a metric that you have direct control over. Something that you can change yourself through direct action versus an output metric is something that you cannot action directly by yourself. It's something that is only impacted by other metrics. And as you can see, this is also why sometimes they're called leading and lagging metrics. The first metric changes leading the way, and the lagging metric will change only after some time has already passed. I actually find it. This is very well mapped also to the concepts of action and reaction. In order to simplify it, this means that when we're trying to achieve a goal, we're going to have some actions are input metrics, and we're going to have some reactions which are going to be our output metrics. Let me give you an example from the world of product management so you can better understand these concepts. Let's say that you are working on an app and one of your goals is to have more customers join your app. Well, you can say that your output metric is the number of customers that have downloaded and signed up. And your goal is to increase that metric. If we think about it, it's very clear that the number of customers, it's not a metric that we can actively influence. We're not gonna go busting down people's doors in the middle of the night, threatening them that if they don't sign up to our app, we're going to come in and over water their plants. Not at all. That's pretty illegal and also strange. However, it is still a very important metric and we still need to track it. But how can we influence it? Well, there are some actions that we can take. For example, you can increase the number of advertising emails that you send to your network. Perhaps you can also increase or redistribute your advertising budget between Facebook and Google ads in order to increase the number of people that will know about the app. Perhaps you're going to invest in some lead generation services. What you're doing is actually manipulating the metrics that are within your controls. The number of marketing emails that go out is something that you yourself can influence. And that is why this is an input metric. And this is also why the input metrics are the leading metrics need to change first before you can see an actual impact on the output metric or in the lagging metrics. I hope I was able to explain these concepts in a way that you could understand it. But if you have any question on this, please leave them in the class discussion and I will try to answer them now that we've gotten the metrics out of the way, let's look at basic goals versus stretch goals. You'll often find these concepts used in business, especially when discussing financial models didn't have to take into consideration changing economic conditions. However, the baseball is often defined in such a way to include some degree of failure, allowing for some things to go. Not quite right. What this basically means is that the base goal is achievable, but it does leave some room for improvements. Should we have the opportunity or should there be optimal conditions everywhere? And you guessed it, this is where the stretch goal actually comes into play. Think of the stretch goal as the absolute best-case scenario, the best outcome that you could possibly get. The stretch goal will reflect a level of the output metric, assuming that everything goes according to plan. And then sum. Let's look at a small example to try to really bring these concepts to life. And I will continue to use the example of an app and trying to get customers on it just to keep it simple, let's assume that you know, the success rate of your marketing campaigns is between 10, 20%. This means if you are running a campaign with a 100 e-mails, your base goal for the sign-ups should be ten customers. And of course, this also means that our stretch goal is going to be 20 customers because we know that this is the best output that we could possibly get from one of these e-mails. I hope this example helped clarify the concepts of base and stretch goal. But if you have any other questions, please leave them in the class discussion and we will work through it together Also. Please don't worry, we will not be doing any sort of math as part of setting our goals. This is just an example to help you understand the concepts. 7. Metrics - Examples: Now that that's out of the way, let's take a look at how we can define our goals for them to be smart, measurable, and actionable. And we're going to use everything that we've learned so far. We're going to take a goal that fits into one of our three main categories. And then we're going to try to define it in such a way where we really focused on the input metrics rather than the output metrics. Then we're going to set up base m stretch goal and see how that works for us. On top of this, we're going to try to define smaller milestones that can incrementally be achieved. And that'll help get you to the end of the goal. Also, in this section, I will be sharing some of my personal goals and how I define them just to give you a little bit of inspiration. So to kick things off, I actually like to name my goals in an imperative way, almost like a command, and afterwards break it down into actionable steps that I would need to take in order to achieve it. I found that this works very well for me because it gives me the opportunity to be flexible in terms of what my base goal and my stretch goal is, as well as it's