The Ultimate Annual Planning Ritual to Crush 2021 with Peter Shallard

In this episode, we share an incredibly powerful annual planning ritual that can transform your entire year. We break down exactly what to do to set yourself up for success in the new year and show you how to avoid the biggest problems that stop you from achieving your goals. Don't let your 2021 goals become figments of your imagination by springtime, listen to this interview with returning guest Peter Shallard to crush your annual planning and goal setting. 

Peter is the founder and CEO of Commit Action – a revolutionary service that helps business owners double their focus and productivity, with accountability coaching. Think of it as personal training for productivity. Commit Action helps you eliminate overwhelm, destroy self-sabotage, lock in laser focus, and get more done in a few days than most do in a month. 

Peter Shallard is also known as The Shrink for Entrepreneurs. He serves as a behind-the-scenes confidante and advisor to some of the world’s top startup founders, counseling them on the intersection of psychology and business. Clients across his roster have collectively raised hundreds of millions of venture capital and created market capitalization of billions. 

Peter’s practice is dedicated to helping the world’s smartest entrepreneurs creating wealth, freedom, and impact… without sacrificing their sanity. He is also a Venture Partner at Human Ventures -- serving as resident founder coach. 

• Evidence-based psychology and anchoring your decisions in science and empirical evidence.

• What are the interventions that are PROVEN by SCIENCE to move the needle on focus and productivity?

• Planning, structure, and social support are essential to accomplish your goals

• The traditional approach to psychology and personal growth has been focused more on exploration and emotion versus practical, measurable impacts on your life

• The patient, incremental work is what truly creates results and value. It's always the unsexy stuff that moves the needle.

• Do you want to FEEL productive or BE productive?

• Most highly successful people dedicate meaningful time and energy to developing their year-end routines and annual planning.

• Annual planning is a vital piece of being productive and can make a huge difference in the results you get in your life.

• How the most important part of planning is, counter-intuitively, thinking about the past (reviewing the year that’s been)

• You need to take time out to do a bit of a review and a post mortem of what has been.

• If you don't anchor your goals in reasonable expectations and a realistic understanding of the PAST

• The best predictor of the future is past performance.

• High achievers default to being hard on themselves and self-flagellation.

• Do you resonate with the idea that no one has bigger expectations for YOU than YOU?

• Year-end review questions:

  • Start positive: What went well? What are you proud of? Where did you show up as the best version of yourself?

  • Then, get negative: What could you have done better?

• What should you do if you're NOT happy with your past performance?

  • Set goals that you can measure, and measure incremental improvement and progress.

  • What is the incremental rate of improvement that you're capable of accomplishing?

  • Figure out what UNIT OF IMPROVEMENT to MEASURE, then determine your RATE OF ACCELERATION that you can achieve?

• Can you set goals that are too ambitious? How do you avoid doing that?

• The psychology of "splitting" and how black and white self-judgment can sabotage your goals.

  • It's really important to ask yourself "How am I going to feel if this goes OK?" (but falls short of your goal)

  • You have to anticipate the "mid-level outcomes" and have a plan for how you will respond to them

• If you fall short of a big audacious goal, ask yourself:

  • Have you improved?

  • Have you learned things?

  • Have you made important progress?

• The "Uninformed optimism" phase that many goals begin

  • Maximum imagination, and zero knowledge about how to execute

• Accomplishment comes from doing the things that other people find difficult, and on the other side of difficult things, there is a big blue ocean of opportunity.

• The "ecology" of psychology - understanding your psychological environment.

  • What are the unintended consequences and steps required for accomplishing the goal you want?

• Self-sabotage is the single biggest barrier to goal accomplishment.

• Lazy goal setting is all objective focused and no process focused.

• Do you know what it is to REALLY want something?

• Nothing of substance or lasting value has been created without someone experiencing struggle and discomfort. There are no get rich quick schemes.

• At least once a year you should take time out to know yourself

• The concept of "evidence procedure" - how would you KNOW if you had accomplished your goals?

  • What will you see when you realize you've achieved that goal?

• Are your goals YOUR's or are they someone else's goals? Are you imitating other people's goals instead of your own?

• The "action result gap" and how it can crush your ability to achieve your goals.

• How do you close the gap between SETTING YEAR-END GOALS and TAKING ACTION ON THEM?

  • Specificity

  • Measurement

  • Accountability

• How to ensure a good 2021 plan doesn’t just gather dust in a drawer: Closing the gap between planning and actual execution

• The concept of "proximal goal setting" and how it can create an enormous impact on achieving your goals, combined with implementation intentions.

• Proximal goal setting is essentially the gamification of your goals. Short term numbers or metrics you can chase to tie your daily activities to your long term goals.

• Get obsessed with the PROXY for success. The daily goals, habits, and routines that point in the direction of your big hairy audacious goals.

  • Write a joke every day.

  • Writ a song every day

  • Sink 50 free throws every day.

  • Make 10 sales call per day.

• You need 2 things:

  • Master the science of execution.

  • Get the feedback you need to be successful.

• Homework: Check out "Headstart 2021" annual planning ritual that helps with intelligent reflection and artful implementation of your goals and reviewing your year.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

Commit Action pairs you with a dedicated accountability coach whose sole job is to give you clarity on what needs to get done and the accountability to make sure you do it.

Our coaches help you eliminate overwhelm, destroy self-sabotage, lock in laser focus and help you get more done in a few days than most people do in a month.

This January, Commit Action membership includes a 6 part digital workshop to optimize your plans for 2021! Learn how to lock in goals hard-wired to avoid self sabotage, then put them into action with our productivity coaching.

Dial in your optimized 2021 game plan. Double your productivity in 30 days. No will power required.

Use coupon code “ScienceNewYear” at checkout to receive a $100 discount on your first month of membership!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Commit Action page

  • SoS Coupon: "ScienceNewYear" Code $100/off

• Peter’s Website

• Peter’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram

Misc

• [Article] Infocus Leadership Solutions - “Five Stages You Move Through Emotionally When Changing Behavior“

• [SoS Episode] The Surprising Data-Backed Truth About Achievement with Business Psychology Expert Peter Shallard

• [SoS Episode] This Is What Will Make You Finally Take Action - How To Bridge The Learning Doing Gap with Peter Shallard

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet, bringing the world’s top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fable.

[00:00:19] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than 5 million downloads and listeners in over a 100 countries.

In this episode, we share an incredibly powerful annual planning ritual that can transform your entire year. We break down exactly what to do to set yourself up for success in the new year and show you how to avoid the biggest problems that stop you from achieving your goals. Don’t let your 2021 goals become figments of your imagination by spring time. Listen to this interview with returning guest, Peter Shallard, to crush your annual planning and goal-setting.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, my co-host, Austin, interviews international private investigator, Tyler Maroney and uncover some fascinating lessons about how the field of intelligence gathering is reshaping our world.

Now, for our interview with Peter. Please note, this episode contains profanity.

Known as The Shrink for Entrepreneurs, Peter Shallard is a renowned business psychology expert and therapist gone renegade. He works with entrepreneurs from around the globe, to help them master the psychology of reaching their goals of success faster, better and with bigger impact. Peter is also the Founder of Commit Action and has been featured in media outlets across the globe.

[00:02:21] MB: Peter. Welcome back to the Science of Success.

[00:02:24] PS: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. This is going to be fun.

[00:02:28] MB: Well, we're very excited to have you back on. I believe with this episode, you are getting the honor of being the most interviewed guest on the show.

