[INTRODUCTION]

 

[00:01:47] Brad: In this episode I have a conversation with Michael Hyatt. He’s a New York Times bestselling author, formerly CEO and Chairman of Thomas Nelson, one of the largest book publishers in the country, and also was named a top 50 social media influencer by Forbes. So, really to say the guy is accomplished would be an understatement but we really dig in on goal setting in this conversation. With 2016 right around the corner, I couldn’t think of a better topic to be covering but Michael talks about some of the biggest reasons people set goals and then fall short of them. He digs into his personal journey, how he became a goal setter. One of my favorite parts, he talks about his morning routine and how that really gets his day started down the right path to help him achieve his goals he’s laid out for the year. He digs in on how he utilizes Evernote as a simple framework to not only get his goals in writing but also keep them visible throughout the year so he can get them checked off.

 

Lastly, one of my favorite analogies he uses in the call is those times where you fall short of goals, how to make that not a demotivator but he actually uses an analogy where he compares that to the baseball great Ted Williams and his approach to baseball. So, anyway, I hope you all enjoy this conversation. I had a lot of fun with it. As always, there’s a lot of stuff discussed in the call so any book recommendations, links, articles discussed you can find those in the show notes at BradJ.net/podcast. Also, a special offer he made to all the listeners depending on when you listen to this is the early bird offer for his goal setting framework, Best Year Ever, so you can find that at the very top of the show notes on the actual podcast section on the website. So, without further ado here’s my conversation with Michael Hyatt.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

[00:03:39] Brad:  I just want to say super honored to have you on here today, Michael.

 

[00:03:42] Michael: Thanks, Brad.

 

[00:03:43] Brad: Anything I missed in that intro? Anything else that the listeners and the viewers today should know?

 

[00:03:50] Michael: Well maybe the most important thing, I’ve been married to my wife Gail for 37 years and we have five grown daughters, four sons-in-law and eight grandchildren so it’s a full house.

 

[00:04:03] Brad: Enough to keep you super busy then, right?

 

[00:04:05] Michael: That’s right.

 

[00:04:06] Brad: By the way, on that note for everyone listening in, my third child has not been born yet so Sarah is due Wednesday and so I might – if my phone rings and I jet, you know why. I’ve got to go to this. So, anyway, well let’s dig in, Michael.

 

[00:04:24] Michael: Okay.

 

[00:04:25] Brad: We’ve got a presentation here. I know we’re going to keep these more conversational but really the thought here is the ten biggest mistakes people make in setting goals and what they can do to overcome those. With it being December and New Year’s right around the corner, obviously, a great time of year to be thinking about goals. So, as we get into that, more on a personal level, I know sometimes just the topic of goal setting just kind of creates anxiety and everybody says, “Oh, that just seems overwhelming.” So, have you always been a goal setter? I’m just curious on a personal note, have you always were – like did you start out as a sixth-grader and started writing your notes down for the goals for the upcoming year? Can you tell us a little bit your journey into becoming a goal setter and what that would look like?

 

[00:05:10] Michael: Yeah. Well, I didn’t start in the sixth grade. If I’ve known the value of it back then, I probably would have but I started in college and I guess I realized that there was huge potential in designing your life and not just drifting. I grew up in our home where I had a wonderful father but frankly he just drifted kind of through life without choosing his adventure or choosing the destination and I saw some kind of things that were negative that happened particularly as I got in junior high where he kind of drifted off the rails a bit and it was a great disappointment to me and to my family, and I talk more about that in the video series that I have out right now. But I started seeing the potential of what could happen if you actually are intentional and begin to decide what it is that you want not just with your business but in every area of your life like what do you want for your health? Your fitness level? What do you want for your marriage? For your relationship with your kids? For your friendships? Or your finances and obviously, for your vocation but even your hobbies or your avocation?

 

So, I just think there’s tremendous, tremendous power in goal setting and by the way, that doesn’t mean that you have to hit all your goals. In fact, the best goal setters I know barely clear half their goals or make half their goals during the year. It’s a little bit like baseball. If you’re batting 300, you’re doing great but if you don’t set goals, you’re very unlikely, I think, to end up where you’re going to live a life of no regrets. You’re going to end up going off the rails at some point.

 

[00:06:49] Brad: So, along those lines, I know really as we get into the framework, number one kind of ties into that but not drifting so actually writing your goals down. Have you always written your goals down? I know you’re also a person that’s invested in mentors along the way whether that was when you were at Thomas Nelson or later on. What mentors may be affected you on that front as far as the goal setting front?

 

[00:07:13] Michael: Yeah. Well, I definitely have always written my goals down. Honestly, it started, Brad, initially with just kind of a bucket list. I was challenged in college to write a list of everything I wanted to do before I got to the age of 75 and so I made a big long list and I ended up revising that about maybe about seven years ago. In fact, I took all my kids and my wife on a vacation and we ended up creating a bucket list and I revised mine. I had them create a hundred things that they wanted to do before they were 75 and it was a blast. We had so much fun just talking about it but those are more aspirations, not really goals.  

 

Goals have to have some specific attributes in order to be, in my view, considered as a goal but one of the mentors that I had that was incredibly valuable to me as the co-author of my next book, moving forward, a guy named Daniel Harkavy who runs a company called Building Champions and you could find him at BuildingChampions.com but he has an executive coaching company and he became my personal coach back in 2001 and he was my coach for more than a decade and just an amazing guy but we wrote everything down. The reason for that is because thoughts disentangle themselves passing over the lips and through pencil tips. It’s hard to get clarity if you don’t write stuff down. There’s something about the process of writing, and I’m a writer and I write a blog, I’ve written eight books so I’m writing all the time but I’ve noticed that until I write it down, I usually don’t have the clarity that I know that I’ll get when I actually commit pen to paper.

