Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Motivation Monday: The Wrong Way and Right Way to Set Goals

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.” (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s one thing to know what you want to do, but it’s something else altogether to actually make yourself do it, and I hope that this series gives you a jolt of inspiration, energy, and encouragement to get at it. So, if you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hello there, this is Mr. Michael Matthews from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. And this episode of the podcast is going to be a chapter from my newest book, which is coming out on August 30th, called The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. And the chapter I want to share this time around is the fifth chapter of the book called The Wrong Way and Right Way to Set Goals. And if you've ever had trouble with setting and sticking to goals, I think you're going to find this information very helpful and specifically the strategy slash exercise that I share toward the end of the chapter. And if you like what you hear in this chapter, then I think you are going

to really like what else I have to share in the book? And if you pre-order a copy now on Amazon, you can enter to win a couple thousand dollars in prizes that I'm giving away, including an all expenses paid trip to Washington, DC to meet me and the rest of the team, hang out, work out, whatever. We'll do a whole day together. And you can learn more about the pre-order campaign,

the giveaway and so forth at www.workoutmotivationbook.com. And the instructions on how to enter the giveaway are there. I also should mention that if you like to listen to me speak, then you should definitely check out the audio book because I recorded it myself. And I'm really happy with how it came out. I recorded it myself and I'm really happy with how it came out. And if you don't have an Audible membership, you can actually get it for free when you sign up for a free trial. And if you want to check that out, go to www.workoutmotivationbook.com slash audiobook, and that will forward you along to the correct URL so you can get the audiobook for free. All right, well, that's it for now.

Let's get to the sneak peek. Chapter five, the wrong way and right way to set goals. Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it's very hard to fail completely. That's the thing people don't get. Larry Page. If you're like most people, you start goal setting by asking a simple question, what do I want? This is a fine place to begin, but if you don't answer this question in a very specific way, your chances of actually achieving anything worthwhile plummet. of actually achieving anything worthwhile plummet. The first step in processing your rough-hewn desires into functional goals is getting specific, because while vague goals may seem more motivating at first, they quickly lose their steam if left that way. This has been demonstrated in a number of studies, including one conducted by scientists at Erasmus University Rotterdam that tested how writing down, clarifying, and planning long-term goals

would affect the academic performance of college students. This was mediated through an online writing exercise that asked the students who ranged from top of class to bottom percentile performers to explain why they were going to school and how they were going to make the most of the opportunity. The students answered questions like, what would you like to learn more about in the next six months? Two years? Five years? What habits would you like to improve?

Where do you want to be in six months? Two years? Five years? Why? What are you trying to accomplish? Then, they were instructed to prioritize their goals, break them into sub-goals, and create a list of potential barriers and ways to deal with them should they arise. One year later, the researchers reviewed the progress of the participants, and the results were striking. Every single group of participants earned more college credits and were more likely to stay in school after their first year. And most surprising were the results seen with ethnic minority students who earned 44% more college credits and were 54% more likely to remain enrolled. Keep in mind that this exercise wasn't difficult either. It didn't take much time, effort, or thought, yet it produced

the kind of results that can be the difference between leaving school and landing a high-paying job versus languishing around the poverty line. In case you were wondering, this exercise was the self-authoring program, which you can learn about in the free bonus materials you can download at www.workoutmotivationbook.com forward slash bonus. A good first step for crystallizing our wishes is asking of them, how will I know when I have succeeded? For example, I want to lose weight might turn into, I want to fit into my size five jeans. I want to be healthier might turn into, I want to have normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels. And for a woman, I want to get fit might turn into, I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle and reduce my body fat to 20%.

From here, the common recommendations to strengthen your commitment and follow through mirror the general approach of the writing exercise outlined above. Write down your goals, make a plan, make sure the first couple of milestones are easy, anticipate barriers, track your progress, either in terms of how far you've come or how much you have left, focus on whichever is smaller, and reward yourself as you make headway. These are all valid and valuable tactics, but before you do any of that, you first need to reflect on another question. What kind of pain do I want? Stating a desire is easy, and especially when it's something everybody wants, like a better body,

more time and freedom, or more income or savings. The hard part is taking the stars out of our eyes and considering how much pain we're willing to endure to get these things. The pain of sacrifice, tedium, doubt, disappointment, and despair. The pain that can shatter self-confidence, stifle self-expression, and squash self-actualization. This means that before committing ourselves to a reward, we have to first assess the cost and see if we're willing to pay it. If we're going to have any chance at success, we have to first face the terrain that lies ahead before setting out to traverse it. Tom Brady will go down in football history as one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game, will go down in football history as one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game,