[00:02:37] PS: Is that right? Three times.

[00:02:39] MB: That's right.

[00:02:40] PS: Three times is the charm. It's an honor that I bear with a great weight sense of responsibility. I think we're going to really make this episode count.

[00:02:50] MB: Well, I’m excited. This episode couldn't come at a better time of year. Before we jump into really the meat of this conversation, I want to back up and longtime listeners might be a little bit familiar with this. Tell me again about your background and Commit Action, how you started it and why it's so evidence-based. Because to me, without that context, what we're about to have a conversation about doesn't make as much sense.

[00:03:18] PS: Yeah, got it. Thanks for asking. Yeah, my background's in psychology. I’ll do the very accelerated version of this. I started out as a therapist. My first business was a brick and mortar therapy practice. To be honest, I was a bit all over the place. I’ve trained in and learned about all sorts of different modalities. Over time, two things happened in the evolution of my career. I started to work more and more with entrepreneurs, until that became my specialty and I doubled down on it with the brand, the shrink for entrepreneurs.

At the same time, I got more and more interested in the evidence-based movement within the field, the broad field of psychology. This was a while ago. I’ve been doing this now for about 12 years. Back then, the empirically validated part of the field was a very narrow pie slice of all of psychology, like Freudian, Jungian, the grandfathers of the field were really armchair philosophers. There's something to that they had a lot of great ideas, but psychology didn't really put on its lab coat until very recently. I was an early adopter and was really interested in what we could validate in the lab with psychology and just lean more and more into that.

Commit Action, the startup that I founded, that really came about as a result of working with a ton of entrepreneurs. I built a client roster with collectively, a few billion in market cap across the entrepreneurs that I worked with and saw some people who just built tremendous businesses that really made a dent in the universe, as they say.

I was aware that there was an underserved group of entrepreneurs that I wasn't really reaching, which were the business owners, the small, medium, owner operators, the people out there building businesses to liberate themselves, create amazing lifestyles, provide for their families, not necessarily scaling to billions of dollars, but loads of success stories that are very real. Those entrepreneurs struggled with a different set of problems that I was equipped to be handling.

Productivity, their focus, those people's ability to get things done was a big – the stone that I unturned. When I looked underneath, I found there's all these business owners who are quietly struggling with this issue of really struggling to be the best version of themselves on a daily basis, show up and execute with the focus and productivity and motivational drive that comes easily when you're a part of an organization and you've got a boss and there's a lot of accountability in place.

There's an isolation to self-employment. There's a pandemic of that isolation. I’ve been saying that for many years before it was cool, so to speak. It's a real major problem and it makes the journey of entrepreneurship much more difficult than it has to be. Commit Action came about when I identified this problem. Basically, started looking around to see what does evidence-based psychology have to say about this? What are the interventions that are proven to really move the needle? What is it that we can do to help small business owners be more productive, be more focused and get more done and achieve their goals faster? Because that was overwhelmingly what people were struggling with.

That was the really the origin story, that sniffing around trying to figure that out was what started the company. I went down this path of developing a very, in some ways, a very simple, but very powerful accountability coaching methodology based on the latest and greatest science around planning and structure and basically, the incredible impact that socially, like objective socially supportive relationships have for humans who are striving towards goal accomplishment.

We invented the service. There's nothing like it that had never been done before where we pair business owners up with dedicated professional personal trainers for their own productivity, basically; someone on their team whose job it is to make them as focused and productive as possible.

Everything we do is deeply rooted in science, all the conversations we have. We built a we built an evidence-based methodology. We worked with a professor of positive psychology at NYU and a neuroscience researcher from Harvard Medical School, one of the professors there, to build out our methodology and train our coaches and launch. That was many years ago and we've since worked with thousands of entrepreneurs and this is what I do now.

[00:07:45] MB: Such a great background. I mean, the evidence-based piece, that's a cornerstone of what we focus on on the Science of Success. I’m such a huge believer in leveraging science, leveraging evidence, leveraging data and figuring out not just oh, that's an interesting study, but really trying to figure out how do you actually apply that to your life in a very practical sense and start to implement it and use it, so that you can be more focused and more productive.

[00:08:14] PS: Yeah, me too. What I love about this is that this is starting to happen. We were the early adopters in this field, but it's starting to filter into there's some coaching modalities that therapists who have been in the cognitive behavioral therapy and the acceptance and commitment therapy field, which are two of the more sciencey parts, or no, that's I’m being facetious. They're very strongly rooted in evidence-based science, therapeutic modalities.

They're starting to play with the stuff too. They're seeing that the traditional approach to psychology, interpersonal growth, has had a lot to do with exploration and the generation of epiphany. For the longest time, I think this really got going with the human potential movement, like the guys out of Esalen in the 70s, who were ingesting substances in hot tubs, and figuring out that if you could have these epiphanies about your relationship with your mother, or how you were the victim of ancestral trauma that had been passed down to you in a multi-generational sequence, this could create all of these unlocks and revelations in your life.

What we actually now know is that a lot of that stuff is fantastic for creating catharsis and a big emotional experience when you're going through the workshop, or you're having the intervention with the therapist. When you check in six months later and see what are the outcomes in people's lives, it just doesn't stand up compared to what's going on in the evidence-based movement, where there's these unsexy, frankly, sometimes boring interventions.

One of the things at Commit Action we struggle with is we have to with our marketing, we have to dress up what we do and imbue a sense of magic and ore and gravitas in the very simple idea of like, “Hey, you know what? You can change your life if you're willing to commit to incremental, consistent action, if you carve out time to work on the things that matter to you and you schedule that time and you use accountability to add a level of commitment to that promise that you're making yourself.” You won't experience overnight success. You won't feel the feelings you'll feel if you go to a Tony Robbins workshop.

When you turn around and look back six months later, you'll blow yourself away with how much you can change your life, how much you can grow a business, how much you can learn new skills, close capability gaps, whatever it is that you might want to work on. That's what's going on in the field right now. It's like, there's this undercurrent of it's amazing what people can do, if we can just do that patient incremental work.

The thing about psychology is that anything that so far, everything that gets validated in the lab, so to speak, is always the unsexy stuff. It's never the fun past life regression, like Oedipus complex. None of that stuff. It's too complicated to test and measure and maybe there's nothing to it. These really basic ideas. Some of the economics research that's being done about where behavioral science meets financial incomes, shows that financial outcomes, sorry, shows that humans rate of saving our willingness to participate in delayed gratification skyrockets, when we're doing it in a group and we engage in status games, like we try to outdo one another by trying to save more than our peers.

There's been some amazing studies done in the third-world, where savings are a problem, retirement savings don't really exist, where these communities become overnight, these incredible savings cultures and start building up these nest eggs that economically set them free, because people are going in there, these economists are going in there and using technology to create a little text message-based leader board, where you know the guy down the street from you saved 30% more than you last week. You're like, “I’m not going to let him laud that over me,” and you grind a little bit harder and save a little bit more. They're finding out that this stuff majorly changes human behavior outcomes and lives. It's like, yeah, it's just accountability competition. Simple stuff like that.

[00:12:26] MB: You brought up something a minute ago, which is such an important lesson. It's this idea that there's a big difference between the feeling of getting results and actually getting results. Really simple, mundane interventions in your life, things like implementation, intentions, accountability, etc., can create massive change, but it's so easy to trick yourself into thinking that this big explosive, emotionally engaging experience, like a Tony Robbins event something like that is going to transform your life. When really, it's the everyday simple habits and routines that ultimately create the biggest impact.

