In this video, we're going to talk about five pretty easy evidence-based things you can do to massively increase the chances that you're actually going to achieve your goals. Now, obviously, when it comes to actually setting and achieving goals, generally, the thing that separates people who do achieve their goals from the people who don't achieve their goals is the action that they're actually putting into them. But if you look at the signs, there are actually these five relatively straightforward things you can do to stack the deck in your favor.
Call them hacks, call them habits. They don't take very long, but they will massively boost your odds of actually achieving the goals. And so if you're already doing all five of these things, fantastic, you are winning. And if you're not doing some or any of these five things, then you've got some very easy wins that you can apply pretty much as soon as you finish watching this video. And by the way, if you're new here, hello, my name is Ali.
I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and author. And since 2017, I've been making videos on this channel, which are all about the books, the ideas, the strategies and tools that can help us live more intentionally, be more productive and generally build a life that we truly love. I also spent ages researching and writing this book, Feel Good Productivity, which is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. And this dives deep into how we can get stuff done without burning out or sacrificing the things that matter most. And it's available in paperback, hardback, Kindle, Audible, basically everywhere books are sold and has also been translated into 35 languages.
And it's got a couple thousand five-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. So if that sounds interesting, it'll be linked down below if you want to check it out. All right, so let's start with point number one. Now here, I want to play you this clip from a guy called Jim Rohn.
Now, Jim Rohn was a multimillionaire success coach guy based in the US, but at age 25, he was completely broke. But he managed to get mentored by this business tycoon guy called Mr. Shoof. And here he is talking about an interesting encounter with Mr. Shoof that completely changed his life. Not long after I met Mr. Shoof, we're having breakfast one morning. Mr. Shoof said, Mr. Rohn, now that we've gotten acquainted, we know each other fairly well.
He said, maybe one of the best ways I can help you. He said, let me see your current list of goals. Let's go over them and talk about it.
And I said, what? I don't have a list. He said, well, Mr. Rohn, if you don't have a list of your goals, he said, I can guess your bank balance within a few hundred dollars, which he did.
And that got my attention. I said, you mean my bank balance would change if I had a list of goals? He said, drastically. So that day I became a student of setting goals.
And I've used it to dynamically affect my life. I've taught it to some of my business colleagues. We use it to do business around the world. Setting goals.
Hmm, so this is interesting. Write down your list of goals. I'm curious, do you have a list of goals written down somewhere?
Could you bring them up if someone asked you to see them? But you might be thinking, this seems a bit too good to be true. This is just some like personal development guru.
It's like, it surely can't be that basic as just writing down your list of goals. Do we have any actual science or research to back this up? And to that, I would like to draw your attention to this study from the Dominican University. And these guys were basically testing, does writing down your goals compared to not writing them down change your chances of achieving success? set goals.
So on the y-axis, we've got average goal achievement, and then we've got two groups. One group did not write down their goals, and the other group wrote down their goals. This was the average goal achievement for the group that set goals but did not write them down. And this was the average goal achievement for the group that set goals and did write them down. The research has found that if you write down your goals, you're around 42% more likely to actually achieve them.
Now, I don't know about you, but if I could improve by 42% the probability of me actually achieving the goals I've set for myself simply by writing them down, I would probably do that because it doesn't take that long to write down your goals. And that is why our evidence-based strategy number one for achieving your goals is to simply write them down. Now, it doesn't really matter what format you write them down in. I personally have a Google Doc. that I've named goalkeeper.
And I've been doing this for the last couple of years. And I personally like setting quarterly goals rather than annual goals. I refer to my quarterly goals as my quarterly quests. And each quarter, so every three months, I like to set around three or four of them.
I found that if I set any more than four, I don't end up making progress on any of them. And so three or four seems to be like a reasonable number. Oh, by the way, quick thing.
If you're watching this before the 4th of January, 2025, then you might like to check out the completely free two-day productivity workshop that I'm hosting on the 4th and 5th of January, 2025. It is called Productivity Spark, and it's essentially a two-day series of workshops that are hosted by me and also my wife and also a couple of guests that are aimed to help you reflect on 2024, figure out where your work and life are heading, and set active goals and quarterly quests for 2025. It is completely free. You can check it out with a link down below, and I hope to see you there potentially. All righty, so now we come to insanely simple strategy for actually achieving your goals number two.
Now here, it is worth us understanding a little bit of the brain called the reticular activating system. Now the RAS is basically a bundle of nerves at the the base of your brainstem that acts as a filter and it determines what information your brain pays attention to. Obviously in day-to-day life, there are millions upon millions of various sensory inputs that your brain could pay attention to. So how does it know which ones to focus on? Well, that's where the reticular activating system comes in.