but many years ago, he was just Tommy, a ninth grader who wasn't good enough to even start on a team that finished 0-8 and didn't score a single touchdown. Most people in the young Brady's life thought baseball was his best sport and so didn't understand his decision to play football instead. sport and so didn't understand his decision to play football instead. He had an arm, but he wasn't fast, he wasn't agile, and he spent his first season warming the bench. Where could this possibly go? Brady paid them no mind. One day, I'm going to be a household name, he wrote in a school paper. His family had a good laugh. As much as they loved and supported Tommy, they never could have even dreamed that the little Brady, as many people knew him, would one day join the ranks of legends like Joe Montana and Johnny Unitas. How did he do it? It's rather simple, really. He gave up everything to become great at football. As Brady said in his 2018 six-part Facebook Watch documentary, Tom vs. Time,

what are you willing to do and what are you willing to give up to be the best you can be? You only have so much energy and the clock ticks on all of us. If you're going to compete against me, he added, you better be willing to give up your life because I'm giving up mine. That's the spirit that inspired Tommy to do things teenagers didn't normally do, like devise his own grueling jump rope program to improve his footwork, do evening workouts after school and homework instead of playing video games, and obsessively practice a tedious hopscotch-like exercise that his teammates hated and cursed called the five-dot drill. That's the spirit that inhabits all extraordinary performers.

That's what it all comes down to. For example, Thomas Edison's lifelong defining goal was to discover the secrets of nature and exploit them for the happiness of humankind. Every lesser goal, every invention of his, was merely an offshoot of that one perennial, unquenchable ambition that embraced the entire world and human race. Like Edison, Marie Curie's goals also forged her identity. She was once a young governess with a burning passion to leave Poland and study science in Paris, as women weren't permitted an advanced education in her home country. This was beyond the means of her family, however, so she arranged a deal with her sister Bronya, whereby Marie would tutor children to help pay for Bronya's education, and once Bronya had graduated, the favor would be

repaid. For nearly three years, Marie spent her days working to cover her sister's costs and spent her nights alone at her desk reading outdated volumes on sociology, physics, and mathematics without guidance or advice, studies that she later said were encompassed with difficulty. But her perseverance paid off, and at 24 years old, after her sister had graduated from the Sorbonne and married, Marie was able to pursue her dream. Marie's university studies were incredibly challenging due to a deficient secondary education. She overcame her academic shortcomings, however, in glorious fashion by ultimately winning a Nobel Prize, the first woman to do so, for her doctoral thesis on radioactivity, which was an immensely difficult subject,

radioactivity, which was an immensely difficult subject only recently discovered. Eight years later, she won a second Nobel Prize, the first person to do so, this time for her research into radium and polonium. Aristotle honored this way of life in his elegant formula for success and happiness. First, he wrote, have a definite, clear, practical ideal, a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends, wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end. We're often told that the failure to achieve goals is due to a lack of motivation, passion, or some other elusive feeling. We're often told that we just need to think bigger or deeper to hitch our wagons to a star and meditate on what success looks like and what we really want to achieve. Failure is rarely solved along these lines. Failure is rarely solved along these lines. Instead, you have to embody your answer to the question Brady has been answering every day for the last 25 years. What are you willing to give up?

When you view objectives in this light, you quickly learn that effective goal setting is more a matter of effective goal selection than anything else. In other words, you must first decide which goals are worth the pain and which aren't, and then focus all of your attention and efforts on the things in the first bucket and abandon the rest. As Ray Dalio says in Principles, I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones. If you don't do this, if you try to push yourself in too many directions toward too

many goals, you'll experience what psychologists refer to as goal competition. Your goals will compete with each other for your time and attention, and the thinner you try to slice these resources, the more frayed and frazzled they and you will become. This is why less is often more with goal setting, and why you must be brutally honest with yourself about what you're truly willing to pay to have the things you say you want. Imagine your life is represented by a stove that's fueled by your time and effort and that your goals are meals you want to cook on the stove. You only have so many burners to work with, and you can only burn so much fuel for so long before, well, burning out, so you have a choice to make.

