The conventional advice that you hear constantly is to not be concerned with what other people think about you. In one sense, it doesn’t matter what people think. If Joe Blow doesn’t like the way you dress, or doesn’t agree with your political beliefs, or thinks you talk too much, it probably doesn’t matter much, so the conventional advice is reasonable. However, in another sense, you should be concerned with what other people think of you, because if enough people that know you have a particular opinion of you, it’s probably pretty accurate.

“What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson-

Every day you exhibit certain behaviors, and they tend to be pretty consistent. People observe these behaviors and make an assessment of your personal characteristics. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s just something that humans naturally do. All your behaviors communicate the type of person you are. If you behave a certain way consistently, it reinforces in people’s minds that you have a particular characteristic. If you occasionally act inconsistently with your normal routine, it won’t be enough to change people’s minds about what you are like. If you behave very inconsistently on a routine basis in a particular area, people will likely have a very fuzzy opinion of how to characterize you in that area.

We each have character traits that we value, and we each have character traits that we hate. We don’t always act consistently with the traits that we value, and we don’t always avoid acting consistently with the traits that we hate. What traits have you communicated to others through your consistent behavior? If a stranger asked a good friend of yours what you were like, what traits would your friend say that you have? What traits would immediately come to mind?

If you value focus, do you think others would characterize you as a focused person? If you value determination, do you think others would say that you are a determined person? If you detest laziness, do you think others would say that you are lazy?

It is often difficult to give ourselves accurate self-assessments, but sometimes it helps to step outside of ourselves in order to get a more objective view. Think about things you do or say each day. If you were another person, how would you perceive your actions and words? If you are feeling really courageous, you can even ask people how they would characterize you in certain areas. Just make sure that you don’t give them pain for telling the truth, even if it isn’t what you want to hear.

The idea behind this exercise isn’t to make ourselves feel bad. The idea is to get more accurate information about what our character traits really are. It’s about finding areas that we think we need to improve on, not because others think that we need to improve, but because we want to improve for ourselves. It’s also about discovering specific ways to improve in these areas. For example, ask yourself, what would I need to do to be perceived as a focused person? What would I need to do to be perceived as a determined person? What would I need to do to be perceived as a cheerful person?

What behaviors can you start performing on a consistent basis in order to get people to begin thinking of your desired character traits when they think of you?

I’m going to go out on a limb. I will bet that you couldn’t walk on the day that you were born. Assuming that you can now walk, you became successful at walking by failing MASSIVELY. You got up. You fell. You got up. You fell. You repeatedly failed over and over again. Eventually your persistence paid off. You began to walk more and more and failed less and less. Without reading a single personal development book, you applied this success strategy to everything you did. You learned to speak, dress, ride a bike, and do all sorts of things by being persistent in the face of massive failure.

You Were Born Relentless…

As a small child, nothing was going to get in your way of learning how to be successful. Adults were wimps compared to you. Failure didn’t phase you. You just pressed on and tried again and again. You relentlessly took action over and over. Your ego never used failure as an excuse to quit.  And it’s a good thing! Can you imagine if you gave up on learning to walk or talk or dress or feed yourself? Luckily, your parents encouraged the heck out of you. They smiled and cheered you on at your every attempt, and they praised any sign of improvement as a success. You linked pleasure with making an attempt whether it resulted in success or failure.

… and Then It All Changed.

Eventually, the party was over. As you began to get older, your parents began to cut you less slack. Failure became less acceptable. Your parents did this because they felt that they were protecting you. In some ways, they were. Unfortunately, the criticisms piled up over the years and conditioned you to fear failure. Now you fear failure even when it rationally doesn’t make sense. You are afraid to ask out the pretty girl or the handsome boy. You are afraid of speaking in public. You are afraid to ask for the sale. These are all actions that really can’t hurt you, but the fear of failure is deeply conditioned from childhood.

Okay, So Now What?

I’m glad you asked. It’s a very good question. It’s also a question that I don’t quite have a great answer to. Overcoming strong conditioning is difficult. We have to find a way to make failure less painful if we are ever going to have the relentlessness that we were all born with. We have to find a way to take our ego out of it. If we continue to take failure personally, then it is something we will continue to avoid, and there is simply no way to be successful without failing. A lot. If you can genuinely change your beliefs about what failure means to you, then your behavior will follow.

