Do you ever look at successful people and marvel at their intense levels of motivation? How do they manage to find the strength to continue with their goals day after day? How do they have the self-discipline? It may feel like you could never achieve the same level of motivation as your heroes, but the reality is different. It isn't that successful people are more motivated than you — they simply do a few things differently than most. If you can master these things, then you too can achieve seemingly superhuman levels of motivation and produce the great work you've always dreamed of. It won't be easy, but it's simpler than you might think. 7 Things to Do If You Need Motivation To get you started, here are seven motivation tips to help you crush your goals. 1. Make a Public Commitment You’d be amazed what you can accomplish when you commit to it publicly. It’s a whole different level than when your goals are just floating in your head or sitting in a document on your computer. Public commitment leverages peer pressure in the best way possible. It’s a simple way to stay motivated, because if you don’t do what you say you would, you have no way to hide it. People will know, and they will call you out. How public you want to make your commitment is up to you. For some people, committing on your website or social media will be out of your comfort zone, and that’s fine. You can also make a commitment to friends or family. What matters is that you have someone who will know (and hold you accountable) if you don’t meet your goal. 2. Make it Meaningful One reason many people need motivation is that the things they’re working toward aren’t meaningful for them personally. Just look at someone like Elon Musk. He’s running multiple companies simultaneously, all while still making time to be with his family. It’s easy to imagine that Musk has some sort of rare gift that allows him to keep up this work ethic, but if you listen to interviews with Musk, you’ll notice how intensely he believes in the work he’s doing. His vision for SpaceX, for example, is no less than to make humanity an interplanetary species. With a vision like that, motivation is easy. Now, we’re not saying that you have to be as ambitious in your goals to achieve the same level of motivation. We can’t all be Elon Musk, and that’s okay. But if you need motivation, you can find something you believe in to work towards. It could be a goal for your job, but also just something you do on the side, such as training for a marathon or teaching yourself a new skill. What’s important is that you believe in what you’re doing and are doing it out of a genuine interest, not just because it’s something that other people say you ought to do. 3. Set Specific Goals One common mistake people make when they set goals is to make them too broad. This can be a real motivation killer. It’s difficult to know if you’re making progress when you have a large, vague goal. Therefore, we suggest that you set specific goals — it will do wonders if you need motivation. For example, say you want to learn the guitar. What style of music do you want to play? Acoustic or electric guitar? Do you want to shred on stage, or just strum a few tunes at family get togethers? And that’s just the beginning: once you decide on what your ultimate vision is for playing guitar, you need to break it down even further, giving you manageable weekly goals such as “learn how to strum a G chord” or “learn the chorus to ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’” 4. Keep Encouraging Words in Sight When you’re in the thick of a difficult project and things just aren’t going your way, it’s easy to get discouraged. In times like these, it makes a world of difference to have words of encouragement visible. We recommend putting motivational and inspirational quotes from your heroes over your desk or on your desktop wallpaper. That way, you can readily turn to them when you need motivation. To get you started, here are some of our favorite motivational quotes: "Start acknowledging all the good you are doing. Don’t discount the little things. I mean, how many times do you scold yourself for doing something small that wasn’t perfect? How often do you think the good things such as being on time, or signing a new client is simply how it’s meant to be? They need celebrating. You need more wins in your life. This will motivate you, encourage you, and help you see how brilliant you truly are." — Kai Ashley "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten." — Tony Robbins "The most effective way to do it, is to do it." — Amelia Earhart "My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time." — Steve Jobs “People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing — that's why we recommend it daily.” — Zig Ziglar "What I've learned in these 11 years is you’ve just got to stay focused and believe in yourself and trust your own ability and judgment." — Mark Cuban “If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.” — Jeff Bezos 5. Create the Right Daily Routine What’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning? Is it something that fills you with energy and motivation? Or is it something fills you with anxiety, stress, or boredom? If the first thing you do in the early morning is check your phone, for example, then you’re not setting yourself up for a motivating day. Seeing whatever horrors have occured in the news or immediately getting sucked into your email inbox are not the way to set yourself up for a motivating day. Instead, we suggest doing an analog activity like reading a book, journaling, meditating, taking a walk, working out or drinking your morning coffee as you watch the sunrise. These are simple activities, but they will do a whole lot more to give your day a motivating start than immediately getting sucked into the busy stress of digital devices. 6. Have Self-Confidence If you don’t believe in yourself, then you’re never going to able to believe in the work you’re doing. This will result in fragile motivation that will be easily shaken when things get difficult. We know it can be hard to believe in yourself sometimes; everyone has their moments of doubt. But what sets successful people apart from everyone else is that they recognize the self-doubt as normal and then push through it, doing great things anyway. To build your self-confidence, reflect on the things that have gone right. Look at all you have been able to accomplish. Celebrate all the good things that have come as the fruit of your hard work. Write them down if you need to. Post them where you can see them; reaffirm them to yourself. This will serve as a major confidence-booster. 7. Have a Long-Term Vision While we already stressed the importance of setting specific goals, it’s important not to go too far the other direction, either. It’s possible to get so set on checking off the items on your daily to-do list that you lose sight of why you’re doing the work to begin with. What big goals are these daily tasks serving? If you can’t answer that question, you need to go back to the drawing board. It’s much easier to persevere through difficult times when you know that the work you’re doing is in service of a larger vision. Stay Motivated for Good We hope you now see that motivation isn’t some mysterious natural gift that some people are just born with. It’s something that anyone can achieve and maintain with the right techniques. When you need motivation, you need to do hard work, of course. But you can stay motivated through difficult times provided that the hard work is in service of something you believe in.