[00:13:06] PS: Right. That's what we did at Commit Action. I’m not trying to make a commercial out of this by any means, but this is what I might less work, what I’ve spent the last five years doing. We basically built out a weekly ritual as a service. That's what we do for our customers, where we spend – we have a short check-in with them, with a dedicated coach every week to do these really unsexy things that make this incredible difference.

It's funny, because I get this – when you're when you're building a business like this and marketing it, we're going up against, we're buying advertising against the Tony Robbins of the world, against the people with the $5,000 weekend walk on fire catharsis retreats, where you're going to cry and you're going to laugh and you're going to dance and you're going to hug people. What we're pitching is check in with an expert, a dedicated pro every week, make plans, use implementation intentions, carve out time on your schedule to work on the things you know in your bones are important to you, the things you keep on passing over, because you're too busy with putting out fires and dealing with urgencies in your life, and marvel at what you can get done a few months from now.

It's tough, because I think there's a part of us that – there's a part of all humans that wishes it were easy, where we're looking for the miracle for the lottery ticket, the magic bullet. What works is the unsexy stuff.

[00:14:30] MB: You touched on the concept of rituals. To me, having the right rituals, routines, habits in your life is a huge difference maker. One of the biggest rituals that I spend a tremendous amount of time and energy on every single year and funnily enough, was doing this morning, is was starting this process this morning is annual planning. Tell me a little bit about why that's so important and how we can really think about effectively developing the right rituals around planning our years.

[00:15:07] PS: Yeah. Yeah, good call. It's funny, the way that I came to annual planning was through imitation. I’ve got these for the longest time, I had these twin careers. One was my private practice, as the shrink for entrepreneurs, working with these incredible technologists and startup founders. The other has been Commit Action.

Commit Action's a weekly ritual. We're talking about rituals. It's that unsexy goal setting, planning, productivity stuff. For a while, I would get calls and have reservations on my calendar made on the shrink for entrepreneurs side of my business, by these incredible high-functioning entrepreneurs, these founders. Around January, early January, end of December they'd say like, “Hey, it's this time of year where I’m taking a retreat. I’m going off for two days to a little cabin in the mountains, something, or the beach, or whatever it was.”

It was ubiquitous. All of the most successful people had their thing that they would go and do and then they'd call me up and be like, “I want to make an appointment the day I get back, because I want to go over everything with you. You're my shrink. This is what I want to do.” I started wondering, there must be something to this. Why am I not? I’m one of those people who's like, New Year's eve is just another day. Yay, yay. We made a lap around the sun.

What I started to realize is that these highly successful people all had this ritual, this habit of taking time out once a year to really retreat from business as usual and life itself to do some, I want to say, deep thinking, but I also want to say thinking at 30,000 feet about the big picture, about what they're accomplishing, what they're working on.

There's something about 365 days as a chunk size that seems to be really, really important. I dedicated a business to helping people with the micro, micro, the seven-day sprint planning. A few years into it, realized I should actually be studying what these entrepreneurs are doing, because they're onto something here. That began the process for me. This is something you and I – I don't know if you remember, but we connected about this years ago before this podcast was even a twinkle in your eye, talking about end-of-year-planning rituals.

I started, basically, studying all of my clients, the most successful people I worked with and putting their rituals together and trying them out for myself. It was just a project for me to try to figure out like, so what do you do when you go to your retreat? What were you thinking about this morning when you were working on thinking about the year? I picked and chose and put together a bunch of different annual planning rituals. It's a game changer.

I think the reason it's so important to think to do this, to take this time is that there's a lot of unusual cognitive biases that are at play in terms of our ability to think about the future and plan. Most people, it's a cliché, but it's a cliché because it's true. People massively overestimate what they can get done in a week and usually, a month as well. There's something about when you zoom out to a year, people tend to underestimate what they can accomplish.

Annual planning when done correctly, has a real funny way of coming true. People who ground themselves in a great ritual and process can often really set themselves up for a big win, by pointing at a north star 12 months from now and then just getting stuck in and getting into the weeds of execution and then blowing themselves away with what's possible. I became a accidental through imitation annual planning fan, and then became a bit of a specialist at it as we started to build out at Commit Action, a whole thing around annual planning. That's what I wanted to talk to you about today.

[00:19:00] MB: When you went and studied a lot of these high achievers and really successful people, when you looked at some of the research and the psychology around this too, what did you uncover? What were some of the commonalities that you found around really successfully structured annual planning and year-end routines?

[00:19:21] PS: One of the ones that surprised me was that a lot of the smartest people I knew spent a lot of time and there is a bunch of science to back this up as well, spent a lot of time actually thinking about the past. I don't know about you, but I actually have this memory of the first time I connected with the idea of goal setting, which was when I was in school, I think I was about 12-years-old and I had some gung-ho teacher who was like, “These kids should set goals.” We were encouraged in January, or whatever it was.

I’m from New Zealand, so our school year runs a little bit differently. At the start of the year, we were encouraged to sit down and write out some goals. It was just, like that was it. Sit down. What do you want to have happen in the next year? For a lot of people, goal setting is immediately like, just look forward down that timeline into the future where do you want to go. I think that there's an elevated opportunity here to take time out, to actually do a review, to do a bit of a postmortem on the year that's been. I think that it's really counterintuitive to start your goal-setting process by thinking about the past.

There's a problem that a lot of people have with goal setting that ruins the process and invites a lot of self-sabotage, which is that they struggle to ground their objectives in reality. They struggle to anchor them in reasonable expectations that build on where they've come from. A lot of people feel like a year is a long time, they're hopped up on personal development and a naive sense of potential and they tell themselves, “I want to achieve 100X, whatever it is. I want to go to Mars. I want to be the first man on Mars.” They set Elon Musk type goals, but they're not Elon Musk.

The thing about the first value, I think, of really powerful reflection on the past is that you can actually – you can ground your thoughts about what you want to have accomplished in the new year, in the principle that the best predictor of the future is going to be the performance of the past. Not to say you can't shoot higher and you can't improve things, but I think doing a bit of a diagnostic on how things went can really help. Is that something that's part of your ritual?

[00:21:40] MB: Yeah, in a big way. Funnily enough, this morning I was doing a almost a cursory review. I went all the way back. I was looking at 2019. I read my recap of 2019 to see what was that year like. I was starting to put together, almost just loose bullet points of what were some of the big things that happened to me in 2020. I’ll continue to add to that list over the next couple days, or weeks. Then, eventually come back to it and really refine it into, I almost create this milestone for each year of accomplishments, things that happened, all this stuff and then reflections on the year. To me, bringing in the past is a really important component of setting the right context before you think about where you're going next.

[00:22:27] PS: When you find yourself thinking about the year that's been, do you tend to gravitate more to the wins, or to the not-so wins, the bad stuff?

[00:22:37] MB: I try to have somewhat of a healthy balance. I more so will create almost bullet points of the wins, so achievements in business and places I’ve visited; not many this year, but typically I’ll say, “Oh, I traveled here and traveled here.” It's fun to look back at the year and say, “Wow. I can't believe I did all these things and visited all these places.” I always, more so in my journal entries themselves, really try to reflect back on the hard parts and the setbacks and the things I struggled with.

[00:23:09] PS: Got you. I mean, I think it's so critical to have a healthy balance. That's one of the things that I picked up from my research in the space, whether it was the anecdotal things that these high-functioning people did, or some of the science on what really works here. One of the things that I learned is that high-functioning, type A, ambitious people, which I’m guessing are the listeners of this podcast for the most part, particularly the entrepreneurs out there, the business owners, they have a tendency towards self-flagellation.

