How to Ensure You Have the Best Year of Your Life
Sean’s Note: Every year at this time, Mark Ford (my long-time mentor and the inspiration behind DIYwealth) scales back his work. He spends some time every day reflecting on the past year… looking over the goals he set at the year’s start… reviewing his journals… and thinking about the big picture. Then he puts pen to paper and begins mapping out his goals for the upcoming year.
Mark says: “It amazes me — when people ask me how I’ve been able to do this and that, to accomplish all these things… I always tell them it’s this system. They seem to understand. But they don’t actually take action.”
He’s invited us to look over his shoulder this month — to see exactly how his goal-setting program works… and how we can follow it.
There is a wonderful scene in Blow Up (a great movie) where the protagonist is in a rock and roll nightclub fighting with other fans over a guitar that one of the band members had just thrown into the crowd. He fights to keep his grip on it, finally wrests it out of the hands of those others who want it, and runs out of the auditorium. Alone on the sidewalk, he looks at his hard-won trophy, drops it on the ground, and walks off down the street.
The same story is repeated endlessly in the world of business.
After working and sacrificing nearly everything, the once-ambitious young person has now, in his maturity, reached the pinnacle of his financial and career success. He retires to what he has always dreamed about — a life of comfort, security, and luxury — only to find that he’s bored to death and wishes he did something differently.
I’ve seen this happen to dozens of successful entrepreneurs and executives — amazingly smart and ambitious people that spent their lives working to rise to the top of their industries and retire. And I’ve talked to a few (and read about many) best-selling authors and politicians and movie stars and rock stars that experienced the same boredom and regret.
I managed to find the solution myself. It took many years, but I managed it.
I even wrote a book about it called The Pledge.
So now that 2022 is nearing an end and has proven to be, from what I can tell, a sub-par year for most people, I want to take a moment to introduce you to my protocol for success, productivity, and accomplishment.
The final days of each year should be wonderful days — days that clear your mind, energize you, and get you ready for a fantastic year ahead.
If you’d like to make 2023 your best year ever, consider incorporating some of what I do into your routine.
Here is what I do at the end of each year:
Step No. 1:
Create The Possibility Of Tranquility That Can Last For Seven Days
For me, that means clearing my schedule of any work that’s unimportant, stressful, and/or open to surprises.
You want a calendar that’s open… so you can spend most of your “work time” doing three things: 1) reflecting on the past, 2) contemplating the present, and 3) setting goals for the future.
Schedule an hour or two every day for these three tranquil activities.
Don’t just promise yourself you’ll find the time. Block it out in your calendar. Find a quiet place. Turn off your cell phone. Shut off the Wi-Fi signal. Put on some tranquil music. Put a “do not disturb” sign on the door.
Your first few hours should be devoted to reflection — looking back at this past year and assessing how it went for you — in terms of what you accomplished, what you did not accomplish, and how you felt about those achievements and failures.
To get the most from this effort, I look at four things: my calendar, my daily journal, the goal sheet I wrote the year before, and the record I keep of the monthly and weekly objectives I set to achieve those yearly goals.
When I first began this process, this exercise in reflection often left me frustrated. I was forced to realize how little I actually did the things I most wanted to do. But as time passed, I improved the way I set and pursued goals. Nowadays, this is mostly a very good experience — feeling proud of what I’ve done. And, sometimes, even amazed.
Step No. 2:
Contemplate What You Want From Life
If you have no goals other than becoming wealthy, your chances of success will be great — but the likelihood that you’ll be dissatisfied will be great, too. As I suggested earlier, there is no greater financial cliché than the poor man who builds a fortune only to discover that he lost everything that was really important to him.
That doesn’t have to happen to you. You can grow your wealth without giving up everything else, like I nearly did. You can become wealthy and wise and healthy… and happy too!
You can achieve that by making sure that your big goals are in sync with your core values. In other words, you have to create goals that mesh with the person you truly want to be.
Happily, I’ve discovered a trick to doing this that is quick and easy:
In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, America’s two favorite juvenile delinquents disappear from their small town for a boyish adventure and then return to find a funeral going on — for them.
Hidden in the church’s balcony, Tom and Huck get to hear exactly what other people think of them. It is an eye-opener for the two young troublemakers. And imagining your own funeral can do the same thing for you.
So imagine being at your funeral. You are hiding up in the balcony. You can see your coffin. Standing behind the coffin are four people:
Someone from your family or a close friend
Someone you work with
Someone whom you admire
Someone who didn’t know you.