There’s a lot of advice floating around on the internet when it comes to goals. You can find guides on how to set goals, which goals to avoid and even which goals are most important. What often gets left out of this discussion, however, is the question of goal types. How many different kinds of goals are there? After all, you can’t set goals if you don’t understand the types of goals available to you. That’s why we created this overview of the six types of goals we’ve identified. These categories  are flexible; some goals will fit into multiple types. We’ll start with a high-level overview of the types of goals available, and then we’ll proceed into a discussion of more specific goals. We’ll also point you to some further resources on how to set (and stick to) any goal you want to accomplish. Don’t Set the Wrong Goal Before we explore the types of goals, we need to mention the importance of setting the right goals to begin with. If you set the wrong goals, then it doesn’t matter what measures you take to achieve them or what types of goals they are: achieving them will make you end up somewhere you didn’t want to be to begin with. So remember this: The most important type of goal is the right goal. But how do you know if a goal is the right one for you? First, the goal should align with your values, whether those are your personal values or the values you’ve outlined for your business. If a goal goes against those values, you shouldn’t pursue it, no matter how many blogs, business books or even people in your life say you should. For example, you could set a goal to make a million dollars a year. There’s nothing wrong with that goal per se, but what if achieving it came at the cost of spending time with your family or treating your employees well? If so, this could be the wrong goal to pursue. Of course, it’s also possible that you’re just going about the goal in the wrong way. To avoid that, you need the right goal-setting framework, one that ensures you’ll set the right types of goals to begin with and follow through with them. To do both, we recommend you use the SMART goal-setting framework. It’s not the only one out there, but it’s one of our favorites. Let’s look at it in a bit more detail. How to Set SMART Goals We won’t cover everything about SMART goals here; we have an in-depth article on the topic that we encourage you to consult in order to learn more. But, in brief, a SMART goal is one that meets the following criteria: Specific - When you set a specific goal, you articulate exactly what you want to accomplish (and how you plan to do so). You go beyond a vague intention like “I want to travel” to “I’m going to visit Greece next summer.” Measurable - A measurable goal is one you can quantify. This way, you can know with certainty if you’ve achieved it. This is why goals like losing weight are so popular; the scale does not lie. Achievable - Achievable goals are ones you can reach given your current resources and abilities. Being as rich as Elon Musk isn’t going to happen for most of us (assuming that’s a desirable goal to begin with). Extreme levels of wealth have a lot to do with luck. But you can certainly set goals to build a business, start investing and even retire early — these are far more achievable for the average person. Relevant - This goes back to what we touched on earlier about how to set the right goal. A relevant goal is one that aligns with your values, that will get you to where you envision without compromising the things that make life worth living. Time-Bound - When you plan to accomplish your goal within a set time period, it gives you both urgency and a clear direction. It also prevents you from setting open-ended goals that can stretch on forever without allowing you time to evaluate and reflect. The 6 Types of Goals Now that you understand how to set goals, let’s get into the different types. The categories below are useful for setting most types of goals you’d want to achieve. We’ll start with two broad categories that cover all types of goals out there, and then we’ll move into some more specific categories. 1. Long-Term Goals Your long-term goals are the ones that you might put on a bucket list. They’re the big goals that guide everything else you’re working on. They tend to be on a timeline of at least one year, and often longer. Here are some examples of long-term goals: Become fluent in a language Publish a book Be a serial entrepreneur While the amount of time to accomplish these goals might vary, they’re ones that you can’t just accomplish in less time, no matter how hard you work or how much money you have. Some things just take time. Understanding which goals qualify as long-term and which are short-term is one of the keys to goal-setting. Luckily, as long as you follow the SMART framework, you should be able to make the distinction without difficulty. 2. Short-Term Goals Unlike long-term goals, which guide your larger vision and can take years to accomplish, short-term goals operate on a smaller time scale. There can still be some variation, of course. A short-term goal could be something you plan to accomplish by the end of the week, such as finishing a blog post. Or, it could be a little larger in scale: finish the first draft of your book by the end of this quarter. When it comes to setting short-term goals, you should keep the “achievable” aspect of the SMART goal framework in mind. Is this a goal you can achieve in the time you have with the current resources available to you? If not, then it may be more suitable as a long-term goal that you need to break down into more achievable short-term goals. Now that we’ve covered these two large, meta categories of goal-setting, let’s move into more specific types of goals that cover the different areas of your life. 3. Personal Development Goals Personal development is a broad category that covers everything from health goals to personal growth goals. It can also include life goals such as “get married” or “have children.” What sets this category apart from the others we’ll discuss is that it doesn’t directly deal with your career or business. Personal goals relate to things you want to do and the person you want to become. They often involve things you pursue outside of your job in your free time, without any extrinsic motivation. If you don’t have personal development goals, then we suggest you set some. It’s easy to focus on your career goals to the point that you forget to also work on yourself. You can maintain motivation and find fulfillment outside of your job if you have personal development goals you’re working toward (and accomplishing), particularly if things aren’t going as you’d like in the professional sphere. 