Back in early 2008, I heard about a remarkable 47-year-old man named Randy Pausch. Randy was dying of pancreatic cancer. This is the most deadly form of cancer, with only about a 4% survival rate after 5 years. This deadly disease did take his life on July 25, 2008. Randy wasn’t remarkable because he had cancer, but rather because he maintained an amazingly positive attitude despite the knowledge that he was going to die soon. On August 15, 2007, Randy’s doctors told him that they expected him to have only 3-6 months of healthy living remaining. There wasn’t much that they could do for him. Palliative treatment extended his life for almost a year after the doctors told him the grim news. I remember following his progress with great sadness on a website dedicated to telling everyone how he was doing. Even though I had never met the man, it was painful to know that such a nice person was dying and would soon be dead.

After his diagnosis, Randy could have given up on life and felt sorry for himself, but instead he dedicated himself to squeezing every bit of joy out of his remaining days. He also prepared for his inevitable death by spending as much time as possible with his very young children, teaching them as much as he could, and preparing lessons for them that would live on forever, so that they would be able to learn from him after he died and when they would be old enough to really understand. In the process, he has given us lessons that we all can learn from.

“It seems only right that a place called Dead Man’s Hole should belong to a guy who nearly died – and who, by the way, has no intention of just barely living.”
- Lance Armstrong (Every Second Counts) -

The Last Lecture

Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy tells us that there is an academic tradition called the “last lecture.” The question is: “Hypothetically, if you knew you were going to die, and you had one last lecture, what would you say to your students?” For Randy, the situation wasn’t hypothetical. He knew he was going to die. So Randy gave his “Last Lecture” on September 18, 2007, and the YouTube video of the lecture quickly became an Internet phenomenon. It is very inspirational and entertaining, and I highly recommend it. In his 76-minute lecture called Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, he talks about how to live your dreams, but in doing so, he also talks about how to live your life. I recommend setting aside some time to watch the whole thing, but if you want to start with something shorter, watch his 11-minute reprisal of his last lecture on Oprah. One of his recommendations that I loved was his recommendation to “Be a Tigger, not an Eeyore.”

“Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life!”
- Bertolt Brecht (The Mother) -

In April 2008, ABC had a special about the “Last Lecture” that includes a powerful interview with Randy and his wife. The ABC special is 41 minutes long, but a lot of it consists of parts of the lecture. If you have already watched the original lecture, you will probably want to skip ahead to the interviews and video clips of him, his wife, and his children. They will really tug at your heartstrings. Randy also gave a 76-minute talk on Time Management. As he says in the video, he is “an authority to talk about what to do with limited time.” He gives some great advice, such as increasing your focus on doing the right things rather than doing things right. As a perfectionist myself, this is something that I am continually making a conscious effort to do. In any case, whether you expect to live only a few months or another 100 years, he has some great advice on time management.

Randy’s Book

Randy wrote a book before he died called The Last Lecture. If you liked his speeches, I think you will like the book. He wrote the book for his children, but it contains advice that we all can benefit from, such as, “If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, ‘Tell the truth. If I got three more words, I’d add, ‘All the time.’”

Conclusion

The title of this post is Would You Live Differently if You Were Dying? I’m not a doctor, but I’ve got some bad news for you. You are dying. We are all dying. We all have a very limited time on this Earth, and there is nothing we can do to change that. We might not have the misfortune of dying as young as Randy Pausch, but our lives are still all too short. We also can never be sure of just how much longer we have to live. We could even die in the next moment. I’m not saying this to be morbid. I’m saying it to remind you to focus on enjoying every single day. If you don’t have any health problems, it’s easy to take your time on this Earth for granted. The challenge is to stay focused on the present moment instead of always focusing on the past or the future.

“Near-death cleared the decks, and what came after was a bright, sparkling awareness: time is limited, so I better wake up every morning fresh and know that I have just one chance to live this particular day right, and to string my days together into a life of action, and purpose.”
- Lance Armstrong (Every Second Counts) -

As the old saying goes, live everyday as if it were your last, because one day you will be right.

