Do Things You Can Sustain In 1996, Southwest Airlines was faced with an interesting problem. During the previous decade, the airline company had methodically expanded from being a small regional carrier to one with a more national presence. And now, more than 100 cities were calling for Southwest to expand service to their location. At a time when many airline companies were losing money or going bankrupt, Southwest was overflowing with opportunity. So what did they do? Southwest turned down over 95% of the offers and began serving just 4 new locations in 1996. Why would a business turn down so much opportunity? What Is Your Upper Bound? Starting in the 1970s, Southwest was the only airline company that made a profit for nearly 30 consecutive years. Sure, Southwest executives wanted to grow the business each year. This is an approach that can be applied to nearly any goal, business or otherwise. We tend to focus only on the lower bound: the minimum threshold we want to hit. A Safety Margin for Growth
How Evernote can Help you Achieve Your Goals in 2015 If you are going to achieve your goals in 2015, you must have a way to track your progress, so you actually achieve it. There are a variety of tools for doing this. Author Michael Hyatt provides tips on how he uses Evernote to organize his life and focus on accomplishing business goals for the new year. Hyatt is the author of The New York Times bestseller, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World. He is also the founder of Platform University and the massively popular course, 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever. Like millions of other people, I use Evernote as my “digital brain” to store ideas, notes, web clips, receipts, recipes, important documents, event details, and more. But, did you know you can also use it to help you achieve your most important goals for 2015? 1. 2. 3. You can use Evernote to track your goals by following these four simple steps. Step 1: Type all your goals into one summary note. Figure 1: Create a Goal Summary Note * Tag this note with two tags: “2015” and “goals.”
How to Set and Achieve Your Goals Using Evernote We all have goals we want to achieve. The problem is many of us don’t have a system for tracking our progress. Today, I’m going to presents a simple, powerful, and effective system for setting and achieving goals – using Evernote. I originally learned this goal-setting system from Michael Hyatt on his popular course “Five Days to Your Best Year Ever”, but have since adapted it to suit my own personal preferences. Let’s look at each step. Step 1. Create a new tag and call it “2016 Goals.” Create a new note and call it “00. 2016 Goals” and tag it as “2016 Goals.” 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Rearrange your goals into an order that makes sense to you. Step 2. Enter the actual goal as the title of your note and tag it “2016 Goals.” Step 2 is comprised of three parts: Key MotivationsSub-GoalsResources Let’s look at each part in detail. 1. Why is this goal important to you? Example: Goal: Lose 14 pounds. 1. “I want to feel attractive.” 2. “I want to have more self-confidence.” 3. 4. “I want find a partner.” 5. 2. 3.
5 Major Goal-Setting Myths That Keep You Stuck Steve Mura was a Triple-A baseball pitcher. He was starting one night in an away game, but he almost lost before leaving the dugout. Why? Courtesy of iStock/SIphotography “I can never win on this mound,” he told his pitching coach and shook his head. When it comes to making progress towards what matters most in life, there are at least five major myths we need to avoid like quicksand. Over the years, I’ve seen these rob countless people of happiness, success, and significance—me included. Myth No. 1: Your Past Determines Your Future Almost 40 percent of people in their twenties achieve their New Year’s resolutions each year, but not even 15 percent of those over 50 do—even though they probably have far more resources to do so. My guess is that they’ve also got more failures under their belt and don’t believe they can win. Maybe it was a failure in business or marriage, and now you’re doubtful about succeeding again. Mura’s coach knew better. That starts by challenging the myth.
