Setting Goals For The New Year With Dan

Dan Austin: [0:02] Welcome to the collecting keys Friday focus. Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the collecting keys Friday focus. If you're new here, these are the episodes that drop on Fridays. Mike and I spend a few minutes just talking about something that's top of mind or relevant in our business that week. Today, I will be your host, Dan Austin. And this episode is dropping the first Friday after the New Year. We've got all the resolutionists hitting the gym right now. Everyone's talking about goal setting, so I figured, hey. I'll just spend a few minutes today going over things that I do around this time of year, maybe give you a few resources, help you with your goal setting. Maybe I'm reminding you to start setting goals for 2023. And it's never too late to start setting goals. So if you're worried about it already being the end of the first week of twenty twenty three, don't worry. They say the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today. The past few years, goal setting has become part of my regular routine, I would say, and I've spent a lot of time learning how to set goals properly, because I always felt this tension between setting goals that are easily attained, and setting goals that you'll never be able to attain, no matter how hard you try. I'm a big believer in setting those big, hairy, audacious goals, the b hags, if you will, that are near impossible to reach. Because the worst that will happen if you're shooting for the stars, but you land on the moon, is you still went further than most people will ever go. As Zig Ziglar said, a goal properly set is halfway reached. However, I'm also a pragmatist, and I do think you need goals that are really achievable, mixed with some b hags.

Dan Austin: [1:38] But don't be an idiot with the b hags. If you're working a w two job, and you just started looking at real estate, and you're not close to being a millionaire, don't even... Don't go out and tell people that you're gonna be a billionaire by the end of the year. It's not helping anyone, it's not helping you. That is not a BHAG that's even achievable. Instead, when you're writing down your goals, use SMART goals, which means your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. This is a very common framework for setting goals. It's super valuable. Go Google it. You can find SMART frameworks and everything for for writing down your goals. So to start, I just like to get my thoughts out on paper. I write down goals that I wanna achieve in my lifetime, down to the little goals that I wanna achieve maybe in the next few months. What you might find as you're writing these goals down, is some of them aren't really measurable, or at first don't fit the SMART framework, and that's okay. For example, you might say, I wanna be a better dad. That itself is a good goal, but you won't ever be able to measure that, because it's not up to you to determine if you were a good dad.

Dan Austin: [2:42] We all recognize that, I hope. But you can set goals around leading actions that you know help improve your chances of being a better dad. For example, spending time with your kids is a well known leading action to being a good dad. So, set a goal to go on 26 daddy daughter dates in 2023. This would be a SMART goal, because the goal is specific, we just said what we're going to do, we're going on daddy daughter dates, we're going on 26 of them, which is a measurable goal. 26 is easily measurable. It's probably achievable, and it's relevant to you because you have a daughter, and you wanna be the best dad possible, and we know spending time with your kids is a very important to the relationship you have with your kids. And lastly, it's time bound. You're going to go on 26 daddy daughter dates in 2023. So that's simply how a SMART goal works. And I and I love these goals, I use them. So now, you need to get off your butts and start setting goals. And I just told you, you should use a framework like SMART goals to ensure you're setting good goals. And don't be afraid to put a few b hags out there, because I do think you gotta have those big hairy audacious goals, but like I said, don't be an idiot with them. The next thing I wanna talk about, actually accomplishing your goals once you've set them.

Dan Austin: [4:02] Because accomplishing your goals might be the hardest part of goal setting. You're probably like, duh, Dan. I know that's why they're goals and they're supposed to be hard. No matter how great your goals are, if you don't have accountability to them, you're not going to accomplish nearly as much as you could. Accountability scares a lot of people. I'll be honest, it scares myself included. No one wants to be told they suck or admit failure when they don't reach a goal. Honestly, get over yourself. If you're worried about that, who cares? We are all worried about failure, but this is the one thing that separates good from great. One of the pillars in GoBundance, what it was founded on, is extreme accountability. We literally talk about our goals weekly and hold each other accountable for the progress. Also make sure our goals are in alignment with what we are saying we actually want in life. Now, don't have to join GoBundance to find accountability. Just start small. If this is a big leap for you, don't don't go crazy. Start by putting your goals somewhere that you can see them every single day. Tape them on your desk, hang them on the wall, whatever is best for you, so that you can just see them every morning when you wake up, when you go to bed, when you're walking by something, so that it's just routinely there. Next, tell someone about your goal. Just tell them one goal.