a lot easier to just say it to your friends when they ask. So let's go through an example. One of my goals for this year is create online content. This is not a bad start by any means. It's very specific, but it's not very measurable or actionable in the way that it is defined right now. So in order to get it to a place where it is more measurable and actionable, I actually split it into two separate categories. The first section is actually to create a YouTube channel. And I went ahead and I put down as a base to publish 52 videos this year based on the simple fact that there are 52 weeks in the year. And I figured that once a week is probably a reasonable cadence for me starting out with this whole thing. I also thought that aiming for more than once a week would actually overcrowd all of my other goals and I didn't want to give myself the extra anxiety. However, I do also want to motivate myself in case there is an opportunity to do better. And so I said a stretch goal of publishing 72 videos this year, meaning that for almost half the time, for 20 of those weeks, I would publish two videos per week, not just one. Alright, so already there is an improvement. I know that I have to create online content and I will measure this by creating a YouTube channel and publishing either 52 or 72 videos. This is great. However, it doesn't include the finer milestones that I actually mentioned. So that was the obvious next step to take. I have my first milestone, add the first video, and then the next milestones are in ten video increments. This gives me a visual representation of how things are going, but it also gives me the opportunity to just celebrate that I've reached a new milestone in my YouTuber career. Here you'll notice that I don't have any goals or metrics that are measuring the amount of views that I get or the amount of subscribers that I get. And this is because those are output metrics. I can't influence them directly. Sure, what I like to have a million subscribers. Of course, it's only human. However, I cannot action that directly. What I can do, however, is try to focus on the number of videos that I put out, making sure that I put them out consistently. And also maybe trying to improve my editing skills. The subscribers and the views and any other output metric may or may not come as a direct result of my work into the input metrics. The second section was to create an online class. And well, if you're watching this, I think I'm already done with that one. Let's look at another example this time from my professional category in order to really understand how we can work with metrics and goals. Here we're going to talk about the goal that I have to improve my French. Of course, when you are setting yourself up for this type of a goal, it might actually be a lot more difficult to set these finer milestones because it's actually more difficult to evaluate how you are progressing. So this is when you might have to get a little bit creative with how you define your goals. But don't worry, I hope that I can give you at least one example to help you through. So here are the milestones that I set for myself and that are included in my base goal. First and foremost, I have to enroll and take the A22 class. Then I have to watch one French series on Netflix. And lastly, I have to send my excellent mother five emails written completely infringe without any help. While it might not be immediately obvious, I actually chose these milestones because each of them helped me practice an area of the language and they will help me work on my grammar through the course, my listening, after watching the Netflix series and my writing through setting my mom some emails. Now in order to keep things just a little bit more spicy, I did also add a stretch goal for myself. As you might have guessed, my stretch goal for this section is actually to take the Delft exam. And this is a certification that you can take after finishing the A22 level. And I want to stress here how the outcome of the exam is nowhere near a goal of mine. Simply registering, showing up and sitting the exam is the goal in itself. And if I do all of these, I will have achieved my stretch goal. Because again, the output of the exam is in my opinion, easily influenced by things beyond my control. Maybe I'm having a bad day. Maybe I actually don't prepare well enough because I'm busy with work, or maybe I get just really strict teacher grading my paper. And this is why I chose to not have any of that as a goal. And last but not least, I want to take you through a physical goal that I have, which is keep on swimming. I mentioned in the previous section that I wanted to improve my swimming and my bass goal was actually to swim at the mid-level all year round. So here I decided that one not going to anymore beginner classes is part of the base skull, as well as going swimming twice a week in the mid-level. Of course, we also have some stretch goals here as well, which is one try one pro class during the year, as well as swim the Amsterdam City swim, which is a two kilometer race through the canals of Amsterdam in order to raise money for ALS. Of course, this is just one example about how you can structure your physical goals. There are multiple other ways. For example, one of your goals can be start running and your base goal will be to go for a run twice a week for 12 weeks continuously. And then if you're really feeling spicy, your stretch goal