Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Crush Your 2023 Goals With These Goal Setting Strategies | Daniel Pink, Donald Miller, Jeff Spencer, Katy Milkman | Productivity | YAPSnacks

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

98% of people fail to execute their new year's goals. Don't be one of those people. In this episode, you'll learn everything you need to design your goals, plan for difficulties, and connect your goals to a larger vision for your life. Featured in this episode are Daniel Pink, a four-time New York Times bestselling author; Dr. Jeff Spencer, the legendary ‘coach of the stars’; Katy Milkman, Wharton professor of behavioral economics; and Donald Miller, CEO of StoryBrand.  Topics include: - Regrets of action vs. regrets of inaction  - How our regrets change over time  - It’s better to try and fail than not try at all  - RIGHT goals  - Identifying goals worth pursuing  - Different stages of reaching your goals  - Preparing for obstacles  - Having emergency reserves  - Why you should write your eulogy  - The benefit of reading your eulogy every morning  - And other topics… Original Episodes:  Daniel Pink: Turn Regrets Into Gold, Understand Your Emotions, and Live Your Best LIfe - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/young-and-profiting-with-hala-taha/id1368888880?i=1000580638008  Dr. Jeff Spencer: Ultimate Goal Setting | E179 - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/young-and-profiting-with-hala-taha/id1368888880?i=1000570276285  Katy Milkman: The Science of Change | E181 - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/young-and-profiting-with-hala-taha/id1368888880?i=1000574619051  Donald Miller: Be Your Own Hero | E153 - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/young-and-profiting-with-hala-taha/id1368888880?i=1000549018819  Sponsored by:  Omaha Steaks - Visit OmahaSteaks.com and get 50% off sitewide plus use promo code YAP at checkout to get that EXTRA $40 OFF your order Indeed - Visit Indeed.com/YAP to start hiring now Rocket Money - Go to rocketmoney.com/profiting for more info Shopify - Sign up for a free trial at shopify.com/profiting The Jordan Harbinger Show - Check out jordanharbinger.com/start for some episode recommendations More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com   Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/ Join Hala's LinkedIn Masterclass - yapmedia.io/course 

Hey everyone, you're listening to YAPSnax, a series of bite-sized content hosted by me, Hala Taha. In today's YAPSnacks, we're going to get you geared up and in the mindset to crush your New Year's resolutions. 20203 is just a few weeks away, YAPBam. It's around the corner. And so this is the perfect podcast to listen to before you decide on your big 20203 goals. This episode features four times New York Times best-selling author Daniel Paine. the legendary coach of the stars Dr. Jeff Spencer,

Wharton Professor and Behavioral Economist Katie Milkman, as well as best-selling author and story brand CEO Donald Miller. Now to get you warmed up on this topic, let's hear from Daniel Pink on why you need to take action to begin with. There's a big difference between regrets of action and regrets of inaction. Everything comes back to that difference. And the architecture of regret, the difference between regrets of action, I regret what I did, and regrets of inaction,

I regret what I didn't do, is huge. And here, there is a distinct difference in age. In my American regret project, which is the giant public opinion poll, I put together such a large sample in order to try to find demographic differences in what people regret it. So thinking that whites would have different regrets from people of color, people with lots of formal education would have different regrets from people with less education, men would have different regrets from women, blah, blah, blah. There were very few demographic differences. I was kind of shocked by that.

But the one had to do with age, and it's this. People in their 20s tended to have equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction, equal numbers of regrets about what they did and regrets about what they didn't do. But by the time you hit basically your late 20s, and certainly into your 30s and 40s and 50s and beyond, it's not even close. By the time you get literally to your late 20s, the inaction regrets take over. When you get to my age, okay, and I'm basically like double the age of somebody in their mid to late 20s.

When you get to my age, it's like three to one. Inaction regrets over action regrets. Overwhelmingly, over time, we regret what we didn't do. I regret that I didn't reach out. I regret that I didn't start that business. I regret that I didn't tell that person that I loved them. I regret that I didn't stand up to an injustice. That's what we regret, inaction over action as we get older.