 

[00:08:54] Brad: Makes sense. So, one of the tips just this year being part of the Mastermind group, I’ve always been somebody that’s worked out playing sports through college but it kind of always revolved around, did I have a workout buddy? So, one of the things that you talk on a lot is having a morning routine and just the fact that I incorporated that this year, I noticed a massive difference for me, number one being no electronics in the morning. So, what I used to do, I’d roll out of bed. Of course, everybody’s got their phone right next to bed. First thing, right into the emails and then there’s a 30-minute, hour-long rabbit hole that you’re in and then the next thing you know it’s time to go to work. It’s interesting. I’d be interested to get your view on how does the morning routine, how important is that with goal setting and how does that maybe feed in and throw a gas on that fire for lack of a better term.

 

[00:09:55] Michael: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, all of us fight this battle between the urgent and the important and they’re not the same. So, if we’re not careful, we can let the tyranny of the urgent crowd out the important so we never get to the important stuff like taking care of ourselves whether it’s with fitness or our spiritual life or our intellectual life. We don’t do that unless we do it, at least for me, unless I do that first thing in the morning. The longer the day wears on, the less control I have over what happens. I’m subject to interruptions, everybody else is getting up, there’s emails, there’s phone calls, there’s meetings and all the rest. But in those early hours, and I get up at 5 AM, in those first few early hours is when I go through my normal routine, my daily ritual which includes my exercise and includes some reading, some spiritual disciplines and all the rest but it also includes reviewing my goals.

 

So, that’s just one of the items on my daily ritual list that I do every day just to read the goal and ask myself the question, “Is there something that I can do today that would move the ball down the field on one of my major goals?” and just having the visibility of the goal is hugely helpful to me.

 

[00:11:10] Brad: So, it’s been interesting. So, this last year I guess for everybody listening in, I know a lot of you have been exposed to Darren Hardy, Living Your Best Year Ever, and I’ve used his framework for goal setting and then this last year I used Michael’s Best Year Ever and going back to the original thought of sometimes goal setting is a little bit overwhelming, that’s one of the things that I really liked about your process, it wasn’t.

 

[00:11:39] Michael: Good.

 

[00:11:40] Brad: Which is a huge step because you actually do it and so nothing against Darren’s. Darren’s is a great framework too, very, very – it’s a lot of hours to get that thing up and running. So, can you speak just high-level because one of the things I took from there was how you use Evernote and I know some of my tech savvy guys like Adam and Jason that are on here, they’re big Evernote fans but can you speak to that framework because you mentioned you get an update on your goals? So, what does that look like high-level just for everyone on the call?

 

[00:12:14] Michael: Yeah. Well, one of the greatest dangers, and we can talk about this a little bit later, but one of the greatest dangers in goal setting is that you lose visibility of the goals. We’ve all been through the drill where you write your goals down and whether it’s a long process or a short process you look at them, you’re maybe enthusiastic the first couple weeks of the year and then you file them away and you don’t look at them again, and then you wonder why you don’t accomplish your goals. So, I realized early on that visibility to your goals is a key component in execution. So, I do a lot of things. I have screensavers with my top 10 goals on it and they just rotate throughout the day but one of the things I do is I also have them all in Evernote.

 

So, for you geekier types, I don’t want to get too geeky here, but I create a separate note for every goal and I’ve got a template that I use inside of that goal which helps me identify, for example, the rationale, connect really with the why, why that goal motivates me so that when I get in the messy middle and want to quit, I can remember why it is that I took on that goal to begin with, what was at stake both if I achieve the goal and what was at stake if I didn’t achieve the goal then I have some action steps and other resources linked to that. That’s all in an Evernote note.

 

Then what I do? And I don’t look at that every day. Okay? So, that’s kind of my planning document, maybe about once a week or once a month I look through that but what I have is I have all of those summarized in an index note with the link to the full note. So, in other words, I’ve got one note that has all ten of my goals and it’s got a hot link so that if I click on the goal then I get – it explodes into the big full blown goal and Evernote has a feature that if you highlight, for example in my case, ten notes and you – I can’t remember what it’s called but you right-click on it and then it can create an index note and it just, boom, just creates that all at once. So, that’s what I review every day.

 

[00:14:05] Brad: Well that’s good to know because I did it the hard way.

 

[00:14:09] Michael: I know I did it the hard way too the first time and one of my buddies from Evernote called and said, in fact I wrote this on my blog and I explained how I did it the hard way and he said, “You know, we basically have that in one click,” and I was like, “Oh, gee. Okay.”

 

[00:14:23] Brad: Nice. Well, that’s about you right there. So, you had a book recommendation on the presentation here for actually writing things down. If you want to – oh and by the way, I know everybody’s probably scribbling notes as we go through this. I’m going to drop an email out following the call. Think of it as show notes so when you book recommendation, app recommendations, things. Actually, if you’ve got any blog post you mentioned throughout the call here, Michael, if you want to just shoot those over, I’ll make those available in viewing.

 

[00:14:53] Michael: Great. Okay.

 

[00:14:56] Brad: So, you had a book recommendation as far as the writing things down and getting them done. Do you remember that?

 

[00:15:00] Michael: Yes, I do. Can I just say one thing before we get to that?

 

[00:15:03] Brad: No problem.

 

[00:15:03] Michael: I promise I’ll get to it. I got to tell you about this study because I’ve always felt like writing goals down was important and a lot of people say, “Well I don’t need to write them down. I know what I want to accomplish,” and maybe they keep them on the back of a napkin or they try to keep them in their head. Get this. Dr. Gail Mathews who is a professor, a psychology professor at Dominican University in California did her own study that involved 267 participants and one of the things that she discovered, it’s kind of a seminal work on goal setting, but you have a 42% chance more likely chance of achieving your goals just by writing them down. So, in other words, she did a blind test with those who had written their goals down and those who didn’t and the ones that wrote their goals down were 42% more likely to achieve their goals just by writing them down.

 

So, there’s huge value in writing your goals down. Now the book is called Write It Down, Make It Happen and it’s by Henriette Anne Klauser and as Brad said, he’ll send that out to you so don’t worry about it but you can find it at Amazon, Write It Down, Make It Happen. That’s the book that I had, my wife and my kids read when we went out on our Florida vacation and wrote our bucket list and it’s just a very, very compelling book.