can be run a five K race. Similarly, if you're already a runner, perhaps your milestones will be more around the number of kilometers that you run over the year rather than how many times you run in the milestones, you can easily split them in 102025 kilometer increments. I want you to really be careful when you are creating your milestones. Because while the a stands for actionable, I think that a should also stand for achievable. Basically, you should make sure that you can commit to doing it. For example, if you're not exercising at all right now, and your new basic goal is to go to the gym five times a week. I'm not saying you can't do it. Not at all, but I'm just saying maybe that's a really big change and big changes are difficult for everybody. Instead, try to use both base goals and stretch goals in order to keep things manageable, but still keep yourself motivated. So for example, instead of going from 0 to five times a week, perhaps our base goal can be going to the gym once a week for 12 weeks, and subsequently our stretch goal will be for six of those 12 weeks. There we go to the gym twice a week. And at the end of this period, you can actually reassessed to understand how ambitious, where your base and stretch goals were they too easy? Was the base goal already too difficult? How can we readjust in order to make it more manageable? And I want to stress that any exercise is better than no exercise. So don't let the definition get in your way. Your goals can include running five K every week, getting ten steps every day, getting ten steps to every other day, or every three days getting one lifting session per week, going for a long swim in the weekend. Anything works as long as you get your body moving ever so often. I personally really like this approach because I think it allows us to make incremental effort and try to look at what we can achieve through our own powers rather than focusing on things that seemed beyond our control. Another thing that I really, really like about setting milestones in this way is that it gives us an option between winning and losing. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. So instead of saying that you failed to achieve your goal, you can say that you simply achieved 50% of it or 55% of it, however much you managed to get through. And I do also want to stress that especially in the beginning, you might be a little bit optimistic and your abilities to pick up new goals and just completely change your life. So I'm here to tell you that your first iterations of setting your personal goals, understanding how to measure them and actually committing to doing it might not be a 100% success, but that's okay. Nobody's expecting that of you starting, going through the exercise and achieving as much as you can is already such an important journey to take. And it'll have benefits beyond where you can actually recognize right now. Last but not least, I do want to touch a little bit on how we should think about our goals in order to improve our mentality. I believe that words are very important, even if they aren't just within our heads. So here's my challenge. Whenever you think about your goals and if you are a pretty truthful to yourself, you should never use the word, should know, I should do this, I shouldn't do that. None of the shades, because ultimately, these are your goals and nobody else's nobody is asking you to achieve them and rest assured, the new year's resolution or personal goal, police is not going to come busting down your door, asking you if you've already achieved everything on the plan, nothing bad will happen if you don't complete a 100% of your goals, I promise you, this is why I'm arguing that you should reframe your thinking to go from I should or I have to do this too. I want to do this, I get to do this. I am testing out working with watercolors because I want to, because I might like it. I get to run five K because I'm already in pretty good physical health. That allows me to move my body in such a way. The goal here is to make sure that your brain always understands pursuing these goals as something that you like doing, that you get to do that you feel grateful for rather than something that's, somebody's definitely pushing you from behind to do naturally, it's going to be difficult to actually keep momentum through the entire year. But if you try to rephrase your thinking in this way, I found that it really does help. So to summarize this section, you're going to spell out your goals clearly, one within each Renaissance category. Then you're going to understand what are the input and output metrics for all of them. Then you're going to proceed to break down these goals into actionable milestones that you can take, see if you can find some stretch goals to keep things spicy. And lastly, completely forget about the output metrics. We're not here for that. We're only here for things that we can action and control. If you are struggling to come up with your goals, or perhaps struggling to define base goals or stretch goals. Or if you have any other questions, please leave them all in the class discussions, as I'm always checking and I'll be more than happy to help you through. I'll see you in the next class when we are going to discuss creating your personal roadmap. 