Your Best Year Ever: Michael Hyatt - Summary & Analysis (4/6)
Step 4. Find your why.
“The hard work of the middle” is a metaphor for anything meaningful we undertake. Pushing off gives us the rush of anticipation and progress. But the anticipation fades and the progress seems to slow. Pretty soon we’re in the messy middle, doubting if we have the strength to make it to the other side — or maybe why we started in the first place. - Your Best Year Ever: Michael Hyatt
Your what needs a why.
Starting is simple. It’s progress that’s tough. The hill is steeper than you thought. The road is longer than you assumed. You are not sure you have what it takes to finish.
When we begin a project there’s all kinds of enthusiasm. We’re energized by that surge of excitement that comes from novelty and our own creativity. But that surge is like starter fluid; it’s not the fuel that will see us through the journey. That’s why so many New Year’s resolutions only make it a few weeks. To go the distance with our goals, we need something stronger.
The Myth of Fun, Fast and Easy.
Anything worth doing isn’t all fun, it’s almost never fast, and it certainly isn’t easy. You’ll have better odds of sticking to your goals if you leverage these five elements:
- The first is perspective. Look at the careers of great leaders, innovators, or athletes. Was it an instant shot to the top with no setbacks for any of them? Not usually. Obstacles, reversals, and even failures are all part of their success path. That’s true for everyone. We can’t bank on being the exception — that’s just an illusion guaranteed to derail and disappoint us even more than the problems we’re facing.
- Second, a new frame. As we discussed earlier, our expectations shape our experience. When we reframe our frustrations, we can usually find a foothold for forward momentum. Instead of letting the worst picture prevail, I ask myself empowering questions to help me push past the difficulty I face. What, for instance, could this obstacle make possible? How can I grow in this situation? What should I be learning in this challenge?
- Third, self-compassion. Perfectionism and self-judgment are sure to derail us. “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” G. K. Chesterton once said. That line carries an essential truth: Doing is better than not doing perfectly. Give yourself a break and keep plugging away.
- Fourth, a sense of agency. Don’t lose sight of this. Entitlement is about feeling like we deserve success. Agency is the exact opposite. It’s realizing we must work to achieve it. Agency sees an obstacle and says, “I can overcome this,” while entitlement complains about not being done yet. If we keep our agency, we can survive the times our dreams cease being fun, fast, or easy.
- Fifth, your why. In my experience, the thing that keeps me going is answering this question: “Why am I doing this in the first place?” I then try to remember the dream. I try to get connected to the original vision, because that keeps me going when the going gets tough.
No one crosses the messy middle to reach their goals unless they really want what’s on the other side of discomfort. Think about parenting or getting fit or hitting a major professional goal. All of these challenges will test our perseverance. This means we have to connect with what researchers sometimes call our “autonomous motives” — reasons we find deeply, personally compelling.
Identify Your Key Motivations.
When goal pursuit is tough, it’s easy to lose focus or discard the goal. If we don’t stay connected to our why, as one study put it, “the infusion of goals with energy may be distressingly temporary. Autonomous goal motives will result in greater objectively assessed persistence toward an increasingly difficult goal. . . . If individuals strive with more autonomous motives, they will be better equipped to overcome challenges in goal pursuit. Your why makes all the difference in the world.
autonomous | ɔːˈtɒnəməs |
having the freedom to act independently:.
Intrinsic motivations come from our hopes, our values, our ambitions.
External motivation comes from outside influences like society, our friends, our bosses, and so on.
External motivations are rarely as long-lasting or effective as intrinsic motivation. When goal pursuit is fueled by personal endorsement and valuing of the goal, commitment and persistence will be high. In contrast, when goal pursuit is the outcome of pressures or external contingencies, commitment will always be ‘on the line’ and goal attainment will be comparatively less likely. If you want to go the distance, you’ve got to find a reason that speaks powerfully and personally to you.
“People lose their way when they lose their why”
Connect With Your Key Motivations.