Do you bring a smaller number of meals to completion before starting others, or do you try to cook a dozen meals simultaneously by rotating them on and off the range in a frenzied act of culinary juggling? You don't have to know much about cooking to know that while the latter approach might eventually turn out food, you're probably not going to want to eat most of it. So it goes in life. You only have so much bandwidth. While it's possible to work toward a smorgasbord of long-term goals every day on several fronts, health, hobbies, work, family, and friends, for example, it requires a singular capacity for sustained effort and resilience in the face of hardship

and an outsized appetite for disorder and chaos. And even then, it takes its toll. A smarter approach to goal-setting and striving, then, relies on specification prioritization and elimination, on clarifying exactly what we want, identifying the prices we're willing to pay, choosing the most important objectives of the lot, and focusing intently on them. There are many methods out there for this, but one I particularly like is Warren Buffett's

two-list strategy, which was introduced to me by my friend James Clear. As the most successful investor of the 20th century and one of the world's richest men, Buffett needs no introduction. It goes without saying that we can all learn something from him on how to better set and achieve goals. Buffett's strategy is particularly brilliant because it can be applied to overarching life goals, domain-specific goals, and even weekly to-do lists. It goes as follows. Step 1. Write down your top 25 goals, projects, or tasks. Take your time and get everything down that you feel drawn toward in general or in specific areas of your life.

Remember, hundreds of scientific experiments involving dozens of types of tasks and thousands of participants have proven conclusively that the more specific and challenging the goals are, the better the resulting performance, so be as specific as you can here. Don't set vague goals that can't be measured, like to do my best or to work hard, push yourself to envision specific challenging goals like to win the XYZ award or to create product X by January 1st. Step two, circle the top five most important goals, projects, or tasks of the 25. To determine which you should ultimately choose, start by circling the ones that stand out as the most critical, rewarding, or interesting. Then, starting with the first of those,

think about and write down the three biggest obstacles you might face in trying to accomplish it. Who or what might get in your way? What might make it strenuous? What might you be required to sacrifice? Now write down a few sentences about how it will feel to accomplish this goal, project, or task. What positive changes might occur in your life? What might make it worth it? Now compare the negative and positive aspects of the goal, project, or task and take your temperature regarding it. If you feel confident and energized, then keep it on your list. If you feel discouraged or undecided, however, consider reformulating the goal or dropping it altogether. Repeat this process for each of the goals, projects, or tasks you first circled, replacing those you've decided against with next best options. Last, review the circled items that remain after the vetting and from those, circle again the five

that stand out as the most critical, rewarding, or interesting. Step three Separate these goals into two lists. The top five goals, projects, or tasks comprise list A and the rest comprise list B. as the primary focus and chip away at list B when time permits, Buffett says you should start working on list A and avoid everything on list B as a potential distraction until list A is complete. Buffett approaches his goals in this fashion because he knows that everything takes more time, energy, and attention than we realize going in, and especially things that we care about. He does it this way because it's far easier and more enjoyable to sprint toward five dones than 20-something half-dones. Furthermore, it reduces the chances of things going catastrophically wrong, of Murphy's Law manifesting itself, by reducing the amount of time it takes to get to done. Remember, the longer it takes to bring something into being, the more

ways it can falter and fail. It turns out that overachievers from all walks and disciplines of life have been doing this for a very long time. It turns out that this is one of the great secrets of greatness. Recommended reading, The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. Do this now. Do the Buffett To-List exercise by considering the following five key areas of your life and writing down your top 25 goals, projects, or tasks. 1. Health 2. Work

3. Love 4. Family 5. Friends. Next, zero in on the 5 among the 25 that stand out as the most critical, rewarding, or interesting and highlight them. Why are these your top 5? Explain in writing. Next, write down the 3 biggest obstacles that might get in the way of each of these goals. What might make them hard? What might you be required to sacrifice? Now write down a few sentences about how it will feel to accomplish each of these goals,

projects, or tasks. What positive changes might occur? What might make it worth it? What positive changes might occur? What might make it worth it? Now compare the negative and positive aspects of the goals, projects, or tasks and take your temperature regarding them. Keep those you feel confident and energized about and reformulate or replace those you feel discouraged or undecided about with worthy alternatives. discouraged or undecided about with worthy alternatives. Give away a celebration of a couple thousand dollars in prizes, including an all expenses paid trip to Washington, D.C. to meet me and the team and hang out, work out, whatever we want to do. We'll go have fun for a day. You can learn more about that at www.workoutmotivationbook.com.

As always, thank you for all of your support. And who knows, maybe I will be seeing you soon.