8. Your Personal Roadmap: Now that we've seen how to define our goals in a way that is trackable, but at the same time healthy. I think we need to take the time to understand how to create our personal roadmap. In my experience, one of the most common pitfalls in achieving your New Year's resolutions, for example, is the idea that you have an entire year to achieve them. And that is not actually true. This idea lulls you in a false sense of security and before you know it, it's November and you haven't even started working on the things that you wanted to achieve that is bare and lack of motivation will kick in and you wallow in feeling like a failure yet again, and ultimately just give up on these goals. But fear not there is a solution. We can look to product management and agile software developer as these professions actively work to combat such situations by using what is commonly referred to as a roadmap and a backlog. These are tools that I am more than well acquainted with because I do have almost eight years of work experience as a product manager, mostly in big tech companies like Amazon and Booking.com. So let's jump into this section. We're going to see what is a road-map, how you can create your own roadmap, and how we can address the creation of more granule personal backlog. Should this be necessary for you achieving your goals as you have probably picked up, we're really launching into the activity of splitting our goals into actionable steps. And once we have that roadmap is simply putting those steps into a timeframe. This timeframe might actually be dictated by the nature of the goal itself. For example, if your goal is to go running twice a week for ten weeks continuously, then ten weeks is the natural timeframe of your goal. However, your personal roadmap is actually more concerned with answering the questions out of the 52 weeks of the year, which 10:00 AM I going to go running in? And if I really have to summarize the purpose of creating a roadmap in a one-liner. Basically, it's trying to help you answer the following. What should I be doing right now? If I have one hour of free time today, What should I spend it on? But I do want us to spend a little bit more time in why it's important to have a roadmap. And generally this can be summarized into two main arguments. First and foremost, it's going to prevent procrastination. As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, we really want to avoid the situation where you would think you have all year to get this done. This is not true because you have all year to get all of your goals done. Instead, what you want to do is set yourself up for success by saying, I will do goal X in July and I will do goal why in October. And having this kind of a planning really takes out all of the guesswork out of what should I be doing right now? Can I afford some free time? Can I take a break and completely avoid the situation of going Oh my God, I have to focus on ten different things right now. I can't do that. I'm not gonna do anything instead. That is not gonna be us this year. And the second reason, as you've probably already realized, is to prevent you from getting overwhelmed. I think we can all agree that making too many changes in your life at once can actually be very difficult. Also, I don t think that just because you're setting yourself up for some personal goals, it means that your life will change in such a way that you suddenly have an additional ten hours of free time every single day where you can just fit in chasing your New Year's resolutions. Simply put, this means that we need to figure out how many goals can you actually chase simultaneously in a way that is still achievable and it doesn't really cause you extra anxiety. Now before we actually go into seeing how we can organize things in our roadmap. I do want to take a moment to highlight a few things that will help you succeed in the long run. Number one, making sure that not all of your goals are a year long. And I specifically referring here to the goals that take an entire year to achieve and for which you need to do something every single week and maybe even multiple times a week. This is actually an incredibly taxing type of goal and it can easily overcrowd all of your other goals and take up all of your free time. For example, I actually only have one goal that spans the entire year, and that is my physical goal, meaning I just have to exercise consistently outside of this. Every other goal that I have is at most a quarter long, meaning three months long. Some of them are even as short as a few hours, especially when I'm talking about taking online classes. Secondly, it's very important to make sure that you are aware of any time restrictions that are outside of our control that are impacting your goals. For example, if you want to take a class that is run by a teacher, either virtually or in person, you might be restricted to the months in which that class runs. So you need to know if this is the case, because if it is an in-person class, then you might not have all year to take them. In fact, you might only have one or two opportunities in the year to attend that class. This means that you want to make sure that within those particular months, you don't overcrowd yourself with planning other goals because, yeah, Then you just get overwhelmed and might have to drop some. And third, you want to make sure that you understand if there are any prerequisites that you have to do before chasing a particular goal. Again, we're talking about outside forces, things beyond our control. Nothing is worse than