have you ever wondered about the difference between a 25-year framework and 25-year goals hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan this is a question that came up for you recently in a workshop and people were wanting to know the difference between your 25-year goals and 25-year framework and how you focus so can you talk about that a little bit because it apparently engendered quite a fabulous discussion yes it did Shannon and what I've realized since we introduced What's called the 25-year transformation that those who really buy into this this has made a tremendous difference in how they see their entrepreneurial future but more importantly how they see just the near future there's a trick here and the trick is that it's not a 25-year goal in the sense that I will accomplish this in 25 years except in this sense that what I'm going to do I'm going to live the next 25 years as if it's a 25-year framework consisting of 100 quarters 90day periods so that's my goal to live the next 25 years within a Time framework that consists of 100 quarters and since I get a lot of quarters you know in the next 25 years it'll freeze me up not to worry about the future but just to focus on the quarter that I'm in because when I'm finished my first quarter of a 25-year framework I've got 99 more quarters that's still available to me and what I noticed is that it has a tremendously relaxing and focusing impact just the thought that I have 25 years to actually achieve incredible growth incredible success in my life but I really don't have to worry about any one of the quarters except the quarter that I'm in and that is such a calming perspective and we've had a lot of clients just go all of a sudden I feel like I can take a breath I can breathe because a lot of them have some very very big goals 10 times goals sometimes even 100 times goals and in most entrepreneurs Minds it's like okay that needs to happen in 90 days or in the next year and they put themselves under enormous pressure so you and our clients are really discovering that oh you actually can give yourself a lot more time and then those goals look like well I can probably do that in 10 years at which point means like you've beat it you've succeeded even faster you know in less time than you allocated and that's a great feeling yeah I don't know if you've ever shanon never discovered this that people have a resistance to goal setting because they feel immediately pressured makes them feel very uneasy it Mak makes them feel you know that they've got to spend all their time on the goal and you know I've been coaching this is my 45th year of coaching entrepreneurs and what I realize is that entrepreneurs actually don't get freaked out by their goals they freak out by the deadlines that they give themselves for achieving the goal so it's never the goal itself that is causing the pressure that's causing their anxiousness that's causing their sense of urgency it's actually the deadline they put on it and if you're a growing entrepreneur and you're talented and you're successful and that you're really really good at creating new strategies and attracting new capabilities around you you're going to get to any goal you want to get to but not if it has to happen a year from now not if it has to happen 6 months from now okay so in the 10 times program and this really put the spotlight on this unease with goals I said to people okay the best Revenue you're you've ever had previously to coming into this Workshop I want you to write down the number just in Revenue I mean we could do it with profits we could do it with personal income but I just want everybody in the workshop to have the same measurement so they can talk to each other about this using a common term which is revenues our UK clients will use the word turnover turnover is the phrase for what we call revenues gross revenues in North America so I said okay you've got that number now multiply by 10 and all of a sudden you can see the freakout factor in in the room and people oh jeez you know I mean 10 times do you know how much work it took me just to get to the stage I am now and you're asking me to go 10 times with it and I said well I'm not asking you to do anything here I'm simply asking you to entertain two numbers the number that represents your best year and multiply by 10 so you tell me what just happened inside your brain and they said well I just don't have the time now in my career to actually do this and I said well how much time are you giving yourself to achieve 10 times and they said well you know I just got to be at it all the time I'm going to have to work harder I'm going to have to work longer and I said well let me just extend and expand your thinking a little bit here you've got the number the base number you've multiplied by 10 you've got a 10 times number now I'm going to give you a framework of 25 years to achieve the 10 times goal and they said 25 years I wouldn't need 25 years to go 10 times and I said really well how soon could you do it and they said I don't know I could probably do it in 15 years and I said isn't that great you go 10 times in 15 years and you still have 10 years change what would you do with the extra 10 years and they said well if I could go 10 times in the next 15 years and my capabilities were at that level I could probably go 10 times again so you're telling me that 10 times when I first brought up the subject freaked you out but now you're talking about a hundred times I love it yeah so the greatest skill you know in our lives is really coming to grips with time and how we use time all of our success as an entrepreneur really actually isn't a function of our particular capabilities our specialized capabilities it's basically our Mastery of time especially you know in this instance Mastery of a time period called the future and my feeling is it's completely up to you to decide how you want to structure the future I find personally that giving myself 25 years is really great so for example I've started a new 25-year period when I was 70 which