Carpe diem. Seize the day.

Yesterday I talked about The Importance of Committing to a Strategy. An equally important point to remember is to avoid overcommitting to a strategy. You overcommit to a strategy whenever you stick with an ineffective strategy for an extended period of time. It is understandable why we might not commit to a new strategy for which we don’t have a track record and for which no immediate results are apparent. We begin to second-guess ourselves for persisting with the unknown, and we even fear looking foolish.

It’s a little more difficult to understand, on the other hand, why we persist with strategies that aren’t particularly effective when we have plenty of data to confirm the ineffectiveness. Why do we do this? We might not want to admit that the strategy isn’t working. It is difficult to admit – even to ourselves – that we made a mistake. Or we have fallen for the sunk cost fallacy. Or we see other people using the same ineffective strategy and assume that it must work. Or maybe we just haven’t thought enough about it to realize that it isn’t working very well. There are all sorts of reasons why we might stick with an ineffective strategy.

Diets don’t work… but I am going to go on one anyway.

One common example of a strategy that doesn’t work is the diet. Most of us have gone on a diet at some point in our lives, and I’m no exception. When I talk about a diet, I’m not talking about a change to a sound nutritional plan that we expect to continue for the rest of our lives. I’m talking about a temporary restriction of calories where we essentially starve ourselves to lose weight rapidly. We even go into a diet with the intention of only doing it temporarily. If we thought that we were going to diet for the rest of our lives, we wouldn’t even bother to try. It’s too painful!

Before you tell me that diets do in fact work, I will agree that they work. However, it all depends on what you mean by “work.” You can obviously lose weight on a diet. Sometimes it is possible to lose weight very rapidly on a diet. I know because I have done it. I lost 32 pounds in less than 6 months back in 2003. The biggest problem with diets is that they very rarely lead to sustainable weight loss. This is what I mean when I say that diets don’t work. There are a few reasons for this. One reason is because our bodies lose muscle mass when we restrict our calorie consumption too much. During a diet, our bodies obviously use up our stores of fat as a source of energy, but the lesser known fact is that our bodies also draw on the protein from our muscles for energy. It’s no secret that muscle mass helps burn calories.

Another problem with dieting is that it causes our bodies to go into “starvation mode.” Our bodies evolved during a time when sources of food were quite unstable. It wouldn’t be unusual to go through periods with very little food. Our bodies developed adaptive mechanisms to conserve energy by reducing our metabolism. When we diet, we are conditioning our bodies to burn less energy. A third problem with diets is that we don’t develop sound long-term eating habits. Significant calorie restriction is painful, and we begin to associate this way of eating with pain. We are pretty much doomed to returning to our old comfortable eating habits.

So what’s the solution? The solution requires finding a sustainable way of eating that keeps our weight down. Anything that is not sustainable will not be sustained. Burn this idea into your brain. It might sound obvious, but it is something that is too often ignored.

Search out your ineffective strategies.

What strategies are you currently using that really aren’t working? Maybe it’s a weight loss strategy. Maybe it’s a time management strategy. Maybe it’s the way you interact with people. We all have strategies that just don’t work well. What are yours? What are the flawed assumptions behind these strategies? What is causing the strategy to be ineffective? Once you figure out what might be causing the problems with the old strategy, you can begin to develop a new and more effective strategy.

I spend a lot of time thinking about effective strategies for accomplishing things. One of the most challenging aspects of testing strategies is deciding what you should do when you aren’t sure that the strategy is actually working. Sometimes strategies take a while before you know if they are effective or not. The effects can be subtle and hard to detect in the short run. In cases like these, you have to decide whether you are going to have faith that it will work if you give it time or just give up the strategy entirely.