Young improfitors, inaction regrets are choices that we didn't act on, and these regrets can even haunt us until we're lying on our deathbed. Like the old saying goes, it's better to try and fail than never try at all. Next, let's get a little bit more practical and hear from coach Dr. Jeff Spencer to gain insight on his winning formula for setting the right goals and how we can go about achieving them. A lot of us have heard of these like smart goals, but you say you have a different framework for goals.

It's called the right goals. It actually stands for some things. Can you break down what a right goal is? Yeah, well, a right goal is a goal that aligns the mind, body, and soul because it exposed itself to a variety of different questions that should be asked and answered in the affirmative if it's the right goal to pursue. There's all sorts of smart goals that you shouldn't be pursuing, actually. So the R and right stands for relevant. You really need to take the time to ask yourself, is this goal really relevant to me? And why is it relevant? Put the pen to the paper to be able to

create a body of evidence as to why this is relevant, because the relevancy creates a certain level of personal commitment and insistence that you do achieve the goal if you have confirmed it to be relevant. The next thing is indicators. The eye and right as indicators. There must be adequate indicators there that assure you that the goal, again, is worth pursuing. Indicators like, do I get enough notoriety coming back from this? Does this give me enough credibility? Does this provide the income that I need for me to be able to pursue this? So there's a number of indicators that we do need to name, that we do need to hold accountability for, because again, when we have vetted this through a purposeful process, then it allows us to have a different type of relationship to our goal.

I think people have way too casual a relationship with their goal. They're not in love with it, or they're not going to fight for it like they really should. The G and right stands for gravity. What is the emotional gravity and grit that the achievement of this goal avails you of? what are you going to say about yourself once you've achieved this goal? Are you going to have a greater trust in your ability to be a manifester of what your talents are and your ability to contribute to humanity? Well, if it brings that level of gravity and it gives you that type of grit, well, I certainly think that it's a goal worth pursuing. The H in Wright stands for humanity. I think personally that our goals need to have a big slice of humanity attached to it. Like, how is this actually impacting

people, places, and things on this planet. Because if that is an answer in the affirmative, then we just kind of don't have that level of commitment that's necessary to stay in the game and keep pushing when the goal gets tough. And then the T and right is time. Is this the right time to be pursuing the goal? Yes or no. Do you actually have the time to pursue the goal? Yes or no. Does the time from where you are to goal completion suit your sensibility? Yes or no. And if you've deliberately taken the time to scrutinize the goal that you're proposing to pursue through that line of questioning and you've answered this in the affirmative, then you have a level of commitment within self that will absolutely 100% guarantee that you will find

yourself in that winter circle. I want to talk about what happens when we actually start taking action. You've got phases like the honeymoon phase and the daily grind phase, which you mentioned earlier. Can you talk to us about the different stages of performance and what we need to know? I feel that we need to have a clear understanding of what the different stages of progress that we will be going through from starting to pursue our goal to the achievement of our goal. The very first phase of this is what I call start. And when we get to a point where we have the preparation readiness and we know it because it's been vetted,

It's extremely important that you have a thoroughly vetted and rehearsed starting procedure to make sure that you get out of the gate cleanly and you hit an early objective that confirms that goal progress is now up and running and underway. Like, let's say you take a horse in the Kentucky Derby that's favored to win. Well, if it trips out of the gate because it hasn't practiced its starting procedure, then the horse that should have won gets last. It's exactly the same thing for us. So please make sure that you have a well-organized and rehearsed starting process that ends in a certain achievement and objective that demonstrates that goal pursuit now is actually formally up and underway. Can you give a concrete example of that just to be super clear?

