How will you know when you get there?
“Know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.” —Stephen R. Covey
If the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall, he liked to say, you’ll only get to the wrong place faster.
As I look into graduate degree programs, a couple of voices are bouncing around in my head.
One belongs to Cal Newport, who regularly advises knowledge workers not to get graduate degrees with two exceptions:
Then there’s the advice from my late mentor Dan Miller:
If you are going to get a degree so you can get a better job – you’re likely to be disappointed. If you are going for the personal development, the social connections, and the broadening of your options, you’ll always see yourself as more prepared and having more options.
What both of these thinkers agree on is that there must be clarity about your end goal.
If you’re going to school (or back to school, in my case) because you’re bored, miserable, burnt out, or feeling lost, it’s quite likely you’ll still be all those things after you get the degree. And if you aren’t careful, you’ll have a mountain of debt added to your list of problems.
Begin with the end in mind. Know what you’re trying to achieve and what’s required to get there. Have an idea for your life planned out before you make a major decision like this.
And if you aren’t sure what you need for the career you want or the lifestyle you have in mind, start asking people who are already doing it.
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One of the essential habits in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is #2:
“Begin with the end in mind.”
The premise behind this habit is that before starting something—a career, a hobby, a marriage, a life—you should project yourself into the future.
By doing so, whether three years or five (or even all the way to your 80th birthday), you can lay out a map for how you want to live your life or complete a project.
I love this habit, and the idea behind it, but it’s also the only habit out of the seven with which I struggle. Why?
Because it’s overwhelming! Sometimes I don’t even know what I want life to look like tomorrow, let alone in 47 years. (God, is 80 really that close?)
It’s also overwhelming because at times, the daunting idea I have in my head seems so impossible that I become paralyzed, unable to do anything.
I know I’m not the only one.
The negative thoughts creep in with a seeming inability to solve them.
The solution?
Start.
Decide on the very next small thing you can actually do.
Julia Cameron calls this “filling the form”—taking the next small step instead of leaping ahead to some giant thing you might not ready for.
Using the examples from above, you can…
It’s the oft-cited cliché that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
You have to put a destination into the GPS. But then you must focus on the directions and look for the next turn.
If the end in mind is too big to tackle, focus instead on the tiniest first step.
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We are all mortal, which means all of us will die someday. That’s obvious.
But there are a few questions we don’t know the answer to, such as…
How long will that be?
How miserable will our dying be?
But there are some other, less depressing questions we can ask as well. And they happen to be questions we can answer on a daily basis…
How did I make life less difficult for others?
How did I influence things for the better?
Better to focus on what you can act on rather than worrying about the unknowns.
A great question I learned from Seth Godin is asking: what’s it for?
The book you’re buying—what’s it for?
That certification you’re trying to earn—what’s it for?
Is it the credibility that goes with having read this or obtained that? If so, that’s just a signaling strategy—though possibly a necessary one.
What about going to medical school and getting an MD—what’s that for?
Is it to get the credibility and authority that goes with the letters after your name? Is it to keep the generational legacy going…even though you’d rather be teaching?
Or is it to actually learn how to help people lead healthier lives?
Back to buying a book—what’s it for? What am I hoping to get out of it? An answer to what I’m supposed to do with my life? Knowledge that I can use to help myself or other people?
Or that certification I’m thinking about. Am I doing it because it actually helps me get where I want to go? Or am I doing it because it’ll look good on a resume?
Begin with the end in mind. That’s where this question leads you.
Begin with the end in mind.
If you don’t know what you want or where you’re going, how will you know what that “thing” is for?
2020 sucks. That doesn’t need to be said anymore. But a post from a gentleman whom I follow on LinkedIn made me rather introspective this morning. Here was my response to his post.
2020 showed me that life was more uncertain and fragile than I’d ever realized. I lost two of my closest relatives. My family suffered unimaginable heartache.
I discovered I’d been living life out of fear, looking at everything through a lens of safety. So I started asking myself, “if I died tomorrow, would I be satisfied with what I’ve accomplished? Would I be okay with how I left things for my wife and family?”
With that mindset, I’ve approached my days differently, dancing with fear and taking action in the face of it. Making definite choices rather than hesitating or hedging my bets.
In short, I’m bolder.
As I’ve learned from Zig Ziglar, if I fail I learn. If I learn, I grow. If I grow, I succeed.
What about you? What has 2020 shown you? Comment below.