is just about 5 years ago now but now I'm approaching 75 as we're doing this particular podcast and I said you know I'm just going to take advantage of the 75 year mark to actually rearrange the 25 years and I'm going to start I'm going to have this will be the fourth quarter of my first century so I'm going to go from 75 to 100 and what I achieve between 75 and 100 will be extraordinarily greater certainly 100 times greater than what I've achieved in the first 75 years okay and I said that's really neat that's really neat I'll start over at 75 and then I'll give myself another 25 years so what do you think about that because I haven't told anybody about that before this well I love it Dan cuz I'm going to be here for the next 25 years so I'm really glad that you have another 25 year plan and it was so significant when you turned 70 to lay out your 25 year framework for the team because as you say you know what's the old guy going to do and to actually just say okay yes here's the plan and here's how many clients you want to have don't know how we're going to do that yet but you were like I'm in the game I'm playing that has not changed which I absolutely love and it's inspiration not only to our team but so many of our clients so I love the 25-year framework and there's just a peacefulness and a calmness and I think it gets rid of some of that anxiety that can really curtail creativity which is why I think it's so powerful but the other part of it I want to talk about a little bit more is how it allows you to just focus on this quarter of which you have a 100 I see you energized so energized at the beginning of every single quarter and actually middle and end as well because you know what you're working towards but all of your attention and focus is on right now yeah so here's the thing I have no way of proving what I'm going to say but I believe that how each individual entrepreneur handles time is unique to them and it has a lot to do with how they look back and how they've handled a time period in the past for example most entrepreneurs if I say well let's just leave the next 25 years the way they right now and let's just hold that thought that we have a 25 year framework ahead of you but let's go backwards 25 years so subtract 25 years from your present age and first of all were you even an entrepreneur then because some of the clients I'm working with are 35 and they were 10 years old so I said if you were to measure the progress that you've made since age 10 to age 35 which is say it's way greater than you thought was possible ible when you were 10 years old and I said oh yeah yeah and I said and is there any way at 10 you could have known how things have turned out when you're 35 and they said no and I said so you already have a 25e framework experience and if I'm going deeper with us I'll ask them to say well identify the five biggest breakthroughs that have actually taking you from 10 years old to 35 and there's been a lot of breakthroughs but if you had to name five of them and they can name them you know and it's all a combination of them suddenly having a greater capability of their own but also they're using the capabilities of other people that got got them where they are and I said so you've got about 25 years experience of doing a 25e transformation you've already got 25 years in you already have 100 quarters experienced backwards that got you where you are but you weren't even conscious of it then now you're conscious of it and you're operating at 35 at a much much higher level of knowledge you have a tremendous amount more practical experience but not only that if you're a really growing entrepreneur you've created teamwork around you and you begin to realize yeah there are certain things I should do my unique ability but I got to keep surrounding myself with other people's unique ability and I can see now much bigger opportunities than I ever could previously so I said let's just turn that 25 year transformation experience that you have and say okay this time you get to do it at a much higher skill level you're much simpler in your thinking about what lies ah had than you were when you were 10 years old so what if a equally exponential growth is going to happen even greater exponential growth is going to happen during the next 25 years but the only thing you really have to concern yourself is just the quarter that you're in and the other quarters will kind of be the result of the growth that you make over the next 90 days so quarter number two will be probably easier and you'll get bigger results if you do the right things in just the next quarter so what's the best possible use of the next quarter such that when you finished this quarter it actually allows you to have them an even better quarter with number two number three is better than number two number four is better than number three and so on and it's actually the growth becomes exponential but you don't have to worry about what's going to happen in 25 years because all you have to think about is the next quarter well I love that because you're compounding all the breakthroughs you're compounding all the learning and the capabilities and if anyone has not read who not how please get it because it will definitely facilitate the the partnering up with other capabilities and it's also kind of I don't even know with you know a rapidly changing technological world how could I plan I mean three years looks like a long time much less 25 years so the whole idea of having that 25- year framework but just focusing on what I can affect this 90 days is very both calming and energizing all at the same time I really like that but I want to point out your plan is not to stop at 100 you have a much longer Life Plan than that well my game plan and there's a book by this title my plan for living to 156 quick story on that I was born in 1944 and I couldn't live a 100 years within the 20th century so I said I'll live 100 years within the 21st century 56 from the 20th 100 from the 21st that gives me 156 you just wanted to live a whole