Yeah. I absolutely can. So let's say that the initiative of a goal launch would be to have our first five five-figure month, $10,000. So that's the target. I mean, that's not the goal, but that's the first target because we know that if we had $10,000 a month, this is for real. It's like we're no longer talking about this, like this is for real. In why having that target in declaring that target in advance is important is because when you hit it, it confirms that the preparation was correct. It also confirms that the leadership that created the preparation processes were correct and should

be followed. It also gives the team confidence that we can actually do this. You always want to start off on a positive when that doesn't need to be big that confirms that we're actually in process and moving forward. So once we've hit that lift-off point, then we move into what I call the honeymoon phase. And the honeymoon phase is where, okay, now we hit this lift-off, we have this confirmation. We're now at, you know, 10,000 a month. This means it's going to be smooth sailing to the winter circle. Well, hold on a second. It doesn't really mean that. It means that we just gotten out of the gate smoothly. And so the honeymoon phase is that when everybody's hyper excited, then they go out and they become very sloppy and relaxed about scheduling. They don't look at their policies.

They may start overspending certain things. You see this in startups all the time where they're not even making any money. And then they're going out and spending all this raised money on stuff that doesn't matter because they already think that they're in the winter circle. So it's a complete abuse of the honeymoon, but we know that when we're in a honeymoon, there's always the opportunity for reckless choices that can really hurt us. At some point, the honeymoon is going to wear off because they all do. And when the honeymoon wears off and you feel like there's a loss in momentum or enthusiasm, that doesn't mean that it's the wrong plan or you can't do it. That's supposed to happen. It means you're now living in reality. It's actually something that you actually want to see

because that level of enthusiasm cannot cure you forever. It's not possible. So we need to be aware of that because we're not aware that the honeymoon is supposed to wear off when the motivation drops and we all think, oh, bad plan, bad management, maybe I should get out while I have at least some resources left. Really bad idea, misinterpretation of the circumstances completely. What I will say also is that the next phase of this, once we get beyond the honeymoon phase and we have our reality check where we reconcile things, we get things back on track, then we may think, well, okay, now we've made this huge correction, now I know we can do it. Well, you kind of don't because the next thing coming is going to be the daily grind. And this is where your plan is now facing reality for the very first time.

Prior to that, it's been a conjecture, a hypothesis, or a presumption, but it's never been fully tested. We know that whatever the weaknesses are in our preparation will surface during the honeymoon phase, that's what it's for. It's supposed to reveal to us what we don't know that we need to know so that we can get it. It's not a sign that we were behind or it was a bad choice, even though people will oftentimes misinterpret it as that and quit prematurely. It's something that we have to anticipate showing up. So here's the promise. In the daily grind phase, if you're looking at the right metrics and you've got the right plan and you got the metrics to confirm that you're making progress, you're going to get up one day and you're going to get up

and believe that you can do it. Like, you know what? I really now believe I can do it. If he can do it, then I can do it. There's no difference. But then we need to go from believing we can do it to knowing we can do it. It's different. So when I was working Dave Asbury at Bulletproof, helping him build Bulletproof, I said, look, Dave, we both believe that Bulletproof can be really big. But we need to now know that we can do it. What do we need to do to go from? from believing to knowing, said, well, we need more inventory and we need more people at the higher levels in the marketing department. So, well, what is it going to take to do that? So probably a couple million dollars. So you know all the guys in Silicon Valley, you go up there and raise that,

let's get this done. So we did it, got it done. And at that point, Dave and I both knew that bulletproof is going to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which it proved itself to be. And we did kind of declare what it is that we needed to get to take us from belief to knowing. really essential step here. Then there's the final step that puts us into the winter circle. Please, everybody listen up. Until you get to the winter circle, you're not there yet. And if you trip before you get there, don't cross the line, then you don't win. When you see that it's possible and probable that you're going to be able to achieve your goal, don't try to speed up to try to get to the finish line faster to enjoy the chocolate cake and the champagne waiting at the finish line.

because it's never over until it's over. And I've seen people trip at the last second and screw things up, never to eventually get past the finish line. Please do not do that. Or don't try to control things so much thinking that you're being safe. Because sometimes when you slow things down way too much, you start to daydream. You think the safety is in the speed. It's not.