Generally based on your goals and priorities, the brain filters out stuff that is irrelevant to those goals and priorities and helps focus your attention on the stuff that actually matters to you. The classic example of this is let's say you're buying a car and you're like, man, I really want to get a Fiat 500. All of a sudden, by the fact that you've set the intention to buy potentially a Fiat 500, you will suddenly start seeing Fiat 500s literally everywhere you look. And that is not because all of a sudden when you decided to set the goal of buying a Fiat 500, suddenly everyone else also bought Fiat 500s. It's because of your reticular activating system. Because you have set this as a goal for yourself, your brain is more likely to notice all of the Fiat 500s that are floating around the place.
And so strategy number two for drastically improving our chances of actually achieving our goals, it's to actually look at those goals that you've written down every single week, if not every single day. Mistake number one that people make is that they don't set goals in the first place, but you're not going to make that mistake because you're watching this video. Mistake number two is that if they do set goals, they don't write them down.
Mistake number three is that for so many of us, we set goals at the start of the year and then we never look at them ever again. And so the idea behind strategy number two is that we can harness the reticular activating system by actually looking at our goals every single day or every single week. I personally review mine once a week as part of my weekly reset. I've got a little journaling prompt that says, what were my quarterly quests and how are they going?
And that means every single week when I do my weekly resets, it just reminds me to check up on my quarterly goals. Each week, I also set three main priorities for the week. And then as part of my daily morning manifesto is what I call it, morning manifesto journaling practice. I ask myself a simple question, which is, what were our weekly priorities and how are they going? I like to refer to it as our rather than my, because it sort of feels like I'm harnessing all parts of my brain.
What were our weekly priorities and how are they going? So every single week I'm reviewing my quarterly goals and every single day I'm reviewing my weekly priorities. This does not take very much time at all. This is like a 10 second job at most, but it's just that little job that the brain needs to be like, oh yeah. I did intend to sign up for that squash club or oh yeah I did intend to make progress on that particular work task and sometimes it's just so easy to forget those things otherwise because we're so caught up in the day-to-day of what's happening in the calendar what's happening in work and in life but by literally spending 10 seconds every week looking back at your list of written goals or priorities that alone is such a needle moving in sight that I'm amazed that more people don't do it and you know to be honest this video is advice for myself because I also sometimes fall off.
I know all the studies. I've read, did a shit ton of research in my book talking about all this stuff. And still, I forget sometimes to do my weekly reset where I look at my goals. And sometimes a couple of weeks pass where I haven't looked at my list of goals.
And I'm like, damn. I've actually been less consistent with the goals that I set because I simply forgot to look at them. Oh, by the way, if one of your dreams or goals is to potentially grow an audience or to generate consistent revenue or turn whatever expertise you have into a full time gig, you should definitely check out the future of newsletters report from HubSpot, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. And you can download this report completely for free using the link in the video description.
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today's video sponsor. So thank you very much for them for making this video possible and do check out the free report in the video description. All right, let's move on to strategy number three. And here we can cite this meta analysis of I think 138 studies that covered nearly 20,000 participants. And the authors of the meta analysis found that one simple strategy that you can use to improve your odds of goal attainment is simply to monitor your progress regularly.
In my case, for example, in my weekly reset thing, I asked myself, what were my quarterly quests and how are they going? The and how are they going bit encourages me to actually monitor progress. Generally, I give it red, yellow or green, or I just say kind of on track or off track. Just even that is enough for me to monitor the progress that I'm making towards my goals. Every single day when I make the time to do my morning manifesto and I ask myself, what were our priorities for the week and how are they going?
Again, I'm monitoring progress. I defined the most important priorities at the start of the week. And now I'm just checking in with myself to see how am I actually doing and achieving them. The other way that I personally like to do this monitoring progress thing, it's also fairly simple.
I use an app Things 3 for my to-do list. And within Things 3, I have the various projects that I'm working on. So I've got, you can ignore Iram and Angus. This is sort of two of my team members that I delegate stuff to. So that is a project because delegation and stuff.
But I basically split up my project into work and life. And you can see I've got these four different projects under work, Company Relocation, LifeOS, Mastermind, and Learn AI Agents, and I've got get food on autopilot because I'm sorting out like some sort of food situation for my life. These are a couple of the projects that I'm actively working on. And about once a week, when I update my projects list, I will just put a little emoji of like yellow or green.
Green is it is on track. Yellow is that it's sort of a bit off track, but there's a plan to get it back on track. And if it's red, it's like off track without a plan.
You can also monitor your progress in any which way you like. Back when I was writing my book, Feel Good Productivity, I monitored progress in terms of word counts for specific chapters, because that's like an easy way to make progress more visible. It also just makes it feel better at as you're achieving a goal.
You're able to monitor the progress, sort of like the leveling up bar in a video game. As you're killing monsters and doing the quests, you're leveling up, your experience meter is filling, and there's something very satisfying about that. But what the evidence suggests is that people who just take a small amount of time to regularly monitor the progress of their goals are significantly more likely to actually achieve them.
And that is why that is point number three, monitor your progress. Again, super easy, super simple, doesn't take very long. If you're not monitoring the progress of your goals, you are leaving a lot of free kind of...
goal attainment points on the table and you just might as well start doing it because why not? All right, let's move on to fairly simple strategy number four. And this comes from a psychologist called Gabrielle Oettingen. And it's a strategy called mental contrasting. Now, mental contrasting is the idea where you basically visualize something that you want in the future, but it's not just about visualizing the outcome.