4. Financial Goals Next, we have financial goals, which can cover a wide range of areas. Everything from improving your daily spending habits to saving for retirement to buying your first home are part of this category. No matter the amount of money you make and what your other goals are, learning to be wise with money will make it much easier to accomplish the things you want. Therefore, it’s worth having both short- and long-term financial goals to work on. Financial goals can overlap with areas of personal development. For example, you could set a personal goal to drink less alcohol to improve your health and a financial goal to save up for a new car. Drinking less could accomplish your personal goal while also helping you spend less money, which achieves your financial goal too. 5. Career Goals Next up, we have career goals. This is a topic we discuss a lot on this blog: Here is an an entire post about it. First, you need to have career goals to begin with; far too many people take whatever job they can get and then hope for the best, assuming that if they stick around long enough they’ll be promoted (or at least won’t get laid off). However, we know that as a reader of this blog you’re more ambitious than the average person. You likely have aggressive goals for your career, like quitting your 9-5 and starting your own business. Whatever the case, the key to setting effective career goals is to remember that it’s a marathon. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to double your salary tomorrow, but you can ask for a raise. You can spend your evenings learning about new subjects that will put you on the path to a better job, or ask a more experienced coworker to mentor you in order to learn the leadership skills to move up. And on an even smaller scale, you can set goals to increase the amount of sales you make, the number of reports you write per week or the number of new professional connections you make. Simply by setting and tracking these goals, you’ll already be on the path to a brighter future than most of your coworkers. 6. Business Goals Finally, we have business goals. If you don’t yet own your own business, then this may seem like an irrelevant category to you. But if you’re planning to start your own company someday (even if it’s just an idea in the back of your head), it’s worth understanding how to set business goals before you begin. This way, you’ll avoid floundering around and wasting time once you do take the plunge. When people think of business goals, they tend to think only of financial performance goals such as a certain monthly revenue or keeping costs below a certain amount. Certainly, these are important metrics to consider — unless you’re running a nonprofit, making money is an essential goal for any business (and even nonprofits need money to pay their employees and keep the lights on). Still, it’s worth thinking beyond the financials as well. You can also consider how many people your business helps, how many jobs it creates or how it enriches your life. If you’ve set out on your own, then it must be because (at least in part) you believe you can do something working for yourself that you couldn’t in a traditional job. Whether that means working in alignment with your values, bringing an innovative new product to market, or just being able to spend more time with your family, there’s more to “business goals” than the bottom line. Hold Yourself Accountable We hope this overview of the different types of goals has been helpful for your life journey. If you need a place to make note of these goals, then we recommend you check out the SELF Journal. It has everything you need to set (and track) goals of all sorts, ensuring you’ll finish what you start. And if you need a daily visual reminder that you can glance at any time, you can also check out the Wall RoadMap, which helps you break your goal down into manageable weekly chunks. Wishing you success in whatever goals you choose!

Do you ever wake up feeling overwhelmed by all the work you have to do? This feeling can be paralyzing and demotivating, causing you to spend an entire day floundering around instead of doing your best work. We recommend using a day planner to keep your to-do list from running rampant in your head. With one of these tools, you can map out your daily to-do list, weekly plans and larger goals with ease. However, the number of day planners on the market can be overwhelming. The 5 Best Day Planner Options To help you spend less time comparing planners and more time accomplishing your goals, here are the five best planners on the market. 1. LifePlanner If you're looking for a whimsical, spiral-bound planner, LifePlanner's collection could be the way to go. Each of their planners features striking decorative covers, monthly planner calendars and lined pages for making notes of important information such as email addresses or phone numbers. You'll also get a pouch to store other pieces of paper and coloring book pages for when you need a break. You can even order planners with custom covers that incorporate your photos. 2. Blue Sky Planner Although Blue Sky's lineup focuses primarily on academic planners for teachers and students, they could still be useful for entrepreneurs who want a basic, larger format weekly/monthly planner. These planners come with protective covers to prevent scratching, inspirational quotes, a storage pocket and a notepad to take separate notes. 3. Franklin Covey Planner The Franklin Covey planners all use a daily planning method inspired by the way Benjamin Franklin planned his days. Hyrum W. Smith first created this method in 1984, and today Franklin Covey uses it to create a variety of planners. They focus on loose-leaf monthly organizer pages that you can pair with their binders or other organizers of your choice. You have full control over the way your planner looks while still taking advantage of the company's special method, which consolidates tasks and appointments into one place while helping you achieve your goals. 4. Gallery Leather Planner Gallery Leather is a leather goods maker based in Bar Harbor, Maine. They offer soft cover leather bound weekly and monthly planners in assorted colors, with an emphasis on leaving enough blank space for you to fill in all of life's details and complexities. If you're looking for a sophisticated, elegant planner, you can't beat these. 5. Self Journal Finally, we have the Self Journal. This is a powerful yet simple day planner to help you structure your day, enjoy life and reach your goals quicker than you thought possible. It's the perfect size to throw in your bag and take wherever you get your best work done. And it uses a science-backed structure in which you set goals on a 13-week timeline, helping you bridge the gap between idea and implementation, building habits that last. Explore Strategic Day Planners and More For more planning and goal setting tools for entrepreneurs, be sure to check out our shop.