My Strategy to Give Up Caffeine

Here is an example. I admit that I’m a caffeine addict. I’ve given it up on many occasions, but unfortunately I have always ended up returning to it. I have tested various strategies of giving up caffeine with varying degrees of success. I made a conscious effort to give up caffeine back in 1996. I remember it vividly. I was feeling tired all the time no matter how much caffeine I consumed. I decided that my body was just too accustomed to having caffeine for it to provide any energy, so I decided to give it up. I knew that I would be pretty useless at work if I had no caffeine whatsoever. I developed a plan. I decided that I wouldn’t consume any caffeine over the weekends. I would just sleep and sleep and sleep. I even took sleeping pills to help me sleep through the withdrawal symptoms. The problem is that I was going cold turkey, and I would gradually develop brutal headaches. By Sunday night, I would be in terrible pain, but I was determined to get the monkey off my back. I just took a bunch of ibuprofen and tried to sleep through it.

From Monday through Friday, I allowed myself to have 2 Diet Mountain Dews per day, which is a total of about 110 milligrams of caffeine. For comparison sake, an 8-ounce cup of coffee has about 115-175 milligrams of caffeine, so I really wasn’t consuming all that much caffeine. Monday would be okay because I had been sleeping so much over the weekend, but life was pretty difficult with the much lower level of caffeine, especially as the week wore on. I was determined to stick it out. I stuck with no caffeine on weekends and 2 Diet Mountain Dews per day on weekdays for several weeks. I had no guarantees that my strategy would work, but I was committed to giving it time. I figured that it might take time for my body to adapt. Sure enough, it did. Pretty soon my body had adapted to the point that I had much more energy with only 2 Diet Mountain Dews than I did with far higher levels of caffeine in my system. Better yet, my energy levels were far more stable. I didn’t suffer from the constant crashing that I had experienced with high levels of caffeine. I’m not sure precisely how the body adapts to reduced caffeine, but it does.

My New Improved Strategy to Give Up Caffeine, Version 2.0

At some point, I returned to using caffeine excessively. I went through a period where I was unusually tired for whatever reason (maybe I had to work long hours), and I began to drink coffee again. I was hooked again. I truly believe that once you are addict, you are always an addict, just like an alcoholic is always an alcoholic whether he is drinking or not. I wasn’t looking forward to the pain of withdrawal again, so I decided on a new strategy. I would gradually and systematically wean myself off of caffeine. No going cold turkey this time.

I decided that I would start off with 4 Diet Mountain Dews a day for the first week and then very gradually decrease it as the weeks passed (e.g. 3 a day for a week, then 2 a day, then 1 a day, and then none).  Not only that, I specified precisely what time I would be allowed to drink each Mountain Dew. For example, when I was drinking 4 Mountain Dews, I would have one at 6 AM, 8 AM, 10 AM, and 12 PM. I intentionally spread them out. Why did I define the times so precisely? For two reasons: 1) to gain control over my habit, so that I was drinking consciously rather than unconsciously, and 2) to make it easier for me to drink less caffeine. How does it make it easier? If you are a caffeine addict and you tell yourself that you are not going to drink anymore caffeine, your willpower will probably give out, and you will go back to your bad habit. But when you know that you only have to make it 2 more hours, you know that you can do it. You can stand it for just a little longer. Another part of the strategy was to wake up at the same time each day – 6 AM. This helped to condition my sleep cycle.

This strategy didn’t make giving up caffeine easy, but it made it far more bearable. I would still be tired and have cravings for caffeine, but having very specific milestones made it more easily achievable. I have used this strategy on several occasions, and it works. My body gradually adapts and eventually begins to create more energy.

All right already. Get to the point!

The whole point of this post is that you sometimes just need to give a strategy time to be effective. I find this to be true especially where the body is concerned. Our bodies do adapt, but they often adapt fairly slowly. It is also true of any strategy that is dependent on habit. Developing new habits takes time (and repetition). Be sure to test the strategy for an adequate period of time before you give up on it. Try not to give up too soon. It would be a shame if you were on the right track but didn’t have the patience to persist until you saw results.

This website is about putting your dream into action. I created it to help me make changes in my own life and share what I learn with others so that they make changes as well. The reason is because change is hard. Really hard. One of the biggest challenges comes from telling ourselves that we are going to [INSERT AMAZING THING HERE] just as soon as [INSERT EXCUSE HERE]. It doesn’t work that way. If you don’t make the change now, you are not going to make the change. Telling yourself that you will begin living a certain way in the future rarely works because it lacks firepower. If it had firepower, you would live that way TODAY.