planning an amazing roadmap, getting to the beginning of July and ready to start your brand new goal. All excited about to jump in, only to realize that you should have registered two months ago and you didn't do it. And now all of the spots are full and what's worse in these cases, a lot of times you don't actually have the opportunity to redo this goal because as I said, maybe it only runs once a year or maybe twice a year and you've already passed the previous iteration. And don't get me wrong, it's totally okay to reshuffle your roadmap as needed, especially in these types of situations. But ideally, we would not get surprised by things that are totally foreseeable. So you need to make sure that you are well aware of all of the milestones that you absolutely need to hit. Milestones that are dictated by outside forces. And milestones that if not done, will actually prevent you from even starting working on a goal. You need to clearly call these out in your roadmap in order to make sure you simply don't forget about them. And now that we've discussed the concepts and best practices of a roadmap. Let's talk a little bit about the backlog in very simple terms. In our use case, the backlog, it will simply be the list of todo things that you need to get through in order to achieve that goal. Well, we actually started creating items for our backlog in the previous section on metrics, it is possible that there are actually more things to do than we originally anticipated. For example, let's say that your goal is to create ten watercolor cards for your friends and family, then your backlog of items should include getting supplies, such as the watercolors themselves, a set of brushes, the paper. Maybe your next item is going to be watched five videos on how to work with watercolors. Then you have to decide on a design for each card. And finally, paint ten cards. As you can see, what we're doing here with the backlog is actually splitting the goal into the most granular steps that are actionable. Now I do want to say that you shouldn't go too wild on splitting the steps. For example, it's enough to say that you have to get the supplies and list out the supplies. You don't have to break it down into go to the store, pick up the items they at the cash register. I think that's a little bit of overkill. 9. Backlog Building Example: Alright, so let's look at another goal and understand how we can build the backlog for it. Let's assume that your goal is to run a 5k a race. Usually if you want to run in an organized race, you'll have to fill out a form. You will probably have to pay some money. But in terms of registration fee or perhaps a donation, if it's a charitable run. And you also have to pick up your number at 1. And usually these races also have a registration deadline. So let's assume for the purpose of this example that you have to register by the 15th of April in order to be able to run the race. So let's take it from the top. Your goal is to run a five K race and the registration has to happen by the 15th of April, then your backlog would include registering for the race and I put a little gold star right there in order to make sure that we remember that this has a hard deadline, something that we cannot influence by ourselves. And it's probably one of the things that you should do first. Then you have to buy your running shoes. You also have to collect your number, which may or may not be at the time of registration, but it also is usually a hard deadline, so it gets another gold star. Then you have to train for ten weeks and you can check off each and every single week. And at the very end, you would have to run the race. And this is how your backlog for this particular goal would look like. 10. Roadmap - Step by Step: Now that we know what the roadmap is and why we should do it as well as what the backlog is. Let's take a look at all of the steps you're going to take for each particular goal in order to set yourself up for success. Here we're going to really combine everything we've gone through in the previous sections as well. First and foremost, you're going to go through the exercise of actually deciding what your goals are with at least three goals for the remainder of the period, one in each category. Second, you need to research if there are any non-negotiable milestones for each of your goals. You need to call these out clearly and make sure that they are not forgotten. Already start adding those to the backlog of each particular goal. Then go ahead and create the remainder of the backlog for each particular goal. Third, understand what is the time-frame for each particular goal or their yearly goal? Is it a quarterly goal? Does it take a few days or perhaps a few weeks? Write down for each goal, what is the intended timeframe for you to achieve it in number four, now we're getting into the good stuff. Look at your yearly plan or the period for which you are trying to plan. And first and foremost, marked down all of the goals that will run throughout this period. This means all of your yearly goals go first. And as a reminder, I really advise against having more than one goal that goes throughout the whole year or the entire period that you're trying to plan for? I personally like to use a yearly planning sheet and a few colors as it makes it really easy to visualize things. However, you can use whatever method works for you in case you also want to use the yearly planning sheet. I