Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, I'm Peter. And in this course we're
going to go over how to find the right goal-setting
system that works for you. You've probably
noticed that there's a lot of different content online and in books about
different goal-setting types. Whether this is smart goals are setting themes or
whatever it is. That's because
there's no one size fits all to setting goals. In this course, we'll go over four elements that
are common across school settings
systems so that you can find a way to apply them
that works best for you. Five years ago, I was
horrible at setting goals. I would try and start
a project and give up three weeks into it
or one day into it. I tried to run a marathon and quit running literally
after the first day. Sometimes I'd keep with it. Other times life would get busy and I just
dropped the goal, forget about it or just
flat out lose motivation. 1. I even convinced myself I wasn't like kind of
person to finish things. I was just a person
who starts projects. Someone else would have
to come in and finish it. That's when I started looking at different
goal-setting systems, how to improve my life
so I could actually finish these projects and goals that I started fast-forward. Now the present day, I've applied some of
these different systems. I've published multiple
apps, the app store. I've written a children's book, I published a course
on Skillshare. Some of my scripts that
I've written have been come public and had
thousands of downloads. And I've even changed
my job a few times. And it wasn't some near-death
experience that changed me. So I can start doing
these things or some incredibly
motivational YouTube video. I simply found the right kind of goal-setting style
that works for me. And that's what we're going
to go over in this course, how to find a system that works for you so
you too can finish your goals and feel that satisfaction of finishing something that you started. When I started studying
different goal-setting systems, I slowly made progress and
got further and further in each of my goals before I die eventually dropout or peter out. It wasn't until I combined all four principles that
I was able to actually finish my goals and start seeing success in finishing
my projects. In this course, we're
going to go over with what those four
principles are, elements are so that you
can incorporate them into your goal-setting system
and go over a couple of examples of how they work for different goals
people might have. We'll begin by going
over motivation. What fuels this desire
to work on our goal? Then we'll talk about
how to actually set the goal itself. We'll continue by looking
at different systems and action plans to make that goal achievable and break it
down into smaller parts. And finally, we'll look
over different metrics and journaling systems
to help keep you on track and provide
long-term motivation while you're working
on these projects. By the end of this course,
you'll fill out a worksheet defining your goal, your theme, your motivation, your metrics, and your action plan so that you can actually achieve your goal. This action plan will
serve as a template system that you can use in the future
to set even more goals. With that, let's
get right into it. I hope you enjoy the course.
2. Themes: Before we set our goal, let's take a step back
and talk about themes. A theme is going to serve as our motivation or
our true purpose and trying to achieve a goal. Sometimes we create our theme
before we set our goal, but I find for most
times I actually create my goal before
I set my theme. But writing my thing
down first helps me realign or redirect my goal. For example, when I
wanted to run a marathon, my theme was actually
trying to build healthy habits or it
could've been develop grid. But I came up with
the goal first. Other times my theme or vision was to become an app developer. And then I use my goals to
define what that meant. A good theme consists
of two parts, a direction and motivation. I like the direction to be a positive direction
going towards something. For example, wanting
to quit Netflix is not really a positive direction
going towards something. Whereas reading more
books are becoming more literary is a direction
that you're moving towards. I'm also very visual thinkers, so I like to think
as my direction. It's something that
I can vision or a moment that I can see
myself going through, like sitting on the couch reading a book on a
Saturday afternoon. This comes off our minds kinda gravitate towards
what we think of. And also I like to
just be a bit more upbeat with my goal-setting
and not induce guilt while trying to work
on something I find that never works as a
long-term motivation. First step direction
positive based. Secondly, we also want the
theme to be motivational. It should spark some sort of
desire to work on your goal. This is a little harder to
define, but every goal, every project has a slump
where the going gets hard. Having a good theme behind it that you really truly
believe in with your core values helps
you to get through that slump and push
through the harder parts. In essence, this
helps you remember why you're doing something
in the first place. Now we set our theme
before we set our goal, because themes are
helpful to know which direction we
want to move our goal towards and when it's
time to pivot our goal or alter it to better
serve that theme. For example, when I really
wanted to run a marathon, that was my goal,
but my theme was actually develop healthy habits. With that as my theme, I realized running a
marathon probably wasn't the best goal to
achieve that theme. Instead, I pivoted and
decided to go running daily. This helped me actually achieve the goal I wanted to truly achieve and not just what I
thought I wanted to achieve. And it aligned better with my values running
to me is more of a meditative process where I can re-center and gain
energy for the day. And not a competitive process where I'm trying to increase my time or run
past someone else. By changing my goal, I got closer to my theme, which was what I actually
wanted to accomplish. Themes also helps set a
long-term plan for your goals. Goal has to have an
end in sight where a theme can be a bit more vague. So this helps, you know, when you've
accomplished one goal, where you want to start for your next goal and what
your next goal could be. For example, after I had started getting in the habit
of running every day, I also decided to start
journaling everyday as a way to increase my healthy habits from both my mental and
physical health. If you're not even sure what kind of goal or
theme you want to set. I recommend looking
at a Wheel of Life diagram that has
different areas of your life as a starting
point for what you want to improve on or what
you feel like as lacking. Also, I like to go back to what I've always
wanted to do for me. I've always wanted to
be an app developer as since I was a little kid. I set that as one of
my themes one-year. As long as it stays
up emotion and provides you a good direction, then it can be your theme.
