3 Essential Battles You Must Win To Achieve Your Goals in 2024
and boy do they require fighting!
The new year is here!
Oh.. It was here two weeks ago. Never mind. Happy New Year still!
We all know January is the time of goal setting. Whether we follow through on our goals or not is a different matter, but goals we must set. You would’ve already read a gazillion articles about goals, so I’m not going to talk about goals today.
I’m going to talk about something far superior. Processes.
To build processes that work, you have to win three battles. Once you do that, your goals become by-products. Let’s look at what they are.
The Battle of Delay Discounting
I know what you’re thinking.
What on Earth is delay discounting? No worries. I got you.
Delay discounting is the human tendency to place lesser value on rewards that are far away in time from the present moment. In other words, you prefer immediate rewards.
Did you choose to skip the gym and watch a movie instead? Delay discounting.
You chose to quit a challenging course instead of seeing it through. Delay discounting.
Avoided a difficult conversation even though it would’ve strengthened your relationship? Delay discounting.
You get the point.
When delay discounting is part of every decision you make, it should be fought against.
Okay… how do you do that?
It’s simple (not easy). Get proof.
Before your mind trusts that it works, you need to give it proof. Here is a 3-step method to provide your brain with what it needs;
- Pick a skill. Anything.
- For the next 30 days, do it for 45 minutes daily. Focussed and distraction-free.
- At the end of 30 days, reflect back on your progress.
At the end of these 30 days, you would’ve become reasonably good at the skill. When you realize this, you now have evidence that the process works, and more importantly, you start to believe you can also do it.
That belief is the pivotal point in getting over delay discounting.
The Battle of Shiny Objects
I get it. The list of stuff you want to do is incredibly long. Same here.
This list keeps growing every day. Especially when what you want the most is decided by social media, the most recent YouTube video you watched, the last podcast episode you heard, or the last movie you watched.
These are what I refer to as shiny objects. You find the main character of these movies appealing or the podcast guests inspiring. You also want what they have.
That is a normal response.
However, if we act on every little thing we find appealing, we will lose track of where we’re going. We can’t do everything at once, so we’ll naturally end up with half a dozen deserted projects.
The 30-day exercise you used in the battle against delay discounting can also be applied here.
During the 30 days, reflect on the process this time. Do you like the process of doing it? What do you like? What do you dislike? You will get a fair idea if you can endure this for a long time. Let’s face it. Building anything worthwhile takes a shit load of time.
Only if you derive joy from the process can you stick to it long enough to reap its rewards.
The Battle of Unsustainability
If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you know the amount of diets that exist.
Keto-diet, Paleo, No carbs, and a million other ones. While some of these, like keto, work in reducing your weight, they are not sustainable.
In medicine, there is a widely accepted saying that goes, “Don’t address the symptoms, address the cause.”
Here, the weight gain is the symptom, but the reason you’re gaining the weight is the cause. If you blindly try to reduce your weight by crash dieting, you will put that weight back on again before you know it. Understanding that weight gain is an issue of lifestyle is the first step in the solution to long-term fitness.
The same applies here.
Say you want to read every day. That’s the goal. You can force yourself to read what others recommend to you. The best-sellers, the books Barrack Obama recommends, and whatnot. How long do you think you can sustain your reading habit if you do not read what you want?
Not for long.
Before you follow any process, ask yourself if you’re addressing the cause or the symptom. If you are doing the latter, go to the drawing board and redesign the process.
Let me know in the comments what battles you find yourself fighting on your journey toward your goals and how you fight them!
Thanks for reading! I will catch you in the next one!