Like most people, you probably have dreams and aspirations for your life. If you accomplish certain tasks and perform specific activities, you may fulfill these desires. But achieving your dreams is challenging, and developing confidence and a clear path to success can be difficult. How can we foresee the common pitfalls if we don’t know what they are? Achieving a goal is much more complicated than setting, working toward, and accomplishing that activity. In fact, there are certain processes that set you up for goal success, many of which may be new to you. Until you make these specific goal-setting and goal-achieving behaviors into habits, you’ll benefit from deliberately following the steps of a prescribed goal-achievement process. But not all goals are treated equally. That’s why you must set SMART goals. Setting SMART goals will give you the best chance of taking any goal from inception to completion.  The SMART acronym stands for: Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time-bound Below, we’ll walk you through each of the components of SMART goals and show you how to create your goals correctly. Setting SMART Goals to Clear the Path Ahead   Whether you want to achieve personal goals or business goals, SMART goal setting will help you turn any vision into your desired outcome. 1. Specific This is the most important aspect of your goal creation. When you begin this process, your initial goal can be vague. But your final goal needs to be well-defined. A specific goal will help you stay focused on the right tasks. Your time is valuable and precious; you don’t want to waste it on activities that don’t move you toward your goal. To create a specific goal, ask yourself these questions: What do you want to accomplish? Why do you want this? How can you achieve this goal? You need to address every aspect of the goal. If this is a large, long-term goal, you may want to break it down into smaller goals that are easier to define. Also, make sure to include everything you know that you don’t know (known unknowns). For example, you may not know how to do the taxes for your new business, but you know that you need to learn or outsource this work, which you would include in your goal. You will need to devise an action plan, which is only possible if your goal is specific enough. By focusing on the details, you’ll know exactly what is needed to see your plan through. 2. Measurable Once your goal is well-defined, you need to make it measurable. Measurable goals allow you to track your progress and determine whether you are meeting your requirements. As management guru Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” This means your output needs to be quantifiable, even if your end goal is qualitative. Look at the following goals for someone who wants to promote their side business by creating content regularly. I want to create and publish content regularly. I want to spend one hour writing new content every day. I want to publish one piece of content every day. The first example is not a SMART goal because it’s unmeasurable. What does regularly mean? How will you know if you hit your goal? But the last two examples are measurable because you’d know whether or not you accomplished your goal for the day. If you can answer the question, “Did I accomplish my goal?” with a clear yes or no, then your goal is measurable. It’s also important that you can measure the progress of your goal. If you have a long-term goal with a five-year time frame, you need to know whether you are on track to complete the goal. This is why you need to break large goals into small goals – so you can measure your performance against each small goal. Measuring your progress will help you stay focused because you’ll know exactly what you need to do and it will help you stay motivated because you’ll see the progress you continue to make. If you want to achieve challenging and lofty goals, it’s critical that you make them measurable. 3. Attainable If your goal isn’t attainable, you’re setting yourself up for failure. An attainable or achievable goal is one that is possible to accomplish. This means that it needs to be realistic and within your capabilities. You can push your boundaries, but don’t expect to become a professional basketball player if you can’t dribble and shoot a basketball, or are only 5’ tall. Different people have access to different resources, so don’t pursue a goal because you’ve seen someone else attain it. Instead, use common sense and determine what you’re capable of completing. Assess the constraints and make sure you can overcome any foreseeable obstacles. Identify the skills required and compare them to your experience and abilities. If you go through this process and believe that you have what it takes to see this project through, your chances of meeting your goals become much more likely. 4. Relevant When you set goals, make sure they matter to you and the bigger picture of how you envision your life to unfold. Achievable goals are only valuable if the end justifies the means. To help you determine the relevancy of your goal, as yourself questions such as: Does this goal align with my values? Will conquering this goal help me move closer to achieving a bigger, overarching goal or vision? Am I excited, or do I want, to work toward this goal? This is the time to think about what’s truly important to you. Management’s goals may be important to the firm, but will they help you in your career? Or will this derail your progress and take you off-course? Only you can answer these questions. When you work toward and achieve goals that aren’t meaningful to you, it takes you away from progressing toward your best self. Don’t let other people dictate your life. Be cognizant of the decisions you make and clear about the goals you pursue. Meaning, fulfillment, and happiness are on the line. Choose a goal that is relevant to you and you’ll never regret the decision. 5. Time-bound Your SMART goal needs to have an end date, otherwise, you won’t know if you’re progressing at the right speed. And since your goal is measurable, you can track your momentum against your due date. Also, you want to make sure that you set a realistic time-frame. You’re destined for failure if your goal is too lofty or you don’t give yourself enough time to complete it. Assess the tasks and use your best judgment to create your deadline. A target date that is difficult but doable is perfect for your goal. To determine your time-horizon, think about everything you need to accomplish and estimate the amount of time it will take to finish each item. Then, add them up, and add a little more time (maybe 10%) for contingency. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned. Expect different things to get in your way. Once you set a completion date for your goal, you’ve successfully used the SMART criteria to create a worthy goal. These five tactics will increase your odds of completing your goal, and it’ll be a goal that truly interests you. So what are you waiting for?! Create your SMART goals so you can take your life in the direction you desire. And once you do, share your goals with us in the comments below!   Looking for a way to Commit to Change? Join the members only community! Community support, tools, and methods you need to make your resolution into reality! Smarter Together One of the most incredible things about all of us is for all the differences in our journey, the more we consider the path of those who surround us the more success we find. The greatest among us will freely admit that they stand on the shoulders of giants. That their innovation is not the exclusion of ideas, but the inclusion and re-imagining of them. When we connect the dots of ideas to preexisting concepts in ways others have not seen we create amazing things.  

