Work Back from 100 Years Old with your Goals
Begin with the end in mind…famous words by Dr. Stephen R. Covey.
One of the best goal setting exercises I have done is to write down what I want to have accomplished by age 100. Then I work backwards from that at age 80, 60, and 40. Then the next three years (I will be the youngest ever 40 year old in 3 years!!) will seem a lot easier for what I need to accomplish.
Bill Gates quote sums this up perfectly. “Most overestimate what they can do in one year but underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
One of the things that I realised twelve years ago, when I was in the corporate world of working within the banking industry, was that I knew I didn’t want to be working super hard in this corporate world for the rest of my life. Missing out on fun things, like the family, on traveling, and so on. The network marketing industry has completely changed what I will be able to achieve in my life. Now that I do not have to worry about going to a job on a daily basis or how to pay for my bills I can think much bigger. This situation has enabled me to really create some fun goals by the time I am 60, 80 and 100.
Just think of yourself as a hundred years old, and you look back on your life and go, “Oh, I wish I would have worked harder and spent less time with friends and family.” That’s probably not really what your suggestion to yourself is going to be.
Instead, what I would have probably said if I was a hundred years old and looking back, “Find a way to work really smart. Find a way to leverage yourself. Find a way to save a little bit of money every single year, starting as early as possible, with compounding interest. This way you can actually save a lot of money and be completely free. Or, find a way in which you can leverage yourself in terms of work, which you can do in the network marketing industry; so that you can work really smart for four or five years (took me ten!), and then enjoy the rest of your life in a much better way.”
I’m actually a huge workaholic and I always have lots of ideas of wanting to do many different things. I still love what I do in network marketing, and I have several more ideas in mind. I’ve never been the type to say, “Oh, I just want to lay on the beach all day long and never do anything else.” I want to accomplish a lot with my life. I want to be always doing different things, but I also understand that some things take time and you can’t do everything all at once. You just have to focus on certain things.
The other day I read an interesting comment on social media by someone saying that the wealthy have seven sources of income. The interesting part is that many think they should start with seven straight from the start. I am a huge believer that focus will get you way better results than spreading yourself thin.
That’s, for example, one of my biggest suggestions in network marketing. Find one company and stick with that one company. I see so many people that are suggesting products from two, three or four different companies and they keep questioning themselves as to why they haven’t achieved anything. It’s hard enough just with one, like a marriage. Read my blog on that here.
It’s exactly the same thing in business. So, in keeping it simple, it’s a lot easier to then focus on one company.
When you’re looking at your hundred year goals, you’ll find it much easier to then set your 80 year goals and your 60 year goals. Due to a birds-eye-view of your life things will seem a lot easier and not so overwhelming anymore. One reason is that you do not have to accomplish so much in this next year when you have more of a long-term vision.
I would start by doing the above and every year when you’re working on your goals, go back and look at your previous year’s goals of what you set out to do.
This is what’s helped me a lot over the last few years, having this long-term perspective and understanding that things don’t really happen overnight. If you want to have success, it’s going to take some time.
You have the ten thousand hour rule. Ten thousand hours is really what it takes to become an expert at anything. Read the brilliant book Outliers on this topic.
Take the best paid violinist as an example. They’ve been practicing for say ten thousand hours or more, whereas the ones who have only been practicing for five or six thousand hours are probably just teachers earning a minimum wage currently. There’s a huge difference between people that have done something for five thousand hours compared to those that have done the same thing for ten thousand hours.
It’s the same with any business or activity. It’s going to take time for you to really get an understanding of everything, to get you to that level of success and where you have a reputation within the industry.
So within network marketing, there are people that come in and do really well very fast. Very often this is because they’ve built up something beforehand, either a network or obtained a set of skills.
For example, we have certain people who came in over the last couple of years, from the recruiting or sales industry, and they’ve been working for many years on their personal skills with other people, their ability to recruit, sales expertise and so on. So don’t always compare yourself to those people.
My final advice would be to just have a lot of fun with your goal setting for long term. It’s so much easier when you do it that way. Understand that you are going to be able to accomplish a lot more over the next five to ten years than you probably think, but perhaps sometimes less over the next year than what you may have wanted to.
Please comment below if you plan on doing your 100 and 80 year goals.