A lot of very ambitious people default to being very hard on themselves at the best of times. It's just a natural thing. If you're somebody listening to this and that resonates with the idea that no one has bigger expectations for you than you, then it's really important to make sure that you're grounding some of your reflection in the year that's been particularly after year 2020, which is a weird one, to put it mildly, in some positive reflection.

I think it's so important to start with what went really well? What are you proud of? To focus the direction of that evaluation, not just on external circumstance. Because if things went well and you got lucky, some nice things happen to you. That's cool. I think, asking the question of where did I show up as the best version of myself? The last year, how did I rise to the occasion in a really magnificent way and bullet-pointing out those, like reflecting on what those things are.

It's so critical to do that, because for a number of reasons. One, because you want to tap that inner resourcefulness, the belief that you are somebody who can rise to occasions and do magnificent things when you go into planning the next year. Also, you want to get some of the emotional resilience and strength to do some real critical thinking about the year that's been as well. Then that's part two, is to really get negative, get deliberately negative and ask yourself, “Where could I have done better?”

It's so important to start there, because I think so many of us naturally go to the negative if we’re not careful. I certainly find myself slipping into that. If you ask me how's my 2020, just catch me on a random day and throw that question at me. I’m going to be like, “Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, I had a couple big missed opportunities.” Good to hear that you're doing a little bit of both.

[00:25:47] MB: Yeah, absolutely. As you said, it's so important to have a balance. I want to come back to something you said a minute ago, because I’m curious how you approach this and how you've seen other people that you've worked with and studied, approach this. You touched on this idea that the best predictor of the future is past performance. What should you do in terms of your goal setting if you're not happy with your past performance?

[00:26:11] PS: I think, one of the most important things is to find something to measure and then make a set goals around creating incremental improvements in that particular metric. If you're somebody who's in a position where you're looking back on the year and there's not a lot of positive and you're just really unhappy with how you performed, there's got to be – measurement is a major issue.

I think that the psychology of negative self-talk becomes toxic when we're giving ourselves a hard time. We've got a feeling and intuition that we're not doing good enough, but we're unable to point at it, to point at a number and say, this thing needs to be 30% better. If it's something in your career, if you're frustrated with yourself because of the way that you showed up in the politics of your work, that can be really tricky to move the needle on. If you're a salesperson, if you do something that lends itself to measurement and you want to improve your numbers, then you can set goals that are really focused on doing that.

You can start the year, you can make your 2021 goal to double it, or whatever your ambitious goal is. One of the things you can do is actually, start off the year by experimenting with what is the incremental rate of improvement that you're capable of accomplishing? I guess, the physics of this in some ways is you've got to figure out what you're measuring, what the unit is of improvement. Then you've got to figure out the rate of acceleration that you're capable of sustaining. Then you know how to set a realistic goal that you actually have a shot at achieving, that's going to be worth striving for. Does that make sense?

[00:27:56] MB: Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense, and ties into another question that I had, which is the idea of what do you do, or how should you approach setting goals that are too ambitious? Because I know that's something that I’ve fallen into is setting goals in the past and then even multi-year goals and then falling short of them materially, because they were wildly ambitious? How do you think about not overstepping that, or not self-sabotaging, not putting yourself in a position where your goals don't align with reality?

[00:28:28] PS: This is a fantastic question. So many people do this. The funny thing about really massive, audacious goals is we do have such a negative – there is such negativity associated with not achieving them, even though they're obviously, so audacious and massive.

There's a concept in psychotherapy called splitting, which is basically, black or white thinking. It's the tendency that people have. It's a cognitive bias, where when we set objectives, we tend to naturally think about them in a very binary way. We have these fluid and analog things that can happen in life, because life is messy and there's loads of shades of gray, but we tend to beat ourselves up in a very black and white way, if we do or don't achieve them.

Let me give you an example. For a lot of business owners, they have classic objectives, like build a billion-dollar business, get to a million dollars in revenue this year. Now, the thing about that as an objective is it might be big from where you're sitting right now setting that goal, but getting to $900,000 and $970,000 in revenue is really, really valuable and pretty proportionately as important as getting that last $30,000 that gets you over the line to your objective.

It seems obvious when I’m painting the picture like this, that of course, if you had the goal for a million dollar a year and you got to $970,000, you'd be feeling pretty great about yourself. It's worthwhile thinking, what are the other areas that we tend to engage in splitting, engage in black and white self-judgment when we set a really big long-term audacious goal and then we achieve some non-zero percent of it.

This is the advice is if you want to set big, even multi-years, you mentioned hugely audacious goals that are the thing that are going to just completely transform your life. It's really important to ask yourself, “How am I going to feel if this goes okay?” I do a lot of work with, or back in the day, did a lot of work with helping co-founders of startups get really great, operating agreements and partnership dynamics between the two of them. It's something I encourage all business partners to ask of each other. Because most people go into business partnerships going like, “We're going to try to build a billion-dollar company together. What's going to be the deal? What's going to be the equity split if it goes gangbusters?”

They're like, “I’m realistic. I also know that this might all be for nothing. We might have to shut it down,” and they have some thoughts about how they'll untangle their affairs if it all goes to nothing. What generally happens is that things go okayish. As an entrepreneur yourself, you know what I’m talking about, right? Most of the big, hairy, audacious goals. They go like, “Okay. Not quite as good.” Nothing's usually as good as you thought it could be, but it's also never as bad as you think it can be, right?

[00:31:39] MB: Yep. Absolutely.

[00:31:41] PS: The key with those big, long-term, hairy goals is you've got to engage in anticipation of the middling outcomes. The key psychologically is if you're aligned and excited about achieving half of the million-dollar objective and 55% and 45% and 65%, but also 30%, if all of the steps along the way to the big, binary, symbolic objective are exciting for you, then there's a level of alignment there that's going to really unlock your unconscious motivation. It's going to get you in a good spot.

If you're setting huge, big, multi-year objectives where it's like, and at the end of this year, I’m either there or I ain't, then you're playing a high-stakes game and setting yourself up for a lot of heartache. You've got to avoid the black-and-white thinking and learn to live in the gray, because to be honest, that's where most of life happens when it comes to goal accomplishment.

[00:32:45] MB: Yeah. That's such a good insight. Even thinking back on, there's one particular goal that I said I wanted to 10X something in my life. I think, I ultimately ended up 3X, or 4Xing it, which is a fantastic outcome from where it was, but at the same time I was like, “Well, I completely missed the mark on that goal.” 30% achievement of what I set for myself. Then I started thinking to myself, “Well, was the goal wrong, or did I not execute properly?” I mean, again, beating myself up when really, it was still quite a good outcome.

[00:33:15] PS: Yeah, totally. I mean, that's the thing. There's so many big, hairy, audacious goals people set and achieve 20% of them and are like, “Oh, this is no good.” They've materially changed and improved their life and they're totally heading in the right direction. They've learned all sorts of things. One of the fundamental biases that we – the mental blind spots that we engage in with goal accomplishment is that by definition, when we engage in new projects, we start out in a state of uninformed optimism.

This is something that we're always come in action. We're always combating on behalf of our clients. When we have a new project and when there's novelty, the side effect of anything new is that we have a lot of unknown-unknowns where we're unexperienced. We tend to, if we're optimists, project into our newest projects all of our hopes and ambitions, our sense that this will be the unicorn I’ve been looking for, the golden opportunity, the big project with all the potential.