 

[00:16:21] Brad: Awesome. Alright. Guys, don’t forget here. We’ve got – you have the next 45 minutes live Q&A so anything, goal setting related, any of that stuff that’s kind of going through your head right now, feed them to me and the ones that make sense I’ll go ahead and I’ll moderate that and get them over to Michael. So, don’t forget that at the bottom there. Okay. Number two, Michael. What’s…

 

[00:16:47] Michael: Yeah. The number two mistake is creating too many goals. Man, I’ve seen this done so many different ways. Some of you guys out there have cheated on this, I know. I remember I had somebody come to me one time and I had recommended five to seven goals as kind of a focus because of this truth, this ancient Chinese proverb that says, “Man who chases two rabbits catches neither.” Well, you don’t have to keep it to two goals but I do think that the more you get, the more goals you write down, the less likely you’re going to achieve any of them because you just don’t have the focus, the focus of your resources, the focus of your attention. You’re just not going to achieve them.

 

But I’ve had guys that would come in and especially back when I was in the corporate world and they would be very clever. They said, “Well I got five to seven goal areas and then they’d have five to seven goals under each one of those.” I promise the likelihood of them achieving any of those was very remote. It’s just too overwhelming. It’s too much to focus on. So, I really do, just as rule of thumb, recommend that you have five to seven goals but no more than ten. So, like for this year, I had ten but I think five to seven is the best and that’s because psychologists tell us that it’s difficult to keep anything in mind, to keep our focus on more than about seven things at one time. So, that will be my recommendation.

 

[00:18:14] Brad: Okay. So, my prompt here got a couple of questions flowing. So, Jason down in Florida asks, “Can you give an example of the specifics of one of your goals? I know you said to write it down. How specific do you get with it and what do you review?”

 

[00:18:34] Michael: Yeah. I get really specific. In fact, we’re going to get to this in one of the mistakes that people make but I get very specific in terms of, for example, like when I wrote my last book, Living Forward, I could’ve just said something like, “Write a book,” but I got very specific. I wanted to write the Living Forward book and I wanted to complete it by a specific time. So, I put a deadline on it but that kind of specificity is really important. Or for example, a fitness goal. If I’m trying to lose weight, I have the exact pounds. This last year, I was trying to reach a certain fat mass and so that – having that specific goal is crucial and I write down the literal number that I’m pushing for.

 

[00:19:16] Brad: By fat mass, lack of fat mass, right?

 

[00:19:19] Michael: Yes. I wasn’t trying to gain fat mass. I was trying to gain – get a more lean body so reduce my fat mass.

 

[00:19:27] Brad: One thing Jason in Florida, because I know we’ve got a couple of you in here, one thing that I found super valuable to that Evernote framework that Michael’s talking about is that next action step. So, if it’s writing that book, it might be find somebody to write the book proposal for you. So, just chunking that thing down so it’s not these big tasks that can get somewhat overwhelming. You can really just get to that next to action step where they’re not as big as they seem which is super valuable.

 

[00:19:58] Michael: Yeah. And that’s one of the things too, Brad. You mentioned earlier that my way of setting goals is not overwhelming and here’s the problem. A lot of guys when they set goals, they create this elaborate detailed action plan which I do by the way. I highly recommend, if you’re building like a nuclear submarine or if you’re adding an addition to your house or something that’s more complicated but for most of us, that becomes a very fancy way to procrastinate. So, you develop these elaborate plans when really all we need to know is, what’s the next step I need to take to move this project forward? Usually, you know exactly what that next step is and if you take it, the path unfolds so then you know what the next step is going to be and you start marching toward the goal and that’s really the secret for me for why I’ve achieved what I have achieved and why the people that I coach have achieved what they achieve is we don’t get too obsessed with the action plan. We do take some action plans and some goals are different but we just don’t get too obsessed with that.

 

[00:21:01] Brad: Makes sense. Alright. Onto mistake number three.

 

[00:21:06] Michael: Mistake…

 

[00:21:06] Brad: By the way, that I know, I make and/or I’ve definitely made over my career and I’m sure there’s a few on here that have as well.

 

[00:21:13] Michael: Okay. So, this one is only focusing, mistake number three, only focusing on one area of your life and usually when people are used to doing goal setting they focus on their vocation or they focus on the financial aspect of their life but that’s only one aspect. Brad, you want to throw that little diagram up that I’ve got on slide 18? Can you do that?

 

[00:21:39] Brad: I will do my very, very best here. Just a second. I’m navigating a bunch of questions here. So, I let you keep going and then…

 

[00:21:48] Michael: Okay.

 

[00:21:49] Brad: Let me see if I can do this here.

 

[00:21:51] Michael: Yeah. So, the point is that there’s this part of what I call the circle of being which includes your spiritual life, your intellectual life and your physical life. So, these are that part of your being that’s the core of who you are and who you are eventually manifests itself in everything else but it’s critical to realize that your life is just more than your work and so that’s where it starts the circle of being.

 

But then in addition to that, there’s also the circle of relating. Your marriage, there you go. The marital domain, the social domain, the parental domain. Maybe you’re not married. Maybe you’re not a parent, that area doesn’t apply to you. But if you are, those areas are worthy of goal setting as well. Because one of the things I’ve seen in corporate life especially is that nothing is done in isolation. If you get sick, for example, if you don’t take care of your health, you get out of shape, you have a heart attack, that’s massively disruptive to your business, massively disruptive to your family. On the other hand, if you’ve ever known somebody going through a divorce and, I mean, it’s a horrific experience, incredibly disruptive to every area of their lives. So, all these things are interrelated and all of them, therefore, require that we give some intention and I believe set goals in these areas as well.

 

Then there’s not only a circle of being, the circle of relating but the circle of doing which is this outward one which is the vocational, the avocational and the financial areas of life. Usually, most of us particularly if we’re high achievers don’t have problems in those areas, setting goals, it’s more this stuff towards the middle of the bull’s-eye that bleeds out into those other areas and impacts them. So, you want to set goals in these other areas as well.

 

[00:23:45] Brad: So, along those lines, I haven’t had a chance to dig in on this yet but didn’t you just create an incredible tool that kind of show you where you rank as far as all these different areas?