3. Good Themes: Now that we've talked about
what makes a good theme, Let's talk about how
to set our theme. There are a few
different ways to encompass or
manifests your theme. Some people like to
create vision boards of all these different
images of what that theme feels like to them. Other people have a moment in their head that they replay of them living out this theme
or having accomplished it. Other people like to
write their name down and this serves as a mantra or repetitive phrase that
they can use throughout the day to help them continue
working on their theme. It's okay if your theme
is a little vague. The important part
is that it provides that direction in
that motivation, that feeling that
it's something you want to strive towards. Personally, I like to
write down my themes and a short sentence or phrase and visualize the moment that encompasses that
theme or vision. When it was developed
healthy habits, my written down thing was actually lovelock
my life because that was a bit more motivational
than healthy habits. The moment I visualize
was actually me running on the
sidewalk, being happy. That served in motivation and something I wanted
to strive towards, and something that I could
actually see myself doing. Like I said, this can
be anything you want, anything that works with your learning style or your
way that your brain things. As long as it's
something that motivates you and you feel like
you can work towards it, then it serves as
a good theme or vision for starting
to set your goals.
4. Goals: Now that we have
our motivation and our directions that let's talk about actually setting our goal. The most important part about setting a goal is
that you have to know when you accomplished it and actually be able
to accomplish it. Those are two checkboxes. Now there's a few
different ways to know those two points. First, let's talk about knowing when you've
accomplished your goal. Unlike your theme, your goal
does need to be concrete. It has to have a definite
finish line in sight. I like to think of it
as the checkbox test. Can I actually check this off? Do I know that I've done it? For example, when I want it to be an app developer and to think about what did that mean to
be an app developer for me, that meant finding someone
who had paid for me to code or publishing an app
myself on the App Store. Publishing an app
on the App Store was something I could check off. I could go to the App
Store and see it there. The smart framework is a great starting
place to knowing if your goal is achievable. And if it's something
you can check off. For example, is it specific? A good goal might
be go running more. A better goal would be
go running every day. A great goal would
be grading every day for at least five minutes. That is something
you can check off every day that you know
you've accomplished. Then stands for measurable. We'll talk about metrics
later on in this course. But is there
something you can use to measure this goal by? Achievable is where
we start getting into the second part of
setting a goal. And that's the goal
you can actually do. For example, do you have the resources to
accomplish this goal? Do you have the skill set or talent or support to
be able to do as well. If not, you might have to set some pre goals to get those
resources or skills acquired. So then you can start
working on your goal. Or maybe this is where you go to your theme to pivot on
something that's more realistic and better adapt for your life to be
able to accomplish something in a
similar direction, but still aligning with
your theme revision. For example, with being
an app developer, I went towards
publishing my own app because something else,
completely new app. And I didn't want to
start freelancing right away because I was very
unsure of my skills. So there's more achievable
for me to publish my own app than
it was to try and freelance my skills to someone. R stands for realistic. Is this something
that's actually realistically achievable? And does it somewhere close
to your starting point? So back to the
marathon example will, for running a marathon, maybe start by running
a five K and work your way up to the
steps to a larger goal, still being in line
with your vision. Or in the case of me wanting
to be an app developer. My first app took
me a day to coat. My second app took me a
week and then a month. But I started where I was at. Finally, the T
stands for timely. Is this something you
can see yourself doing? I like to think of
it as if I'm hiking. Can I see the finish line or do at least know where
the major hills are? There might be some parts
that I don't know how to do, but if I don't know how
to even accomplish are beginning to accomplish
the end goal or project, then that means that I'm not thinking about this
in a timely fashion. It also meant that I didn't have enough domain
knowledge to know when I could realistically expect myself to complete this goal. When I was making apps, I limited myself to one
new subsystem per app. So the first one was
building user interface. The second one was how to
store data on the phone. The third one, how to
store it on the Cloud. It was steps that I knew I could take with only
little things that were discoverable that I still
knew enough about to know that I knew that that was
what was discoverable. So summarizing this
backup to the two parts, can you know that
you've accomplished your goal and can
