🎯 30 Day Productivity Challenge — Day 3
👋 Hey Friends,
Welcome back to the 30-Day Productivity Challenge by the famous YouTuber, former doctor and now writer Ali Abdaal. In yesterday’s episode, we explored the concept of setting a brief overview of our goals. In other words: we have created a broad sense of what we want to accomplish. If you haven’t read this episode, check it out:
Goal Brainstorm 👉 click here
Today, we dive deeper into what we would like to be doing with our lives by writing down specific things of our imagined future.
🤨Why is that good?
If you created a broad sense of your ideal future yesterday, you have noticed that most of your goals were pretty vague and didn’t cover much detail. This was fine to create a broad sense of what you want in your life. However, this doesn’t help to create a direct plan to take action. As physics tells us: We can only change a system by taking some action.
Ali uses the great quote from Stephen Covey to illustrate this concept:
"If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step just gets us to the wrong place faster."
The quote tells us that no matter how great our goals are and no matter how great our system of productivity is, if we haven’t set a precise destination (a place for the latter to stand) we can climb the latter as high as we want. We will never get to the right place.
I struggle with this phenomenon as I only have pretty vague goals in my mind. These are set in some place in the future, but they aren’t structured. I have, for example, always wanted to get into a good university. My goal therefore looked something like this:
- ❌ Get into a good university somewhere sometime.
I rather should have looked into the future, reflected on my options and then rephrased:
- ✅ Get into a good university which has the following criteria:
- 🧪strong science/ physics programs
- 🏫 strong research programs and scientific ambition
- 🏅manageable for my high school grades
- 🏠 good housing options
- 👨👩👧👦 Allow a connection to family (either directly or via travel)
- 💪 gym facilities
- 💵 funding programme
- 🌍 possibility for exchange programs to either USA, England, Australia, Canada, Japan…
From these more precise ideas of what the university should look like, I was able to sort out a few choices:
- 🌃 Humboldt University, Berlin
- 🧑🎓University Göttingen
- 🍺 Technical University Munich (TUM)
- …
Once I have found my choices, I can then therefore plan a life in how I want it in a couple of years. This is then precise goal setting. But how and why should you plan for the future?
📝 How do we plan our future?
Ali goes over the principles to plan once future really well, so, as said before, I highly recommend joining the 30-Day Productivity Challenge. But let's still look at how we can improve our mindset about setting goals, as I give you personal examples.
When setting goals, we want to imagine ourselves in the future to see and comprehend what our future life and problems will look like. Furthermore, if we have an idea in our mind of how our future will be, it is way more likely that it will turn out that way. As Ali puts it:
When you write down the specific things you want in life, it drops a pin in your mind—a psychological North Star that subtly guides your actions in the direction of your goals.
What her recommends for us is that we look 10 yearsinto the future and describe how we want our life to look then. The more detailed you go here, the better. You can write about your career, friends, family and financial situation.
I, personally, struggled with this a lot because I am in a position where it is pretty tough for me to imagine a certain future. I am currently 17 years old and pretty depended on my mother. This means that I consider myself to be unclear in my decisions because I always have things influencing me that aren’t in my control.
What I have learned from this is a pretty important lesson:
No matter in which situation you are in, you are in control of your life and thoughts, nobody else.
Although I am depended on my family, I certainly will not be depended on them any more in 10 years. This means that only I can design my future how I want it to be, and nobody else.
🏫 My personal future
I have done this excise of imagining myself in the future already a little more privately, but I will give you a quick summary for those who are interested. No matter what, I encourage you to design your own personal future by looking into Alis further tips.
🧑🎓 Career
In ten years from now, I would love to have finished my graduate degree in physics and be on the way on either applying or working as an PhD-Student or working as a researcher at a company. Therefore, I have to focus myself on my current studies to be able both personally and from the perspective of grades to study physics. That is my dream and my goal.
💶 Financial Status
I want to be financially independent of my family either through the PhD Job, working as a researcher or through social media and online writing. I am going to plan and construct my 1,000 words a day challenge in such a way that I can earn money from it. This can be through writing ebooks or advertisement.
❤️ Personal Relations
I will work on my romantic relationship in such a way that I can still be together with my girlfriend in 10 years. We hopefully will plan a life together and, based on our financial situation, think about marriage and kids.
I want to meet with friends at least on a weekly basis, and I wish to hold my relationship with my mother and brother and strengthen my relationship with my grandparents and father.
Finally, I wish to say that when you do this exercise, you want to focus on clarity and goals that can be separated into monthly achievements!
If you have enjoyed this episode of FRIDAYS FINDINGS and you don't want to miss out on any future episodes consider subscribing for FREE.
Thanks again and I'll see you soon.
Victor (@observethecosmos)
🎟 Want to advertise on Fridays Findings? → Send an E-Mail
Check out some of my social media pages to learn more about math, science and astronomy:
🎬:Youtube