 

[00:23:56] Michael: Yeah. This is a tool that we launched two weeks ago that I’m super excited about. It’s called the LifeScore tool and it’s a self-assessment. You can find this by the way at MichaelHyatt.com/lifescore and what it does is it’s an Excel spreadsheet and it has you rank yourself in the ten domains of life and give yourself a score of 1 to 12, and it’s basically four quadrants in each domain and it only takes about ten minutes. I make it sound more complicated than it is. When you see it, it’s intuitive. It’s easy to do but then you get a life score and the whole premise behind it is you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Let me say that again, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. You guys probably teach this with your clients. But it’s…

 

[00:24:49] Brad: It sounds very similar to marketing, what we talk about, so yes, we’re right along the lines.

 

[00:24:53] Michael: Yeah. So, it’s true. I mean if you can’t measure your fitness level or how you’re doing in your marriage, I mean, I get that you’re more than a number, your marriage is more than a number, your fitness is more than a number but it’s extremely helpful to reduce it to a number so that you can see if you’re improving in that area and that’s what the LifeScore assessment does. It’s basically a prelude to goal setting as we move it at this time of the year and start thinking about 2016.

 

[00:25:19] Brad: So, I’m going to feed you a couple of more questions here, Michael. These two kind of overlap. So, from Greg, “When you don’t complete a goal, how do you not let it become a negative?” And from Jason, different Jason, up in Washington, Evernote fan Jason so, “After setting a goal last year, our team came up short. We had a great year but we did not hit our goal. Not hitting our goal seem to create a sense of disappointment.” So, kind of some overlap on that question there. How do you handle that?

 

[00:25:47] Michael: First of all, that’s a great question. I want to tell you what I learned from Dan Sullivan. Some of you guys may know him but it’s a concept of the gap or the gain. So, here’s the idea. Planning forward, you want to measure the gap, where you are versus where you want to be. So, all of us have a destination in some area of our life and there’s a gap between where we are and where we want to be. But when we get to the deadline for that then we measure backward. So, plan forward, measure backward. Now the question is not how far did we fall short of the goal but how did we achieve versus where we were so, example, a year ago?

 

So, I’ll give you a good example of this, Brad. I have a website. This is a major source of income for me called Platform University. It’s a membership website. We’ve got thousands of members that pay us a monthly fee on that. So, we only open it for registration twice a year and in our fall campaign we had a big hairy audacious goal, and everybody was absolutely fired up convinced that we can make it. Well, the truth is we fell about 20% short and it would have been really easy for everybody to be disappointed and for everybody to kind of pull back when they thought about 2016 and just say, “Gosh, maybe we just should push for like 5% improvement because that hurts when we didn’t achieve what we achieved.”

 

So, here’s what I did. As a leader of the group I said this, I said, “First of all, let’s acknowledge reality. We fell short of our goal. We fell short by 20%.” I said, “Look at what we accomplished,” and then I just started going through all the stuff that we had accomplished since last year. First of all, it was our biggest registration ever. We were ahead last year by about 40%. I’m not convinced we would’ve got there if we had shot for a lesser goal. I made it, as the leader, okay.

 

[00:27:44] Michael: I said, “Look at the capability we developed. Look at what we learned in this process, look at all the new tools that we developed, look at the experience that we gave for the people to join”. So, it’ll inform next year but we celebrated the fact that we had gained all this ground against our goal even though there was a gap. So, it’s your focus. So, Living Forward before the goal is achieved, you want to plan forward and focus on the gap. How can you close it? But once the deadline passes then you want to turn as a leader and focus on the gain. Otherwise, your people start getting scared. They start getting disappointed and they won’t set big goals. My people, I promise you, after this exercise, everybody felt super empowered. They felt that it was safe to set big goals even if we don’t always achieve them.

 

I was just reviewing this week what happens in Major League Baseball. So, if you bat 300, it means that for 10 times you get up to bat, you hit the ball three times, 30%. The best baseball player with the highest batting average in the history was Ted Williams in 1941. He had a 0.406 batting average which meant that it was about a 40% and everybody thinks of him as a superhero. So, 60% of the time he got up to bat he didn’t hit the ball. So, I think we’ve got to take a page out of that as goal setters and realize that if we’re going to be high achievers, we’re going to really shoot for big goals that are meaningful that move the needle that really makes something happen. We’re going to miss a lot of those goals but if we measured the gain, we’re a lot further ahead than if we had not taken that step to begin with. That make sense?

 

[00:29:29] Brad: Very much so. Very good advice. I’ll just share something that I was exposed to this year speaking to kind of the – what you don’t want to do is lead your team and then, “Oh, we missed it this year,” and everybody goes depressed into next year. So, going back to the Dan Sullivan reference that you used, Michael, so Dan’s got this 10-times mindset mentality. So, I’m doing $1 million of revenue this year rather than looking at a 30% or 40% gain. What would I have to do? How would my business have to evolve and change if I was going to do $10 million? Very, very big differences, scaling and systems and things like that. So, along that same front, so Joel, one of the guys that does some coaching course, one of our advisors, take that in reverse.

 

So, the year you did $1 million of revenue, for example, think back to the year that you did $100,000 of revenue and think about how different your team was, how different your process was, how different your marketing was and I think sometimes as achievers all we focus on is what’s next going back to that gap, where is that little bit that I fell short as opposed to, “Oh my gosh, the last four of five years my business has just been revolutionized and I’ve grown like crazy.” So, it’s kind of that mindset that you got to work on a little bit sometimes on that front.

 

[00:30:48] Michael: Absolutely. Yup.

 

[00:30:50] Brad: Okay. So, let’s dig into mistake number four which I think answers a previous question here.

 

[00:30:55] Michael: It does. Mistake number four is people don’t make their goals specific enough and you got to get this specificity. For example, instead of just saying, and I gave this example earlier, “Write a book,” a more specific goal would be, “To finish, in my case, the Living Forward manuscript.” Or another example, instead of saying, as one of my goals for this next year, I’m a photographer, amateur photographer, “Learn photography.” That’s broad and general and who’s to say when you learn it. I could have something really simple and specific like, “Complete Linda.com’s Photography 101 Course.” So, that’s a kind of specificity you need. It’s fine to have a general aspiration like, “I want to lose weight,” but how much weight do you want to lose? If you want to say, “Well I want to lose fat and gain lean muscle mass,” how much? Make it specific. It increases the likelihood of you actually achieving it.