If you're going too slow and you start to daydream, then you're at equal hazard as if you're going way too fast. So don't change your pace. Keep your pace. keep your eye on the ball, keep executing what has to go right until you're way beyond the finish line. Once you're beyond the finish line, then it can celebrate in Victory Circle. So as long as we're aware that there are these five different steps and stages that we go through from act to pursuit a goal to arrival in the winter circle and we can name where we are and we know what that means, then that's our safety net for sticking together and working together as a well-organized,

coherent team that can get things done most efficiently and get us into the winter circle at least time and effort and expense. I really love what Dr. Jeff Spencer is saying. Keep your eyes on the finish line and don't let up once you set out on your goal. Now we can all be consistent, of course, but that doesn't mean that we're perfect. We're human after all, and having a bad day or two is inevitable. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. at Yap, we have a super unique company culture.

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But I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up, I feel like I was jumping on a cliff with no parachute. I'm not really good at that kind of stuff. I'm really good at marketing, sales, growing a business, offers. But I had so many questions and zero idea where to find the answers when it came to starting an official business. I wish I had known about Northwest Registered Agent back when I was starting YAP Media. And if you're an entrepreneur, you need to know what Northwest Registered Agent is.

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your privacy, build your brand, and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash Yapfree and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registered Agent.com slash yapfrey. Let's get ahead of our rainy days with a little guidance from behavioral economist Katie Milkman. We often hear about the power of positive thinking, but you talk about over optimism and how we can blind ourselves and it could lead to overconfidence. and you say that anticipating and planning for obstacles can be more powerful than adopting a positive mindset. So in terms of everything that we're talking about, tell us about your perspective on the power of negative thinking. Yeah. So this is another one where I just want to say you also have to believe in yourself to get things done.

So it is important to have positive beliefs to some extent. But if you don't plan for what can go wrong, if you aren't thinking negatively and anticipating obstacles, I mean, that's sort of the whole benefit of all the research that's been done on behavioral science and strategies, because if you say this might go wrong if I don't create constraints, for example, if I don't set goals that I break down into bite size pieces, if I don't seek out social support or come up with a commitment device, then you are much less likely to succeed. So it is really important to set yourself up for success by doing that planning process, anticipating obstacles. And there's really wonderful work by NYU's psychologist, Gabrielle Ettingen on the importance of that kind of obstacle-based planning where you think what could go wrong, what could get in my way as I'm trying to achieve this goal. And then you say,

okay, and how am I going to overcome it? And that improves results. And it's something we do, I think, naturally, right? Again, going back to engineering, it's something we do naturally when we take on certain types of work. But we don't always do it in our personal lives. We don't always do it when we're thinking about our productivity. And it's important to do it there too. It's also been called a premortem. So we know what a postmortem is, like something fails and you go, oh, what went wrong? Like, let's analyze it. But it can be really useful to do the same thing before you pursue a goal and to sit down and say, imagine this all falls apart and goes wrong. What would be the reasons? What are the most obvious reasons this would go wrong? So that's a premortem. And that's another way of

thinking about planning for obstacles. And it totally makes sense because the more you plan, the more prepared you are. So that negative thinking is actually quite positive. Exactly. One thing that I found super interesting with your work was this concept of flexibility and emergency reserves and kind of setting ourselves up to be more flexible as opposed to rigid in order to execute on our goal. So can you talk about why rigidity doesn't work? Yeah. Rigidity, I will say, is something that I was initially bullish on, which probably sounds silly. now that I'm putting the term rigidity to it.

