Vague Goals are Worthless

• 00:04 The second biggest blunder most people make when it comes to setting goals for
• 00:09 their life is they make their goals too abstract or too generic or too fuzzy.
• 00:15 And at that point, there's really no difference between a goal and a wish.
• 00:21 If I say, I have a goal of becoming a world famous surgeon, and
• 00:26 that's it, what does that mean?
• 00:29 If you dig a little deeper,
• 00:30 you might find that that I'm saying that because my parents told me that would be
• 00:34 a respectable thing to do and I'd make a lot of money.
• 00:38 In reality, maybe I hate the sight of blood.
• 00:42 Maybe I hate chemistry.
• 00:45 There's no way I'm ever going to pass the organic chemistry class in college.
• 00:50 So the goal for me to become a surgeon or a doctor is frankly a waste of time.
• 00:57 It's just a general fuzzy aspiration.
• 01:02 I'm sure you have friends who say, yes, I've started this great new diet,
• 01:06 I'm going to lose 50 pounds by beach season.
• 01:10 And you see them three or four months later, and they weigh the same or
• 01:14 more than before.
• 01:16 And they're talking to you about the newest diet they're on while
• 01:19 eating a bag of potato chips and drinking a soft drink in front of you.
• 01:25 Losing 50 pounds is an abstract, fuzzy, general notion.
• 01:31 Meaningless if you don't couple it with a daily habit of not drinking soft drinks,
• 01:37 not eating garbage food out of a bag, eating healthier, exercise.
• 01:42 It is made up 100 other little daily habits
• 01:46 if you want to actually lose weight.
• 01:50 One of the most generic, and therefore, worthless goals people often
• 01:55 tell themselves they have is, I want to be rich and successful.
• 02:01 So they end up bouncing around from job to job to job thinking,
• 02:05 this time I'll get lucky, this time, I'll strike it rich.
• 02:10 In my observation, looking at the most successful people in the world,
• 02:14 the richest people in the world is, they never start off with the goal of,
• 02:18 I want to be rich.
• 02:19 They start off with a goal of trying to use their intelligence, their insights,
• 02:25 their creativity in a way to help the most number of people in a way that
• 02:30 their customers benefit, their clients, and they benefit too.
• 02:35 I'm not saying they're all altruistic, but
• 02:38 they started off with a vision of creating something.
• 02:42 And that's what grew their wealth.
• 02:46 Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet,
• 02:49 if you really look at their histories, children, young men,
• 02:53 it was never about them saying, I want to make more money than anyone else so
• 02:59 I can have the biggest car and the biggest house.
• 03:03 That's not what made them successful.
• 03:06 They focused on creating something.
• 03:09 The wealth came.
• 03:11 And that is the biggest problem with most people who are starting off life or
• 03:16 their career or they're out of high school or college or
• 03:20 graduate school and they're just thinking in terms of wealth.
• 03:24 I want to be rich.
• 03:26 I want to make 10x the money I made last year.
• 03:31 I'm not saying you can't have specific quantifiable financial goals,
• 03:37 but the goal of just being rich in and of itself, it's like clouds in the sky.
• 03:43 It's fuzzy, it's amorphous.
• 03:45 It doesn't really mean anything.
• 03:50 Now, it does mean something is saved yourself.
• 03:53 I want to become the best in the world at delivering this service or
• 03:56 creating this product, and I'm willing to work really hard every single day.
• 04:02 And I'm willing to refine it and market it to the whole world.
• 04:06 Yeah, people like that often do get wealthy, but
• 04:09 it's the thing they're trying to do that's making them wealthy.
• 04:13 It's not the sheer desire for wealth.
• 04:20 You've seen the statistics, as have I, the vast majority of
• 04:25 people who set New Year's resolutions do not fulfill them.
• 04:30 Most of them are broken, certainly by the end of the first quarter,
• 04:34 many of them by the first week of the new year.
• 04:37 Because it's not backed up with specific tactics,
• 04:42 it's not backed up with habit changes.
• 04:45 Your goals in life,
• 04:47 what you reach in life is primarily a function of your daily habits.
• 04:52 Of course, there's luck.
• 04:54 I'm not going to tell you everything is about who works the hardest.
• 04:59 Life is unfair based on where you were born, what you might look like,
• 05:05 your race, your gender, your skin color.
• 05:08 All of these things can create factors that work against you or for you.
• 05:17 But I believe the biggest factor in people who end up really successful
• 05:22 in life is about their daily habits, and that's what you can control.
• 05:27 And that's what we're going to go into more detail in this course,
• 05:32 is helping you not just have general, vague, fuzzy goals, but
• 05:37 how to have highly concrete, specific goals.
• 05:41 Of course, you still have to have macro-level goals for
• 05:44 the different spheres you have in life.
• 05:48 But you'll never just leave it there.
• 05:50 You're not going to say, my goal is to be healthy.
• 05:53 Healthy and thin, completely meaningless, abstract goal.
• 05:57 It's only meaningful if you then break that down into a daily exercise routine.
• 06:04 A daily healthy eating routine, daily healthy sleep patterns,
• 06:09 all of those things you put them together, now all of a sudden,
• 06:15 good health, proper weight, that can become a meaningful goal.
• 06:21 So that's the second biggest blunder most people make.
• 06:24 First, of course, as I mentioned in the previous lecture,
• 06:26 just not having any goals.
• 06:28 The second biggest blunder, having goals that are too general,
• 06:33 vague, fuzzy and they're just a wish.

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