you accomplish it? Those are the two checkboxes we want to check off
for our good goal. I also like to add
a third checkbox on my goals and that's
do I want to do this? Take some time to actually
think about your goal and say, Is this something I want to do? Is this something
that I feel like I should do or I
feel like someone wants me to do a great way to actually accomplish your
goal and move towards your vision or theme is to find something that's fun and
something that you enjoy. There's no point in
running every day to run a marathon if your vision
is to get healthy exercise, especially if you're
someone who loves playing soccer or playing football. I also found that
when I was doing apps for the app store, admin apps that I
actually wanted to use. I couldn't make apps that family members
wanted me to make. I just didn't have
the same motivation. And it wasn't something
I wanted to do yet. I guess that actually is a
switch three checkboxes. Can I know that I've done it. Can I do it and do
I want to do it? If you can check those
three boxes off, you're on your way to
setting a great goal.
5. Life proof: Now that we have our goal, we need to life proof it
as much as I want to say, just have grit and work
through the hard parts. The reality is, life
happens to all of us. Things change our
motivations and priorities change, our
environment changes. It's impossible to predict, but we do know some common
elements that come up in life. And we can work around that instead of just trying to
blindly push through it. Instead of being naive that
lifo happened this time, or you'll just stay
motivated the whole time. Let's sidestep life and
figure out how to proof our goal so we can actually keep working on it when
the going gets tough. To do that, we're gonna do
three things to our goal. The first is cut it in half. Our brains are incredibly powerful machines
and extremely useful. Unfortunately, they
have a few glitches. One of that being, we think
a good thing is good. So we think more
of it is better. This is great when you
have to eat vegetables or collect berries for the winter is not so good when you're
trying to set a goal. For example, when
I was trying to make an app developer
my first app, I thought it'd be
good if I could set this journaling app that also syncs to social media and has an integration with a printer
so you could print it off. And it just slowly becoming more and more and more until the goal itself was this massive project that would have taken
years to finish. I no longer felt
excited to work on it. Instead, I
counteracted my brain. I took that initial goal of
creating this journaling app. I cut it in half to the main
features that I wanted. And then honestly I
cut it in half again. Now, if you're experienced
in this goal or subject area that
you're working on and you've completed
something very similar. You probably know
what you're in for, so maybe you don't have
to cut it in half, but at least be lenient and give yourself some extra
time to work on it. If you are an Office, then make sure you account for the learning
curve and that you're gonna make mistakes
in the beginning or maybe the first
week or month, you might be going in
completely the wrong direction. That's part of the
learning and growing experience and
plan for that when you're setting your deadlines or your general timeline for when you want to
accomplish this goal. The second thing we need to do our goal is add checkpoints. Checkpoints are similar to cutting our goal in
half and give us many goals to work on and feel accomplished for achieving. Sometimes it's harder to
see the end in sight, and so it's easier to work
towards these mini goals to serve as good directional
and focus aspects. So we know what
we're working on. Personally when I'm working
on a programming project, I always add three note
cards to my goal of three main points
or milestones I want to hit with
programming this project. And then I like to break
down these checkpoints. So there's two or
three features that each one adds to the project. You don't have to
use note cards, find a way that you can
visualize or write down or Adam entre to these
little checkpoints that you can work your
way through your goal. Check lens are great
because they also prevent you from getting
overwhelmed from your goal. While the end goal might
be really exciting, it also is really daunting. Having many checkpoints
help us counteract that by still working towards
the larger goal and having the
excitement of logical, but much less daunting
many checkpoint that we're trying to hit
within our larger goal. Then the third thing
we need to do or to our goal is make
it frictionless. Changing takes time. So plan for that when you're taking into
account your goal. For me, that means
setting the bar at the bare minimum
when I'm starting a new habit or structure
to my routine. So let's take the example
of going running every day. When I first started, I realized there were
certain friction points, so I would have a
really busy day at work or busy schoolwork and I didn't have
time to go running. So I set the bar incredibly low. I'll add to do on
those days was just get out of the house and
walk around the block. Now, this might
feel like cheating. You're not actually
working towards your goal, but what you're doing is you're still developing the habit of making progress on your
goal even if it isn't a lot. And that takes most of
the fight out of it. If you can at least start
