On personal goal-setting

How not to lose sight of your personal long-term goals during daily grinds.

TLDR 🙂

1. Identify something you could be aiming for for the years to come, something that is really difficult, or even impossible to achieve.
2. Turn it into a personal mantra.
3. Craft a strong password from your newly created mantra, giving you a daily reminder.

Voila!

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If you come from the world of startups, or business in general, you should be familiar with goal-setting and planning concepts like North Star, OKRs, KPIs, SMART and SMARTER Goals, BHAGs, MBO, Hoshin Kanri, ROAM, Backcasting, Pareto Principle, Scaling Up, you name it.

They all should, if used correctly, help you to define a goal your business should pursue in order to maximise whatever you want it to maximise - most likely profit, but it could be anything really.

But what about our personal lives?

A small detour

As a nearly 20-year-old, I wanted to have a tattoo. I am not sure where the idea came from, to be honest. None of my friends had any, and where I grew up at that time it wasn't very popular to have a tattoo. Unless you spent time in prison that is!

It took me a whole 6 months to think of the concept. It started with massive designs, like a sunset covering my back or a flying dolphin on my thigh 😃 What I eventually ended up with was the smallest possible text on a non-sensitive area of my body that just says "Free as a bird™️".

People mainly remember it as The Beatles' song Free as a Bird, which was released right before my tattoo planning adventures. So maybe it was my inspiration, maybe not. At the time, I wasn't really interested in The Beatles - sorry, but I was more of a Pink Floyd and Genesis guy back then! I was just looking for something to help me make "better" choices in life.

It's funny how a few words can have a profound impact on how we navigate our paths in life. It turned out I didn't need complex KPIs or SMART goals; I had a simple yet powerful mantra etched into my skin - a beacon for life.

How it worked

It served me well most of the time. A reminder of what's important to me when facing life-changing events. Here are some examples:

Look for a job or work for myself
This one was quite easy. Since I was 17, I worked in my father's business, a non-technical startup. I always preferred flexibility and longer hours, at times even approaching 100 hours a week to the "safety" of a regular job.

A new job
If I had to get a job, pick the one that gives me more flexibility and future development opportunities.

Studying or not
Pick what gives me more freedom or choices in the future. I ended up studying too long!

Staying home or emigrating
Pick what makes me more flexible and adaptable in the future. I ended up emigrating, but that's for another time. 

Which basketball team to play for
Surprisingly, I preferred the teams with well-structured plays to no set plays and free flows. Just like a triangle offence with the 1990s Bulls - even though it looked rigid at first glance, it allowed endless creativity once mastered.

Just a few examples, but you should get the gist.

9–5

As I go back down the memory line, I remember that it also helped me to accept the fact that I am not really built for a 9–5 work schedule. I like the flexibility too much to commit to the strict schedule. Don't get me wrong - I did a fixed schedule in the past, whenever there was no other way and it was fine. My brain though just kept looking for a place where I could get my flexibility back.

It wasn't a one-way street though. I believe that what I offered back to the business was equally important - my commitment meant I would keep trying to solve complex problems at any time of the day or night, regardless if I was on the clock or not, going the extra mile, fixing bugs on the weekend and focusing on satisfying customers exceptionally well.

New attempt to define my goals

Now, as I am turning into the second part of my, hopefully, long life, I started to think maybe it's time to re-evaluate. No, I am not gonna erase the tattoo! 😂

I played with something I called Lifetime OKRs, where I would identify areas in my life that I wanted to improve and then create objectives around them. It worked well as a discovery tool, but it became unmanageable on a daily or even weekly basis. I thought I needed something simpler. A mantra, or motto.

Here is what I came up with.

Case study

Let's just walk through a hypothetical example to see how it could work.

First, you should identify areas of your life that you want to capture with your motto. Let's say have come up with these:

Attitude 
Children
Health and Fitness
Wealth
Home
Startups
Quote

You should then turn them into a few words per section, for example:

Attitude → stand up straight with your shoulders back
Children → healthy and smart children
Health and Fitness → skiing at 103.2
Wealth → financial freedom
Home → safe home
Startups → don't think, just ship!
Quote → mood follows action

I found it useful to break down each section into something that can be easily evaluated as delivered or not with a simple yes or no answer. For example:

Startups

don't think, just ship!

1. from the commitment to work on a new idea I want to have a landing page live within a week
2. from the commitment to work on a new idea I want to have version v0.1 live within a month
3. from the commitment to work on a new idea I want to have Minimum Lovable Product live within 3 months

Wealth

financial freedom

1. triple mean yearly income in your geographical area
2. detached from hourly weekly commitments
3. no debt, no mortgage
4. safe place to sleep

This is just an example so feel free to adjust to make it more suitable for your case.

Use your mantra as a strong password

Now to the key part. How can you ensure you always remember your future aspirations? Life can get hectic, and amidst daily chaos, it's easy to lose sight of your goals.

What you can do is to make a strong password out of it for your password manager of choice. You would then be forced to repeat it every day multiple times. Win-win!
 
You can take, for example, the first letters and also use punctuation and maybe capitalise some words:

stand up straight with your Shoulders back  -> suswySb
healthy & smart Children                    -> h&sC
skiing at 103.2                             -> sa103.2
financial Freedom                           -> fF
safe Home                                   -> sH
don't think, just ship!                     -> d'tk,js!
Mood follows Action                         -> MfA

and you could then end up with…

suswySbh&sCsa103.2fFsHd'tk,js!MfA

a very secure password 😊

You're welcome!

Stay inspired and stay "Free as a bird!"

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Hello 👋 My name is Michael Antczak.

I work. I learn. I write. I play. Sometimes hard…