The 2 Types of Growth: Which One of These Growth Curves Are You Following? We often assume that life works in a linear fashion. People will say, “You get out of life what you put into it.” The basic idea is that for each unit of effort you put into a given task, you get some unit of return. There is just one problem. Instead, most areas of life follow two different types of growth. Which one of these growth curves are you following? Type 1: Logarithmic Growth The first type of growth is logarithmic. Logarithmic growth increases quickly in the beginning, but the gains decrease and become more difficult as time goes on. There are many examples of logarithmic growth in daily life. Fitness and Strength Training: The “beginner gains” come quickly at first, but then it becomes more difficult to get stronger each week.Literacy: Children and young students make massive leaps as they learn how to read. There are thousands of other examples. Type 2: Exponential Growth The second type of growth is exponential. The Challenges of Each Growth Curve How to Accelerate Your Progress
How to Change Your Beliefs and Stick to Your Goals for Good In one of my very first articles, I discussed a concept called identity-based habits. The basic idea is that the beliefs you have about yourself can drive your long-term behavior. Maybe you can trick yourself into going to the gym or eating healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift your underlying identity, then it’s hard to stick with long-term changes. Most people start by focusing on performance and appearance-based goals like “I want to lose 20 pounds” or “I want to write a best-selling book.” But these are surface level changes. The root of behavior change and building better habits is your identity. This brings us to an interesting question. How to Change Your Beliefs The only way I know to shift the beliefs that you have about yourself and to build a stronger identity is to cast a vote for that identity with many, tiny actions. Think of it this way… Let’s say you want to become the type of person who never misses a workout. Of course, it works the opposite way as well. Read Next
The 15-Minute Routine Anthony Trollope Used to Write 40+ Books Beginning with his first novel in 1847, Anthony Trollope wrote at an incredible pace. Over the next 38 years, he published 47 novels, 18 works of non-fiction, 12 short stories, 2 plays, and an assortment of articles and letters. Trollope achieved his incredible productivity by writing in 15-minute intervals for three hours per day. His strategy is explained in Mason Currey’s book, Daily Rituals (audiobook): “It had at this time become my custom,—and is still my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient of myself—to write with my watch before me, and to require of myself 250 words every quarter of an hour…This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year…” —Anthony Trollope Trollope’s approach may seem simple on the surface, but there is more going on here than it may appear at first glance. The Problem With Big Projects
How to Commit to a Goal Psychological experiments demonstrate the power of a simple technique for committing to goals. Here’s a brief story about why we all sometimes get distracted from the most important goals in our lives. Perhaps you recognise it? You are thinking about changing your job because your boss is a pain and you’re stagnating. Work is busy at the moment, the money is OK and your home-life is also packed. Apart from anything else you’ve been thinking about learning a musical instrument. A few months pass. Unfortunately everyday life intervenes again and you do little more than search online for the price of electric pianos. After six months you come back full circle to changing your job, still without having made a real start towards any of these goals. Written like this, with six months compressed into a few paragraphs, it’s obvious the problem is a lack of goal commitment; although in reality, with everyday life to cope with, the pattern can be more difficult to spot. Reality check Hearts and minds
The Importance, Benefits, and Value of Goal Setting How often do you set goals? How often do you revisit your list? We all know that setting goals is important, but we don’t often realize how important they are as we continue to move through life. Goal setting does not have to be boring. Setting goals helps trigger new behaviors, helps guides your focus and helps you sustain that momentum in life. Goals also help align your focus and promote a sense of self-mastery. In this article, we will review the importance and value of goal setting as well as the many benefits. We will also look at how goal setting can lead to greater success and performance. The Importance and Value of Goal Setting Up until 2001, goals were divided into three types or groups (Elliot and McGregor (2001): Mastery goalsPerformance-approach goalsPerformance-avoidance goals A mastery goal is a goal someone sets to accomplish or master something such as “I will score higher in this event next time.” Research done by Elliot and McGregor in 2001 changed these assumptions. Dr.
How to Set and Achieve Life Goals The Right Way Goal-setting theory draws on the concept that our conscious ideas guide our actions (Locke, 1968). So, can we take this premise and apply it to the biggest, most meaningful objectives we could possibly set for ourselves—our life goals? And what would that really mean, in terms of planning and getting on with it? Locke’s seminal research has given us a good deal to go on when it comes to effective goal-setting. Whether you’ve got no clue what you want, or you have a mile-long bucket list, hopefully, there will be something in here to get you motivated. What are Life Goals? Life goals are what we want to achieve, and they’re much more meaningful than just ‘what we need to accomplish to survive’. And because they are personal ambitions, they can take many different forms. Why Should We Set Goals in Life? Lots of us have dreams. 1. First and foremost, Locke’s Theory of Goal-Setting puts intentions squarely at the center of our behavior (Locke, 1968). 2. 3. 4. 6 Examples of Setting Life Goals 1.