But when I first started thinking about habits and what we knew about habits, it seemed clear that you wanted a lot of consistency in order to build lasting habits. And so I have done research looking at whether or not it's actually better when you're building a habit to try to always do it at the same time or try to vary when you are engaging in the behavior. And I was sure that consistency would be better and surprised, actually, to find that it was worse. And when I sort of dug into the data I had analyzed and that I'd collected to look at this, where we'd randomly assign people to basically either engage in the behavior they were hoping to make habitual on a really consistent basis or in a more variable way.

What we found is that the people who were consistent built rigid habits. So after the startup period when we're sort of training them to build the habit, they're decent at getting to whatever, getting to their goal in this narrow time frame that they had picked as they're like magic time. But if they miss that window, they don't do it at all. Whereas people who had trained their habit in a more variable way who are like, say, trying to go to the gym, more consistently. And sometimes they go at 9am, sometimes they go at noon, sometimes they go at 5. They also tend to go, they tend to choose a time that's optimal. And let's say half of their visits end up being at that time. And that's useful. You do want sort of a first best. But if they miss their best window,

they still get around to doing it. And overall, that leads to more robust and lasting. habits and better outcomes. So this led to this concept that like rigidity is something that we often characterize as consistency and we think of as good for building habits. But if it gets too consistent and too rigid, it becomes brittle. And we actually won't achieve as much. And there is some real meaningful value if you're trying to build a new habit, whether it's around learning a language and when will you practice or going to the gym or check-ins with mentees. You want to spend time with whatever that thing is, meditation, it's important not always to do it at the same time, but to build in some variability. Because life doesn't always allow you to get to your goals at the same time. Things come up.

And you want to be able to pivot and have a fallback plan. And that really is what builds the most lasting change. Yeah, I think the key is like always having a backup plan. Absolutely. So related to this is something you call the what the hell effect. And basically, from my understanding, It's like, let's say you're on a diet and you cave, you grab the chips instead of the apple. Then the rest of the day, you're going to pig out because you're like, well, what the hell? I already ruin it for the day. Absolutely. So well described.

And by the way, one of the best named effects in all of psychology. Give us an example of how we can basically have an emergency reserve to counteract us falling down this spiral of the what the hell effect. Yeah. So you're pointing to some wonderful research by my colleague, Marissa Sharif, on the. importance of actually having really tough goals. Like, I'm going to try to exercise seven days this week or I'm going to try to meditate seven days this week. You want to push yourself because tough goals are best in terms of accomplishment. However, then they create the what the hell effect as a big problem because if you're trying for seven days a week, you miss one day, you say, what the hell,

I'm never going to hit my goal. So she came up with this very clever idea that I think relates to ideas used by some dieting programs, for instance, of giving yourself some, like cheat days, emergency reserves. She actually thinks it's important that they be referred to as emergency reserves rather than cheats because then you don't feel entitled to take them, but rather only allow yourself to recover when there is a true emergency. So she ran experiments showing that if you tell people, set the toughest goal, seven days a week I'm going to aim to do this thing, but I'm going to give you two emergency reserves.

If you have a miss, we'll pull out that chit, we'll call it get out of jail free, and we'll say you're still on track. If anybody uses dualingo, you might have seen they have street. freezes if you're like trying to build a streak of practicing the language, they'll let you have sort of this kind of emergency reserve where you freeze. It doesn't really count as a breakage. So you get out of jail free and she tested this against something that's psychologically should be identical, which is let's set a wimpier goal instead of seven days a week. I'll try to do it five days a week. That's literally identical to seven days a week with two emergency reserves.

But you see dramatically better outcomes when people are striving for that higher, tougher goal. but just giving themselves these emergency chits as opposed to a wimpyer goal that isn't going to push you and stretch you as much. So I think it's really interesting research. And we can think in our lives about where is it that we might want to push ourselves hard, but also have a way to recover when there is a misstep that doesn't lead us to throw up our hands and give up on ourselves. How can we give ourselves those emergency boundaries? In addition to planning for obstacles and utilizing the concept of emergency reserves, we also need to ruthlessly prioritize and get extreme clarity on our goals.

