The Secret to Successful Goal Setting: Get the Foundations Right

I’ve been thinking a lot about focus, about organizing my time and having clear tasks that I know are the best thing to do. There are so many things we can do with our time, it’s hard to know what the best thing we should be doing is. For example, if you are interested in becoming healthier, which means improving your diet and start exercising, there are a lot of things you can do.

There is an astounding number of things you have to do and you could go very deep down a rabbit hole on each sub-topic that comes up within the main topic of “health”. There are many levels to “eating right”. Your first worry is about what foods you can eat, then you consider how much they cost and if you can follow that particular diet, how much food you can actually eat, and what your daily calorie intake is, then you wonder what recipes you can prepare, you need to find the time to cook, then you wonder if you’re getting all the nutrients. Even after you got all of that done, you then need to focus on the macro, which is, why am I doing this? What is my goal? How consistent can I be with it?

Same with fitness, you first need to decide what kind of exercise you will do, then you have to decide how many times per week you want to train, if you go to the gym you have to decide on a workout split, then you have to study which exercises train which muscles, is your form correct? What’s the best rep range? How many sets should you do? Then you look into supplements, protein, creatine, BCAA’s, and all of this happens at the same time. It’s too much at once.

Doubt kills more dreams than Failure

It is daunting and it makes us want to not even start. Or if we have already started, we think “Maybe I’m doing this wrong, I should focus more on that instead of this.” We are filled with questions and we want to know the answers immediately. The thing is, there is a baseline for all of this.

The baseline is showing up every day and doing the best you can do based on the current knowledge you have.

There are things you know that work. You know that junk food is bad for you. That is the baseline. No matter how much confused you are about i.e the nutritional profile of flaxseeds vs chia seeds, you still need to not eat junk food. It’s not like “Uh, maybe my diet isn’t great if I don’t have kiwis, but I don’t currently have them at home, thus, I am not doing things 100% right so I might as well order takeaway for dinner and start taking this health thing seriously only when I have all the information.”

You’re supposed to do things wrong

This is something I am currently experiencing as I build my brand. I am posting daily on 4 different platforms, I am learning how the different platforms work and what kind of content works best in each platform. I look around and see other creators starting from scratch who got more followers and more engagement and I wonder if I am doing something wrong. The answer is yes! Of course I am doing something wrong. I just started doing social media less than 2 months ago, of course, I am doing things wrong.

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t post. I know the important action I need to take is to show up every day. Show up and post valuable content that’s it. That’s all I need to do in the first phase. Then as I prove to myself that I can stay consistent with posting daily I start optimizing for each platform. Also, the best way to get better at something is to do it repeatedly. I know that if I have 100 LinkedIn posts I can extract much better information from those analytics than if I only had 20 LinkedIn posts. Volume is super important.

Impatience

The problem I see here is impatience. I want to know what to do without having spent years trying and failing as many times as necessary to gather that knowledge. What keeps me grounded is listening to people like Gary Vee, Tim Ferris, and Ali Abdaal, who all advocate for putting yourself out there and just keep on posting. Try, Fail, Learn, Do Better and Start Over.

When you first start going to the gym, there is absolutely 0 chance that you will do one single exercise correctly. Not even one. If you put a complete beginner on a bench and tell him to lift that bar you will see the most unstable lift ever. It’s natural. How can one know how to do things if they haven’t got experience?

Social media works. Having a personal brand is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Even if things go “wrong” I’ve developed my writing skills, I proved to myself that I can be consistent, I created insane amounts of content, and I learned a lot about myself and what I like and dislike doing.

Having Low Expectations

What I find that helps me a lot of keeping my expectations low and expecting to not be great at the thing I am doing. That keeps me with a student mindset because I know I can improve. If you say to yourself from the beginning “I know I will do things wrong at the start” that means you are admitting to yourself that you have space to grow, that you can become better and that you accept the challenge of figuring things out as you go.

So I think focusing on getting the baseline right is super important. Don’t worry if you’re not doing it perfectly, but focus on the little things that will keep you moving forward. You will always have doubt, but you only have 2 options, you either keep doubting yourself and you don’t start, or you doubt yourself and you do it anyways.

Hope you found this useful! If you read this far you’d also enjoy my weekly newsletter where I talk about these topics and share my personal experiences, so consider subscribing here. It would mean a lot to me.

Have a fantastic day!

Martim