We find that people who spend too long visualizing having already achieved their goals. actually in some studies are less likely to achieve those goals. But if you visualize achieving your goals and you also contrast it with the obstacles that you might encounter along the way, that is mental contrasting. And that really seems to boost people's goal attainment.
And so this psychologist, Gabrielle Uttingen, came up with a fairly simple technique called the WHOOP method, which stands for wish, outcome, obstacle, and plan. Now the wish and the outcome is where you are basically setting the goal. There are all sorts of different ways for goal setting. You can use The GPS system, which is my personal favorite, you can think in terms of facts, feelings, and functionality. You can think in terms of wish and outcome, like what is the thing that you wish for and what is the outcome that would happen as a result of you achieving that goal.
But then the key bit of the WHIP method is this obstacle and plan. You are visualizing the obstacles that might stand in your path. Let's say, you know, I've set the goal of, I don't know, writing my next book by...
halfway through next year. All right, cool. What are the obstacles that could get in my path? Well, one obstacle is I might not make the time for it. Another obstacle is I might run out of ideas.
Another obstacle is I might feel demotivated when I sit down to try and write. And then the final component of the WIP method is plan. What is my plan for addressing those obstacles?
So I might say, okay, cool. I'm going to put in three hours on my calendar block every single morning to focus on writing. I might do a few brainstorming sessions with my team to avoid the problem of running out of ideas.
And I might use an app that me and my team have built called VoicePal to make writing more fun because then I can... write the book while talking rather than while simply typing on a computer. And so strategy number four that we have here is visualize obstacles and to make a plan. Again, doesn't take very long to do. Each time you set a goal, you can just spend literally three minutes thinking to yourself, okay, cool.
Wish outcome, W-O. obstacle plan. What are the obstacles that could get in my way? And what's my plan for overcoming those obstacles?
And again, according to the research, this will drastically improve your odds of actually achieving the goal. And then finally, we come to fairly easy strategy number five, and that is to tie them to an identity. Now, the classic example of this is that there was a study where they looked at voting. So for some of the people in the study, they asked, will you vote in this election? And for the other half, they asked, will you be a voter?
in this election. And they found that the people who were asked the question of, will you be a voter were way more likely to vote than the people who were simply asked, will you vote? Will you vote is an action. Will you be a voter is an identity.
So the key thing here is wherever possible, when you've got your goals, you want to just sort of spend an extra 20 seconds to tie them to an identity. For example, one of my goals is to reduce my visceral abdominal tissue because, you know, genetics and stuff and I want to live longer and healthier and I've been reading Outlive by Patriot here. Now setting the goal of improving my bench press or reducing my visceral adipose tissue or all that all that kind of stuff is all well and good, but if I were to take the 20 seconds to tie them to an identity of I am a healthy person, that will make it more likely that I'll actually achieve the goals and I'll actually stick with it when the going gets tough because I've resonated with that identity.
Similarly, I found when I was working on my YouTube channel, when I gave myself permission to lean into the identity of I am a YouTuber, that was what allowed me allowed me to stay consistent with making YouTube videos in the tough times. For ages, I did not identify with the identity of being an author or being a writer because I had all sorts of imposter syndrome around it. Who am I to write a book? Any of this sort of stuff.
But when I lent into that identity of being an author, and I started this video, I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and author, leaning into the identity of being an author, you know, what does an author do? An author writes. What does a writer do? A writer writes. That makes it a lot easier in the mornings when I'm figuring out what I wanna do with my day, what I wanna do with my week.
Oh yeah, I'm a writer. I guess I should do some writing. And this is often in line with the goals that I have. have for myself. So the question would be for whatever goals that you're setting for yourself, how can you tie them to an identity?
Because, you know, there's a quote that I really like from Tony Robbins, which is that the strongest force in human personality is the need to stay consistent in how we define ourselves. If you label, if you define yourself as a procrastinator, you actually will stay consistent with that. If you define yourself as a YouTuber, you're more likely to stay consistent with that.
If you can get over the imposter syndrome and define yourself as a high performer or as an entrepreneur, you're more likely to stay consistent with that. likely to do the sorts of things that high performers or entrepreneurs or healthy people or whatever the thing might be, you're more likely to actually do those things. Therefore, you're more likely to achieve your goals in that domain.
Now, if you incorporate all these five things, which I hope you do, because they're super easy to do, and you might as well, and they're evidence-based and they work. If you incorporate these five things, there is still one mistake that you might run into, which is the idea of setting too many goals. And here I want to link you to that video, which is my summary of Cal Newport's new book, Slow Productivity, that makes a really strong case for doing less, but better. and doing it in a way that doesn't foster burnout.
So if you haven't yet read Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, you can check out that video over there where I summarized the key learnings from the book. And I hope you find that useful. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you later.