How many times have you told yourself that you are going to live a certain way? How many times have you let yourself off the hook because now is not a good time to start? Or because starting tomorrow will be just fine? If you aren’t living the way you want to live, there is a reason. It’s not an accident. Your old strategies are not working, whatever those strategies are. Think objectively about why those strategies are not working and then develop a better strategy. The new strategy might not work, but the old strategy wasn’t working, so what do you have to lose?

I have a vision of how I want to live my life, but unfortunately I keep putting it off. I have made progress this year, but the gap between the way I want to live and how I am actually living is still too large for my satisfaction. I have created a simple list that I am going to try to focus on and live by.

TODAY I’m going to…

…focus.

…simplify.

…exercise.

…learn.

…finish something.

That’s it. My list could be huge, but I intentionally tried to keep it simple. My list isn’t a comprehensive list of how I want to live each day. It’s a simple list of things that I think deserve more of my attention. These are all areas where I think I need improvement. If you create a list of how you want to live today, it could be much different.

Let’s look a little closer at what I have chosen:

…focus. Many times I feel distracted, far more than I used to. I used to be able to sit down with long books and plow right through them. I still read a lot (probably more than ever), but it is scattered and distracted. I jump from topic to topic (on the Internet, of course). It isn’t unusual for me to watch TV, then surf the web, then watch TV, and keep going back and forth, even when the computer is in a different room from the TV. When I’m on the web, I have numerous tabs open with all sorts of articles and things that I want to read. It’s a little crazy. I am going to consciously work on my ability to focus on one thing at a time.

…simplify. Simplification fits well with focus. My attention is scattered in too many directions, so I need to simplify and reduce the objects of my attention. I need to reduce the number of things that occupy my time. I need to reduce the number of possessions that occupy my space.

…exercise. This one doesn’t really require explanation. I have been meaning to exercise for so many years now that it is ridiculous. That’s why I am going to start exercising just as soon as… Just kidding. I will exercise today.

…learn. People who know me well might be surprised to see learning on my list. I have an insatiable curiosity, and I am constantly learning about a wide variety of topics, so why would I put this? I want to be more deliberate about learning things that will help me reach my dreams and goals. I need to focus and simplify my learning.

…finish something. I explained this one yesterday.

So those are the things that I’m going to remind myself to live by every day. At least for now. It could always change in the future. It will probably be challenging as hell, but it should also be very rewarding.

I don’t think that there is a person alive who doesn’t procrastinate on something. I have been trying to figure out what causes procrastination. One thing that I have learned is that procrastination has nothing to do with laziness. I have always been a hard worker. I have routinely worked overtime at pretty much every job I’ve had. Growing up, I was extraordinarily diligent about studying and training for sports. And yet, despite this strong work ethic, I have always procrastinated on certain things. Like term papers and school projects. Going to the doctor or the dentist. Fixing things around the house. Taking out the recycling. The list is endless.

Why do we procrastinate? I don’t think that there is just one cause, but I think one major factor is fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of failure. Fear of humiliation. Fear of rejection. Fear that taking action will take a lot of effort or a lot of time. Fear of discomfort or pain. There are all sorts of fears that could contribute to procrastination. Another issue is that we sometimes don’t recognize the true cost of procrastination, such as the cost of procrastinating on investing. Sometimes it is because we don’t think it is a priority, and sometimes this is what we tell ourselves when we don’t want to face up to our fears.

Whatever the causes, procrastination certainly causes a lot of stress. If I had a dollar for every time I said to myself, “I really need to do such and such,” I would be a very wealthy man. There are millions of reminders around my home of things I have been meaning to take care of. Individually, all these little issues probably wouldn’t have much of an impact, but add them all together and the impact is much more significant.

That is why I have decided to try to finish something every single day. It doesn’t have to be something huge. In fact, my mission is to begin to work on finishing the little things that bug me, one little thing at a time. I figure that it will give me greater peace of mind and an increased sense of control.