Here's more from Storybrand's CEO Donald Miller on the importance of planning your life story and the power of saying no. We need to define what it is that you want. Do you want to be a writer? Do you want to start a company? Do you want to be an influencer? Do you want to get married and do you want to start a family? Do you want, you know, what do we want?

And we need to write those things down. And I recommend writing them down from a very interesting perspective, and that is the perspective of the end of your life. So I, and I give the assignment to write your eulogy, to actually write your eulogy as though people were reading it after you died and talk about the things that you have accomplished. And what that does is it opens a story loop in our brains. Will you get these things done? Every morning, including today, about four to five mornings a week, I read my eulogy. It's how I start my morning. And my eulgy talks. about the fact that Donald Miller has lived three significant stories. One is he started a company

well, business made simple, which became basically a college at a major university for entrepreneurs. So I have a meeting with the president of a major university here in a couple weeks to pitch all these frameworks to be housed inside their university. Well, why do I have that meeting? I have that meeting because every morning I get up and I read that story. So every day I'm putting something on the plot. If this president says, Dom, we're not going to do this, I'm going to get a meeting with another university. But this college is going to exist. So that gives... Oh, wow, you manifested the actual college thing specifically. 100%. Yeah, I wrote it down. Yeah, I wrote it. I didn't manifest it. I decided I pointed there and I went there. Right. And I mean, I don't know about manifesting. There's nothing magical about,

you know, saying, I'm going to eat an Oreo cookie and then you eat it. You know, that's just what do you do. But it did, you know, it gave me that. The second is that is my family story. My wife and I and our daughter, I'm alive, live on 15 acres in Nashville, Tennessee. We have an event space. We're building a guest house. It's a beautiful sort of mini-retreat center. And the vision several years ago that I wrote in my eulogy was that we would live in a house that serves the world, that thinkers come here, writers come here, entrepreneurs come here. You can't pay. It's all free. And a couple weeks for now, Evan McMullen is coming. He's running for Senate in Utah. He's going to speak to a group of influencers here. A former representative from the red campaign is coming to meet with country music

singers and the governor's office to talk about criminal justice reform. All of that was just an idea. But what it was was a story that my wife and my six-month-old daughter could live into. And what I was trying to do was say, okay, we're going to start a family. What would be the coolest place you could possibly grow up in to realize that you can change the world? And we dreamed up this house and an event space in the backyard and a guest house where writers come. Right now, a couple writers are upstairs. One of them wrote a book about the lead up to the Iraq War. We had a great dinner last night, talk about it with some people. It's just a place where wonderful conversation happens. Well, you say, Don, that sounds so special and so magic. It was just an idea, right? And then you

start doing things toward it. Another one is something called Build the Middle Class that will exist by the end of the year. And basically, it's a petition that people can sign, but says, we are asking, Republicans and Democrats to come together and pass eight pieces of legislation on tax reform, education reform, immigration reform, and so on and so on. Immigration reform launched yesterday. And then that's it. I don't have any time. I've got 30 years left in my life and then I'm dead. And I will never come back to this planet. So I have 30 years left. And if somebody comes and says, Don, we'd love for you to do a TV show. I look at my eulogy and I say, there's no TV show on here. I'm sorry, I can't do it. I've got three stories. And I'm going to live these three.

and I don't have time to switch gears right now. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. What's up, Yap, gang? If you're a serious entrepreneur like me, you know your website is one of the first touch points every single cold customer has with your brand. Think about that for a second. When people are searching on Google,

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Again, that's framer.com slash profiting for 30% off. Framer.com slash profiting. Rules and restrictions apply. Young and profiters. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know.

It's not a character of flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius. The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lensione and he is a business influencer and author.

And the working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention, so I like to rally people and I like to invent new things, I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one. I don't like it when people slow me down.

I don't like handholding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role, which I do have, Kate, on my team. So working genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team, helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel. And it's also helped me in hiring.