 

[00:31:51] Brad: So, that leads into mistake number five which is?

 

[00:31:55] Michael: Which is they don’t make the goal measurable. Again, let’s just give example. Instead of just lose weight, how about lose 35 pounds? I had one guy that went through my Best Year Ever course this last year and lost 75 pounds. I’ve had lots of people lose this much weight. It’s totally possible. Well, here’s another one. You guys see this all the time in your practice I’m sure. Somebody has a client or he has a goal of earning more money. How much more money? Do you want to double your income? Do you want to get 20% better return? Or maybe just convince your boss to give you a 10% raise. What is it, get specific and make it measurable.

 

[00:32:38] Brad: So, along those lines, I’m going to throw an example out there that maybe relates to the advisors on the call here. What I see a lot on in my chair is we did $10 million of assets this year. Next year I want to do $15 million. So, it is specific but it’s a very big broad goal and it’s how do you get there? So, a lot of times guys will get a few months in the year. They’re not pacing for that $15 million that they laid out so, “Oh shoot. Do we readjust? Do we all get upset and depressed? What do we do?” So, one thing I challenge everyone on the call to where I’ve really seen advisors be able to break that down to an actionable, weekly actionable item is you did $10 million of assets this year. So, now let’s go back. How many clients was that that you acquired this year? So, $10 million and let’s say it was ten clients just to make math easy. So, each client was a million-dollar client. Well, now I’m going to $15 million so all else being the same rather than acquiring ten clients this year, I need to acquire 15 this year and then break that down under your calendar. So, I need a client about a little over once a month.

 

So, I know those are big numbers. I wish everyone on the call was dealing with 15 clients a year for $15 million. I know that’s not the case but just breaking that down and making it measurable and specific but also not just measurable on really big numbers but measurable on those action items that you’re dealing with on a weekly basis and that can be huge on that front. So, I figured I’d just share that example while we’re on it.

 

[00:34:14] Michael: No. That’s a great example. There’s a lot of things that if you measure the process or the habit that it’s going to require to deliver a bigger process, it’s a much better focus, much easier to manage in our minds and much easier to control.

 

[00:34:30] Brad: Okay. Number six.

 

[00:34:31] Michael: Number six is they don’t assign a due date. Now some people hate due dates. A few people I’ve met love them but let me give you three big benefits of deadlines. First of all, a deadline creates a sense of urgency. I mentioned earlier, Brad, that in our Platform University we do, we open for registration twice a year and it’s not available the rest of the year and we have a deadline. Do you know that half of our sales come on the last day of open registration? That was just human nature. It creates a sense of urgency and people get to work and do whatever it is if there’s a sense of urgency. If there’s no deadline, it’s really easy for the work to just kind of continue to move on.

 

Number two, they balance your workload. When you have a deadline, it balances your workload because hopefully, you’re going to be spreading your deadlines out so they’re not all come in due on one day but it helps you to balance the workload. Then third, they help prioritize your daily task. So, if you know you got a deadline that’s due like I’ve got a webinar that I’m doing later this week and I know that that’s a huge priority for me to finish the slides up for that webinar tomorrow. So, it helps me to prioritize my daily task list.

 

It’s as simple as this, and that’s just putting a date beside the goal. So, instead of just losing 35 pounds, lose 35 pounds by July 31st. Or instead of convincing your boss to give you a 10% raise then convince your boss to give you a 10% raise before April 1st. So, whatever it is, just adding a date to it. In fact, I think this is the main thing that separates an aspiration, nothing wrong with aspirations, but it’s not a goal unless it has a deadline.

 

[00:36:19] Brad: So, I believe all your sales coming in the last day because all the registrations come in about two hours before this call.

 

[00:36:26] Michael: Yeah. You were telling me that.

 

[00:36:28] Brad: So, and for you, this could be a really cool tool. So, one thing that’s interesting in our industry, Michael, a lot of it is direct mail based as opposed to your industry which is email based, list based. So, I got a very cool framework from another big name out there and prior to every webinar that he does, he does four drip emails, two hours, one hour, 15 minutes and go live are his basic timeline and it’s amazing since we incorporated that and I know we’ve had a few of you out there that are like, “Why do you send me so many emails?” The reason that I send you those before this call is so you’re on here and it’s incredible how it works. So, for those of you out there that haven’t tried that for maybe some of your public events that you’re doing, it might be worth trying, a week before, three days before. Do you have any thoughts on that, Michael?

 

[00:37:20] Michael: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. The other thing I think is it helps if you tie something to the deadline, something bad happens if they miss the deadline or something good happens. Sometimes both. You and I are involved using this MakeMe application and we have to work out three times a week and we’re all part of this little group in my inner circle group and if you don’t work out three times a week, there’s a bad consequence. Well, it’s actually a good consequence but we have to give an amount that we’d each pledge to charity if we miss the workout. So, I think tying a reward or a punishment so to speak to the deadline is very helpful. I try to do the positive thing but sometimes the negative thing works too.

 

[00:38:04] Brad: So, on the MakeMe app, we didn’t go this route this time but maybe in the future. There’s a public shaming section. Maybe we’ll go that route and make sure everybody stays motivated.

 

[00:38:16] Michael: The other point is to use leverage, to create some leverage. So, one of the things we do in our webinars is that we give – we have a gift that we give to people for just showing up. So, I give some incentive to show up. But on the other hand, we also don’t promise to replay it if they don’t show up. So, there could be a negative consequence or can be a positive one but if you want to drive registrations or sales, I think having those kinds of incentives really help. Back in the day when we had Platform University open all the time, our sales were like a tenth of what they are today.

 

[00:38:51] Brad: Goes back to that deadline.

 

[00:38:52] Michael: Yep.

 

[00:38:53] Brad: So, because a lot of this is segueing a little bit on the marketing but this is a cool conversation, a lot of our guys do public events so a one-hour presentation, here’s our firm, here’s our story, here’s what we do. Do you have any pieces of advice or good value items that you’ve given for webinars that might be something that would apply to their live events?