This should be an interesting little experiment, not to mention somewhat challenging. I’m going to focus on things that I have been meaning to do for a very long time. It will force me to confront things that I have been avoiding. If I have been consistently avoiding something, then I figure that there must be something about it that makes me uncomfortable. It’s time to begin acting with decisiveness and courage. It’s time to just do it.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how small changes that are continued on a consistent basis over long periods of time can lead to massive changes. The example that I mentioned in yesterday’s weekly status update was that of the Grand Canyon. This wonder of the world was created by small, almost imperceptible changes year in and year out over thousands of years. Small change can be powerful.

In Beat the Pros by Being a “Know-Nothing Investor”, I explained how $1,000 per year (about $83.33 per month) will compound into large sums of money if consistently invested in the S&P 500. This is something that really is in the reach of the vast majority of Americans (or could be if they stopped making excuses), but how many people do it? Most people wait quite a few years before getting serious about investing. Why is this? It is probably because few people recognize the power of small changes practiced consistently. This is especially true in areas subject to the power of compounding such as investing. When compounding is involved, there is a snowball effect where the change begins to accelerate.

Even when changes don’t compound, small changes add up.  This is the basic principle underlying the Japanese practice of kaizen, which is a very deliberate process of continuous improvement. An extraordinary dedication to kaizen was a major factor in allowing Toyota to overtake General Motors as the automotive sales leader.

Use Small Commitments to Make Big Changes

By making small, but strong commitments to ourselves, we can begin to move ourselves in a consistent direction and finally begin to see some major changes. If we don’t make a strong commitment, then it is too easy to slide right back where we started after trying to make a change. Years can go by without seeing any progress. Has this ever happened to you? I know it has happened to me. I have been promising myself that I would get in shape for many years. I have started to exercise on numerous occasions, but my previous efforts have not been backed by strong commitments.

When I started this blog, I committed myself to 4 new blog posts a week (plus a Friday summary post). It hasn’t been easy, and I have been seriously tempted on several occasions to break my commitment. I have a day job that requires overtime, and my sleep habits are poor, so I am often tired. It would be easy to convince myself that I don’t need to meet this standard every week. After all, nobody is perfect.  In the end I decided that I would seriously be risking losing my momentum if I allowed even a single exception. For the time being, I will continue my current posting schedule and condition the habit even stronger, which should make my commitment easier over time.

Eliminate Quitting as an Option

A few years ago I made an attempt at blogging, and it soon floundered. I quickly gave up. I lacked a strong commitment to a specific, consistent standard. I think that this is an important point. When we set a standard for ourselves that is very specific, we can easily tell if we have failed to hold ourselves to the standard. And by refusing to allow even a single exception, we take the decision to quit completely out of the equation. It’s no longer an option. When there is no decision to be made, there is no chance that your brain will go through the debating process that could convince you to not take action just this one time, which of course is never just this one time.

This is quite often the problem when people want to exercise but they are not specific about it. We tell ourselves that we will exercise today without specifying when. Our brains convince us that we will exercise a little later. Then a little later our brains convince us that it will be okay if we wait just a little longer. Then our brains convince us that it will be all right to skip exercising just for today.  And then tomorrow our brain convinces us that taking two days off in a row won’t kill us. By the time we have skipped three days in a row, the routine is toast.

As part of the 90-Day Challenge, I committed myself to writing from 6:15 AM to 6:45 AM every single morning for the month of April. It’s a fairly small commitment, but consistently applied it should move me decisively in the direction of my goal to publish 2 e-books by the end of the quarter. It’s a very specific, consistent standard, and I have mentally eliminated the option of quitting as a possible decision. I will reevaluate this standard at the end of April, but I am going to stick with my commitment. Getting rid of the choice of whether to take action or not is actually quite liberating!

What small change could you commit to that would make a big difference in your life?

On last Tuesday, I announced The 90-Day Challenge. The purpose is to challenge myself and others to make some kind of radical shift in the 2nd three months of 2010. The challenge officially begins April 1 and ends June 30. I am using the time until then to prepare and plan in order to really hit the ground running.

This process is purely experimental. I have never tried anything quite like it before. I am trying to use what I have learned in bits and pieces and use this knowledge more systematically. No matter what happens, I will learn something, so it will be worthwhile.

I have broken the process down into a basic framework that I will be applying.