You see this in entrepreneurs a lot with new business ideas, or with the seasoned entrenched operators with the new product idea, the new pivot, the new thing that's going to change everything. Uninformed optimism is the rush of serotonin and dopamine we get at the start when we know nothing about actually executing on this plan, this idea, that hope that we've had, but we have maximum imagination.

Over time as we execute, we move, we transition from a state of uninformed optimism to informed pessimism. As we execute and move through time, the increase in our knowledge and our wisdom about the space that we're executing in the new project, the new venture, could be a new hobby that you're developing, it starts to ramp up. With that information, with that learning comes the curse of becoming the cynical, jaded expert.

You see this dichotomy all the time in startups. Startups are full of young, frankly, arrogant technologists, kids who understand tech, going into industries where there's 65-year-old Yoda-like characters who are like, “It can't be done. I’ve been here for 35 years and I’m telling you that the legislative environment and the way that the consumer demand is there's just no room. You're never going to change whatever the industry is.” They're right, until they're wrong.

The startup founder, the Dewey-eyed 20-something-year-old knows nothing that this old Yoda-like guy knows, doesn't have the experience. Because of that, has this uninformed optimism that enables them to see the billion-dollar opportunity. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're wrong. In the process of that startup founder actually executing on the billion-dollar opportunity, he or she will move from uninformed optimism through informed pessimism, down the emotional rollercoaster into a state of practical despair.

This is what Seth Godin talks about in his book, The Dip. That's fundamentally what that whole concept is about, that valley of despair that we get to when we engage in any creative or commercial. Any effort where we're stretching ourselves to make something happen, we'll eventually land in this place where we realize, “Oh, shoot. If this was easy, everyone would be doing it.” It's only if we can get out the other side of that and keep on executing that we can actually make something happen. I went on a massive rant here. I forgot what you originally said. Yeah, big goals, uninformed optimism, it's a challenge. It's hard wide and that's a challenge we have to face.

[00:36:58] MB: Yeah. No, that was a fantastic digression and really helped put in context a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about. The older I get, the more time I spend building, scaling businesses, etc., the more I come back to the informed optimism stage of wow, it's a lot harder to do pretty much anything than you think, even when you account for the fact that you know that you're underestimating how hard it's going to be.

[00:37:27] PS: Yeah. I always think about, it's actually my dad said this to me when I was a kid over and over in all sorts of contexts. He just used to say, “If it was easy, everyone will be doing it.” I think, especially for the entrepreneurs out there, that's so true in a commercial, capitalistic sense. The market is efficient. Entrepreneurs are looking for arbitrage opportunities. If you think that you've had some idea that you're going to make a million bucks and it's going to be just easy, I’m telling you, somebody else already thought of it and it's saturated and there's tons of other people doing it. The fact that it's competitive, makes it difficult. That's the deal.

I think that when people get to that place of informed pessimism with their goals, that's when they realize, “Wow. If this was easy, everyone would be doing it.” That's fundamentally a truth. I will say that accomplishment, doing things that are worth doing, particularly in business, comes about as a result of doing things that everybody else finds really difficult, because on the other side, now we're talking about something different. On the other side of doing things that are really difficul,t there's a big, empty, blue ocean, because not that many people are willing to do it. That's where a lot of value creation happens.

[00:38:39] MB: Yeah. That's a whole another conversation, but some really, really rich material that we should mine at some point.

[00:38:46] PS: You got to have me back to be the first ever guest to be here for four episodes at some point. We'll get into that later.

[00:38:52] MB: That's right.

[00:38:57] MB: I’m so excited to tell you that this episode is brought to you by my very good friend and three-time Science of Success guest, Peter Shallard. He's the Founder of Commit Action and he's known as The Shrinf For Entrepreneurs. Why is he sponsoring the Science of Success? Well, January is a time when we're all thinking about setting goals and making strategic plans for the year.

If you don't get it right, your best intentions just end up gathering dust in a drawer. We've all experienced that before, right? Big ambitions in January, totally sidetracked by March. If you truly want to make 2021 your best year ever, then make sure you listen to the special episode we did together on New Year's Eve.

We went deep into the science and practice of annual planning, covering the overlooked power of reflection on the past and how it can unlock huge growth in the future. The science of psychological ecology and how self-sabotage and motivation problems can be avoided entirely by setting your goals the right way. How to connect the dots between your big picture plans and your actual week to week life so that your intentions for the year end up becoming concrete reality.

Peter is a huge authority in evidence-based psychology, particularly for business owners. You have to check out the incredible episode we did on his ultimate annual planning ritual. It's one of the most useful and practical interviews we've done, so make sure you check out that episode with Peter. The episode is called The Ultimate Annual Planning Ritual to Crush 2021. It was released on December 31st, 2020. It's available anywhere you listen to The Science of Success.

Make sure you carve out some time and really focus on mapping out your success this year and use that special episode as your guide.

[00:41:00] MB: I want to come back to year-end planning. We talked a lot about the psychology of making sure you set the right goals, not too ambitious, not too pessimistic. What are some of the other important lessons, or methodologies that you found around building a really effective year-end plan?

[00:41:21] PS: Yeah. One of the biggest things that we now do at Commit Action when we do year-end planning with our clients is we talk a lot about ecology. The psychology of ecology. What that means is basically, thinking through the secondary consequences of goal accomplishment and also, looking at I guess, at holistic values and your inner self-awareness about what you truly want and what truly drives you. Because one of the biggest things that – I would say, the biggest obstacle ban none to big goal accomplishment over the long term is self-sabotage, which comes about as a result of not knowing oneself and one's true desires and capabilities.

A lot of people set goals that they think they should have. They set other people's goals. They hear about other people doing things and think, “I’d like to do that too.” They don't have a deep ecology in terms of an internal congruence of really understanding what the goal is, what it will require of them and wanting not just the goal, but all of the steps to get there. The classic example I give all the time is so many entrepreneurs, if you're like, what do you want to accomplish in a year? They're like, “I’d love to double my business.” Then you look at their business and it's a services business, where they do a bunch of work with clients. If they doubled their business, their life would be over.

They don't really want it, or at least not quite – there's a richer definition of what they really want, which is they need to scale up and have more capacity to deliver the service, then they want to double the business. That's what ecology is all about. It's thinking through okay, so you want to double your company's revenue. What's going to happen when you do that? What's going to happen to the rest of your time? How will that impact your family? What are the unintended consequences and side effects of having the thing happen and unfold that you're saying that you want?

Ecology is about really thinking through all of that stuff and also looking at the steps required. I think lazy and in some ways uninformed, unevolved goal setting is all objective-focused, but no process-focused. No process-focused. Like, I want to double my business. Do you want to double your sales activity? Do you want to double your marketing knowledge in the next 12 years? Because now, we're getting to if you want to double your business, we've got to get to the process goals, the proxies that you need to focus on the proximal steps to actually get to the end-objective that you really want.

When we come in action, when we talk about ecology, what we're basically doing is grabbing our clients by the shoulders and shaking them and being like, “Do you know what it is to really want something?” I think that that's the thing, the honesty and the introspection required to do really effective annual planning is a challenge for a lot of people. It's really hard to be real with oneself and know what questions to ask to actually get to a set of goals that you're not going to get to the end of the year and feel the goal posts have moved.

If I want to make everybody listen to this uncomfortable, how many of you have set a goal where you're like, this is the big objective. Then six months later or whatever you're like, “Oh, well. Things changed and yeah, I still want that, but actually, this other thing came along and now I’m going to do that instead,” and you let yourself off the hook.

