15
Visibility Is Essential

It is good to repeat and review what is good twice and thrice over.

PLATO, Gorgias

General “Jimmy” Doolittle is most remembered for his daring bombing raid over Tokyo just four months after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, but Doolittle’s most significant contribution to aviation happened many years earlier.

In 1922, he became the first pilot to fly cross country in less than twenty-four hours. He’d planned to fly by the light of the moon, but bad storms kept him in total darkness for several very dangerous hours. Luckily he had a turn and bank indicator installed on his plane. “Although I had been flying almost five years ‘by the seat of my pants’ and considered that I had achieved some skill at it, this particular flight made me a firm believer in proper instrumentation for bad-weather flying.” Flying with instruments was new and rare at the time, but without the indicator he might have been forced to “bail out” or just “luck it through,” as other pilots were forced to do.

There had to be a better way. “Progress was being made in the design of aircraft flight and navigation instruments and radio communication. If these sciences could be merged, I thought flying in weather could be mastered,” he said. The right mix of instruments could give him the direction he needed in the dark. It took several years, but he figured out a combination of radio and gyroscopes could let him fly safely regardless of visibility. And he proved it in 1929 by flying a plane with a totally blacked-out cockpit.1

I’d like to suggest several important parallels to achieving our goals in Doolittle’s story. The first is that we often try to reach our destination without enough support. Without proper instruments, when we face bad weather—which we invariably do—we’re forced to bail or just trust our luck that we’ll make it. We usually don’t, which is why there are all those sad statistics about New Year’s resolutions. As Doolittle found, when it comes to experiencing our best year ever, we need the right mix of instruments.

You already have two: (1) a simple procedure for breaking down goals into next actions, and (2) a set of Activation Triggers. Now we need to add another: a regular goal review process. You can’t just write goals and motivations. You have to review them and keep them top of mind.

Loughborough University Professor Cheryl J. Travers tracked students who not only wrote down their goals but journaled about their progress. She found they came to greater self-awareness about their goals and their progress, including discovery of how pursuing one goal impacted their pursuit of the others. They were able to better analyze what was holding them back and what it would take to keep moving forward.2 Reviewing your goals and motivations will keep you ideating, self-checking, and analyzing. And that will up your resolve and stimulate creative problem solving.

I break goal review into three separate reviews: daily, weekly, and quarterly. Let’s start with daily.

Daily Review

One of the main challenges we face with reaching our goals is losing track of them. We get distracted and sidetracked by life, and they slip out of focus. We can lose months of the year before we realize we’re not making progress. A regular goal review process can fix that problem.

It starts with a simple list of your goals, a goal summary. You can do this in a physical notebook or planner, like my Full Focus PlannerTM, or a digital solution like Evernote or Nozbe. You can even frame your goals and hang them on the wall. (I use a hybrid system of the Full Focus Planner and Nozbe, as well as hanging a summary on the wall. You need to find whatever works best for you.) To gain the full benefit of the review, you should scan this list each day. I know it sounds like a lot, but it takes only a minute. After all, you only have seven to ten goals, right? I do this as part of my morning routine.

Many people feel stuck or fail to make progress because they can’t make the connection between their yearly goals and their daily tasks. All their hopes languish on a wrinkled sheet of paper in a drawer somewhere. I saw this in corporate strategic planning all the time. Massive strategy documents would be created with significant goal commitments. But there was no mechanism to translate those annual and quarterly commitments to daily actions. In the end, the big binder would wind up crammed on a shelf between other big binders, rarely consulted and mostly forgotten.

The daily review is designed to make that connection between goals and tasks. As I scan the list, I look for relevant next actions. I ask myself the question: What is it that I could do today that would move me down the field toward the goal? I’m connecting my goal list to my task list. And I don’t let that list get complicated or lengthy. As I teach in Free to Focus, I limit my tasks to what I call my Daily Big 3. So I never have more than three significant tasks to complete in any one day. But those three tasks are chosen specifically to help me achieve my goals.

A lot of people start out their day with ten or twenty tasks for the day. By close of business, they’ve only checked off half the items and they feel like a failure. They’re creating a game they can’t possibly win. Who’s got time for that kind of demotivation? If you really want to make progress toward your most important goals, you need a fast and easy method to chunk down big goals into achievable daily tasks.

Weekly Review

Next is the weekly review. It goes a bit deeper and takes a bit longer, about twenty minutes. There’s a triple focus of the weekly review. The first part is to stay intellectually and emotionally connected to your motivations. We identified those in Step 4. That wasn’t an academic exercise. Ultimately the purpose of that list is to review it so we can keep our why in view. This is the secret to continuing to move forward when you want to quit.