Dan Austin: [5:14] You know, tell your spouse or a close friend that your goal this year is to buy one rental property. Simple. That's all you gotta do. Tell it to them. Then then tell another person and tell another person. And you know, the great thing about telling other people your goals is they can help you accomplish them. After telling somebody your goal is to buy your first rental property or buy two more rental properties this year, they might say, hey, I have a friend looking to sell their rental property. You want me to connect you to? Simple things like that that add up over time in that compound effect. And that's why telling people, telling the world what your goals are, do you have to go on Facebook and post them? No. Some people do, and I think that's great. That's their thing. What you need to do is find people that you can talk to, find methods that can hold you... That you can hold yourself accountable to, and that other people can hold you accountable. I'm a very self motivated and driven person, but I know myself, and if I don't have someone holding me accountable, I'll let things slide. And when you let one thing slide, you just... Just a little bit, it opens the door to a huge landslide, and next thing you know, like I said earlier, you're not accomplishing nearly close to what you could accomplish. You're not reaching your full potential. Okay.

Dan Austin: [6:21] So I've shared with you some information on how to set goals. I've shared with you the importance of accountability in achieving your goals. And now, I just wanna chat really quickly about a couple tools you can use to help track or guide your goals a little bit. So, you know, first, we talked about that SMART goals framework. Again, Google that. That's one way you can write out your goals. I don't love like the typical framework, I just like the idea of SMART goals, but it's up to you how to use that. Anyhow, the first tool that I wanna talk about is actually from the book traction, get a grip on your business, written by Gino Wickman. It's a book Mike and I recently read, and they have a tool in there called the Vision Traction Organizer, or BTO for short. And Traction, if you don't know about it, it's a book just... It's written to help business leaders organize their goals and their accountability to those goals. So it it can still be applied to your personal goals if you don't have a business to apply to, which is I still think it's great. But I love that VTO for for personal goals, and it's really quite cool. Particular, I like the format on the second page of the VTO that gives you space to write write out your one year plan, your rocks, and any issues you need to resolve to meet your goals. So you can use this to write out a one year goal.

Dan Austin: [7:34] So say, I wanna be a better dad, is that goal, or something within that subcategory, right? Just like we talked about earlier. Or say, your goal is to wholesale 10 houses this year. Your rocks are your quarterly milestones you need to hit every twelve weeks to accomplish this one year goal. So your first rock might be learn how to market to distressed sellers. Turn this into a SMART goal and reword it as join the Instant Investor Program by January 15. There you go. So instead of just learning to market to distressed sellers because that's really hard to measure, you gave yourself a goal that you can measure. Did you join instant investor program by January 15? Then write out several quarterly rocks for each quarter of the year to get you to how you're going to wholesale 10 houses that year. Then write out any issues you need to solve as well. Right? So I don't have $250 a month to join the program. Well, you could drive Uber Eats five times a month for two hours each and easily have $250 to pay for it. Boom, you're done. I'm being I'm being a bit facetious here, but those are actually really goals and and quarterly rocks you could set to to achieve that goal of, you know, wholesaling 10 houses. It's it's definitely doable, and I think the VTO is one way to write those out. It's free, go online and Google it, you'll find it. I think they have the website for traction that you just put in your email, and they're gonna put you on their email list, which is fine. They'll still give you the free fillable PDF form.

Dan Austin: [9:00] Okay. The next tool I wanna talk about is a habit tracker from the book Atomic Habits written by James Clear. The habit tracker is exactly what it sounds like. It's a tool used to create a habit by tracking said habit. It's super simple and easy to use. You know, a habit you might want to create is reading 10 pages a day. So on the habit tracker, you put read 10 pages a day in that first row of the right... Of the of the farthest left column. Then across the rest of each column, there are the days for that current month, for that current quarter. So every day that you read 10 pages, you just mark a text next to it. Super simple. Right? James Clear states in his book, Atomic Habits, it takes about sixty six days to create a habit. So you get 66 x's in a row, and you and you've created a sustainable habit. It's literally as easy as that. I love this concept, especially for smaller goals. And if you're trying to create a new habit, I implore you to track it. Just saying you're gonna do something every day does not make it so. I'm a good example of that. There's just something about having to log it physically, or not log it physically, like you missed that day, that makes a habit more sticky.

Dan Austin: [10:12] So I really like that tool. I think it's great for those smaller goals. Maybe you have a lot of health goals, maybe you want to, again, read 10 pages, improve some skill of yours, just 66 x's in a row. So to summarize, today, I shared with you how to use the SMART goal framework for setting your goals. I talked about the importance of having somebody or something holding you accountable to your goals. I just shared a couple of what I think are cool tools that I've used and that I believe are good tools to help you accomplish any of your goals and how to track your goals. So if you wanna know more details about how I set my goals personally or for our business, hit me up on Instagram at investor man dan. If you're ready to start the new year off kicking ass by finally starting your off market real estate business like we run, go to the Collect the Keys podcast, click on the big blue button at the top that says become an instant investor. Go check it out there. Other than that, happy New Year, and I'll catch you all next week. Thanks for listening to this collecting keys Friday focus. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.