[00:44:53] MB: Unquestionably.

[00:44:55] PS: That's because ecology is missing. The psychological optimization of that goal wasn't in place. You were distracted by the bright, shiny object, because there was some part of you, some nook and cranny in your unconscious that didn't really want that to happen, or didn't want to do the work to make it happen that wasn't aligned with the outcome that the front part of your brain said, “Yeah, that sounds good. I want to do that.”

Yeah, I’m curious to hear for you. You must have thought about some of this stuff too. Have you ever set goals that you ended up realizing were not actually what you wanted?

[00:45:29] MB: Oh, yeah. There's no question. Funnily enough, one of the people that really brought that concept to light for me is our mutual friend, Mark Manson, who he has some great illustrations in his first book, where he talks about this idea of wanting something versus wanting to want something. I always think of the analogy he had of wanting to be a rock star. If you don't like practicing every day and you don't like lugging your equipment to the sound stage and all of these component parts, if you don't like any of that stuff, you're never going to actually do the work to become a rock star. For some reason, that analogy really stuck with me and it's just a great illustration of how you can be really misaligned from what you're telling yourself you want, versus what you actually want.

[00:46:14] PS: Yeah, that's such a – Damn it, Mark. He's always so good with the good metaphors. He can say in a handful of words, but I just spent 20 minutes trying to unpack for you. I think that's exactly right. I think that one of the things, like we're obviously doing all of our work with Commit Action with business owners. One of the things I often remind people of is and our coaches are trained to know this as well, is that nothing of substance or lasting value has been created without somebody experiencing struggle and suffering and discomfort.

There is no get rich quick. Nothing of substance, or lasting value. I will say and you'll hear about this, you'll be tempted to not believe me, because you'll hear about entrepreneurs who achieved overnight success, push button profits. They're out there on the Internet trying to sell you courses, which would tell you something about their actual businesses. The thing I will say is that you can find arbitrage opportunities to make a quick buck if you're on the cutting-edge of looking at ways to exploit whatever new technology there is to do something that makes a quick buck, but it's a vanishingly closing window. It's not lasting.

There's no business that gets built that really fuels a life that puts kids through college, that really truly sets the owner free from a financial success point of view, without some major struggle. Without that person, I think Mark's metaphor is like eating a shit sandwich. You got to eat the shit sandwich. You've got to struggle in some way, because that's where the value gets created. Because if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

That's the big piece of ecology when it comes to goal setting, is actually being able to really unpack your objective and ask yourself, “Am I willing to do the lugging of the guitar around to the gigs in the freezing cold? Am I willing to practice until my fingers bleed? Do I want this or do I want to want it?”

Peter Thiel, recently popularized the French philosopher Renee Girard, who has all this work about mimetics. He has this theory of – it's a armchair psychology, but it's great. It's good stuff. I can't help, but bring – Am I allowed to talk about this on the evidence-based Sciences of Success Podcast?

[00:48:22] MB: We'll allow it.

[00:48:24] PS: You'll allow it. He has this incredible theory that so much of human behavior – he's one of these guys with a universal theory of everything. Why everyone does everything they do. I’ve read every book that and they're all partly right and partly wrong. His is that we do everything through imitation, that we want what other people have, that human beings because we're social primates, we're just hardwired to pay attention and glom onto other people's definitions of success.

It's never been easier to fall into that trap, because we're inundated with social media, other people's highlight reels. If you're an entrepreneur, you're inundated with the push button profits guys telling you how it's going to be easy, telling you that you should want a four-hour work week, or you should want whatever, whatever.

The reason that going back to the importance of a retreat, that taking time to go through a process in isolation, really do the deep thinking on your own is so important. At least once a year, you should take time out to really look inside and know yourself and set objectives from a place of true authenticity, true relationship with self, so that you don't start just getting distracted by mimetics, by imitative goals, by wanting what other people seem to want or seem to have.

[00:49:47] MB: Tell me a little bit more briefly about the actual implementation of doing some of this ecological work. What does that look like in terms of investigating your own biases, really looking at the roots of your goals, whether you want them, or they're just imitative goals from other people. How do you concretely start to unpack some of those things?

[00:50:10] PS: I can't give you all the secret sauce. At Commit Action, we have nested loops of series of questions that we have people take their big, hairy, audacious goal for the year and filter it through all these different evaluative questions to get at the root of what really matters. Let me give you one example. One of the things that we encourage people to focus on is what's called evidence procedure, which is what is the way that you know that you have actually accomplished the thing?

So many people set goals that are abstract, that are not clearly defined enough, such that they're like, “Well, I want to double my business.” That feels like a milestone. It feels like a thing that would be cool to have. I think it's really like an Instagram dream. It would feel cool to tell people that.

What we actually focus them on is really thinking through what is the moment in time that you will know when you have it, the goal? What will you see, hear, feel, touch, smell and taste, let's throw those ones in for the mix? What that does is it orients people with a vision of the moment in time that this goal is accomplished. Also, has them start to visualize that, imagine that in a very real way, where it becomes easier to access the other side effects and consequences.

To go back to this quintessential example of I want to double my business. If you're that service entrepreneur, where the more you sell, the harder you work, because not everybody's business is – In fact, very few businesses, can you just snap your fingers and 10X growth, right? Stuff has to happen. What we do is we say to them like, what's the evidence procedure? What will you actually see when you realize you've achieved that goal?

Let's say you achieve it on New Year's Eve 2021. Where will you be? What will you see? They're like, “Well, I guess, I’d get a P&L from my QuickBooks. Maybe my accountant would e-mail it to me and I would see that number and our top-line revenue.” We'll ask them like, how does that make you feel? What else is going to happen when that happens? There's that gulp moment where they're like, “Oh, that means we would have had to sell this much and we'll be on the hook to deliver this.”

I’ve had this conversation with people where just from specifying evidence procedure alone, they reel it in and they're like, “Actually, next year if we could create a 20% growth in profit margin, that would be more meaningful to me than doubling the top line of the business.” Now, we're getting to ecology. I’m trying to use a very abstract example, a very general example here to highlight an abstract principle. That's one way that you can start to zero in on what is it that you're really aiming for?

[00:53:01] MB: Yeah. No, that's a great example. I think it really concretely implements that a lot of times, the goals we set for ourselves aren't really the things we actually want. If there's a misalignment there, if your ecology isn't right, then your subconscious is going to start self-sabotaging. In the example of that service entrepreneur, they don't really want to work 80-hour, or 100-hour weeks to try and get to that goal, or maybe even more than that to double the amount of service that they're delivering, but maybe re-engineering the business, focusing on some different, more profitable segments, etc., they can achieve that other goal, that's something that their subconscious can get onboard with and they won't self-sabotage in the pursuit of.

[00:53:43] PS: Yeah, exactly. There's nothing worse than being in a position where you've arbitrarily decided to throw out a big, hairy, audacious goal to yourself. You've told your friends and family, “This is what I’m aiming for.” Then you find yourself in this rock versus hard place moment, where you have to do things that you never wanted to do in order to accomplish the thing that you said you were going to. That's exactly it. That's where self-sabotage kicks in. You'll find yourself hitting snooze on the alarm button again and again and again. That's a metaphor. Also, literally what can happen. Just failing to show up as the best version of yourself for an entire quarter, because you're out of alignment with what you think your north star is.