 

[00:39:13] Michael: Yeah. One of the things we do and I can only apply what we do with our live webinars and that is we give a gift, usually a free digital download of some valuable piece of content that solves a problem that they face and we do that just for signing up. So, we have a sign-up bonus then we have a show-up bonus that they get and then in our case, we have something we call a stay-on bonus because we know we have higher conversions if people show up to the live event than if they don’t. They’re still going to be in our email drip sequence but the likelihood of them converting is about 40% of what it is if they show up live to the event because on the live event I’m going to be addressing them, personally engaging them, there’s all the trust and all that kind of stuff. But a lot of times people will stay on a few minutes. They’re not – they don’t stay on until the end. I mean obviously, it’s got to be a compelling presentation. It’s got to be engaging but if there’s some juicy something that they’re going to get for showing up or staying on until the end, that’s helpful too.

 

Then I’ll tell you another one. We actually have a fourth bonus which is a fast action bonus so if they buy before the end of the webinar then they get some kind of discount or some kind of other freebie that incentivizes that kind of behavior. Because, again, we know that if they get off the webinar and they haven’t bought, they’re going to probably walk into a meeting, they’re going to take a phone call, they’re going to forget. They’re not going to be as likely to buy. They’re going to be the most motivated when they’re on the webinar.

 

[00:40:41] Brad: So, that was gold right there. I want to make sure everybody on this call got it because as you’re saying that I’m just like, “Why is everyone not doing this with their live event?” Because actually, it’s very similar to a webinar. You send out a piece of mail, somebody calls you and says they want to show up at your event so that would be your sign-up bonus, right? So, I’m going to email them something, “We’re so excited to see you. Here’s your bonus for signing up.” Then your show-up bonus would be, “Here’s what you get once you get to the event,” make sure that’s communicated in that sign-up bonus. “Here’s what you get once you walk in the door of the event,” some other piece of value and then your stay-on bonus I was thinking a few different things. That could actually be what they get if they sign up for an appointment to come into the office. Or the fast action bonus might be if they booked the appointment at the event because some of our guys book appointments at the event and then they have follow-up calls so that could be your fast action bonus if you actually book at the event versus later on.

 

[00:41:43] Michael: Love that.

 

[00:41:44] Brad: That is gold. Obviously, it works. So, make sure – I’m sure everybody’s wheels are turning on that. I know mine are.

 

[00:41:52] Michael: Good.

 

[00:41:53] Brad: Thanks for sharing that.

 

[00:41:55] Michael: You bet.

 

[00:41:57] Brad: Okay. By the way, guys, don’t forget questions. We’ve got about 20 minutes left here. Actually, I’m going to go to Brian. He just submitted a question. “How would we drip market for a seminar when direct mail is so expensive and takes a while to get in place?” I’m not sure I fully understand that, Brian. Can you add a little more context to that? If you’re talking about the value pieces that Michael just or the gift side, I should say the sign-up bonuses, I think what you would do is say they register two weeks before your live event. As soon as they register, that’s an outgoing mail piece direct to them because they registered. But I think those actual bonuses would be on their original mail piece that you send to invite them. Michael, your thoughts on that?

 

[00:42:45] Michael: Yeah. I’m just curious why you guys use direct mail instead of email marketing or maybe use both.

 

[00:42:55] Brad: We like to market expensively. Now what’s crazy about that is there’s a handful of advisors that have done some email-based marketing and I see – it all depends on the database in the list as you know. Those that have actually done a good job with their CRM and maintained a decent list, you can drive two, three, four or five live event registrations from just an email which cost you the click of a button essentially. So, more people should be doing it is the answer.

 

[00:43:30] Michael: Well, I wonder even if you could do a hybrid system where your initial mailing was direct mail but once they registered then you’ve got their email and then the communication after that so it’s not so expensive. You’re not reminding them of the show-up bonus with another direct mail piece but that could all be done with email following that first direct mail contact.

 

[00:43:51] Brad: Good point. Ricky asks a question, “What are we sending them in the mail after the registration?” So, going back to the sign-up bonuses, what are some cool ones you’ve done that are kind of in your world and how would those maybe apply to our world? Some different sign-up bonuses that have been popular?

 

[00:44:11] Michael: Well usually like for example with Platform University we’re helping people build online platforms and get visibility for their message or their brand or their firm or whatever. So, maybe something as simple as five mistakes you’re making on your website and how to overcome them. Something that creates intrigue that has a promise that it’s going to be quick, we want to give them a quick win, something that they want to have in order to do that. So, like for example, another one that we’ve done also like on a blogging course that I’ve got is something that gives them kind of a blueprint or an anatomy of a blog post and it promises to save them a huge amount of time just by having this framework that they can use. So, anything that makes it easier, cheaper, faster. That’s what people respond to easier, cheaper, faster. It could be a resource list, it could be a cheat sheet. I like digital content like that because it cost me pretty close to zero to produce it.

 

[00:45:18] Brad: Okay. Mistake number seven.

 

[00:45:21] Michael: Okay. Mistake number seven is they don’t keep their goals visible. We talked about this a little bit at the very beginning but you don’t want to make the mistake of framing up your goals, getting really excited and then stuff them in your desk drawer and never looking at them again or file them away and never looking at them. So, this is where you might want to create, for example, a vision board or let me just grab mine here. These are actually on my wall so I’m at 2015 goals where I see them first thing every morning. I’ve also got a series of screensavers where I had one of my daughters just create these images. One, that had one per goal and then some inspiring picture like the one that was from my fat loss program. I had some guy off the cover of One Fitness magazine who had a six pack like I wanted and I’m still pursuing. I’m really good at the one pack. I’ve got that one down.

 

So, just anything that’s inspiring like that that keeps these goals visible even the Evernote thing that I mentioned earlier, putting all those in an index so that you can review them every day and make that a part of your daily routine preferably your morning routine so that you don’t lose visibility. Because if you lose visibility, you’re not going to achieve your goals. If you can keep them in front of you and keep reminding yourself of this big picture, you have a much less chance of getting distracted and pulled into all this stuff that keeps you busy but unproductive.

