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hey this is leo for actualized.org and i want to talk about new year's resolutions a little bit ah yes new year's resolution time what a wonderful and crazy time it is right what i want to say about news resolutions is this and i've already set one in fact i've set a whole list and i hope that you're setting more than one new year's resolution i hope you're setting a list of many many many i probably have oh at least 40 things that i'm working on this year but the one that i really decided to make my official new year's resolution was that i wanted to shoot one video every day in 2014. that's 365 videos quite a lot of videos quite a big commitment and i knew that it was ridiculously ambitious when i said it and i made that on purpose i actually said that you know there's no way in hell that i'm going to make that work but why don't i try to pull it off so i just said something ridiculously ambitious not even realistic and you know what it was interesting because up until yesterday last night i stayed with it and that's about two weeks i did about two weeks of shooting a new video every day in fact what i did is i had i had a notion that i would not be able to shoot a video literally every day because something would come up and one day i would not be able to shoot a video so then i kind of adjusted i was kind of adjusting it in the middle of the process i'm saying well if i just make one video per day so total 365 but that doesn't mean i'll shoot one exactly every day so maybe i'll shoot two today and then i'll skip tomorrow and then shoot one the other the next day so overall i would get that quantity of videos and that seemed a lot more realistic because frankly it's not very convenient to shoot a video every single day just the setup of putting on the microphone and getting the camera out getting the lighting doing the editing doing all this stuff getting myself into the mental frame that i need to be to shoot a good video that all takes like prep work to do that and it's much easier when i shoot one video and then just shoot one back to back back to back back to back sometimes i'll shoot four videos in a row because i'm kind of on a roll and that's like four days worth right but i said you know what there's still something important about a daily ritual a daily habit and so i said i will shoot a video every day and then i actually missed out yesterday and i didn't feel too bad about it because i knew that it was really ambitious and i'm still in the end many many views ahead i think i shot like 40 videos in 14 days so i've got like a month worth of videos already and now i'm back on track but what i really wanted to talk about is here is the idea of getting back on track because i'm sure that some of us create these new year's resolutions where it's like i'm gonna go to the gym uh five days a week for this year or i'm gonna you know i'm gonna eat clean and i'm not gonna eat any candy bars for uh for the next month or whatever your goal is you know whatever your resolution is you set something like that and then what happens is that you know you're human you trip you fail something comes up an emergency or you're just lazy whatever the excuses you slip one day and so you slip that one day and it's like well that's it we're done it's over you know i failed again failed my new year's resolution just like everyone said i would so cliche why do i even set them but that's the perfectionist mindset that you're coming from i want you to be coming from a different mindset i want you to be coming from the optimist and the really the optimalist mindset which is make the best of what you've got even if you screwed up just a few minutes ago right so it's kind of like this idea that like if you're in golf and you're playing 18 holes and i'm not a good golfer i don't really go golfing but i can still use analogy because it makes a lot of sense to me when you shoot a bad stroke right you make a bad stroke you get the ball lost somewhere you're totally in the woods or you're in a sand pit all of a sudden you get very depressed because it's like you were you're on a good streak but now the ball landed in a sand pit and that means you're going to lose a couple strokes for that what if you like get a double bogey what if you lose 10 strokes trying to get out of that sand pit you're going to be embarrassed it's going to be embarrassing to be horrible it's going to totally screw up these 18 holes and it's going to screw up the nice streak you've got going for the last few months right you get really kind of down on yourself but what you don't realize is the long-term perspective is that you're playing for the long run right i hope you are you're not just playing one round of golf you want to be a good golfer and you're not just uh you know doing a month of work you're going to be working on your business for the rest of your life or you're not just dieting for a month you're going to be keeping up with that diet for the rest of your life so when you're thinking long term it really doesn't matter too much that you slip up once and in fact what you got to do as a strategic thinker long-term thinker is you got to anticipate that there will be screw-ups poor strategy is creating a plan and then being inflexible with it and saying well this is the plan but you know what reality i'm not executing according to the plan so i failed no the plan has to be adaptive good strategy is adaptive strategy that means that you anticipate problems you try to plan for them but when they come up you have countermeasures and you have a way to move forward you don't stall if you stall and the mindsets that you have right now and the way of thinking that you have about success in any part of your life is causing you to stall that it's not really empowering is it it's not very good strategy the question is what do we put in place instead of it to get you to keep forward going forward and that's the idea basically that you're always making the best of what you've got no matter what happened even two seconds ago right you make the best of what you've got and this is easier said than done but still at least be aware of the fact that this is a mindset that you could be bringing to the table that probably most of you are not right now so with the golf example you know there's two ways it can go one is that you're playing a nice round of golf and then you hit a bad stroke and then you get all butt hurt about the fact that you hit a bad stroke and you start thinking about how it's messing up your record now your game is ruined etc the other mindset is to say okay i've played i've played some nice rounds here and now i've had a bad shot but everyone has bad shots even tiger woods has bad shots the trick is not to eliminate having bad shots the trick is to deal with the bad shots as best as humanly possible that's where most people trip up there's no perfection in life there's no perfection in creating your business there's no perfection in creating a diet plan or anything else that you're trying to do any kind of ritual that you're putting into place you're going to falter on it sometimes you should not try to on purpose but you should recognize that when you do the very best thing is to just get right back on get right back on track