When you take your first leap into entrepreneurship, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement. You’re finally free (or on the path to being free) from the constraints of an employer, a 9-to-5 job, and climbing the corporate ladder. You’re in charge of your fate now, and the freedom is exhilarating. But, eventually, the excitement wears off, and you find yourself without a clear idea of where you want to take your entrepreneurial pursuits. You were so caught up in getting to the point of being self-employed, that you didn’t have a chance to think about what you’d do next. You find yourself wondering, Now what? Once you’ve reached this moment, it’s time to define your entrepreneurial career goals. Although your career goals as an entrepreneur differ from those as a salaried employee, the importance of having clear goals is just as significant, if not more important. This article will explore how to define entrepreneurial career goals, including how they differ from traditional career goals, and how to set them in a way that will help you find the success and direction you desire. How Entrepreneurial Career Goals Are Different Most of the advice about setting career goals is aimed at corporate employees, advice which isn’t much help to you as an entrepreneur. You’re not interested in how to talk about your career goals in a job interview with potential employers. Explanations of the career path to a management position are irrelevant. And discussions of the role of career goals in directing your job search seem out of touch with the reality of your job, the job you’ve created for yourself. We won’t rehash any of this advice; we know it’s not what you’re looking for. Instead, here are the five things you should keep in mind when setting your entrepreneurial career goals. 1. Set Realistic Goals Entrepreneurship, in one sense, is an act of ego. You have to be willing to have enough faith in your idea, in yourself, and in your business in the face of naysayers and struggles. You should be bold; you have to be bold. But there’s also the danger of being so bold that you set unrealistic goals for yourself. Goals are a powerful tool when you apply them correctly, but if you set goals that are too lofty (especially on too short a time scale), you’ll only set yourself up for frustration. We’re not saying you should fear failure; you must be prepared to fail, as all successful entrepreneurs fail and learn from their failures continuously. Nonetheless, you shouldn’t set goals that you cannot achieve with your current resources or abilities. For example, we now know Elon Musk for companies like SpaceX and Tesla, but we forget that he only undertook those ventures after he was already a multi-millionaire as the result of his success with PayPal. He didn’t build either of those companies from nothing, and you shouldn’t feel like you have to do the same either. Set goals that stretch you beyond where you currently are, of course, but that are still achievable with what you have available. 2. Set SMART Goals To set career goals you can accomplish, we recommend the SMART goal setting framework. We won’t go into the full details of the framework here, as we have a full article on the topic. But in brief, SMART goals are ones that meet the following criteria: Specific - The goals isn’t vague, but concretely defined. Measurable - You have an objective, quantitative way to determine if you’ve achieved the goal. Achievable - The goal is something you can accomplish with the resources, skills, and time you have. Relevant - The goal will contribute to your larger vision of success. Time-sensitive - The goal has a time frame that ensures you know when you have (or haven’t) accomplished it; it isn’t open-ended. 3. Define Your Long-Term Career Goals Once you have your goal-setting framework in place, it’s time to set the goals themselves. We recommend you start with your long-term goals. These are the ultimate goals that you’d like to achieve within the time frames of 1, 5, and 10 years. You can think even longer-term if you want, but beyond that it’s so hard to say how changes in the economy or your life situation might present new opportunities or necessitate shifts in your career trajectory that setting goals so far away isn’t productive; such is the territory of dreams. Long-term goals can be fairly general. They’re goals such as “Make enough money to replace my employee income” or “Build a passive income business that requires a few hours a week of work” or “Create a business that disrupts my industry”. These are the big goals that will guide the short-term ones, always in the background to serve as reference for your overall path. 4. Define Your Short-Term Career Goals Once you have set your long-term goals to guide you, you can work on the shorter-term goals. Where do you see your business in 1, 3, or 6 months, and what do you need to do to get it there? Are there networking events you should attend to find investors? Leadership skills you should develop to help direct your team as your company grows? Training you want to attend or books you should read? These may not seem like entrepreneurial career goals, but they’ll get you on your way to the bigger, more exciting goals; short-term goals are crucial. 5. Record Your Goals In order to define your goals and make them useful, you need to get them out of your head and onto the page. Writing is a powerful tool of self-reflection, one that allows you take the many plans and competing ideas in your head and put them down on the page. Once you have this material out of your head, you can work to organize it and put it in a form that allows you to act on it. The bonus of writing down your goals is that you memorialize your goals in a format that lets you refer to them, post them on your wall, and keep yourself accountable. Write down your goals; you won’t regret it. Start Crushing Your Goals Today You should know have an understanding of how to start setting goals for your entrepreneurial career. Whether you’re still trying to make the transition to working for yourself, or have an established business, setting goals for your career remains crucial. We wish you the best on your journey.

If you want to get things done, you must set goals. Without goals, you’re just going to flounder without a reliable gauge of whether you’re making progress or not. Setting goals is the first step toward getting what you want out of your career and your life. But as it turns out, just setting goals, any goals, isn’t enough. While having a goal tends to be better than not having one, you need to make sure you set goals in a way that will guarantee progress and eventual success. Yes, the way you set goals matters as much as the goals themselves. In other words, you need a goal-setting framework.   There are as many goal-setting frameworks as there are productivity gurus, but you can’t go wrong with a classic, time-tested goal-setting framework called SMART goals. What Are SMART Goals? SMART is an acronym that outlines how to set goals you can actually complete. The first known use of the acronym was by George T. Doran in the November 1981 issue of Management Review, as part of a paper called "There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives". While the SMART framework was originally developed for managers working to set goals for their department or organization, it’s just as useful for setting personal goals, as you’ll see in a moment. SMART is an acronym that reminds you of the criteria your goals should meet in order to be calibrated for success. Each of the letters in SMART stands for a characteristic: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound Let’s look at each of these in more detail. Specific Creating a specific goal requires you to state what it is you want to accomplish and what steps you will take to reach its completion. Now, how specific you get is up to you. While it is possible to be too specific, people tend to have more of a problem with not being specific enough. For example, let’s say that you want to learn Spanish. This isn’t even a goal--it’s an intention or, at most, a vaguely-articulated desired result. It certainly isn’t specific. A more specific goal statement would be something like: “Learn how to describe the weather in Spanish”. This is specific enough to guide your studies and actually get you closer to being able to communicate in Spanish. Measurable A measurable goal helps you understand if you’ve achieved the goal or not. You may also hear people refer to this as “quantifying your goals”. The exact way you measure is up to you, but a good rule of thumb is that it should be something you can chart on a graph. Measuring also brings up another common goal-setting issue: input-based vs output-based goals. In brief, an input-based goal deals with the actions you can directly control, whereas an output-based goal focuses on the result, or what you produce. Both types of goals have their place. Input-based goals are ideal for when you just need to “put in the time” on something each day. For