What do you hope each one of them would say about you? Go ahead. Imagine what they’d say. You might think about statements like these:
“He was the best father I could have ever hoped for. He taught me to be strong and independent and he showed me that I could be brave and loving at the same time.”
“He always made me feel important, even when I felt like I had nothing to give.”
“I would still be working as a security guard if it were not for him. To think of what I’ve become. I know how much of that I owe to his help and care.”
“He was a brilliant writer. For someone who spent so much of his life in the business world, I was astonished at how well written his stories were.”
Each of these reveal what I mean by core values — the ideas about living that you value, in your heart of hearts, at the deepest level.
And that, incidentally, is why “becoming rich” is probably not likely to make you happy or proud. Because I doubt that when you imagined your funeral you imagined people saying, “Boy, (your name here) was really rich!”
So take the time to think about what you want from life. You just reviewed your goals and accomplishments of the prior 12 months. Now spend some time asking yourself how you feel about them and making sure they are in sync with your core values.
Give yourself the chance to rethink your long-term life goals. There’s no law saying you can’t change them. If you want to make changes, do so.
Step No. 3:
Plan Your Future
If you invited all the right people to your imaginary funeral, you can now figure out what your core values are in every important aspect of your life.
Your core values might sound something like this:
“As a worker, I want to be considered creative and helpful.”
“As a parent, I want to be thought of as supportive and kind.”
“As an individual, I want to be thought of as smart and interesting.”
The point of doing this is to help you know yourself in a way that matters.
Which brings us to your next task: converting your core values to life goals. If you’ve done your work well so far — if you truly do know yourself — this will be surprisingly easy.
How many life goals should you have?
I recommend four:
A financial (wealth building) goal, because we are all morally responsible for paying for what we consume.
A social (social-relationship) goal, because we are all social creatures. We live among people and recognize that a great deal of our happiness is partly derived from our relationships.
A personal (personal-development) goal, because we are all also individual creatures. We have individual values and ambitions and recognize that our happiness is partly derived from acting on those ambitions and values.
A health (fitness) goal, because we know that without good health nothing else can be done well or enjoyed.
Do that now—convert your core values into four big, long-term goals. Do that in writing. Your list of four goals might look something like this:
My financial goal: To be financially independent and take care of other people (e.g., family, friends, people in need) in some responsible way.
My social goal: To be a great parent, a loving spouse, a loyal friend, and a charitable soul.
My personal goal: To be a published author, a competent pianist, and a great conversationalist.
My health goal: To be able to work and play with vigor; to be pain free and mentally alert and energetic for as long as I live.
As I said in the beginning, having four main goals rather than one might decrease by some degree your chances of achieving all four. (My guess is that your chances of achieving all four will be 75% rather than 95% if you choose only one.)
But the good news is that by having four goals that align with your core values you will begin to have a rich and happy life immediately. And when it comes time to retire, you will retire into an equally rich and happy life and not end up tossing your accomplishments away like an unwanted guitar.
Step No. 4:
Adopt A Productivity System That Works
Most ambitious and successful people set goals and use task lists. I’ve seen those task lists. They’re usually handwritten on lined paper. Pages and pages of “things to do” with no way to sort out what’s important.
I used to do that. But I was never able to accomplish my important long-term goals that way.
I was very busy. And I made loads of money.
But my life was speeding by without any hope of being able to look back and think, “I did what I wanted to do.”
The time-management system I use now is more detailed. When you see it, you might think it’s obsessive-compulsive and nerdy — definitely not something truly bright and cool people would do.
But it works.
Since starting, I’ve accomplished a number of things I would never, ever have done otherwise. I:
Wrote and had 24 books published—mostly nonfiction. But several books were on culture and poetry. (Two of those books were New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-sellers.)
Wrote four screenplays. Three were made into movies.
Produced three movies… one of which may not be terrible.
Earned a black belt in Brazilian jiujitsu. I won three first-place belts in the master’s division of one regional and two national competitions.
Started a family charity that funded — and is running — a $2 million-plus community development center in Nicaragua.
Relearned the French horn.
Developed several financial products and services (such as the Legacy Portfolio) I’m very proud of.
Started a boutique publishing company. It’s produced books and records for unknown people I think deserve to be noticed.
Developed a 10-acre palm tree botanical garden. I hope it will one day be open free to the public.
Stayed healthy, kept my friends, enjoyed my family, and managed to increase my family’s wealth.
Before I developed this system, I never had time to write poetry or produce movies. I never had time to get involved with charitable endeavors.
To accomplish all this, I realized I needed more than goals based on my core values.
I needed a system to make my goals a priority.