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You’ve probably looked at someone who was in great shape and thought to yourself, “Man, I wish I could be like him.”
Maybe this thought crossed your mind soon after: “If I really enjoyed hours at the gym and grilled chicken and broccoli every night for dinner, I’d be fit too.”
Here’s the thing – fit people don’t necessarily enjoy spending 3-4 hours a week at the gym or eating simple, similar meals over and over again. It’s not a matter of enjoyment.
What they do is subordinate their cravings, emotions, and desires to a higher value system they establish for themselves.
People who are successful at anything do the same thing. Albert E. Gray said it best when he wrote:
“The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.”
–Albert E. Gray
One of the most important lessons I learned from Dr. John Berardi of Precision Nutrition is that when making change for your health and fitness goals, you are going to be tired; you are going to be hungry sometimes; you are going to be in a crabby mood and not want to do what is good for you. His response: “whoever said this was going to be easy?”
Successful people, whether they are successful in health or fitness, or successful in their families and careers, are just like you and me. They have the same cravings, the same desire to say “screw it all” or “I don’t want to do that” or “I’m scared I might fail/they might laugh at me/they might say no.” The only difference is they make the choice to act anyway.
They are able to do this because they want something more than the resistance is telling them they want in this very moment. They begin with the end in mind and act proactively, rather than living in and for the moment, reacting to whatever whim, craving, or feeling comes their way during any given moment.
This way of living–of choosing to do things that failures don’t want to do–can all be traced back to fundamental principles of effective living. They are embodied clearly and coherently in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. Successful people subordinate their fears and momentary desires to values, principles, and a desired end-goal. They “begin with the end in mind” as Dr. Covey writes in the chapter about Habit 2.
A successful sales person probably doesn’t want to make another cold call and face the very real possibility of rejection. But she does it anyway because the end she has in mind might be a full sales pipeline, a good income to support her family, or the growth of her business (perhaps all three and more). She’s just as scared as anyone else; she still feels the butterflies in her stomach when she dials the number; but she chooses to act rather than react to the feelings of the moment.
You are a successful person already because you have the ability to do this with every task, project, and goal in your life. Realize that it’s all a matter of choice based on the end-result you desire. Envision the end you want to achieve, hold it in your mind in the moment of choice, and make decisions based on which outcomes get you closer to the end you want.
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When we create something in which we take great pride, we have a tendency to expound on nitty-gritty details of the work that went into it and how it works.
The people who will use or benefit from your something-or-other rarely care about the what or how: they want to know why.
Why should they use it? Why should they buy it? How does implementing it benefit them? How does it improve their lives?
No one cares how a hot dog is made as long as it is delicious and satisfies hunger.
No one cares about the hammer you built. It doesn’t matter what kind of wood the handle is made of or what sort of rare metal from Mars makes up the head. What the user/buyer/beneficiary wants to know is simple:
Will that hammer put a nail in the wall so that I can hang my picture?
Seek to understand who your widget is for and why they would want to use it: that’s the only thing that matters to the end-user.
(You probably should care how a hot dog is made, but that is a discussion for another day.)
Successful people are normal. They have no superhuman abilities, no extreme discipline honed by years of meditation or special operations training. However, they do something the rest of us don’t always do:
They choose.
Successful people choose what is important to them; they choose to prioritize what is important throughout the day; and they choose to carry out those things regardless of feelings or external triggers.
You must plan to do the things that matter – the things that will get you where you want to go. These are the achievements, contributions, and attributes for which you want to be remembered at your funeral.
Before you can plan them, however, you must define them. How will you achieve what’s important if you don’t know what is important?
You won’t.
But even if you lay out what is important and plan your day accordingly, it will not matter unless you choose to carry out the items of importance. This is what separates successful people from the rest.
“The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do….They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.”
E.M. Gray – “The Common Denominator of Success”
Even if something is important, and you are aware of its importance, you will find times when you really don’t want to do it. You won’t want to exercise; you won’t want to read your kids to sleep after a long day at work. If you don’t, that’s fine. But you are making a choice based on feelings or circumstances, relinquishing control of your own life.
Every action you take or don’t is a choice. Choose to do the things that further your mission, rather than choosing to let other people, feelings, and circumstances choose for you.
Choose to be successful.
Define what really matters most to you.
Plan your days based around what is important.
And most importantly, choose to act regardless of how you feel, what other people do, or what is going on around you.
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