example, if you’re writing the first draft of a book, then you could set a goal to write each day from 9 am to 10 am. You’re not concerned with how many words you produce, confident that as long as you put in your time each day, you’ll eventually have a first draft. Output-based goals, on the other hand, are useful when you either need to create a specific quantity or quota of something within a limited time, or when the quality of what you produce matters more than the time you put in. An output-based goal would be to write 500 words of your book each day, starting at 9 am (notice that this still includes a start time to ensure it’s specific enough). You don’t care how long it takes; you’re not stopping until you write 500 words. What SMART input- and output-based goals both have in common as that you can still measure them. Whether it’s “minutes spent writing each day” or “words written each day”, you could still plot each on a graph. Achievable An achievable goal is one that you can realistically accomplish with your abilities and resources. Setting an achievable goal ensures that you won’t get frustrated and give up on your goal just because it was unrealistically difficult. For example, setting foot on Mars is an exciting goal, but it’s not achievable for most people (at least at the moment!). Even goals that other people have achieved may not be achievable for you due to prohibitive costs, extraordinary physical abilities, or rare connections required. Of course, this is an aspect of SMART goals where you should exercise caution. It’s easy to look at a really difficult or ambitious goal and think “I could never do that” when, in fact, you could if you were willing to put in the time. Learning to code, cook, or speak another language are all achievable for the majority of people, even if they are “hard” goals. It’s very difficult to imagine yourself achieving something that will take a couple years of dedicated practice, but if you break the goal down into small, specific, and measurable enough parts, you can achieve things you would never imagine were possible. Relevant A relevant goal is one that aligns with your broader goals and ambitions. If you don’t set relevant goals, you may find that you’ve accomplished a lot...but that the accomplishments don’t mean anything to you. Usually, you’ll run into problems with this area when you set goals based on what other people say is worth doing, instead of what matters to you. For instance, many people set a goal to develop six-pack abs. After all, that’s what it takes to be sexy, and all the movie stars are doing it. But just because that’s a desirable goal for other people, that doesn’t mean it’s relevant to you. If you really do want to get a six-pack, then go for it! But make sure that you’re doing it because it’s relevant to your broader personal and professional aspirations, rather than a distraction from them. Time-bound Setting time-bound goals helps you maintain motivation and puts a healthy amount of pressure on you to achieve your goal. A goal like “learn how to describe the weather in Spanish” is good; a goal like “learn how to describe the weather in Spanish by April 1st, 2018” is better. When you set a target date that imposes a time boundary on your goal, it helps you plan what you’ll do each day and week to accomplish it. Without a time limit, goals can turn into an endless demotivating slog where you’re not sure if you’re making progress or not. But what if you want to achieve a really big goal, or you’re not sure how long a goal will take? This, again, is where you should break your goal down into smaller parts that you believe you can accomplish within the set time frame. There will be some trial and error involved. For example, you might set a goal such as “Be able to do 25 pull-ups in a row” and plan to accomplish it within a month, believing this is perfectly within your capabilities. But halfway through the month, you’re still only able to do 10. If that’s the case, don’t worry. Just finish out your month and get as far as you can. After that, you can write about what worked and what didn’t and adjust your goal for a more realistic timeline. Don’t view the experience as a failure because you didn’t get the original expected result; you still reached a higher number of pull-ups than you did when you started, and you’ve learned a valuable lesson about how to set better initial goals in the future. Start Setting SMART Goals with Our Free Template Now that you understand how to set SMART goals, we want to leave you with a goal-setting template that will help you set your first SMART goal today.  Click here to download the free SMART goals template. To use the template, open the file using the link above, then go to File > Make a copy.  Choose a name for the document, and click OK. And for more help setting SMART goals, check out the full range of goal-setting products in our shop.

What are thousands of people doing to improve their lives in no time flat? Have you started a New Year’s resolution? Are you already staring down the barrel of another year failed? You're not alone. We all get inspired by the grand ideas in our resolutions. They take the mediocre and mold it into something incredible. Inspiration leads us to a desire to take action, but grand ideas are not executable. That’s why despite best intentions you’ve already hit a wall. To effectively use inspiration you have to channel it right, or you'll ultimately end up in the loop of inaction. Unsure what to do next, and questioning every decision you make. Where should you channel your inspiration?     Into Setting 13 Week Goals It’s no gimmick. 13 week goals is a how everyday people are turning the inspiration of hopes and dreams into sane and sensible steps for real life change. If you’ve already gone through the exercise of visualization with us, assessed your goals to be S.M.A.R.T. and built a calendar that gets you excited for the year. You've got some inspiration built up and created a desire for change! Turning that into clear 13 week milestones is the last thing you need to achieve lasting change. Use that energy you've riled up and let’s build a plan of commitment to make your success inevitable! Success is a habit. Give this a heart if you agree! A post shared by BestSelfCo (@bestselfco) on Dec 30, 2017 at 4:30am PST Take a breath, relax your shoulders, and let’s ask ourselves some questions. In a few easy steps we’re going to show you a big vision broken down into a 13 week goal. The result will amaze you!     No Goal Too Big   To get started with 13 week goals let’s do a basic exercise. First you need a vision for your future. Think about the perfect ending to a goal you are working on right now. Remember, the idea behind visualization is to go big! Don’t hold back and don’t “be realistic”! Target something that sends chills of excitement down your back and frightens you! Now, take a moment and connect with that big thing, what it means to accomplish it, and what it will feel like when you do. Got it? Do you feel excited and scared? Good! Now that your heart rate is up let’s get a few questions answered to flesh out these goals. 13 Week Goals Questionnaire: How much time do you have available to do pursue your goal? What is the one important thing you must do to make progress? What are 4 milestones you can celebrate on the way to achieving your vision? What can you accomplish if you do this one thing everyday for 13 weeks? How close does that get you to your goal? Let’s look at an example answering these questions. Big Vision: My goal is to write a 100,000 word novel! Sounds pretty exciting and scary to me! Questionnaire answered: I have only 1 hour of free time to write. The one thing I must do to make progress is write. I can celebrate reaching each 25,000 word section. 25,000 words divided by 13 weeks or 91 days = roughly 275 words a day. With just 275 words written everyday for 13 weeks, I can write 100,000 words. Bump up 275 to 300 just for kicks. Does that sound like something you could do?    Connecting 13 Week Goals with the Calendar   The year calendar is great for your vision, but it’s too big for 13 weeks. Just like thinking about 100,000 words is too big! Thinking about 25,000 words? Less scary... Thinking about 300 words? Not scary at all! So right now take a calendar you reference everyday and block out 13 weeks of time.     Add these two elements to your calendar: Write the one thing you need to accomplish at the bottom of each day for the 13 weeks. Cross off the day when you complete the one thing needed to achieve your goal. Commit yourself to not break the chain of cross offs! Do that and you'll be just like Jerry Seinfeld!         Excited, but still feeling the push of Inaction? Join the members only community!   Community support, tools, and methods you need to make your resolution into reality!   Not Sure? TRY A REFLECTION PRACTICE FROM THE INNER CIRCLE HERE FOR FREE     Going Further Together   Have a vision, but not sure how the breakdown looks? Share your vision and let’s break it down together!    

