Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals

by Michael Hyatt

Third, progress starts only when you get clear on where you are right now.

confidence, happiness, and life satisfaction are byproducts of personal growth.

If our habits of thinking are beneficial, we tend to experience positive results, such as happiness,

personal satisfaction, even material success. If our habits of thinking are counterproductive, however, we often experience the opposite: unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and the nagging feeling that the deck is somehow stacked against us.

Because our expectations shape what we believe is possible, they shape our perceptions and actions. That means they also shape the outcomes. And that means they shape our reality.

One of the biggest reasons we don’t succeed with our goals is we doubt we can.

The first key difference between an unmet goal and personal success is the belief that it can be achieved.

To accomplish anything, we have to believe we’re up to the challenge.

Resources are never—and I mean never—the main challenge in achieving our dreams. In fact, if you already have everything you need to achieve your goal, then your goal’s probably too small.

“There is no deficit in human resources,” as King said in his 1964 Nobel lecture, “the deficit is in human will.”

Completing the past is not just about processing failures and disappointments. It’s also about acknowledging and celebrating your wins.

recommend setting seven to ten goals

but only two or three major deadlines per quarter.

As far as I’m concerned, reading a farce is far better than living one. Instead, limit yourself to seven to ten goals that align with your life, your values, and your ambitions.

Avoid setting more than seven to ten goals.

few per quarter so you can space your effort more or less evenly throughout the year.

These are called habit goals. Both achievement and habit goals can help us design the future we want, especially if we can get the right mix and leverage their differences.

achievement goals are focused on one-time accomplishments. They might target paying off your credit cards, hitting a financial benchmark, or finishing writing a novel. It’s essential that achievement goals include deadlines.

Habit goals, on the other hand, involve regular, ongoing activity, such as a daily meditation practice, a monthly coffee date with a friend, or walking each day after lunch. There’s no deadline because you’re not trying to accomplish just one thing. You’re trying to maintain a practice. Instead, there’s a start date, which triggers initiation.

While habit goals do not include deadlines, the most effective habit goals have four time keys: Start date. This is when you intend to begin installing this habit. Habit frequency. This is how often you will observe this habit. It could be daily, specific days of the week, weekly, monthly, and so on. Time trigger. This is when you want to do the habit. It could be a specific time each day, week, and so on. This makes it easier to become consistent if you can do the habit at the same time.

Streak target. This is how many times in a row you must do the habit before you can consider it installed—that is, once the activity becomes second nature. With most habit goals, you can stop focusing on them once that happens.

Another way to use habit goals is as a means to completing an achievement goal. Let’s say, for example, you want to write a 50,000-word book by June 30. You could identify several next steps, or you could focus on simply installing a writing habit. For example, “Write 500 words a day, 5 days a week at 6:00 a.m., beginning on February 1, and do it for 100 days straight.” Or let’s say you want to increase your revenue by 30 percent before year end. You could identify several next steps, or (again) you could focus on simply installing a habit. Remember the example of Larissa? To reach your achievement goal, you could set the following habit goal: “Make 5 sales calls each week to qualified leads, beginning January 1, and do it for 52 weeks.”

I write key motivations as a series of bullets and usually end up with somewhere between five and seven. I recommend listing each one until you run out. After that you’ll want to prioritize them.

Bottom line: You’ve got to write down your motivations. And you have to connect with them, not just with your head, but with your heart.

You can set the chain to any target: miles run per day, sales calls per week, date nights with your spouse per month.

Instead, you should tackle your easiest task first.

While we should set goals in the Discomfort Zone, the way to tackle a goal is to start with a task

in the Comfort Zone.

Now you want to identify the triggers that will work best for reaching the goal. Make sure your Activation Triggers are easier to achieve than your actual goals. That’s the whole point. You’re leveraging the easy to do the hard.

The daily review is designed to make that connection between goals and tasks. As I scan

the list, I look for relevant next actions. I ask myself the question: What is it that I could do today

that would move me down the field toward the goal? I’m connecting my goal...

Daily Big 3. So I never have more than three significant tasks to complete in any one day. But those three tasks are chosen specifically to help me achieve my goals.

Next is the weekly review. It goes a bit deeper and takes a bit longer, about twenty minutes.

A weekly review keeps those key motivations present in our minds. When we’re in the thick of it, it can be hard to recall. But when we’re reviewing our rationale week in and week out, the reasons become so internalized, we know what’s at stake.

The second part of the weekly review is a mini After-Action Review.

Review your progress. List your wins and your misses. Next, list the lessons you learned and what you would do differently or better. How will you adjust your behavior? Write that down too. Committing to the change on paper (or screen) will help you find clarity and build the necessary resolve.

The third and final part of the weekly review is to get a sense of what needs to be accomplished for the upcoming week.

All the way from the goal down to the individual daily tasks, the idea is to direct your actions so you’re always gaining ground. The daily and weekly reviews make that possible. I designed my Full Focus Planner to offer an integrated goal-to-daily-task solution to make this process simple and straightforward. But regardless of the tools you use to implement it, the review process works like a road map to goal achievement if we’re intentional.

Quarterly goal setting naturally leads to a deeper review every three months. You can treat it like a scaled-down version of the Best Year Ever process and walk the 5 Steps again. If you don’t have time for that, the main purpose of the quarterly review is to analyze your goals and decide if they’re still relevant to your life, and then make any adjustments if not.

The key in this situation is to refocus on the original goal and reconnect to your why. In other words, list what is at stake. What will you gain? What will you lose? Once you have these in view, you can consider new strategies or find additional resources. But you have to decide, deep in your heart, I’m going for it.

Your goal is the what, your strategy is the how. There’s nothing sacred about your strategy.

If you’ve decided to remove a goal, I recommend you replace it with another you want to achieve.

Wrapping up, I recommend looking at the five quarterly review options as a decision tree: ▶ REJOICE if you’ve reached your goal/milestone. If you’re not there yet, ▶ Then RECOMMIT to achieve it. If you can’t recommit, ▶ Then REVISE the goal so you can achieve it. If you can’t revise, ▶ Then REMOVE the goal from your list. If you remove a goal, ▶ Then REPLACE it with another you want to achieve.

If you want to see a big change, you must be willing to take a big LEAP. It’s as simple as four steps, one for

each letter of the acronym: Lean into the change with expectancy. When you notice that a change is desirable or necessary, that’s your green light. Punch the gas pedal. That inkling is all you need to get going. Engage with the concept until you achieve clarity. Don’t let the feeling pass. Work with it until you’ve got a sense of what to do. That nagging thought in the back of your mind might be the start of a whole new adventure—or the ladder you need to climb out of a deep rut. Activate and do something—anything. Sometimes we wait to move until we have all the information. That’s a mistake. Clarity comes in degrees. And you only need enough light for the next step. Even if you get off on the wrong foot, the rest of the journey will become clearer as you go. Pounce and do it now. Once you’ve determined your next step, take it. Don’t wait. Waiting feels safe, but waiting kills dreams.