It’s a shame he picked such magnificently boring ones but leading self-improvement guru of the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin, was on to something.
Instead of aiming for a 10/10 beach bod, he didn’t even try promising himself to work out. Ok bad example.
Here: rather than vowing to be a sincere person, he told himself “Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.”
Never mind the goody two shoes, note the setup: he focused on input, rather than outcomes. Virtues he called them, 13 of them (how about that last one).
—The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
B minus on specificity, but at least they’re actionable. The worst kind of goal is outside your control.
‘Cause our love can’t always go requited. The market won’t always see the value we believe to provide. And our biology doesn’t necessarily always let our booty be ready for spring break.
But we can always initiate a date. Take one picture a day. Or do two squats first thing in the morning.
Aight cue the rage quit. This is exactly what you do not want to hear. You wanna hear you can achieve your wildest desires within 2 months and proceed to sail off into the sunset.
You most certainly probably can. But this is exactly where most people go wrong: we spend more energy picking a destination that is as lofty as it is arbitrary, than creating the vehicle that will take us there. And come Christmas we wonder where our milli is.
Don’t be like most people. It doesn’t work, been doing that shit since ’96.
You are better off thinking about a specific doable way to a general direction than an undefined way to a specific, possibly undoable place.
The Beatles didn’t set out to become the biggest boyband on the planet. They set out to write songs. They wrote so many, they gave leftovers to other groups. That’s how the Stones got their first hit.
It goes back to that age-old cliché: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Just because it makes you throw up in your mouth, doesn’t make it any less true.
Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg got in shape by first committing to one push-up before bed. "No matter how late you're running, no matter what's going on in the world, you can't argue against doing one push-up. Come on. There's no excuse. I often find I just need to get over that initial hump with something that's almost embarrassingly small as a goal, and then that can become a habit.”
Tempting as it is to set outcome dependent goals, setting input dependent goals is the more productive way to go about it.
Topping the charts sounds great on paper. But where do you go from there? Releasing one track a month on the other hand - improving, in front of an audience - will get you on the right path. And it’s ridiculously possible to achieve. As is noting down just one lyric each day. Could just provide the missing piece of the puzzle called your breakthrough hip-hop tape.
It’s not thinking small, it’s dreaming big gone practical. You’ll make more progress doing a little bit consistently than doing the ambitious consistently (‘cause you’ll quit). Ambition’s Paradox some rando called it once. Better to dial up over time than to tone down and feel a failure.
You spend all of 2023 trying to craft the perfect piece, and end up producing exactly nothing. While any kind of rhythm could’ve worked wonders — good, bad or ugly. Garbage In, Garbage Out is always better than Nothing In, Nothing Out. Inertia is decay.
“In truth, I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order; and now I am grown old, and my memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it. But, on the whole, tho' I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.” — Benjamin Franklin
Maybe Benji didn't age well in more than one regard. But regardless, you can take it from here. Translate those resolutions of yours into extremely doable habits. Productive is an app for that. Free too. And before that spurs you into the equipment trap, don’t break out the Benjamins just yet. Odds are you can start right now - without Moleskine or Moog.
When in doubt, do as Franklin wished: imitate Jesus and Socrates. Ended great for them.