Working genius is absolutely amazing. I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the working genius assessment and get 20% off, you can use code profiting. Go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's working genius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. What's up, young and profitors?

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Totally. I mean, I think this is such an interesting concept. I had Matt Higgins on the show. He was on Shark Tank. He's a big TV personality, big VC investor. And he also swears by writing a eulogy and then he reads it every day as well. I had Robert Green on the show, huge successful author, he talks about the law of death denial, and it's very similar that if you avoid the thought of death, you lack urgency, you lack motivation. And this sounds very similar. So why does writing a eulogy work? Like, why do you think that that actually helps you get closer to your goals? Processing your own death does a few really wonderful things for you. And what I mean by processing is realizing that you're not here forever and that your story is in fact very, very short.

One, as you mentioned, it creates a sense of urgency. I don't have time to sit around. I don't have time to take that frivolous meeting. I don't have time to, you know, whatever. I don't have time because I only have a certain number of days left. Thinking about our own death is the, I think, is just the basis of wisdom. And if you say, Don, that's morbid. I don't think we should think about our own death.

That's sad. I want to be really clear what you. you're saying. You have the right to say that. Certainly you do. What you're actually saying is, I don't want to think about the truth. Just let that sit. I don't want to think about the truth. I want to live in denial. And, you know, death denial, as you mentioned earlier, is something that does not, in fact, serve your life. 100%. So let's give my listeners something actionable to do. If we ask them to write their eulogy, how much time should they take? How long? should it be? What are the elements of a really well-written eulogy?

So the eulogy assignment that I give is not an actual eulogy assignment. It's not exactly what you want people to read when you die or want people to say. I mean, certainly it is. But what it is is something you can read every morning to remind you what your story is about. Therefore, in my opinion, it should be short. And why should it be short? It should be short because if you have a seven-page eulogy, you will not read it every morning. because it takes too long.

So mine is about four paragraphs. It takes me about 120 seconds to read it. And I actually have created- And you read it every single morning. It's part of your morning routine. I spent $200,000 on a piece of software that keeps track of whether or not I'm reading my eulogy. That's how important this is to me.

It's in a piece of software. If you go to mydailyplanter.com yesterday, I've been doing this for years. Yesterday we made it available to the public. So you go to my daily planner.com. You can write your eulogy, your 10-year, 5-year, year, one-year vision, your goal worksheets, and a daily planner page. It all comes together as a morning ritual that takes about 15 minutes.

And right now, it came out yesterday. Right now we have 85 people using it. So it's me and 85 people who are doing this. But that's fine with me. I did it because I think it's a life-changer. And so it also, very, very soon, within the next few weeks, the developers are adding a streak button. So it will keep tabs of how many days you've read your eulogy period. And then how many days in a row you've read your eulogy so that you are, you know, that's gamified so that you would want to keep your streak going.

And it's a super, super effective tool. But yeah, I've probably read it. You know, it's got to be thousands of times now. Well, yeah, fam. I hope this got you inspired to start thinking about your goals for the new year. And I hope you can take a tip or two from this podcast to get clarity on your goals and make them easier to manage and stick with. If you liked this YAP Snacks episode, you can go check out all of our full episodes with these incredible guests that you heard from today. Number 189 with Daniel Pink.

Number 179 with Jeff Spencer. Number 181 with Katie Milkman and number 153 with Donald Miller. All of these episodes are excellent. I highly recommend them. And if you listen, learned, and profited from this episode, drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Or you can just DM me directly on Instagram. I actually read all of my DMs.

So DM me, and I'll most likely respond back or tag me in your story. Show me that you're listening to this show. Tag me in your story, and I will re-post it. Again, that's at Yap with Hala on Instagram. You guys can also find me on LinkedIn. In fact, I recently broke 200,000 followers on LinkedIn. So shout out to my loyal LinkedIn community. What a wild ride it's been.

This is your podcast princess and your LinkedIn, Halitaha, signing off.