actually attached it to the project resources so you can go download it from there. Number five, start trying to fit in the rest of your goals into your planning sheet in such a way that at any point in time, you don't have more than three goals overlapping. So for example, if you see that you have a month where for some reason you have to chase five goals at the same time. While I can't stop you from planning your roadmap that way, I also have to say that's a very ambitious target to hit. And you might be setting yourself up to fail. And while there is no right or wrong number as to how many goals you should be chasing at the same time, this is a very deeply personal choice. I do find that three Keeps it somewhat manageable. After some trial and error, you will actually get to a number that works best for you. So maybe start out with three and see how it goes. If you think you have so much more free time than you can increase it. And also, if you think that three is way too much for your particular circumstance, then you can also negotiate down in the next iteration, or perhaps even re-plan the rest of your roadmap in order to accommodate this. Number six is actually optional because it might not be possible. But I want you to look at your roadmap and understand if you can shift things in such a way where you might have some break periods, for example, this could mean having a few weeks where you only have your yearly or long-term goal to chase and nothing else. If possible, you want to allow yourself some time in order to slow down a little bit, take a little bit more easy. As I said, a year can be a really long time. You want to allow yourself some time to re-energize and really motivate yourself before you start working again. I can definitely say from personal experience that it's not uncommon to experience down periods when you're simply not as motivated. And having these breaks already planned out in your roadmap will definitely help with not giving up in the long run. And seven, lastly, I do want to stress on something that again, might be optional, but you can consider it as a best practice. Maybe you haven't thought about this yet, but try not to put all of the goals that incredibly excited about in one period. And then the rest of the time contains only the stuff you really don't want to do. This is a sure-fire way to get demotivated and definitely just miss some of your goals and don't get me wrong. It's a natural tendency to be more excited about certain goals than others. But I'm really asking you to not clump all of them together in one period of time. Instead, either tried to balance your goals by trying to do one exciting role and one not so exciting goal within the same period, or even dare I say, start with the things that you're not really keen on, just get them out of the way firsthand. And then all you have to do is things you love. This might seem counter-intuitive. It is true that your motivation is like a battery at the beginning of the period or at the beginning of the year, it is at full charge. So you'll probably need that charge in order to get through things that they're either unpleasant or you simply just don't feel like doing them. So why not start with something that you're not really keen on? And at least you can smash out one of them boring goals right at the beginning of the year. Take the time to plan and replan your roadmap before you get started, until you land on a version that you think is achievable and balance at the same time. Before we end this section, I do want to give you one more tip that I do for myself, and it is totally optional, but I do find that it keeps me motivated. I generally either print out or write out my personal roadmap. I tape it to a door in my apartment so that I see it every single day when I walk past that door. This way, I'm reminded every single day that I am trying to pursue something larger than myself. And also, when I do complete a goal, I actually have a checkbox that I can check and that definitely give me a boost of serotonin. So perhaps you can also consider putting your roadmap somewhere that you see frequently in order to just keep it at the top of your mind if you have any other question or if perhaps you're struggling with your personal roadmap, then do leave a comment in the class discussion and I will try to help you out as much as I can. And I hope to see you in the next lesson where we're going to discuss just how important our social circle is. 11. Social Circle: Now that we've discussed how you can create your personal roadmap, I do want to take a little bit of time to discuss improvements in our social circle or at least changes within them. While he truly believed that chasing and setting your goals is an inward activity, meaning that you are doing it for yourself and you only need yourself in order to achieve everything that you want. It is also true that our social circle has a deep impact on our ability to be successful. As Dan Pena put it, show me your friends and I will show you your future. In other words, I'm making the argument that it's useful to be surrounded by like-minded people, people that want to improve themselves and that are also open to helping the others around them. While I'm sure that you already have supportive friends within your friend circle, I think now is the crucial time 21, start cultivating these relationships and getting closer to the people that can push you