Century I wanted to live a whole Century I thought that'd be a real treat from the very start of a century to the end of the century I said I think that'd be a pretty neat experience and I use that and you know I've been at this since 1987 with this framework and it's the only framework regarding my lifetime that I have the moment I think about something I said well you know I'm turning 75 I still have 81 years after that so massive amounts of time I can do the one to 100 I can do a 25 year to 125 I can do another 2 5 years to 150 and here's a sneaking suspicion I have Shannon that if I get to 150 I bet I can renegotiate the 156 I love that yeah I definitely think you can at that point I said I think I will have solved some very fundamental problems about staying alive because nobody's done it that we know about and people say well do you really think that you're going to get there and I said it doesn't have to do with whether I'm going to get there or not it's what having that goal does to my ability just live for today so where the 25 years framework as an entrepreneur allows me to actually just focus on this quarter the 156 years actually just allows me to focus on today and I've got 90 today's you know in the next quarter so what do I do today and what I do is focus on three things each day work day that will actually contribute to me having a great quarter I love it Dan I was going to ask you how can people take action on it and you've actually given a lot of prescriptions already which I love so really focus on the three crucial results per day you also burn a th000 exercise calories before breakfast yes is one of bur and how many days well I'm into my third year I just started my third year and then the first two years except for 6 days out of 73 30 I accomplished my goal of exercise burning 1,000 calories before I ate breakfast all the tests I get a full top to bottom physical with a lot of different testing you know every kind of test that's immediately available right now and for the last two years my test scores are just going off the chart you know in almost every area of health and fitness and I said you know they said do you think you could do that for 25 years I said I know I can do it tomorrow which is perfect yeah if I always know I can do it tomorrow I don't worry about the 25 years or the 156 years I said if I'm doing this every day already is there any logical reason except for injury or some debilitating sickness or is there any reason why I can't continually do it tomorrow you know on any day over the next 25 years is there any reason why I could not burn 1,000 calories and we arrange where we are that they have good gyms so it's actually made Babs and me very very strategic about where we stay when we're traveling someplace else and all the gyms we have totally support my early morning habit I love that I also really like the thinking process of looking back over your last 25 years so I'm thinking back and I was already a coach then and how much I've changed and learned and grown it's kind of amazing and what that means for the next 25 years I think that's a really great thinking exercise and just to kind of go through that process of what would your next 25y year framework what would you want to be true not in a goal sense so much but you've set some goals for coach in terms of how many clients we might have again don't quite know how we're going to get there or what it looks like or what the fee structure will be but there's some nice exciting numbers out there yeah and I'm not freaked out about the numbers you got to have a number you got to have some sort of measurable to your goals so we just are a year into the game changer program and I said 10 years we've got a th in the game changer that's just a working number because you say well what kind of improvements and changes do we have to make in this first quarter and this will be 40 quarters what do we have to do to open ourselves up to having a thousand at this level so you work backwards from the goal and you say well what are the new capabilities you know especially marketing and selling and then other coaches to handle everything except the game changer program you're using your future self I mean when you set a goal for the future it's you in the future giving you some direction right now about how you have to improve and change right now if you're going to be that person later down and you know we always create the future for the notion of ourselves having much greater capabilities and opportunities at some point that you can put a date to it and you can put measurements to it yeah but it gives you this flexibility and entrepreneurs of all people on the planet should really take ownership of their future you know and their future results because first of all nobody forced you to be an entrepreneur I mean this is strictly elective okay and you're not required to be an Entre R preneur and the other thing is that you've more or less made yourself incapable of being anything else if you're an entrepreneur you mean you're no longer employable yeah yeah I mean I wouldn't hire me and all the entrepreneurs that I coach I wouldn't hire any of them but I would collaborate with them and I do collaborate with them but I wouldn't hire them because they're too self-directed they wouldn't work for somebody else no and no one else is going to do it for you so you need to be in charge of your future nobody else owns your future time nobody else owns your future you're the one who owns this so take ownership I find this 25-year framework very useful both from just the long it's like oh I've got a lot of time to accomplish my big goals and then the absolute Clarity and focus it gives you for this quarter so thank you Dan for clarifying the question and I know that other people are going to find this incredibly useful thank you thank you Shannon great questions thank you so much for listening if you like this please feel free to share and definitely subscribe and we'll talk to you next time on the next inside strategic coach podcast