working on your goal, then you started
making more progress towards your end goal
and towards your vision. The other friction point that
I found was that it would be cold some morning so I
wouldn't want to go running. So my solution to
that was instead of just pretending like
I would actually get my shoes out of the cupboard and get my
sweatpants out of the drawer. I would lie those all on
top of a pile every night next to my chair so that they're ready to go as
soon as I woke up. Every time you encounter
something that makes you not want to
work on your goals, spend a few minutes and think, how can I remove this
obstacle or make it frictionless for me to actually
start working on my goal. It might take a few weeks to iron out all the wrinkles,
but that's okay. It takes time to
make these changes. And so planning that in that the first few
weeks might just be establishing routine and
not making serious progress. And then after that it
might just be slowly ramping up that progress
is a great way to be lenient on yourself while also
understanding how life is busy and it takes time to
balance in a new activity. Those are the three
things we're going to do. Our goal, we're going to cut it in half or
double the time. I'd check points and
make it frictionless. I hope you're
enjoying this course. If you are, please feel
free to leave a review, this will help other people
find the course too.
6. Habits: Now that we have our goal in themes that let's
talk about how we can actually make progress
and working towards our goal. There are two ways we're
going to talk about. The first is habits and the
second is time blocking. Habits are actions that we
perform usually thought even having to think about them that provides some sort of reward. Think of them as default
programming in your brain. The trick to this is if we
can make our goal a habit, it becomes a lot easier and more sustainable for us
to keep up with. In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg breaks a habit
down into three components. The trigger, the
action, and the reward. The trigger is gonna be
whatever starts off the habit. So in my case with
running the trigger was missing my shoes on my chair. That helped me know, oh, it's time to go running now, when planning for your habit, tried to make the trigger
as easy as possible. Making the triggers
irresistible are on the ignorable is really what makes a powerful
habits sustainable. Back to my running example, I was going through
finals week and it was incredibly difficult to
start running every morning. So I changed my habit
trigger instead of putting my shoes on next to my
bed or on my chair, I put them in front of the
door so I had to physically move them every morning to
get out of the apartment. Meant that I had my shoes,
my hand I saw my shoes, I saw my door and made
it a lot easier to trigger that habit of
actually going running. Second piece of the
habit is going to be the action or the thing
that we're performing. So for running, that was
going running every day, for programming, was writing
lines of code every day. When starting a new habit, I tried to focus on
making the trigger an action as correlated
as possible. That helps set it up. So when you're actually gets
longer and more difficult, the connections already there to start and actually
start working on it. So some days I don't always
have time to go running. So instead I'd walk
around the block. So at least the
action of getting out of the house and putting
on my running shoes was still there to help make
it easier to get into running on the days that I
did have time to go running. Finally, we have the reward
and the habit cycle. This is what you get after
you complete your habits, is actually what you
anticipate when you see the trigger that makes
the habit irresistible. In some examples, this
can just be dopamine or other chemicals are
endorphins that are released for completing
something with running, that's certainly the case. Try to find ways
to reward yourself immediately after
completing the action. If it's not something that
naturally releases endorphins, checking something off a list is a great way to kind of get a little jolt of
having done something. It really depends
on what you like and what kind of
rewards motivate you. For longer-term daily habits, it can be hard to sustain them. And as we've talked
about in the last video, life gets in the way
that's inevitable. Instead of ignoring that, let's plan around it. I like to follow the
one day off rule, which is I can stop doing my habit or daily
action one day, but I have to do it the next. I can only take a one-day
vacation from it, so to say, for running when I
was getting started or when big projects
will be due, maybe I'd take one day off, but that meant I absolutely
had to go the next day. So at most I only dropped
down to 50% of accomplishing. This is good because
if you take two days off for three days off
and then get back to it, it becomes harder to get back to performing your habit or
working on your goal. At least with the
one day off rule, it stays in the
forethought of your brain, even though you're
not necessarily making great progress on it. Sometimes with a habit, you're focuses on improving the action and running
further, getting faster. Other times it's just on the trigger reward
and actually building up the habit so that when you do have more
time or more energy, you can focus back on increasing or
improving your action.