I can think back to when I ran my first half marathon. It was really hard because I’d never run that far before. In my training, I never ran farther than nine miles. Bad idea, I know. I remember getting to mile 11 and really wanting to quit. Sometimes the messy middle waits till nearly the end. But that’s what happened. So I dug deep and I remembered why I was running. I’d gone very public with my commitment to run. First and foremost, I didn’t want to be embarrassed. Plus I had convinced a ton of my colleagues to run with me. What would it look like if the CEO whose smart idea this was to begin with didn’t finish it? So I said, “I’ve got to finish. My leadership is at stake.”

A weekly review keeps those key motivations present in our minds. When we’re in the thick of it, it can be hard to recall. But when we’re reviewing our rationale week in and week out, the reasons become so internalized, we know what’s at stake.

The second part of the weekly review is a mini After-Action Review. You’ll remember the stages from Step 2, but instead of going through the process for an entire year, you just want to recap the past week. Review your progress. List your wins and your misses. Next, list the lessons you learned and what you would do differently or better. How will you adjust your behavior? Write that down too. Committing to the change on paper (or screen) will help you find clarity and build the necessary resolve.

The third and final part of the weekly review is to get a sense of what needs to be accomplished for the upcoming week. As we saw with the case of General McClellan, it’s critical to break down big goals into actionable next steps. Now it’s time to break down those next steps into the actions you must accomplish in the coming week. I call this my Weekly Big 3, and it’s the best way I know to get traction and maintain momentum on those next steps. The Weekly Big 3 represents definitive outcomes I must accomplish to move closer to my goals. How does this relate to my Daily Big 3? I use my Weekly Big 3 to dictate my Daily Big 3. Taken together, the process works like this:

Here’s an example so you can see it in action. Let’s say your goal is to restore a classic Volkswagen Beetle for your daughter’s sixteenth birthday, which is October 18. It’s March 1. That’s not a lot of time, but it’s doable. And the pressure is on because you want something super special to celebrate this milestone in her life.

The most important next actions are probably purchasing a car that fits your budget and having it shipped to your house where you can begin working on it. So how are you going to proceed? You might map out a complete project schedule, but you don’t need to. The first step is buying the bug; that much is clear. And this is where the weekly review helps you connect your goals to your daily schedule.

To move toward your goal, during your weekly review you might identify the purchase as one of your Weekly Big 3 outcomes. Depending on the rest of your priorities that week, you could then schedule time to talk with your spouse about the budget on Monday, research time on eBay and Autotrader on Wednesday, and purchase on Thursday. Each one of those tasks would be part of your Daily Big 3.

All the way from the goal down to the individual daily tasks, the idea is to direct your actions so you’re always gaining ground. The daily and weekly reviews make that possible. I designed my Full Focus Planner to offer an integrated goal-to-daily-task solution to make this process simple and straightforward. But regardless of the tools you use to implement it, the review process works like a road map to goal achievement if we’re intentional.

Quarterly Review

As I mentioned in Step 3, I recommend setting goals by quarter so you space them out in the year and also prompt action immediately, instead of waiting till later in the year as a more distant deadline finally comes into view. Quarterly goal setting naturally leads to a deeper review every three months. You can treat it like a scaled-down version of the Best Year Ever process and walk the 5 Steps again. If you don’t have time for that, the main purpose of the quarterly review is to analyze your goals and decide if they’re still relevant to your life, and then make any adjustments if not. I like to take a full day for my quarterly review. But if time is tight I can usually do this in an hour—two at the most.

In the quarterly review process, at least five options are possible:

1. Rejoice
2. Recommit
3. Revise
4. Remove
5. Replace

First, you can rejoice. Let’s say you’ve reached an important milestone in pursuit of one of your goals. Pause to recognize and celebrate it. I firmly believe in celebrating our wins. I recently took my whole company (plus spouses) on a Caribbean cruise to acknowledge a major victory. But it’s important to pause and celebrate the small wins too. You don’t have to wait to achieve the entire goal. In fact, the bigger our goals, the more important it becomes to celebrate small wins along the way.

The creation account in Genesis tells us God looked at everything he created and called it good. He didn’t wait until the whole creation was done. He did it at each stage. That’s a good model for us too.

Recognizing and rejoicing in our progress helps us stay emotionally engaged for the long haul. Celebrating triggers your brain’s reward system, which, according to endurance athlete Christopher Bergland, is “a prime motivating force to help you keep pushing and achieve your goals. . . . Being self-congratulatory isn’t about ego or hubris, it is about harnessing your reward circuitry and tapping your dopamine pipeline.”3 Winning helps keep us in the game. So we need to be serious about rejoicing when we score.