[00:54:27] MB: We've talked about a couple different, really, really helpful methodologies to start to shape the annual planning and goal-setting process. One of the biggest disconnects that I see personally and I know many, many people – pretty much everyone struggles with this piece, which is how do you actually – let's say, you get the goals aligned, you have your ecology right, you've done your year-end interview, all this stuff. 90% of the time you put those goals in the drawer and then you forget about them and maybe do one or two of those things, but by February 15th, those goals are out the window and all the habits and the new me and all this stuff isn't actually happening. How do you close the gap between making those plans and actually executing on them?

[00:55:10] PS: Yeah. This is deeply unsexy evidence-based psychology stuff, because this is the stuff. The answer to this question is a lot of what we do at Commit Action. A lot of it has to do with specificity and with measurement. We touched on this earlier. A lot of big, hairy, audacious goals that we'll throw out for 12 months from now or whatever. We don't necessarily know what are the measures that we're going to be focusing on in the short-term to get there. There's this concept called proximal goal setting, which is very validated, like scientifically proven to make an enormous difference. You can combine it with one of your favorites that you mentioned, I know you talk about all the time, which is the implementation intentions.

Proximal goals are basically, having a thesis, figuring out what do you aim for in the short-term that rolls up to the big long-term objective. That's the part that I think you've got to do at the start of the year and not leave till later. Because what most people do when you say put their annual plan in the drawer and let it get dusty, is they say, “This is where I want to be in 12 months. That's the goal.” Feel great about it. Put it away. Get to work.

Then they have that moment of sitting down at their desk on a Monday morning on what's it going to be next year, like January 4th and just having no real sense of even where to get started. We can avoid that by really doing the work of thinking, “Okay. If this is the big long-term objective, what are the proxies for success that I’m going to focus on that can keep me motivated by allowing me to close that feedback loop throughout the year?”

I’ll give an example here. We've had a lot of business ones and I’ll step away from that for a second to something everyone can relate to. Health and fitness. We could all be in better shape. We've all got the potential to improve our health and fitness. The thing about let's say, trying to lose 10, 20 pounds, so you have to you have to exercise and you have to eat healthy for three or four weeks before you're going to even notice a difference in your belt buckle on the scales. There's a delay. We call it the action result gap. You have to take action, but there's a gap between taking the action and getting the result.

If you want to close that gap – Well, let me step back for a second. Most big annual goals that are worth running for, like building a business, launching a new product line, I don't know what some of yours are, big things. There's going to be huge action result gaps. The health and fitness one is actually relatively small. Three or four weeks and then you start to feel your clothes are a little looser and people are going to start to say, “Hey, you're looking well.” You're already getting feedback and being motivated.

For your big annual goals, how do you keep yourself going when it's June? It's May or whatever and you're like, “Ugh. I’m not even close to finishing this thing.” Figuring out proximal goal setting is really about the gamification of your big long-term objectives. This is why with health and fitness, things like CrossFit are so freaking effective, because they create all of these frankly, arbitrary, meaningless proxies, games for people to play, that roll up to them getting a much stronger and much fitter and having a much better BMI.

If you can become obsessed with chasing a number in the short-term, it could be something so simple. It can literally be just like, I have the goal of every day I do a thing and I check it off on a list that I – on a piece of paper I stuck on the wall. You start to get that sense that you're building up a streak and it becomes a game that you're playing. That's how you close the gap. There's got to be a proxy that you're striving for, so that you can give yourself the sense of accomplishment and those reward chemical hits of enjoyment and satisfaction, because big, hairy, audacious goals if it takes a year or more to achieve, you're going to run out of steam if you're not feeling you're having micro wins along the way. That was a big rant. How are you doing over there, Matt. Got some proxy goals figured out?

[00:59:28] MB: Yeah. No, it's funny. I mean, such a great concept. I’m going to paraphrase you a little bit. Essentially, it's this idea that there's a bridge – proximal goals are essentially the bridge between your longer-term, big, audacious goals and your short-term activities that you're actually implementing in the day-to-day execution of your life.

[00:59:51] PS: Exactly. They can and should be cutesy and sometimes silly. You hear about this in the biographies of ultra-high performers, the NBA stars who just decided when they were 13-years-old that they were going to sink 50 baskets before bedtime every single day and they just started doing that. It became this, it's like, totally arbitrary number, totally just a – What's their goal? Their goal at 13 was to be like us, just a rock star basketball player. They had some huge multi-year audacious goal. They got obsessed with the proxy for success.

I love the story of and I think this might actually be an urban legend. I haven't been able to verify it, but I still tell it anyway which is the story of Jerry Seinfeld, who had one of the most long-term convoluted goals of all time, which is becoming a successful stand-up comedian. Talk about an action result gap. How many people spend a decade doing shitty clubs, like open mic nights for tips or whatever, before they get a break, or their material gets good enough, or whatever it is that creates success in that field?

Allegedly, he became obsessed with the goal of writing a joke a day. His material just developed at this pace, because he had this proxy where he was like, every day I just write a new joke, no matter what. Started to feel good about himself for doing that, for streaking on it and whatever. You see this a lot with some of the notorious high performers, that we get to read their books and hear about what they do. There's nothing stopping you playing the same games with yourself.

Gamification works, because it shortens that action result feedback loop and makes it enjoyable to do the thing that is actually, you're tricking your brain into doing the thing that's actually an exercise and incredible delayed gratification.

[01:01:46] MB: Such an important insight and in many ways, ties together a lot of what we've talked about today. You touched on specificity. You touched about measurement. One of the other elements that I know you're a huge proponent of and I have really dug into the science on is the importance of accountability. How does that factor into this?

[01:02:08] PS: Yeah. I’ve been going out and banging on about accountability on podcasts and in public for five or six years now. It's funny now that 2020 happened and people have been more isolated than ever. The truth is that I believe that we are living in a – and this is prior to the pandemic, but certainly has been exacerbated. We are living in a pandemic of isolation. It's a social cultural thing. The causes of it are rooted in the accelerated rate of technological development, which I’m not some crazy conservative being like, “We got to go back to the old ways, villages of a 150 people and everyone has dysentery.” Not that at all.

It's just that the technology has been this incredible double-edged sword. It's revolutionized our lives. The microprocessor has changed everything. You can see all of these graphs about productivity, all of the science on gains in productivity and all of these social changes to do with the way people live. Everything changed in the 70s when that microprocessor revolution kicked off. I think, historians a 100 years from now will actually look back and see, that was really the beginning of a new era.

What's changed is that our work has shifted. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably a card-carrying member, a participant in the knowledge economy, the technology economy. The work that you probably do is increasingly abstract. You're probably able to do it in your PJs on a laptop. Certainly, the entrepreneurs that we work with at Commit Action, it's never been easier for them to start a business. All you need is a laptop, in many cases.

The way that we're operating as human beings, the way that a lot of us are working now is completely alien in that it would be unrecognizable to our grandparents. I say this a lot, entrepreneurship in two or three generations has become unrecognizable, because my grandfather, if he wanted to be an entrepreneur, he would have had to go, get to know his bank manager with the firmness of his handshake and the winningness of his smile. He would have had to find a business partner and open up an office and put a sign out on the street and convince people to come in and buy whatever widget he was selling. It's a very social enterprise.

Now, all of the innovation and growth is happening digitally in cyberspace. We are living and working in a more isolated environment than ever. So many people wonder why they're not as focused as they could be, why they're so easily distracted, why it's hard to keep track of the goals that they've set. The truth is that they're in a vacuum of total isolation. They lack human accountability.