7. Time Blocking: For other goals that don't
fit neatly into a habit, I like to use time blocking, which is blocking
off a section of my day or I'll make
progress on the skull. For example, making this
course has three phases to it, scripting, videoing,
and editing. It doesn't really
make sense to invest all the effort into trying
to build a habit to video myself every
day when only need two or three days of filming
to get all the shots I need. Instead, I focused on
building a habit of time blocking and working on my
project for about an hour, so every day so
that I keep making progress on it as it goes
through these different phases. For programming, this can be coding, testing, and publishing. It really changes depending
on the type of habit, goal you're working on. So here are five quick tips to help you improve
your time blocking. The first is satisfied the same time every day
if that's possible, or have the same pre-event that leads to that
time blocking. So getting off work, and then you start
your time block, maybe that changes by an
hour or two every day, but at least you know what
you're doing after work. Second is if you're feeling procrastinating or you're doing something new or you're not
grudgingly going into it. I like to set an
early start line, so that way I only have
to do a little bit. Maybe I've set aside an
entire hour to program this new part of the
code that I really need. But I'm really nervous about
how it's going to work out. So I said that To
finish line of, once I get five
lines of code done, or maybe even just two
lines of code done. I can step away if
I still want to. Usually by then I've
hooked myself when I'm in a deep bug and I want
to start finishing it, but to get myself started, I like to set an
early finish line. Third is used the path
of least resistance. Even for our fun goals, there might be phases
that aren't that fun or art that exciting. For these portions, I tried
to remove distractions and other fun activities so
that the goal itself or project becomes the
most fun thing available. This might mean turning off my phone or finding
someplace quiet to work so that I can really focus and there's not
really anything to distract me or anything
more fun to do instead. For I recommend starting each block with what
specifically you want to get done in that time period
is their specific function. You need to finish
this specific video, you need to finish filming. Again, this might be
an early finish line, but having something concrete
really helps, you know, when you've completed
it and gives you, is that good little dopamine
hit halfway through to be able to check something off,
you're making progress. And finally, build some
buffering to your schedule. We've talked about life kinda showing up whenever it
wants to quite a bit. But plan for that. For example, at a
book I wanted to get done before I met
up with our friends, we could talk about
the book and I only had about two weeks to read it all and it was
about 15 pages a day. Instead, I created the
time block that I had read 15 pages and finished
whatever chapter I was on, which usually you only men about another two or three pages. But this gave me a little
bit of buffer because I was doing more than
the bare minimum. Because of that later on
in the week when we had dinner with friends and I didn't have time to read that day. I was still ahead of
schedule and able to complete the book on time. Be wary here though, that you don't go
back and undo having your goal and that you are
now doubling your goal. I like just small little
buffers to help for the occasional
distractions, learn life. So between habits
and time walking, you should be able to
find a good system that helps you
work on your goal.