 

[00:46:54] Brad: Alright. So, let’s keep rolling here. We’ve got about 15 minutes and I’ve got some fun questions here at the end if we can get to them.

 

[00:47:01] Michael: Alright.

 

[00:47:02] Brad: Number eight.

 

[00:47:03] Michael: Okay. Number eight is they don’t stretch outside their comfort zone. Okay. This is so important, Brad, because I see so many people. Man, I used to see this in corporate America like crazy. People would set a goal and in my world, the publishing world, which is a very traditional world where there’s not a lot of growth. They make a goal and they set it for like 3% growth and you say, “Well does that make you uncomfortable?” “No, that’s a slam dunk. We can do that.” Well, that’s exactly the kind of goal you don’t want to set because it’s not compelling. The thing that I look for is three negative emotions that indicate that I’m on the right path. This indicates that you moved out of the comfort zone into the discomfort zone which is where all the important stuff happens. The answer to your prayers, the fulfillment of your dreams, all of that is in the discomfort zone, not in the comfort zone. So, I look for these three indicators.

 

First of all, I’m looking for fear. If I feel a little bit of fear like I’m afraid I might actually fail, that to me is a good indicator that I’ve moved into my discomfort zone. Another negative emotion is uncertainty. If I don’t know how to achieve it or accomplish it, that’s great. That means that I’m on the edge of a breakthrough and I can actually do something that’s worth doing. So, I’m looking for that sense of uncertainty. You know, when you’re talking about Dan Sullivan having that 10X goal, one of the reasons he says that you should have a big goal like that is because it forces innovation. If your goal doesn’t force innovation then it’s just going to be the same old, same old. It’s going to be incremental growth or maybe just staying flat. The third emotion I look for is doubt, the sense that I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes. I’m not sure I’ve got the resources to pull this off.

 

When I feel those three together, fear, uncertainty and doubt, I’m pretty confident that I’m in the discomfort zone and that’s exactly where I want to be. Those are the kind of goals that to me are worth pursuing, the ones that make me uncomfortable.

 

[00:49:10] Brad: So, that’s good to hear. That means my goal of writing a book this next year, I’m going down the right path because there’s definitely fear, uncertainty and doubt.

 

[00:49:21] Michael: Excellent.

 

[00:49:24] Brad: Alright. So, we’re getting a few questions here. So, Adam asks, “Because the why behind the goal is so critical to achieving the goal, what wisdom can you share about discovering the why power to remain focused?”

 

[00:49:36] Michael: Yeah. I really believe in this. In fact, in my course, 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever, I spent an entire day. One of the sessions, five sessions in that course, but one of the sessions is to discover your why and one of the things I encourage people to do is to ask what’s at stake.

 

For example, there was a time maybe about 15 years ago that my wife and I went through a really rocky patch in our marriage and I just sat down literally and said, “Why do I want to stay married to this woman?” Now it’s very important to ask yourself the right question because if I had asked myself this question, I learned this from Tony Robbins, if you ask yourself the wrong question, your brain is like a computer and it’ll spit forth all the wrong answers. So, if I had said for example, “Why should I get a divorce?” My brain would have dutifully served up a whole litany of reasons as to why that would make sense but I said, “Why should I stay married to this woman? I actually blogged on this but I wrote like 20 different reasons and they were very compelling to me. I mean, honestly, I teared up as I was writing these and I thought, “There is so much at stake here both positively and negatively.” It opened up my heart, got me reconnected to the why and I really started working on my marriage and she did too. We’ve been married 37 years. We’ve got a great marriage today and we just didn’t drift into it but we were intentional about it. So, I think that question of what’s at stake is critical.

 

[00:51:01] Brad: So, that reminds me a lot and I know a few of you read this book, The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy and there is a story he tells in there about this buddy, since we’re on the marriage topic, that he was just always complaining about his wife every time they got together and he’s like, “Your wife is awesome. I’m not even sure why she’s married to you.” So, he challenged him to write a journal every single day what’s one thing that he loves about his wife that day and it was just as he focused on what he actually loved as opposed to what drove him crazy, he said just the fact that he recognized it and focused on it changed everything about their marriage. So, it’s crazy how asking yourself the right question can do that.

 

Okay. So, Justin, we’re going to – I think you can answer this pretty quick. One thing I’ve gotten from you, Michael, when you put out as much content as you have in your blogs, a lot of times you’re like, “Oh yes, I wrote a blog post on that.” I think that’s going to be the reply to this one. How do you organize your Evernote? Do you have any just quick tips there on doing that?

 

[00:52:05] Michael: Yeah. Let me just refer you to an article that I wrote and it’s called How I Organized Evernote, A Peek Inside My Personal System and I do it not with notebooks but with tags and I explained exactly how I do it and you can find this at MichaelHyatt.com/Evernote-tags.html. Brad will have this in the show notes but just go to my site and search for Evernote and organize and you’ll come right to it.

 

[00:52:39] Brad: Perfect. Okay. Mistake number nine.

 

[00:52:44] Michael: Mistake number nine is they don’t make their goals compelling. This is the problem by the way of setting your goals inside your comfort zone. I mean can you really get excited about 1%, 2%, 3% growth over next year? I don’t think so. I mean I get jazzed. My business had grown 100% each year for the last four years and that gets me fired up. I’m not sure I can sustain that level of growth but I want something that forces innovation, something that’s compelling. There’s been a lot of research. I’ve got another blog post. I won’t take time to look it up right now but there’s a blog post that if you’ll look at my site under Goals and Compelling there are some researches been done on this but the likelihood of you achieving your goals if they’re compelling is much greater than if there’s small and easy to attain. So, you want to have something that really gets you jazzed that if you accomplished it you’d be pumped about that result.

 

[00:53:38] Brad: Alright. Number 10.

 

[00:53:40] Michael: Number 10 is they don’t identify the next action. Again, I just want to say it’s important to set goals but it’s not enough because eventually, you’ve got to lace up your shoes and get on the trail. You got to actually make something happen. It’s all in the executions. The goals are important but you’ve got to execute, but as I said earlier, this does not require some kind of crazy detailed action plan. Usually, it’s as simple as identifying the next step. For example, Brad, in your situation about wanting to write a book this next year, are you pretty clear on what the next action is?

