How to Achieve your Goals and Dreams
The Ultimate Steps on How to Achieve Your Goals — Jack Conte’s Method
Why build a plan?
Planning for the future is the best way to help you achieve your goal. If you have a plan to work toward you will have something to focus on and aim for.
It will help you:
- 1. Stay Focused
- 2. Know what you want
- 3. Know if you’re on track to achieve your goal
“Thoughts happen through writing”.
Writing an annual plan forces your intention to be clear and it helps you find clarity in your thoughts
What to expect? What’s the outcome of this plan
When you’re done with the retro, your annual plan will have 3 sections:
- Vision statement
- Key result
- Areas of focus
A vision statement is a clear statement that summarizes what you’re going to achieve which mention the specific key results (Vision Statement)
The key results are key performance indicators you can track to figure out if you’re going to achieve your vision statement. It helps you figure out exactly how far you’re away from your goal. This is what makes the difference between wishing and having a goal. You can’t track a wish, but you can track a goal.
An Area of Focus will help you remember what you need to focus on in order to achieve your goal and keep you on track toward those goals. Whenever you feel lost, you can look at your area of focus to remember what you need to do in order to achieve your goal.
Step by Steps Guide
To get started, go through the following steps one by one. You can refer to the detailed section of each step for more information.
- 1. Ask questions
- 2. Do a Retro
- 3. Visualize the future
- 4. Organise your answers
- 5. Write a vision statement
- 6. Choose Key Results ( KPI )
- 7. Choose areas of focus
Step 1 — Ask Questions
This exercise starts with a brain dump. This is a way to reflect on your own life by asking yourself the hard questions.
Better Questions Better Life
I found that having a few questions to get started was very helpful for finding follow up ones. You don’t have to answer all these questions, these are just examples. Remember that this is a brain dump, and you might have questions that are more relevant to your own situation.
Here are some questions ideas:
- What do you want? Why it matters to you? Why it doesn’t matter?
- Why are you doing what you’re doing?
- What are you best at as an individual?
- What attracts people to your work?
- Who are the people that you are reaching with your work? What do they get from it?
- What do you want to be doing 5 years from now?
- What would my life look like if it were easy?
- If I don’t achieve what I want, what are the worst things that could happen?
- Were my goals my own, or simply what I thought I should want?
- If I could only work 2 hours per week what would I do?
- What would I do/have/be if I had $10 million?
- If I could have and do whatever I wanted, what would I choose to have and what would I choose to do?
- Who do I admire most in the world? and Who has qualities that I aspire to develop?
- In what areas of my life am I settling?
- What haven’t I taken the time to learn about?
- What would I do if I wasn’t scared?
- What’s stopping me from doing the things that I should be doing?
- If I achieved all of my goals, how would I feel? What can I do to feel that way as I work to achieve them?
Step 2 — DO A RETRO
If you’re familiar with Agile methodology, you might be familiar with Sprint and Retro. The goal of a retro is to help you learn after every swing. It holds you accountable for improving after every swing. This approach allows you to apply the concept of a retro to your own life so that you can learn from previous mistakes and make changes for the future so that you don’t repeat them and so that you can make improvements in your life.
Start by creating the following three columns:
- What worked?
- What didn’t worked?
- What improvement do you want to make for next time?
Example:
When you write “What didn’t work” make sure you’re writing Problem statements — it’ll help you get behind the symptom, find the problem, and ask follow-up questions ).
Step 3 — Visualize the future
Dream up the perfect world based on your questions and retro.
- what happened?
- What didn’t happened?
- What did you create?
- What makes you feel proud of your work?
- How much money did you make?
- How much did you reinvest in your projects, personal goals or business
These questions are just examples. Try to come up with your own. Ask yourself as many questions as possible to visualize your perfect future.
Step 4 — Organize your answers into buckets
- Find the common themes ( which answers are related? )
- Are there any answers that can be grouped? Are there multiple answers that can be resolve through one action?
- Do some of your answers feel repetitive?
- What are the key ideas that are most important
Step 5 — Write a vision statement
- Use your organized answers and brainstorming to write a vision statement for an inspiring year.
- “Thought happens through writing” -> it forces your intention to be clear
- This process helps you find clarity in your thoughts
- It should get you PUMPED
- Specific and ambitious but achievable
- It should help you see the future
Example:
Step 6 — Choose key results
This is your Key Performance Indicator ( KPI ). It needs to be a binary key result that tells you whether or not you’ve accomplished your goals. They need to be things you can track, so you can be aware of whether or not you are on track to achieve it.
- You hit it or you don’t
- Quantitative or qualitative
Quantitative Examples:
- I have published 1,000 posts
- I have made $10,000
- I have donated $5,000
- I have 10 clients
Qualitative Examples:
- I am proud of the work that I do
- All my clients are happy with the work that we do
Example:
Step 7 — Choose areas of focus
This section technically answers: How am I going to achieve these key results. They are actions you can take to achieve the key results. As you’re taking those actions daily, weekly or monthly they get you closer to your key result.
- Directs your day to day activities and pushes you closer to your vision and your goal
- When you get sticks, you look at your areas of focus to figure out what you do today
- Should be enough work for a year
Example:
( forget #2 (market your album) — it’s too broad )
You’re DONE!
Congratulation 🎉 ! If you’ve come this far you’ve completed your Annual Retro. With this, you are now literally on track to achieve your goal. If you ever feel that you’re not on track, remember to check your area of focus.
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I’ve been following Jack Conte — CEO of Patreon — for a while now and I’m a huge fan of his content. This article is based on the note I wrote after watching his video “How to Achieve your Goals”. After I implemented the framework for my own life, family and friends asked for my notes so I decided to share my notes publicly to help others take action and implement this in their own life. This blog post breaks down the video in a simple step process. I hope that this guide will help you achieve even your most ambitious goals.If you liked this article, I recommend checking out his youtube channel. You can watch the video that inspired this article here:
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I’m a Senior Web Developer, Content Creator and Startup founder. I love to write about web development, technology, entrepreneurship and content creation. Don’t forget to hit the follow button if you don’t want to miss my next article.
