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The Easy Way to Achieve Your Goals

2021-09-15 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Elizabeth · recording, 8:40 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present

In a Book Club episode on Ray Dalio's Principles, Ali walks through Dalio's five steps for reaching goals: set audacious goals without asking whether they are realistic, own up to the problems and weaknesses in the way, diagnose their root cause with the five whys, design solutions, and execute; being lazy, he executes by making the work fun and adding accountability rather than by discipline.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Goals need a process; this episode of Book Club is on Ray Dalio's Principles

  • ★★ Ray Dalio (quoted): Ray Dalio says in Principles that many people have no process or system for achieving their goals, and so never really get there. — 00:00:00
  • ★ This Book Club episode, in Ali's series distilling highlights from insightful nonfiction books, is on Ray Dalio's Principles. — 00:00:00 · Book Club

00:00:29 — Step one: set clear and audacious goals; Tony Robbins's three-hour brainstorm on the beach

  • ★★ Ray Dalio (quoted): Dalio's first step is to set clear and audacious goals: our mindset limits us, so we avoid goals that feel unattainable and stay in our comfort zone. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Ali admits he subconsciously asks whether a goal is realistic, which limits how audacious his goals are; he is trying to follow Dalio's advice to separate "is this realistic" from setting goals in the first place. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Tony Robbins (quoted): Tony Robbins writes in Awaken the Giant Within that he set aside his limiting beliefs and wrote on a beach for three hours, brainstorming every possibility, with a timeline of tomorrow to 20 years, never asking whether he could achieve them. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali is going on holiday the next day and plans to spend three hours there with a notebook doing Tony Robbins's goal-setting exercise. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali says he will share the resulting list of goals with his email newsletter subscribers. — 00:01:27

00:01:56 — Step two: find the problems and admit your weaknesses despite ego barriers

  • ★★ Ray Dalio (quoted): Dalio's second step is to find the problems in the way: most problems are potential improvements, but ego barriers make people afraid to highlight their weaknesses. — 00:01:56

    “most problems are potential improvements screaming at you”

  • ★★ Ali advises being totally open with yourself when setting goals and admitting exactly what your weaknesses are rather than letting your ego hide them. — 00:01:56

00:02:26 — Step three: diagnose the root cause with the five whys technique

  • ★★ Taking writing a bestselling book as an example goal, Ali owns up to his weakness that he is actually not that good at writing, a skill he must admit to himself and actively work on improving. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Ray Dalio (quoted): Dalio's third step is to diagnose the root cause: you will be much more effective if you focus on diagnosis and design rather than jumping to solutions. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Ali says problems are often less obvious than they seem: to stop the symptoms you have to dig down to the root cause and cure the disease rather than band-aid the symptoms. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ One of the best ways to diagnose the root cause of a problem with a goal, Ali says, is the five whys technique: ask yourself why at least five times. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Asking five whys about why he is not yet a Gymshark athlete, Ali finds he does not work out consistently, because gym is optional for him and his motivation is extrinsic rather than intrinsic. (playful) — 00:03:24 · Gymshark, identified motivation

00:03:53 — Step four: design solutions; replay the story and visualise what must change

  • ★★ Ray Dalio (quoted): Dalio's fourth step, design solutions, in his tweet: replay the story of what led you to where you are now, then visualise what you and others must do to reach your goals. — 00:03:53
  • ★ Taking a goal of looking like Zac Efron as his example, Ali says he has struggled with consistency at the gym and with eating right because the gym is not scheduled in his calendar and he eats takeaway "like two to three times a day". — 00:04:22
  • ★★★ As a design to make working out consistent, Ali says he can schedule three to four gym sessions into his calendar, get a personal trainer for accountability and prepay the sessions, so skipping one lets someone down and wastes money: a systems-based fix that stacks the deck against his own laziness. — 00:04:52

00:05:21 — Step five: execute; Ali makes things fun and adds accountability rather than white-knuckling

  • ★★ Ray Dalio (quoted): Dalio: designing precedes doing, and the design gives you your to-do list. — 00:05:21

    “designing precedes doing. The design will give you your to-do list.”

  • ★★ Ray Dalio (quoted): Dalio's fifth step is to execute: people good at it reliably execute a plan, are self-disciplined, proactive rather than reactive to daily tasks, and results-oriented. — 00:05:21

  • ★★★ Ali, lazy by his own account, dislikes white-knuckling and suffering towards goals: he makes whatever he has to do more fun so he is more likely to do it, or adds accountability such as a personal trainer and prepaying. — 00:05:50

00:06:19 — Clip of the Nebula companion video with Elizabeth, CuriosityStream sponsor read, sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: five whys · Principles · Ray Dalio

Also: People: Elizabeth · Tony Robbins · Zac Efron

Projects: Book Club

Works: Awaken the Giant Within

Organizations: Gymshark · Nebula

Concepts: extrinsic motivation · identified motivation · stacking the deck

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