A Basis Framework for the 90-Day Challenge

1. Clarify your dream. Create a long-term vision for your life. Your vision doesn’t have a deadline or specific numeric objectives. Your vision is like a movie of your life. You decide on what you really want for your life. Your vision provides a direction and a reference point that aids you in deciding what actions to take to get there.
2. Think backwards and forwards. Even if you are clear about your dream, the path that you will need to take to get there might not be nearly as clear. Try starting with your destination and working your way backwards, year by year. Try visualizing the path that you would have taken to get there. Then work forward and see if it still makes sense. The exact path will change as you go along, but this will help you get started in the right direction.
3. Clearly define your 90-day goals. This is where you decide specifically what you want to accomplish in the next 90 days that will move you decisively in the direction of your vision. Your goals are well-defined if it is easy to determine whether or not they have been completed. A goal to lose weight is not well defined and could be an ounce or a hundred pounds, but a goal to lose 10 lbs. is very clear.
4. Create a preliminary action plan. It is impossible to know beforehand everything you will need to do to achieve a difficult goal, but you can still brainstorm initial ideas. As you begin to take action, you will continue to learn and be able to revise your plan as you go along.
5. Put the plan into action. The best plan is completely useless if it isn’t put into action. This is often the most challenging part. Sometimes it is because the plan isn’t as good as we hoped and just isn’t working, but often it is because it requires overcoming old habits. Consistent action is absolutely critical to achieving challenging goals.
6. Adapt the plan as you go along. Your initial plan will most likely need numerous revisions. There is usually a learning process involved with achieving difficult goals. As you progress along the path to your goal, you will learn more about what is required to keep progressing. This is why it is not important to know exactly how you will achieve a goal initially. Have faith that you can learn what you need to know along the way. You didn’t give up on learning how to walk or learning how to talk, so don’t give up on this either.

That’s it at a basic level.

The most important thing isn’t to get the plan perfect, because it can’t be done.

The important thing is to think, act, and repeat.

There are two basic types of change that are polar opposites: radical change and
incremental change. There has been a surprising amount of debate over which kind of change is better. Some people, such as consultant Gary Hamel, promote the idea of innovation, or radical change. Others, such as the proponents of kaizen, believe that smaller, gradual improvements are better.

People who believe in innovation often think that incremental change is too slow. Those that believe in incremental change often believe that radical change is too risky and isn’t sustainable. So who is right? Which is the better form of change? I would argue that it is a stupid question. It’s like asking, “Which is better – hot or cold?” It’s nonsensical. It’s not specific enough. Better for what?

The situation determines the type of change to use.

If we want to make rapid changes, then obviously radical change is the way to go. However, if we want to make sustainable changes, then incremental change is preferable.

Let’s say you want to lose weight, so you decide to go on a diet. Diets are often successful in terms of allowing us to lose weight rapidly, but they are not sustainable. They aren’t even intended to be sustainable. We start diets with the thought that they will be temporary. To keep the weight off, we need to gradually condition a new sustainable nutritional plan, or we are going to end up back where we started. Conditioning is a form of incremental improvement. Our brains and bodies slowly adapt. This is where most people fail in their goal to keep weight off. They don’t formulate a plan to form new habits that allow them to keep the weight off.

Another example is clutter. If you have a house full of clutter (guilty as charged!), then you can make some rapid changes and clear out the clutter. However, if you don’t condition new habits to keep your space uncluttered, then the clutter will return. In an interesting dichotomy, my work office typically has almost no clutter at all, even though my home is very cluttered. The difference is that my work habits support an uncluttered space, whereas my habits at home do not. That is something that I will need to address in order to achieve my vision of going minimalist.

What if we can have the best of both worlds?

What if we can combine the speed of radical change with the sustainability and continual improvement of incremental change? We can do this by consciously incorporating both types of change into our lives. Radical change requires willpower, and as I’ve said before, willpower always runs out. This doesn’t have to be a problem though, as long as we understand this fact and plan for it. The solution is to focus on incremental change with quick bursts of radical change.

Yesterday, I announced The 90-Day Challenge. One of my core strategies during this challenge will be to incorporate incremental change with quick bursts of radical change. We will soon see what kind of results I get.

Are you up for the challenge?