because actually it's not that bad and that's what happened with my new year's resolution yesterday is that you know i got a little bit butt hurt about the fact that yeah i missed a day sure i still shot a lot of videos but it would have been nice to just uh you know really been able to do 365 days straight or at least get a couple months in of just holding on to that resolution so i was a little bit butthurt about it i felt kind of depressed and then today i'm like well so what in the grand scheme of things i missed one day what if i just get back on track right now how bad would the damage be it would not be very bad at all missing one day of anything is not going to damage your routine and your results too much but i want to be very careful about saying that because some people then say well it's not one day is not that important and then you can use that as an excuse and that's where it gets a little dangerous that you can use this as an excuse your lower self can use this as an excuse to create a slippery slope kind of like oh i'm just going to miss one day at the gym you know it's not that bad not bad and then oh you know the next day yeah well if i missed one day i can miss two days two days kind of similar similar to one day and all of a sudden one day turns into two two days turn into three three days turn into a week and then you have a really hard time go to the gym because you missed a whole week and then you stop going totally you don't want to go down that slippery slope so what you got to do is you still got to keep your motivation you got you got to understand why you're doing it it's just that sometimes you will be able to just not be able to execute on something and at that point if you miss a day it's in the past right don't live in the past you got to cut that cut it off it's really tempting to want to say but if only i like went today everything would have been perfect and i wouldn't even have to deal with this and if only i didn't make that one bad stroke my game would have been a perfect game or if only i would have made that one video i would have been on track and i could be really proud of myself and i could say yeah i did i did exactly what i wanted to do and i'm this totally self-controlled person but that's the perfectionist perfectionistic mindset and i'm really trying to beat that out of myself because i realize that i can't get good performance in my business or anything else that i'm doing in life with that kind of attitude i need to change that around so instead what i decided to do is i said okay i broke my resolution fine but it doesn't really matter right that's not what's important what's important is that i got back on track right now and i'm shooting a video right now in fact i shot this my second video so great i'm back on track now i'm going to do the best i can right it's giving yourself that leeway because you know what honestly if you set a very ambitious goal for yourself like if you set a goal to create a business that's going to earn you 5 million or if you set a goal to lose 50 pounds or if you set a goal to shoot 365 videos or whatever whatever else something ambitious like that for yourself and you only execute to 90 percent you're still going to be very good you're still going to come out super super ahead you're still going to be thrilled it's much better to set an ambitious goal and get 90 of it and set a wimpy goal and get all hundred percent of it right because a lot of people would never set a five million dollar goal for their business they would say you know i only need a hundred thousand i'll just do a hundred thousand if i'm if my business could only do a hundred thousand i'll be happy i promise i'll be happy i won't ask for anything more let me just get a hundred thousand going and then what they do is they under deliver on that and let's say they get ninety percent of a hundred thousand that's ninety thousand still not bad but if they set a goal for 5 million and they only did 80 of it just compare the difference right compare the difference and sometimes what you do is you have to set a really ambitious goal and realize that it's just crazy ambitious and you're probably not gonna do it but you still kind of just like play a game with yourself and you say you know i just wonder how close i can get i'm not i'm not gonna get it but just how close can i get and give yourself that that margin of error that margin of error because in school when you're going to school and you're taking a college exam or something 90 is still an a it's still awesome it's still a good grade right you're not aiming at 100 on every test it's really really hard to do and if you were always expecting 100 on every single test you would drive yourself nuts and in fact i would argue that it's going to be counterproductive to you and that you're probably better off shooting for something like 90 or 95 rather than 100 because at 100 you're always going to be disappointed by never being able to get 100 but a 90 you can actually get that and being cool with a 90 is good and even being cool with like an 85 is good because then you can improve from that once you're solidly getting an 85 you can ask yourself how do i get an 86 and then you can crank it up to a 90 and then maybe you can crank it up to 95. much better to go gradually like that than just aiming for hundreds straight away that's what a lot of people do when they set goals is that they aim for those hundreds and then well they come out short very short and because they come out short their expectations are so out of whack with with what they're actually accomplishing that they get discouraged and they quit and when you quit that's when you really failed you only really fail when you quit things so be very cognitive of that and the danger of quitting and that the greatest danger in any project that you're undertaking any endeavor is quitting it's just not going through with it it's not following through so that's the biggest danger that you got to watch out for not so much the quality but the quitting part because the quality will handle itself as long as you put in the time all right so that's all i wanted to say about this make sure that you are still on track with your new year's resolution so even if right now you've already broken it it's never too late to get back on track right you're still gonna be better off if you get back on that diet right now even though you missed five days you're still gonna be better off if you hit the gym again even though you missed five days you're gonna be better off if you start working on that project even if you've been procrastinating for five days better start now because if you start now you still got a lot of time to make a lot of success out of it but if you're so discouraged because you missed five days you're going to quit and then you've truly failed all right this is leo signing off be sure to give me some comments i want to hear what you guys think about this topic and then of course please like this and share it i release this content for free so that you can spread it around so please help me do that and then finally go to actualize.org for more advanced personal development videos just like this one where we help supercharge your life get you amazing performance in whatever area of life that you want