forward. And at the same time, you offering to support them in whatever their pursuit is because we don't want to be selfish and take more than we get. It is a two-way street after all. And secondly, it's also important to understand if there are perhaps new friendship opportunities that you can make an cultivate friends that you've never met before. But now you realize that you have a lot in common with, for example, if your goal is to run a five K, Maybe you can join a training group of people that are also trying to run a five K. You might think you only have one thing in common with these people, the running. Perhaps you have more in common with them that you'd think because they might be like-minded people that have goals. Think about the future. Think about improving themselves just like you are. And the wonderful thing with having these types of friends is one of them or more of them can actually become your accountability buddy. I cannot stress how important it is to have an accountability buddy. Especially if like me, you are prone to some procrastination and at the same time, you really respond well to social pressure. That means if somebody is asking you all the time how things are going. However, I do believe that accountability buddies do more than just keep us on track by asking what the progress is. They can also serve as emotional support when things go tough. Sometimes you just might need to rent to somebody. And let me state this again. It's not impossible to pursue your goals by yourself without anybody helping you. I'm just saying that it's a lot easier to do it when you have a support system as you are building your personal roadmap, I want you to take time to consider what are the friends that would be a good accountability buddy for that particular goal, either friends in real life or virtual friends that perhaps you've never even met once you've identified somebody that would be suitable to help you with a particular goal, why not reach out to them and ask them if they would be open to being your accountability buddy. I think you'll be surprised just how willing people are to help you out and cheer you on throughout your difficult journey of achieving your goals. And now that we've touched upon how to find an accountability buddy and why that is so important. I do also feel that I have to touch a little bit about friends and family that might not be so supportive of what you're doing. Before we go further into this part, I do want to spend a little bit of time just clarifying exactly what I mean. When I say friends and family that are not as supportive, I don't mean that they're not as excited as you about your goals. None at all. I actually think that finding these people that are as excited as you is going to be quite difficult. That's a pretty high bar to set. Instead, I'm referring to the individuals who are either passively or actively discouraging for you from chasing your goals and bettering yourself. Or perhaps they're even mocking you for trying to do so. This attitude can really come in a variety of forms from simply expressing doubt that you can do something, haven't we all had that one cousin that always as you think you can run a five K O Lord. And the other end of the spectrum is the more aggressive, direct, belittling and mocking of your attempts to do something, or perhaps even mocking your enthusiasm to try something new if this is the situation that you find yourself in. I'm first of all, very, very sorry for you. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you might be surrounded by toxic people. I don't actually encourage you to try to change these people or try to change their minds about what you're doing. The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new. And in this spirit, I want you to keep your head down, keep working, keep going at it, regardless of what the naysayers are trying to put into your head. By doing this, you will feel better. You will know yourself better and ultimately be a lot happier than if you would try to put all of your energy interest, simply trying to convince your friends and family that going for a run is a good thing. The fact that these individuals are trying to reject your pursuit of happiness, in my opinion, has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with how they see themselves when confronted with an individual that is passionate about hobby, trying new things. They can reflect on the fact that they're not doing these things and feel inadequate. So trying to put you down as simply a knee-jerk reaction that they have to reflecting on the fact that they're perhaps not doing enough or not what they wanted, I would suggest to try to limit your contact with these people. Don't spend all your time with the naysayers. Instead, to spend more time with the people that are encouraging you and that are actively supporting you in the pursuit of more knowledge, better physical health, and just generally a happier life. I hope that everybody feels comfortable sharing their goals, both with me and with the other students. And that we tried to cheer each other along because chasing your goals is actually a trying time. It's not easy. That's why a lot of people try and fail. And that is why also we might face failure. But just because we can't finish a goal doesn't mean we also have to face rejection or mockery. So I hope that we can build a very supportive community in the class discussion that being said, I hope I'll see you in the next section when we're going to discuss potentially changing our goals? Or is that even allowed? 