I find most self-help achievement stuff often too convoluted and distracting to actually help me.
Here’s a simple model for making insane stuff happen in your life that actually works.
There are just two essential parts, one at either extreme on the spectrum of clarity:
- Your goal (highest level)
- Your process (lowest level)
You get these two extremes right, and I find that everything in between falls into place, every single time.
Highest Level – Your Goal
The thing I missed for so long that has recently changed my entire life, is realising that you need to practice visualising your goals.
Ideally, every single day.
(Not that this ever happens, but it’s a good standard to aim for.)
There’s a fundamental difference between setting goals, one time, writing them down somewhere and forgetting them…
and actually practicing creating the mental image of them—day in, day out—for years on end.
Goal visualisation itself needs to be its own practice. Not just a one off. Make this a habit for the rest of your life and you’ll achieve anything you desire.
Why? because you’ll be forced to actually figure out what you desire. This itself is a skill.
And this is very important to understand.
Knowing what you want with any degree of clarity is actually not that easy. It takes time and iteration. Some people think they have some vague notion of what they want in life, but when forced to condense it into a tangible image in their minds, they find it impossible. They really have no fucking idea what they want.
(I realised this was me as soon as I started trying to do this myself. And that was the first step to a huge leap in progress.)
Until you can see your goal state as an image in your mind’s eye, you really don’t know what you’re aiming for.
Start trying to see your goal situation every day, in every detail possible, so that you give yourself a chance to slowly figure out what it looks like.
It’s not easy, but that’s the point.
It’s just so worth it.
Lowest Level – Your Process
This part is slightly more obvious, but I see people procrastinating on it even more. Let’s make it easy.
1. Decide what the projects are that are required to carry you to your goal (which is really a set of sub goals each requiring its own project; e.g. your goal life situation might include a goal for your business/career, your fitness, your relationships, travel, other hobbies, and whatever else you want in your life)
2. Commit to a measurable practice of how much you aim to work on each of these projects every week
3. Have a way of tracking that completion (I use a simple spreadsheet with boxes to tick each week as I go)
When rubber meets the road, your mind will pull every bullshit trick under the sun to stop you taking consistent action on these projects.
And that is the one way to never realise your goal.
You need to be prepared for that. You need to have condensed down the standards for the practice, that are within your control, that you are going to hit no matter what.
So this set of practices had better be achievable. Not right now when you’ve got the time and motivation. But when life is pulling at you from every direction, you have negative time, and you couldn’t give a rat’s ass about putting your allocated time into your long term project for the day.
What does achievable look like? For me, it’s 5 minutes a day of language practice. One set per week of each of my 5 strength goals. 5 minutes a day on each of my 3 major business projects. 5 minutes a day of reading non-fiction.
Noticing a theme here?
It was only when I cut down to the point of making it unreasonable for me to not be able to complete my input target for each of my most important life projects, that I started to gather any sort of real consistency with them.
And as we know, all impressive results come from doing basic stuff, consistently, for long enough. It doesn’t have to be much. You just have to show up, and sustain it for 5-10 years. Success honestly really is that simple.
So that’s how I make my practice work. Making it 5 minutes a day. If I can’t do that, how do I ever expect to learn a language, build a business, hit my strength goals, or absorb any substantial amount of useful knowledge?
That’s it. Two things. You want to achieve anything in this world?
1. Start visualising exactly what that goal is, every single day.
2. Decide exactly what you’re going to do every week for the next 10 years to get you there.
And then do both of the above for the next 10 years. I can guarantee it’ll work.
Applying this to fitness to guarantee getting jacked in the next 3-5 years
Let me lay out an example of this process in action for you using the most tangible and well-tested one I have—fitness.
My goal (highest level)
My entire fitness process revolves around purely building to 5 clear strength movements:
- Straddle planche
- Front lever
- Handstand pushup
- One-arm chin-up
- 60kg loaded single leg squat
You could sub in any equivalently difficult movements for these, but this is exactly what I choose to aim for. If you’re a woman, slightly lower progressions on these same five movement patterns would afford you an equivalently sexy physique and relative strength levels.
Achieve these movements eventually, and you know you’ll be jacked and lean and look amazing by the time you get there.
My process (lowest level)
- Work each movement pattern at maximum strength threshold through full range of motion, briefly, once per week
- Eat 1.8g/kg bodyweight protein per day (in my case 140g)
That’s it. That’s my entire fitness process, and the secret of RINGSTRONG’s success, right there.
Do it
If you have some stuff in life you might like to one day achieve, I’ll make this this very simple for you:
Go sit down somewhere right now and try to visualise exactly what your goal life situation is right now. Specifics. If you can’t see it, you don’t know what you want (yet). You’ll get there. But you have to start trying.
Then write down exactly what you’re going to do each week to make it happen. Something as simple and achievable as “5 minutes per day of writing.” It doesn’t have to be much. In fact, if you want to succeed long term, it probably shouldn’t be.
And finally, remember to include in that plan the practice you just did of visualising your goal for a minute or two, every day. (Your clarity will improve drastically with time, guiding the rest of your practice better and better.)
You should then have an actionable plan for working towards an ever clearer goal, and know exactly what you have to do each day to make it happen.
That’s all there is to it.
Get to work!