Place A Priority Stake On Your Goals
To be more productive — and achieve more at work and in your personal life — you must place a “priority stake” in long-term goals that correspond to your core values.
Then work backward to establish yearly, monthly, and weekly objectives.
Let’s say a long-term goal of yours is to become conversational in Portuguese. You must first pick a day — sometime in the future — when you hope to meet your goal. Mark that date down. Then work backward.
Establish yearly objectives, then monthly objectives, then weekly objectives.
You might find you must learn five new verbs and 10 new nouns. You are, in effect, setting and keeping a pace.
Based on your weekly objectives, create daily task lists. And then here’s the key: You must make it a mission to complete each daily task.
But if you want to really change your life, you have to learn how to prioritize your long-term goals… relative to everything else in your life.
The most important lesson I learned came from author Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey presents a technique for prioritizing that impressed me… and became a central part of my planning process.
Divide your tasks, Covey says, into four categories:
Non-important and non-urgent
Non-important but urgent
Important but non-urgent
Important and urgent.
In the “non-important and non-urgent” category, you’d put such things as:
Catching up on office gossip
Shopping online for personal items
Answering unimportant phone calls
Responding to unimportant emails.
In the “non-important but urgent” category, you’d include:
Returning phone calls from pesky salespeople
Making last-minute preparations for an office party
Attending a required meeting that doesn’t help your career
Planning for a meeting that doesn’t matter.
In the “important but non-urgent” category, you might include:
Learning how to write better
Learning how to speak better
Learning how to think better
Working on your novel
Getting down to a healthy weight.
And finally, in the “important and urgent” category, you might list:
Making last-minute preparations for an important meeting with the boss
Making last-minute sales calls to key clients
Solving unexpected problems.
When you break up tasks into these four categories, it’s easy to see you should give no priority at all to “non-important and non-urgent” tasks. These tasks should not be done at all. They’re a waste of time.
Yet many people spend a lot of time on them. That’s because they tend to be easy to do and enjoyable… in a mindless sort of way. Many people are afraid to get to work on truly important tasks because they’re afraid of failure.
Even worse than spending time on tasks that aren’t important and aren’t urgent is spending time on those that are non-important but urgent.
They should’ve been dealt with long before they reached the crisis stage.
Do The Most Important Work First
When it comes to personal productivity, we all have the chance to have good days or bad days.
Good days are those that leave you feeling good… because you’ve accomplished your most important tasks. Bad days are those that leave you feeling bad… because you’ve failed to do anything to advance your most important goals.
If you want to have a better life, fill it with good days. The best way to do that is to organize your day according to your personal priorities — doing the most important things first.
It’s easy to do. Yet most people don’t.
Eighty percent of the people I know — and I’m including all the intelligent and hard-working people I work with — do exactly the opposite.
They organize their days around urgencies and emergencies. Taking care of last-minute issues that should’ve been addressed earlier. Or completing tasks that help other people achieve their goals — while ignoring their own.
Doing first things first is a very simple discipline. But its transformative power is immense. It can change your life — literally overnight.
It changed my life. Several times, in fact.
It’s the single best technique I know for change.
And it’s the fastest and easiest way to turn your life around if you’re not happy with the way it’s been going so far.
Doing first things first.
In Summary…
As we round the year and move into 2023, I want you to make a pledge to follow the steps I’ve laid out for you and to use the goal-setting system I’ve just outlined:
Force yourself to make the time for tranquil contemplation.
At the beginning of the year (or the very end of the current year), contemplate your future by dreaming your best dreams… thinking about your responsibilities… and imagining what you hope people will say about you at your own funeral.
Identify four life goals.
Break down your four life goals into yearly objectives and then monthly objectives.
Now, here’s the trick: You absolutely, without question, must break down your pledges into daily or weekly task lists to make this work.
Prioritize them according to importance and urgency. And devote your early morning hours to important but non-urgent items first.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with this year who couldn’t accomplish what they wanted… because they were using some modified, watered-down version of this system.
A simple “to-do” list will NOT work. You have to use my system — incorporating important but non-urgent life goals—into your daily tasks.
So after today, I’d like you to spend an entire morning advancing further toward meeting your objectives.
Start by making a daily task list of only those objectives. Assign each one the amount of time you think you can devote to it. Then get to work.
Take no unnecessary phone calls. Keep your office door closed. Get at least 15 minutes of additional work done on each item. When you’re done, take a break. Reward yourself with a walk around the block, a cup of tea, a shot of booze.
Well… maybe you should hold off on the booze.
But only if that’s also your objective.
Regardless, cheers to 2023 being a marvelous and successful year for you.