Is your calendar planning just holidays and appointments? Calendar planning is just a long term to-do list that's probably going to change anyway, why bother. Sure there's a few things that have to be on there, but planning a whole year is crazy! Nobody can predict what's going to happen, what a waste of time. Sound familiar? If so, beware! This is the moment indifference steps out of the shadows and into your life. A looming presence that stretches out into the entire span of your year: waiting and watching to moderate your excitement for living. If you've ever felt numb during joyous times for no reason you could discern, then you've experienced the influence of indifference. But don't worry, it's not hopeless. When what's on your calendar is more than a glorified to-do list of externally enforced responsibilities indifference is forced to slink back to the shadows. How can you use calendar planning to push indifference back?   A Steady Drip Eventually Floods Every year starts of the same. A boost of excitement and idealism for the future. A few months in we stand strong, there might have been a few set backs but overall we are still excited. Halfway through the year all the excitement we felt at the start of the year has vanished. It's easy for us to point towards different events in life that have assaulted our optimism for what we could accomplish. Most are things far outside of our sphere of control. We resort to doing what we did the year before and the year before that. Looking forward to the holidays, vacations, and weekends. All the general escapes from our daily lives. As we near the end a growing despair turns to hope once more, and the cycle continues. But here's the question. What traps us in this perception prison of ultimate mediocrity? The answer is the slow and steady drip of indifference. When the year starts we have a singular event that drives decisive action, we are encouraged by society to become engaged in our lives like at no other time in the year. In the months leading up to the 1st, January becomes filled with new and exciting initiatives for your life. Perhaps these initiatives even go so far as to expand into February and March. That's where things usually end. By this time your days have taken on a sameness, especially if you've been consistent. As far as you can see into the next nine months it's more of the same. The drip begins. As the year progresses, so the drip steadily falls and surrounds you like a flood until you become hindered by it. Even if great things start happening around you. There is a disconnect from the events, life seems to move by you faster than you keep up until the drip is so high you are up to your neck, and it's all you can do to just float. Indifference has now overwhelmed every facet of your life. As the new year returns the goodwill overwhelms indifference, the drip disappears, along with it the flood is drained, and once again you dare to hope. Intentional Calendar Planning for a Year of Your Life To stop the drip and cut off indifference at the pass you need to imbue your calendar throughout the year with the same kind of push that you receive at the start of it. More than that, these pushes need to be things that you are excited by, things that you can look forward to. Most importantly, they need to be related to supporting your overall goal and intent for the year. The big one! The one thing that when you accomplish it, your life will change drastically. The Basic Calendar: Shared Social Holidays Birthday Celebrations Meetings and Appointments The Intentional Calendar Planning Additions: Two "Big One" Related Events One Monthly "Big One" Related Meetups One Weekly Check In with a "Big One" Related Group or Individual With these new types of events filling up your calendar it won't be just tasks to get done, it will be experiences to look forward to! A feeling that alone could change your whole year!   Connected Through Experiences When we surround ourselves in activity with people of like mind and purpose it amplifies everything we're striving for. Our capacity expands because when we are together the sum total of all our experience can be utilized by everyone. So, we have to ask. When was your last big event, meetup, or group/individual check in? What was it about? How has it expanded you? Inspire others to be intentional with their calendar planning! Who knows, maybe even make some connections here!  