 

[00:54:18] Brad: I am. Actually, Joel, your son-in-law helped me out quite a bit on that path. So, I’ve identified four to five potential writers that will help me with a book proposal and get the first two chapters in the book. So, that’s where I’m at.

 

[00:54:31] Michael: Great. Perfect. Okay. So, here’s an app that you can use for goal tracking that I like very much. It’s called Strides, and Brad, you and I were talking about this before we got on but it allows you to track things like habits, track milestones, progress toward a goal and all that and you can find that – I don’t have any relationship with this company other than I like the app – but it’s called StridesApp.com. That’s the URL to find it.

 

[00:55:03] Brad: Awesome tool by the way. I just started using it when you sent this presentation over and it combines both the frontend, the goal setting, what you want to achieve with the daily actions and it’ll even pop up little reminders throughout the day where you check in whether you’ve got them done or not. So, great tool.

 

[00:55:21] Michael: Good. Good.

 

[00:55:22] Brad: Okay. So, I know you’ve put together a special offer for everyone on here so I just want to talk about that and then I want to throw you a few questions here. So, going back to having a roadmap to achieve these goals, you put together and agreed to kind of let everybody in on the early bird for your goal setting framework. Can you just speak to your Best Year Ever and how that works and what they can expect?

 

[00:55:48] Michael: Yeah. So, I did this goal setting course called 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever. It doesn’t actually take five days but the design is that you would take five days. This was my practice, has been my practice for years but the five days between Christmas and New Year’s. Actually, seven days there but take five of those days and spend one hour or 45 minutes to an hour a day doing some aspect of goal setting for 2016. Again, not just professional but personal as well. So, in each one of those sessions, I take you through some aspect of goal setting. Over 10,000 people have been through the course.

 

We’ve had extraordinary results but you can find out more at BestYearEver.me and Brad’s going to give you a link here in a little bit but it’ll give you access to three free videos which I’m offering right now called Design Your Life and the whole premise behind it is that you really can design a better life. I mean think about it this way. What would this next year look like or have to look like if it was truly going to be your best year ever? What would it look like in terms of your own health and fitness? What would it look like in terms of your marriage or your most significant relationships? What would it look like in terms of your vocation, finances, all the rest? So, that’s a free video series and Brad will send you the link to it but that also then leads into the course where you can have an opportunity, as Brad said, to buy at the early bird discount rate which is about 25% off the regular price.

 

[00:57:17] Brad: By the way, for everybody on the call, that was what I used this year and I’ve had my best year ever from a – and I think all of us are on here for business purposes but the balance of making sure that you’re the dad, the husband you want to be, that’s been huge over this last year. So, let’s throw a few questions out here. By the way, for everyone on the call, before you start running all over the place, googling like crazy, we’re going to make this easy for you. We’re going to send a recap email with all of the different tools shared on here, some quick links so no worries. We’ll make it as easy as possible for you so you’re not sending all kinds of inquiries into Michael’s blog about where these posts are. Okay. So, some fun questions. We call this rapid fire, Michael.

 

[00:58:09] Michael: Okay.

 

[00:58:10] Brad: We’ll go. You tell me when you got to stop. We’ve got a few minutes left here.

 

[00:58:13] Michael: I’m good.

 

[00:58:14] Brad: Hear the word successful, who’s the first person that pops into your mind and why?

 

[00:58:20] Michael: Yeah. Well, the first person that popped into my head is Chalene Johnson. Now Chalene is somebody that understands that you can’t win at work unless you’re also committed to succeeding at life. She’s a Beachbody fitness instructor, one of their top people, but she and her husband, Brett, have a multimillion dollar business that they built online and she’s just really committed, to me, to all the things that I hold dear, sort of full orb success, not just business success and she walks her talk.

 

[00:58:56] Brad: Awesome. So, I know you’re not that big of a reader or anything but, a joke for everyone that’s not aware, what’s the favorite book that you ever read and how did it impact your life?

 

[00:59:09] Michael: Well the tough thing about that question is my favorite book is usually one of the most recent ones I’ve read because it’s fresh in my mind but I’ll give you a couple that I’ve read in this last year. One of them that I’ve reread now for about a third time and have given cases of this away is a book called the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. First of all, he’s the guy that wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, the novel, and this book is a brilliant book on just how to overcome something he calls the resistance and create an improvement in any area of your life whether you’re trying to write a book, whether you’re trying to lose weight or you’re trying to build a business. He talks about that and he kicks your butt. It’s fantastic. Then another book is a book that many of us read this last year, Brad, Essentialism by Greg McKeown and it’s basically the disciplined art of accomplishing more by doing less. Essentialism.

 

[01:00:08] Brad: Great book. I haven’t read War of Art but Essentialism is great. Okay. This is the fun one. If you could start your career over and go back to 25-year-old Michael Hyatt and give him some words of wisdom, what would you tell 25-year-old Michael?

 

[01:00:27] Michael: I’d say, “Dude, be a financial advisor.” No. I think I would say – well, first of all, let me just say, I have a crazy work ethic. I work really hard but I think I would’ve said to my 25-year-old self, “Don’t be so driven in one area of your life without giving attention to the other areas of your life like fitness and family because eventually if you don’t give attention to those, they end up taking a whole lot more time when you’ve got to fix them because you didn’t give incremental attention to them along the way.” So, it’s almost like if you went to the gym every day and all you did was work out your right bicep and you have this huge bicep and the rest of your body is not keeping up with that and I think that’s how my life was. I spent so much time at work that I didn’t give attention to those other areas.

 

[01:01:18 Brad: Alright. Well, we are at the one-hour mark and I know you’re a guy that tends to work by a schedule so I just want to say thank you so much, Michael. It’s been an honor to have you on here.

 

[01:01:30] Michael: Thanks, Brad.

 

[01:01:30] Brad: And I know you’re a tremendous amount of value to everyone listening in here. So, thank you and enjoy the rest of your day in Tennessee.

 

[01:01:37] Michael: Thanks so much. Great to be with you.

 

[01:01:39] Brad: Alright. Take care.

[END]