Second, you can recommit to the goal. This can be hard when you feel like giving up and walking off the field. But then you realize the game isn’t over. Literally anything is possible. You never know what may happen. The only thing you can know for sure is that if you quit now, you will lose.

My daughter, Marissa, had a sales goal she was trying to reach but had given up before the end of the month. She thought there wasn’t enough time to hit the target. I challenged her on it and asked what it would take to reach the goal. It was a bit like the story of Mura and Dorfman from Step 1. She had a limiting belief blocking her progress. But there was still time on the clock! She still had a chance to affect the outcome of the month. The moment she recognized that liberating truth, it gave her a new sense of ownership and possibility. She recommitted to the goal, marshaled her team, and beat it with only minutes to spare.

The key in this situation is to refocus on the original goal and reconnect to your why. In other words, list what is at stake. What will you gain? What will you lose? Once you have these in view, you can consider new strategies or find additional resources. But you have to decide, deep in your heart, I’m going for it.

A regular mistake people make at this stage is getting married to their strategy. Don’t conflate goals and strategies. Your goal is the what, your strategy is the how. There’s nothing sacred about your strategy. You can change it at any time if it’s not producing results. If we’re married to our strategies and they fail us, our goals will suffer. But if we’re committed to our goals, we can confidently pivot on our strategies as often as we need to hit our targets.

If you’re no longer committed to the goal, your third option is to revise it. This is totally valid. After all, when you are planning, you have limited knowledge. Maybe you’ve realized that you set the goal in the Delusional Zone instead of the Discomfort Zone. Other facts or circumstances that you could not have known about may come into play—and they may be out of your control. You do have to be careful when revising a goal. You don’t want to do it just so you can stay in the Comfort Zone and not stretch. But you also don’t need to put yourself in a no-win situation just to prove a point. Personally, I would rather recommit if I possibly can achieve a goal and revise if I can’t.

When I can’t recommit, and I don’t want to revise, the fourth option is removal. Grab an eraser. Hit delete. Don’t let that shock you. It’s a last resort but sometimes necessary. I’m all for achieving our goals. But the “Sabbath was made for man,” not the other way around. This is your game. I never met the goal police, but I’m certain they don’t show up when you strike a goal off your list. If a goal is no longer relevant, if it’s no longer compelling, if you’ve tried to revise it and you can’t, remove it. If you don’t, the goal will just sit there and accuse you. There’s no need to pay an emotional tax like that on your own list.

If you’ve decided to remove a goal, I recommend you replace it with another you want to achieve.

What if you miss a goal? Don’t obsess about it. Timing is tricky under the best of circumstances. It’s doubly so with major goals. I don’t always reach mine by the deadline. If you’re pursuing big goals, it’s normal to miss the target sometimes. The important thing is to stay in the game.

Wrapping up, I recommend looking at the four quarterly review options as a decision tree:

▶ REJOICE if you’ve reached your goal/milestone. If you’re not there yet,

▶ Then RECOMMIT to achieve it. If you can’t recommit,

▶ Then REVISE the goal so you can achieve it. If you can’t revise,

▶ Then REMOVE the goal from your list. If you remove a goal,

▶ Then REPLACE it with another you want to achieve.

Why Celebrate?

Before closing this chapter I want to come back to the subject of rejoicing. High achievers sometimes struggle with this one. I used to. After a win, I rarely stopped to celebrate before jumping into the next project. But remember the observation I quoted earlier from psychology professor Timothy A. Pychyl: “We experience the strongest positive emotional response when we make progress on our most difficult goals.” That’s only true if we stop to notice. When we achieve our goals or reach milestones along the way, we need to take the appropriate time to celebrate.

Celebrating your wins validates your work. And it’s also a key component of living a full, meaningful life. After running a race in Greece called the Navarino Challenge, ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes was surprised at how the townspeople came out to celebrate the winners. They dropped their work, closed their shops, and started dancing. “These people were all willing to put aside what they were doing and join together,” Karnazes said.

“If we always made decisions with our heads instead of our hearts, we’d probably live much more orderly lives,” he reflected, “but they would be much less joyous. . . . How many people spend their entire lives striving for something with their nose to the grindstone, only to wake up one day and realize they haven’t really lived at all?”4

When we skip the celebration, we cheapen our efforts. And we also shortchange our lives and the lives of those closest to us. That’s why it’s critical to dance across the mile markers. Bring your family into it. Bring your friends into it. But take time to celebrate. Reinforce it. Let it sink into your nervous system and power you across the goal line. To give you a leg up, I’ve included a reward prompt in the sample goal templates at the back so you can identify upfront how you will celebrate when you accomplish your goals.