8. Metrics: The fourth and final element of goal-setting that
we're going to talk about in this course is metrics or finding some way
to measure your goal. Metrics are quantifiable
measurement so you can easily cross off to know that you're making progress towards
a larger project. So if this is writing a book, pages, written
words, written code, lines of code
functions completed, running, number of
days ran, miles ran. Something that you can
easily track to know that you're making progress and working on your larger project. A word of warning though, metrics are only
really exciting for the first few days and the
last few days in the middle, they can actually be kind of depressing to check every day. This is because there's a lot of difference at the
beginning and end. Going one day running is now doubled when you go
to days running, what is better when you
do four days running, but going 65 days running to 66 days running is
not as exciting. Similarly, at the
end when you have 5 thousand words left to right and then only 3 thousand words, less than 2 thousand words left. It's a lot more exciting
than 10 thousand words left, 9 thousand words left, et cetera, et cetera. With that in mind, I think metrics are still
really helpful to check. Occasionally in the middle of a project when you come
into that slumped to say, Hey, I've gone
running for 38 days. I got to keep that
up and keep going. Good metrics are easily
tracked and recorded. It should be something
you can record and find out rather quickly. Anything that honestly
it takes more than even a few seconds to
record is going to be a little too complex and
harder to keep up in the long run for consistent
records technology, however, has made
this incredibly easy to get great metrics. I'm pretty much any
project manager That's your phone tracking
how far you read, or your computer tracking
how many lines of code you've written in
your latest GitHub commit. Ideally for any project, I try to aim for 123
metrics per project, favoring towards just one
metric on the project. That way it makes it even
simpler in going back to our habit cycle metrics
are also helpful way to kinda get that reward or
dopamine hit the end that Hey, you can cross it
off for the day, add the ticker, whatever it is. And finally, metrics
are really helpful for setting that bar and what you actually need to
get accomplished. If your goal is just
go running every day, sometimes that might just
be around the block, but hey, you can
still check it off. Other days you're feeling
more ambitious and you go running for three miles. You're still checking it off. But because of the
bar is set low, you can keep up that consistency while still making progress. That also helps remove friction and pressure to
work on your goal, which are again, things
that are going to help you make more progress
in the long term.
9. Journals: The final part of
metrics I want to talk about is
journaling or keeping some sort of record
of the overall change that you've made
while you're working on a goal or project. I find it helpful whenever I'm starting a new
project to maybe do one quick journal entry or
video or something to record. What I'm feeling,
what I'm looking to get out of this where
I currently am. And then at the close or end of a project to kinda do a
bookend of what I've learned, what I've gained,
how far I've come. This helps to see the change
in development that's kinda slower and harder
to see in the moment, but becomes very easy
to see when you can see you're starting and end
point clearly defined. Find a medium that works
best for you to record this. It could be a couple
of sentences. It could be an entire
journal entry, it could be an entire
vlog about it. Whatever helps you know where you began
and where you end. For some of my coding projects, this is just looking at my
first app and then looking at my last stop and how far
it's come along for running. It might be, Hey, I can only run really a mile before
I got completely winded in dead and now I can run three miles some way to
track overall progress. And finally, my last tip
in this entire course is to store all of your
finished project somewhere. Our minds are really
good at finding patterns no matter
what that pattern is. So if we ask our mind
to find a pattern of times we've been successful
in completing our goals. They will find that, but we need to help
them see that. Whereas when we tell our minds, hey, I'm not good at something. It'll try and find that pattern and find evidence of that. Failures are disappointment stick out in our brain a little harsher because
it helps us learn how to survive in
environments better. To counteract this. Keeping a record of all
finished projects helps you to train the part of your brain that
recognizes successes, to find those patterns
of success and help motivate you in
further projects. So to summarize, start a reflection at the
beginning of end. Capture all of your finished
projects in one easy place. I like to use a photo album of just quick picture of
everything I've done, but find some medium
that works for you to collect evidence of finished
and successful projects.
10. Outro: Thank you so much for watching everyone By now you have
everything you need to know and do to complete your action plan so you're
ready to start working on your goal and have a
system set up in place so you can successfully
continually set goals. Don't forget to be
willing to pivot your goal accordingly
so that it better aligns with your focus
and find easy to measure metrics to help
you track your progress. I'd really appreciate
it if you left a review somewhere so I can know what you think of this or if you have
any questions, hit me up in the Q&A section. Finishing a goal,
especially one that you've had for a
really long time, is an extremely rewarding
feeling and I've been so happy being able to complete all
these various projects. I wanted to share that
with everyone else. I hope you guys
found this useful. Thank you so much for watching.
Peter Flickinger, Filmmaker, Programmer and Teacher