12. Reflection: In this very last section, before we close off, I want to touch a little bit on how important it is to reflect on what you're doing throughout the process as you're busy chasing your targets while at the same time keeping up with your day-to-day life, you may not have the time to really stop and reflect on how are you doing, How are you feeling about the progress or lack thereof. And this is why I encourage you to set some milestones for yourself where you can really stop and assess how you're doing both physically and mentally. And while I think that it's useful to have one of these milestones every single month. It's ultimately up to you how often you want to reflect on things. I also want to point out a few natural milestones that exist within this process that maybe you can use these instead of setting different ones. The first natural milestone is when we first started out, obviously when we are choosing or goals or when we even make the choice to have goals, we're trying to improve something or maybe we're curious about something. Perhaps we're trying to prove something to ourselves or others. And this is a good moment to take the time to understand what is really pushing you forward. What is motivating you to start? Is it a healthy motivation? And if not, can we reframe it in a way that is more healthy and more beneficial to us. And just as starting a goal is a natural milestone, so is finishing a goal, as we've discussed when we are creating the personal roadmap, not all of your goals will finish at the same time. And this is why whenever you achieve one, I think it's a good moment to stop and reflect on how things are going. Here are some guiding questions that I encourage you to ask yourself at this point in time, did I enjoy the process? Am I passionate about this activity? And can I do it long term? Do I want to continue this activity to get better at it or go to the next level of craft. What about this goal or process or activity? Did I not like? And can I do anything in the future that would improve my enjoyment? More preparation, better planning, different approach, anything at all. Of course, these are just a few guiding questions to get you started, but you shouldn't limit yourself to only these and last but not least, another opportunity for reflection is when you quit a goal. And I really want to stress here that it's very important to understand what is making you want to stop this goal in order to maintain balance between enjoying yourself and being in your comfort zone with challenging yourself and discovering new things. Obviously stepping outside of your comfort zone is going to be uncomfortable in the beginning, but that shouldn't be. The only reason why you stopped pursuing something. Is it just a passing feeling of de-motivation, or is it something deeper than that? Is it better to put a goal on pause rather than quit? I think it's important that you sit down and explore the answers to these questions as ultimately being honest with yourself and knowing the answer to these questions will better serve you in setting the next set of goals. And ultimately, you will constantly be learning and understanding what are the things that work for you, for your particular circumstances, with your situation in life, with your schedule. What are the tools that you can best use? What is the tracking the best works for you and what really sparks your motivation. And I promised that eventually the whole thing will become effortless. But there is a bit of a learning curve at the beginning and taking the time to really reflect on what is happening both outside and inside of your own self is really important. And I think it's a worthwhile investment to do in your well-being. 13. Finishing Remarks: Well, my friends, that's it. We've reached the end of the class. Thank you so, so much for taking my class and trying to go on this journey with me on how to define our personal goals using the Renaissance approach, I hope it gives you a new perspective and newfound motivation to go out and chase your dreams. As I've been saying so far, you can use the class discussion in order to ask me any questions and I'll be more than happy to help you. Or maybe if you just want to strike up a conversation, I do have a request as well at the end, if you could leave this class or review because it really does help me out, whatever your opinion might be, I'm just looking for your honest feedback. You can also follow my teaching profile on Skillshare and maybe if you're interested, also check out my other class, Cracking the behavioral question interview for the class project. You've guessed it, you're going to be working on setting up your personal goals because New Year's resolutions don't only start January first. Don't forget to check out the project resources because I did put some resources there that can help you along in your journey. And I hope that you feel comfortable enough to share it. Some of these goals and how you managed to set them so that we can all learn from each other in the class discussion, I really believe that sharing your goals with others, talking to other motivated people, sharing the struggles and just getting a supportive year sometimes is really key to keeping us going. Thank you so much for watching, good luck and have a good day.