Who's Doug Hitchcock? And in a world full of goal-setting exercises, why does Doug's system stand out? Find out why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark and Doug's plan works almost like magic year after year. Find out not just how to set goals, but how to create a stop-doing list (yes, that's a goal too). And finally, learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system. Find out how we've made almost impossible dreams come true with this goal-setting system. http://www.psychotactics.com/goal-setting-successfully/ ------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark Part 2: How to set goals, but how to create a successful stop-doing list Part 3: Learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done Learning: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn 5000bc: How to get started on your goal setting ------------------------------- The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is the Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Doug Hitchcock was my first real mentor and he had been bankrupt thrive. When I first moved to Auckland in the year 2000, I didn’t really know anyone. I was starting up a new business, I was starting up a new life. I joined a networking group and within that networking group I asked for a mentor. Well, no one in the networking group was willing to be a mentor, but someone did put me in touch with Doug. The only problem with Doug was he had been bankrupt thrive. Now, when I say he was bankrupt thrice, it doesn’t mean he was still bankrupt. He just pulled himself out of the hole three times in his life and there he was, at about 70 plus, and he was my first mentor. Before he starts to talk to me about anything, he asks me, “Do you do goal setting?” I’m like, “Yeah, I have goals,” and he goes, “No. Do you have goals on paper?” I said, “No.” He says, “We have to start there. We have to start with goals on paper.” That’s how I started doing goal setting, all the way back in the year 2000. Almost immediately, I got all the goal setting wrong. You ask, how can you get goal setting wrong? After all, you’re just putting goals down on a sheet of paper. How can you get something like that wrong? You can’t write the wrong goals, but you can write too many goals. That’s exactly what I did. I sat down with that sheet of paper and I wrote down all my work goals, my personal goals, and I had an enormous list. That’s when Doug came back into the scene, and he said, “Pick three.” I said, “I could pick five.” He goes, “No, no, no. Pick three.” I picked three goals in my work and three goals from my personal life. You know what? By the end of the year, I’d achieved those goals. Ever since, I have been sitting down and working out these goals based on Doug’s method. Doug may have lost his business thrice in a row, but he knew what he was talking about. Most of us just wander through life expecting things to happen. When they happen, we say they happen for a reason, but they don’t happen for a reason. They happen, and we assign a reason to it. In this episode, I’m going to cover three topics. The first is the three part planning. Then we’ll go the other way. We’re create a stop doing list. Finally, we’ll look at benchmarks and see how we’ve done in the year. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the three part planning. Does the San Fernando earthquake ring any bells in your memory? Most people haven’t ever heard of this earthquake, and yet it was one of the deadliest earthquakes in US history. It collapsed entire hospitals, it killed 64 people, it injured over two and a half thousand. When the damage was assessed, it had co