The question I like to pose is listening to this, how many people on earth know if you absolutely crushed it yesterday with whatever you were working on, whatever goal accomplishment you were engaged in personally, professionally, business, whatever, it doesn't matter? How many people know if you crushed it, or if you just completely phoned it, watched Netflix, wasted the day? For most of us, even those in happy, functioning marriages, the answer is often zero. That's the problem. That's the major social pathology of our time.

What we do, what we see is that when you take – now ironically, I think the best annual planning is often done in isolation. When you come out of planning mode and come up for oxygen and plug into a web of human accountability, when you get to connect and have other people know what the objectives are and hold you accountable and workshop those goals with you and figure that stuff out, that's when you get the 10X growth.

This is the big unfairness, I think, that I saw when I was doing my consulting work as the shrink for entrepreneurs and learning about annual planning rituals for the first time. I was seeing these founders of these fast-growth startups with just hundreds of millions of dollars of market cap or more. They would go away on a retreat to some amazing location, do their annual planning, read a bunch of books, clear their head and then come back and check in with their executive team and share the game plan. They would call their advisors and tell them, “This is what I think I want to do. This is the vision for the year.” They would have a board meeting with their investors. They were at the center of this web of accountability that lifts them up and makes it easy for them to wake up on a Monday morning and be the best version of themselves.

You know what? We have built at Commit Action is a way for people to have a dedicated lifeline of accountability with a really affordable accountability coach that they can work one-on-one with on a weekly basis, to check in and have that relationship, to be that lifeline of somebody else who says, “What's the plan for the next seven days? When are you taking time?” We're trying in some ways to emulate the thing that I believe is the difference between the most elite successful entrepreneurs who just hit homerun after homerun and the gap between them and everybody else who just struggles with the stuff over and over forever, because they're in that vacuum.

[01:07:31] MB: One of the things I love about what you've done with Commit Action, it's so evidence-based and it really takes the evidence, it takes the science, it makes it so applicable, practical and it puts it into a framework where you can implement it into your life. Coming back to the concept of annual planning and preparing for 2021, preparing for recapping 2020, tell me a little bit about what you've put together and what you've built for making that process even better?

[01:08:03] PS: I think I mentioned, I don't know if people picked up the hint a couple of times here. I have this deep belief that I don't believe in information. I think that there's way too many courses and $2,500 workshops and weekend retreats and stuff out there. I’m on a mission to convince people and especially entrepreneurs that they actually know what they should be doing deep down inside in their bones. What they really need to do is master the science of execution and learn from real-world feedback that comes about from doing a bunch of stuff.

Commit Action is a services business, where we only sell accountability coaching. We don't sell information. We don't teach people stuff for money, because we just want to help them with the execution piece. Now that said, I realized a few years ago when I was learning about these annual planning rituals that I was doing a disservice. I was studying all the stuff and developing my own ritual, emulating my best clients. I realized, I should probably share all of this with the Commit Action customers.

We started this crazy tradition. The first year was just an experiment, but it turned out to be just one of the best things ever that first of all, our customers back then said, changed their life. Then our veteran customers who have been with us since then have anxiously awaited and then repeated every single year. That is we call it headstart and this one's going to be headstart 2021. It is a complete guided annual planning ritual that we release as a video training. It's a big information dump. It's a six-part series, where you get guided through the intelligent reflection, the artful implementation, the thoughtful questions to get at the heart of ecologically optimized, well-formed objectives, all of that.

It's an end-to-end process designed for somebody to hit the play button, do the exercises and arrive at the end of a day of annual planning retreat that you can have on your own with this, with a fully fleshed-out plan, psychologically optimized plan for the year ahead. This year, we created a workbook that we printed and sent out to all of the Commit Action customers. We still have a huge stack of them for all the people who join in January to do this, or new customers. It's just done for you. Open it on page one and follow along and go through this ritual that we've spent the last six years dialing in and getting to be the best it can be.

We don't sell this. It's absolutely free. We just give it away to all of our existing members at Commit Action. I wanted to come on your show and tell you guys a little bit, tell you and your listeners a little bit about the science of psych and the psychology of really, effective annual planning and invite them to join us.

We really believe that what makes the difference is the day after you finish your annual plan, that when you begin executing, particularly with accountability in place, with objective and professional accountability, like what we provide at Commit Action, that the planning itself won't change your life, but the patient execution, day-to-day, week-to-week that rolls up in the service of those big annual goals will be a revelation.

That's what we're doing. I welcome any listener of The Science of Success to come join us. This is our busiest time of year, January. I’m sure you can imagine, we're like a gym business in some ways, where we get a lot of the new year, new me crowd. I wanted to do something special for your listeners, if they do want to join. They should do that really quickly, because we're a services company and we tend to sell out in January. I got a coupon for them, which is just ScienceNewYear. I figured that would be all one word. That would be a good one.

We're giving them a $100 off their first month of membership with us. You can join Commit Action for a $100 off. We really never offer discounts like this, but it's a big, big discount. If you join us in January, you'll get complete access to the entire library of headstart 2021 training videos. We'll send you out the workbook and you'll get a month of accountability coaching with us and the start of a Commit Action membership, which is that's what we do, accountability coaching each and every month that you can continue on with us, if it's something that resonates and makes sense and come along on this ride of evidence-based incremental growth that we create for all of our customers.

[01:12:48] MB: For listeners who want to check that out, who want to find out more about headstart 2021 and Commit Action, what is the best place for them to go to do that?

[01:12:58] PS: Good question. Just go to commitaction.com. There's a little widget there, because this is a seasonal thing, so we release headstart to our customers, basically, right before Christmas, right before the holidays and it is a limited time thing. The workshop's only there from then till the end of January and we tend to sell out somewhere around in the middle of January in terms of availability.

Go to commitaction.com. You'll see a little widget there floating on the website that's got – you can click it and get information about headstart. The only way to access it is to just join Commit Action’s accountability coaching service as a member. If you're ready for that and I would encourage you, if you don't want accountability coaching, please don't sign up. Find your annual planning ritual elsewhere. If you're ready to add that level of effectiveness, if you want to work with a personal trainer for productivity and bring that into your 2021 plan, let's do it. Go to commitaction.com. Check it out. There's all the information there. There's a bunch of testimonials from the entrepreneurs who are our customers, you can take a look.

When you get to the checkout, there's an option to enter a promo code or a coupon and put in ScienceNewYear, you'll get a $100 off your first month of membership. We'd be stoked to have you. We love Science of Success. My marketing manager actually, he's a new hire and he just discovered you guys and has binged listened to 20 episodes in the last week, I think.

[01:14:19] MB: That's amazing.

[01:14:20] PS: Yeah. We thought it'd be cool to share this with you guys and have you join us. We can make 2021 your best year yet and we've got the science to do it, so let's make it happen.

[01:14:30] MB: Well, Peter. Thank you so much for coming back on the show once again, for putting together such a generous offer for all The Science of Success listeners. I’ve worked with Peter. I’ve been a fan of Peter. I’ve been a fan of Commit Action for a long, long time, so I would highly recommend checking it out. It's phenomenal stuff as we've talked about at length in this conversation. It's very evidence-based. It's rooted in psychology and it really works.

[01:14:56] PS: Thanks so much, Matt. It means the world to me to have you say that and thanks for having me on the show.

[01:15:01] MB: Well, thanks for coming back on and hopefully, it's not the last time.

[01:15:04] PS: For sure. Let's do it again sometime.

[01:15:06] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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