Connection happens in two ways. First of all, intellectually. It’s important to have intellectual buy-in to the motivation. Maybe it’s some research you’ve done, remarkable data, or an argument you find intellectually compelling.
Second, you need to buy in emotionally. It’s not only important to understand it. It’s important to feel what’s at stake. Anticipate what it would feel like to achieve that goal. Or, conversely, what it would feel like if you missed that goal.
When it comes to structuring my week, I think of my week like a stage. I divide the time between Front Stage, Back Stage, and Off Stage time.
Front Stage time is when I’m working on the projects that are in my Desire Zone. These are the projects that drive the most revenue for my business and intersect with my greatest passion and proficiency.
Back Stage time is dedicated to the more mundane tasks of managing the business and preparing for those Front Stage performances.
Off Stage time is reserved for rest and rejuvenation.
I used to work almost constantly. But then I began to see the wisdom in totally unplugging on the weekends — going Off Stage. My key motivation is to recharge my batteries and be fully present with family and friends. I got that intellectually.
The author recounts the story of one of his alumni, Ray, would was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Ray had accumulated $400K in debt.
“I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve been telling myself one day I’m going to get out of debt. One day I’m going to take care of my family. One day I’m going to build a retirement fund. One day I’m going to get in shape. One day I’m going to travel and do all the things that I promised my wife from the day we got married. And I was suddenly faced with the reality that might not come.” — Ray.
As terrible as those circumstances are, Ray found his why buried inside. “I finally had that wake-up call where I realized I either had to do this now or was never going to do it. And I also knew my family was watching. I wanted to be there for them. I want to be there for my son’s wedding. I want to be there when he has my grandchildren.” Those reasons, along with the desire to leave his family debt-free with a thriving business, lit a fire under him that kept him going even when he ran out of steam.
“When I felt the temptation to stop or to give up, or rationalize why I shouldn’t do this after all, those reasons keep me going.” — Ray.
Bottom line: you've got to write down your motivations. And you have to connect with them, not just your head but with your heart.
You can master your own motivation.
We’ve all seen talented, smart, and well-trained people bottom out and quit on their dreams. It takes something more to achieve our goals. Call it perseverance, persistence, or grit — it’s the willingness to keep going even when the odds are bad and our enthusiasm has waned.
The lines of preparation and opportunity finally merged, and that can happen for us too if we stay in the game.
Next to finding your why, mastering your motivation is key for developing the necessary persistence to make it through the messy middle. I want to share four key ways to do so:
- Finding the right reward,
- being realistic about the commitment,
- gamifying the process, and
- measuring your gains.
Internalise the Reward.
External motivators can work, but they’re usually less effective in the long run, especially if we lose interest in the reward, get demotivated, and slack off before we’re even aware. Worse, if those external rewards are someone else’s idea — say, a spouse or a boss — we can become resentful of the reward if we’re not careful.
Intrinsic rewards help us avoid that danger because we connect personally and emotionally with them. You might say they’re self-justifying. Intrinsic rewards become an end in and of themselves, even part of our identity.
Over time, we can train ourselves to anticipate the rewards as we internalize the benefits. If we start with a suitable intrinsic reward, such as the way our new behavior makes us feel, we will naturally begin looking forward to it. This moves the reward from mere incentive to a potent source of energy and drive.
Mastery of an action, like my guitar playing, eventually makes it self-perpetuating.
The activity is fully internalized and has become its own reward. You’re now a guitarist, a runner, or whatever, and maintaining the activity begins to “feel more like an investment than an expense.
Be Realistic About the Commitment.
It’s easy to lose your why when a goal runs into overtime. It might take an additional effort to get over the hump with your habit goals. Thankfully, there are a couple effective workarounds. For instance, we can leverage the motivation of an achievement goal to keep us going on a difficult habit goal by matching relevant achievements and habits. Running six days a week might not be your thing. But if you’re emotionally connected to an achievement goal of, say, losing twenty pounds by August 1, you can leverage that motivation to help you get up early and hit the pavement. If it helps, think of habits not as ends unto themselves, but as serving larger achievements. The habit essentially serves as the next step in reaching your achievement goal. It's easer to maintain the effort over time because your eye is on the bigger prize.
