Here’s an email I recently received, along with my answer:
Matt,
I recently subscribed to your (email) newsletter and I’m loving it so far but I have a couple of questions on the proper way to apply psychocybernetics. So, I’ve been experimenting and I’ve noticed a few things:
- Short term goals are better than long term one’s for visualization
- Emphasizing the goal identity or self image in your visualization tends to be stronger than visualizing yourself achieving something. IOW (in other words) visualizing yourself being someone is more powerful than visualizing yourself achieving something specific
With that in mind my question to you is this. How do you pursue long term goals? Do you pursue them at all or do you break them down into short term goals and focus on those, or do you visualize your long term goal and then focus on your short term goals? What is the best way?
Julian
Great insights and questions, Julian.
First, I don’t have long-term goals, at least none in the five, ten, or 20-year range. I have never found them useful or effective, in part because the time-frame is too big. A one year goal works much better for me.
Second, I break my goals, including daily goals, into bite-sized, easily digestible nuggets. As I tell my students, “Grab the low-hanging fruit.” This gets you into action quickly and leads to momentum.
An example of the power of this is easily seen in the following: Back in 2008, I had a goal to write 8,000 words in a single day. This isn’t something I would recommend for a beginning writer, and it was a challenge for me that I wholeheartedly welcomed just to see if I could do it. Incidentally, unbeknownst to me, I had already written this many words previously (30,000 over a weekend), but I wasn’t keeping track back then.
So I got up in the morning and an idea for a book, 101 Ways to Magnetize Money, came to mind. I began by writing the title on a 3×5 card. Then I focused on making a list of the 101 Ways.
After doing this I had a feeling of momentum, so I continued with the next goal, which was also simple. It was to write the first sentence for each of the ways I had listed.
When this was done, I went for a walk on the beach. Upon returning to my laptop, I began writing until I had 2,000 words recorded. This was followed by another walk along the beach.
I repeated the above until I had written 8,000 words.
But by that point I had so much momentum established that I decided to continue until the first draft of the book was completed. I began at 7 AM in the morning and at 6:10 PM, I was finished.
I then looked at the bottom of the word document I was typing into and saw the following: 12,224 words.
This is the power of short-term goals.
But there’s more: That book went on to become a best-seller. In fact, the audio version of that product is now available from Nightingale-Conant, and can be downloaded at audible.com
The above illustrates why I primarily use daily short-term daily goals.
Do I have any goals that go beyond daily? Yes. I have one I am working on now with a finish line a few months away. It is an enormous project that I cannot finish in a day.
So what do I do?
- I focus on writing that first sentence.
- I add to that first sentence.
- I take a lot of breaks to walk, exercise, practice martial arts, take naps, and so on.
- I cut back on everything that can wait until I am finished with this project, which includes the frequency of how many emails I am currently sending out. Today, oddly enough, I am “taking a break” to answer your questions as I believe it can be of immense help to other subscribers.
Oh, I better add the following: In addition to the aforementioned project, I also carve out time to write and publish my two monthly newsletters, Info-Taining Zen Mastery and Theatre of the Mind Masters, both of which contain the insider-secrets of how I do what I do.
You may want to look into one or both of these as I reveal information that no one else is putting out there, and all of it is game-changing.
Here endeth today’s lesson.
Matt Furey
