Daily progress on your goals creates momentum towards your major life goals
Accomplishing great goals in life requires small incremental steps taken daily. These daily steps focused on your major goals create a consistent pattern. And it is this consistency that creates the momentum that is required to accomplish your huge life goals.
Jerry Seinfeld, the stand-up comic and co-creator of Seinfeld, credits his success to a consistent daily habit of writing a joke per day. Early on in his career, Jerry hung a giant calendar on the wall, and every time he finished his daily joke, he drew a big red X over the day. Over time, the string of Xs formed a long chain.
According to Jerry, this visual tracking of his daily joke was the key motivation for writing every day. He did not want to break the chain of Xs on his giant calendar.
You too can achieve the same success by making daily progress on your goals. Follow these 5 steps and you will be on your way to crushing your life goals:
Step 1: Get clear on your vision and goals
A vision inspires action. A powerful vision pulls in ideas, people, and other resources. It creates energy and the will to make change happen. It inspires individuals and organizations to commit, to persist, and to give their best.
A vision is a practical guide for creating plans, setting goals and objectives, making decisions, and coordinating and evaluating the work on any project, large or small.
Your vision will inform and clarify your goals. You can’t accomplish a goal until you’ve defined it.
You should write your goals — short term and long term goals. By taking a few minutes each morning to look at your vision and read your long-term goals, you will put your day into perspective.
You will think about them every day. If you think about them every day and spend your days working toward them, they’ll manifest.
I have found this step of writing down my goals super useful. I break down my long-term goals into annual goals. And then break these down into quarterly goals. As I write my goals down daily, I keep them in focus, and doing this helps me align my daily tasks to my 30-day and 90-day goals.
Step 2: Identify the right daily habit you require to make progress on your goals
Having the right daily habit is critical to making progress on your goals. It’s best to keep this simple. Remember, it’s the daily incremental small steps that you do consistently over and over again that make a big difference over time.
I recently completed my first book, Tax-Efficient Wealth. I credit the effort it took to complete this book to the daily steps I took each day to write a piece of the book. It was the small incremental steps taken each day, put together over time, that resulted in a completed book within a few months.
That’s all it took. Every day, I focused on a simple step. It was easy. And it did not feel like I had this insurmountable goal of writing a book. Staying consistent day after day on this daily habit of writing and working on small pieces of the book made the difference.
Develop the right daily habit and consistently follow it to make progress on your goals.
Step 3: Use a system
You need a system to execute your priorities every day.
A system that will allow you to breakdown your decade long goals into annual goals, and eventually to your daily tasks.
You are three times more likely to achieve your goals by stating your implementation intentions. You can use the 3×3 Achievement System to reach your life goals by breaking down your:
- Quarterly Big 3 Goals
- Weekly Big 3 Outcomes
- Daily Big 3 Tasks
By doing this, you ensure that you are doing at least one thing each day towards your long-term goals. And by taking one step towards your big goals every day, you’ll soon achieve your life goals.
Step 4: Track and visualize your progress
Anything that is not measured is not improved.
By tracking and visualizing your progress each day, you accomplish two objectives:
- You reinforce your habit through self-accountability.
- You boost motivation as you visualize your progress.
Like Jerry Seinfeld’s fascination to keep his chain of Xs going, recording your progress will keep you motivated. Seeing the progress you’re making and the successes you’re achieving will generate more momentum for the days ahead.
Step 5: Get an accountability partner
This is probably the most important step you can take. Establishing a good relationship with an accountability partner will have a significant impact on accomplishing your goals. However, care must be taken to ensure you get an accountability partner that is the right fit for the task you’re looking to accomplish.
You want someone that will encourage you, push you beyond your comfort zone, and provide support when needed. Your accountability partner may be a friend or coworker. It could also be a professional counselor, coach, or trainer.
Final Thoughts
Making progress on your goals is within reach for you, but you might need to make a few changes to how you think about goals. When you put these 5 steps into practice, you’ll get moving in no time.
P.S. I am on a mission to arm you with financial education. That’s one reason I started writing on medium and that’s why I wrote Tax-Efficient Wealth. This book will help you accelerate your wealth in a tax-efficient way. Grab a FREE eBook version of my new book, Tax-Efficient Wealth, to learn how you can build wealth quickly using strategies that will save you a ton in taxes.