Chains and Games.
Another trick is tracking streaks.
Building a habit takes time, and its probably longer than you assume. Maintaining a calendar chain can help you sustain the effort until the habit is firmly installed.
Another version of tracking is gamifying the activity. Now the habit is internalised and staying hydrated is its own reward. I have more energy. My thinking is better, my focus sharper. Gamifying the activity made it fun and helped me maintain the streak long enough to install the habit.
Measure the Gain.
When we set big, challenging goals, its’s easy to see how far we have to go and lose enthusiasm. We can start criticising ourselves and get dispirited. If your goal is to write a book, pay off your mortgage, build up your retirement, whatever, it can be daunting to look up and realise how far you still have to go. That's The Gap™. Something I learned from Dan Sullivan has helped me rethink this problem. Dan talks about measuring the gain, not the gap.
So take a minute and look at the gain. See how far you've already come and let your progress inspire your perseverance. This is another reason setting milestones is helpful. Not only do they help break up the big goal into manageable chunks, they give us something to measure — forward or backwards. By measuring the gains we’ll not only cultivate persistence, we’ll also get a sense of our momentum.
Lag measures are an excellent way to measure achievement goals because they’re tied to endpoints. But they’re one-offs — and they’re usually a long way off. It's hard to gain a sense of momentum that way.
Lead measures work differently. Instead of looking backward, they look forward. They measure the activity that influences whether you will hit your target. For instance, if hitting your sales goal is your lag measure, then making a certain number of sales calls each week could be the lead measure.
Why?
Because those activities enable you to achieve your sales goal. By focusing on the right measurements, we can maintain and even accelerate our progress toward our goals.
Incremental Wins.
Success is about incremental change, but we live in an instant-gratification culture where we just don't want to wait.
The Journey is Better with Friends.
Success Is Your Social Circle.
We have a very powerful myth in our culture, the myth of the self-made man or woman. But let’s be honest. There's no such thing. Success requires help — and usually lots of it. It’s impossible to discount the influence of our social circle.
“Make no friendship with an angry man, and with a furious man do not go, lest you learn his ways and set a snare for your soul”
Research has shown that if you are in a community that is getting healthy or overcoming something difficult, your chances of success go way up… positive energy is contagious.
Nobody has the strength to do their life alone — let’s be honest, its a two-person job at minimum.
These intentional relationships are invaluable in at least four areas:
- Learning. Getting connected with a good group can accelerate your learning, provide key insights, help you find important resources and teach you best practices.
- Encouragement. Whether it’s business, family life or our faith journey, our goals can seem impossibly tough to reach. A good peer group can give you the validation and support you need to keep going and rise above the tempests.
- Accountability. We need people who can speak into our lives and help us when we’re veering off track. The right peers are essential.
- Competition. Abundance thinkers aren’t threatened by competition and tend to value it. Why? Social pressure is a real (and often) beneficial force for achieving our goals.
It’s not just about what you get. You can offer the same learning, encouragement, accountability and competitive pressure to others in your peer group. You've got to share your goals selectively with the kind of people who can help you achieve them.
Choose Your Circle Wisely.
Share your goals with supportive associates and friends. People who understand the goal-setting process. People who are willing to hold you accountable. People who are willing to call you out when you're making excuses. People who’ll encourage and energise you when you hit the messy middle.
Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.
The right peers serve as a support structure for our liberating truths. They help us retain our belief and commitment when we hit the messy middle.
Don’t Miss Out.
Intentional relationships make us more productive, creative and useful than we could ever be on our own. Professional and family demands can easily interfere with building and maintaining these sorts of groups, especially the more intimate and intensive ones.