Is a visualization exercise more than wishful thinking? It can be, without actions a vision can fade but without a vision actions eventually become muddled. Without a vision it's far too easy to get lost on the way to our goal. Worse, if we feel lost it eventually leads to us becoming indecisive. Once indecision tears into our lives it leads us down a dark path of all our progress being halted. If indecision effects us deeply we tend to look for a guide, someone with experience to help us along our path. This usually comes in the form of an external force, a friend, a coach, or the like. It helps in the short term but can become a crutch in the long run if we aren't careful. This is because an external force will not always be there to point the way for us. So, utilizing a third party to manifest decisiveness in ourselves doesn't develop the skill set for manifesting decisiveness in ourselves. How can we become the masters of our own decisiveness?   Visualization is an Exercise to Plot the Path There's little more we face in life as sinister as the motivation destroying tornado of indecision. It's a subtle force that sneaks slowly into our minds. At first we don't realize it's influence but in time it builds into a mass of power until it becomes a cyclone that crashes through our lives. In the wake of indecision's chaos confusion reigns that diminishes of any sense of self-confidence we have. Everything around us feels like a mess, we don't recognize our surroundings and it makes us think we're lost. It turns us around when suddenly we find that we're wandering aimlessly through life despite our best intentions or goals. What's worse is that we know how to beat indecision, we make a choice! Get up and do something, anything! Yet, when indecision has us in it's hold, knowing what we must do does not equal taking action. Indecision stops us because it veils any action we might take as just another step down a road you're already unsure of.   ...if you do not know where you are, then you can't know where you're going... To find our way we have to stop and take a moment to check our compass, find our true north, and verify we're headed in the direction we desire. When we do this indecision loses it's grip! Our steps gain back their purpose and a growing haze is lifted. Give visualization a try with this exercise!   Special Gift: A Visualization Exercise from the Inner Circle Once you’ve reflected on your year, the next step is to start looking forward. Our mission is to help you live a life you're proud of.  So it’s time to think about what you’d create in a life that makes you proud. A proud life is a balanced life that’s fulfilling in all areas. So if you could wave a magic wand, what would you love to create in the year ahead - to build a life that makes you proud?   STEP 2 OUTCOME  By the end of this step you’ll have a comprehensive list - categorized into areas that matter to you - of what you want to create for your life. This list provides a clear vision for your future. It’s a reminder of what you really want to strive for. It’s a reference point where you can sense check any decisions - to ensure your choices, actions, and hustle take you closer to where you want to go. ESTIMATED TIME: 60 minutes ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: Life Focus Worksheet TOOLS NEEDED: Life Focus Worksheet What's Visualization? To get to this stage you have to have reflected on the year that’s passed to give yourself a baseline to spring from. The next step is to visualize what you’d create for your life if anything was possible. Here’s why… By visualizing, you can use your imagination to create a new future. And because you’re using your imagination you don’t have to think in the way that you usually do. Instead, you can let go of any limiting beliefs and give yourself space to dream. This is hugely powerful.  When you think without limits and let go of any preconceptions of what you can or should do, you start to explore the things you really desire. You become a shade braver and bolder with your goals. And when you then articulate them on paper, you set the wheels in motion to make them a reality. In this way, visualization can provides a road map - a vision that can direct your brain’s focus. As a result, your future actions, decisions, and observations all work together to help you discover the insights and opportunities you need to make things happen. Have you ever wanted something so much that it consumed you? Then, as if by magic, you met the right person, read the perfect book, discovered the missing insight, or solved an ‘impossible’ problem. That’s the power of visualization.  It kick-starts a chain of action It unleashes your subconscious mind It provides the inner compass that takes you closer to the things you desire. It’s why Step 2 of your Best Year Yet uses visualization to tease out the goals you long to achieve.   How To Visualize When it comes to visualization, here are some tips to help you get the most value from this step. Firstly, aim to banish all your preconceived notions about who you are and what you’re capable of. We get it! This probably won’t be easy! You live everyday under the pressure of perceived limitations that have come to define you.   You tell yourself there are: • Things that you’re just not good at• Successes you could never achieve• Ways of existing and socializing that's just who you are• When you start to dream outside these confinements, things can get scary!• But awesome things can happen when you shrug off those old preconceptions and start from a place of openness about what’s really possible for you. It’s a little like starting a whole new life in a whole new place - where you get to define exactly who you are (and what you do). And because the people you meet don’t know any different, they accept your story outright. This is what visualization looks like. It’s the ultimate view of a life you love. A life that’s lived on your terms - where you’re not squeezing yourself into someone else’s framework and where you go after those meaningful goals that will bring you joy. So how do you visualise a life that would make you proud? Let’s move onto the activity instructions and start visualizing yours...   Action Items: Step 1 already got this process rolling. Thanks to your reflection, you’ve identified things you enjoyed in the past year (along with the things that didn’t go so well). As a result, you’ve already begun to think about what you want to create more of in your life (and what things you wish to let go.) So building on your Step 1 foundation, we’re now going to visualize what your life would look like if you could wave a magic wand and have everything and anything you desired. There are two ways you can approach this activity.   Method 1: Use the Life Focus worksheet You’ll notice the Life Focus worksheet comes in three formats: There are two versions already complete with eight categories And another one that’s blank - so you can focus on the categories that are important to you When it comes to your areas of focus there’s no wrong or right answer - there are only the areas that matter to you. So the first part of this exercise is to determine your categories. Either use the categories provided, create your own, or use a combination of both. Once you’re happy with your categories, now comes the fun part. It’s time to dream :-) Taking each category in turn, if you could wave a magic wand (and have absolutely anything you desire), what would fill each section?   To complete this task:  1. Set yourself a limit of three minutes per category 2. Grab a pen 3. Write down whatever comes to mind   Don’t censor yourself. The benefit of working to such a short time-span is there’s not enough time for your logical, analytical mind to trip you up and keep your thinking small.There key here is to dismiss what you currently believe is possible for you and instead dream as big as you dare! As Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you’re right.” Here’s the thing about your brain… It will look for answers to whatever questions you ask. Ask different questions, get different results. Just allowing a possibility the space to breathe can open up all kinds of opportunities that you previously didn’t imagine were possible. And remember you don’t have to achieve everything tomorrow! In fact, it may take you a number of years before you create everything you desire. But that’s part of the fun. Life is about the journey - not just the destination. And anyway you never really ‘arrive’ because every time you achieve a goal you simply open the door to an entirely new target.   Method 2: Sticky Note Method Here’s an alternative take on the visualization task. This is the same goal setting process that we use on our team retreats and it’s hugely effective. The principles remain the same. This is about thinking big and reaching out into the world of desire and possibility. To complete this exercise:  1. Grab a pack of sticky notes and a pen 2. Think about what you want for your life 3. For every idea that you have, write it on a different sticky note 4. Give yourself 20-30 minutes to do this 5. Once finished, categorize your sticky notes into different life areas 6. Then add them to the relevant sections of your Life Focus worksheet The key difference with this approach is you get to think about your life as a whole instead of category by category.   Did you like this exercise? There's more inside the members only community! DON'T LEAVE THE YEAR TO CHANCE. STAY ON TARGET Two Eyes are Better Than One When we reflect on our lives having someone we trust to work through the details can give incredible insight we might otherwise be blind to. This is because those around us aren't caught up in the habits and cycles our mind engages in. When we share our visualization with others it helps clear paths and reveal truths  we might otherwise miss with our singular viewpoint.