PowerGoals / Chapter 7

How to Set and Achieve Goals / That Turn Your Dreams into Reality.

by Dr. Hannes Dreyer (Ph.D.) with Elzet Blaauw.

Chapter 7: Perfect Days

Now that you know about the ten environments of you and how to use them to identify where you are, you need to know how to translate that into action. It is no use knowing something is bad and that you need to change it but not do it. For most things in life, it is not enough to do something once either. You must do it over and over again.

You can’t view one property and the next day have a property portfolio that is worth millions. You can’t exercise for one day and have six-pack abs the next day. You need to keep on doing those things, stack other actions on top of those things, and keep on doing those until you get to your goal.

That is what this chapter is about. Once you know where you are, you need to take certain steps to move forward. This chapter shows you a step-by-step process of how to do the right behaviors and turn them into habits. It is about action and accountability. This chapter is about the nitty-gritty stuff that you need to do every day.

Some of you are doers. You are getting excited now. You love to-do lists. You love action. You can’t wait to start with this chapter. You probably got started even before you got to this chapter. That is great, but I want to remind you that behaviors and habits are only one of the five levels of transformation. Doers can get lost in doing a lot, but doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. You end up doing a lot but never getting to your PowerGoal?. So don’t neglect any of the other steps because you are only doing.

There are some of you who are dreamers. You are the thinkers, the reflectors and some of you are perfectionists too. You do not want to read this chapter. To-do lists do not work for you. You have maybe beaten yourself up in the past because you know you should be doing all of these things, but you get overwhelmed.

You freeze. You get stuck in analysis paralysis. Do not worry. This book is not about productivity or efficiency. It is not about getting more and more done. It is about getting results. Doing nothing will never get you results. Getting results is about doing the right things, and only the right things. And you know best what those things are. You know it already – you don’t even have to spend a lot of time to figure it out.

I make it very simple for anyone to succeed. As I like to say, this is your game, so set it up so that you can win. It starts with the smallest of victories every day, and before you know it, you cannot believe what you are doing. Let me show you how you can make every day a perfect day, right until you reach your PowerGoal?.

The story behind perfect days.

I came up with the idea of having perfect days when I was an insurance salesman in the 1980s. Being an insurance salesman at that time was one of the easiest jobs you could start doing. You did not need any qualifications, and you did not need any experience. The snag was that you did not earn a salary either. You only earned commission on what you sold.

At that time in my life, I had tried and failed at many other jobs. But I had had an epiphany when I read Og Mandino’s little book. I was not going to fail again. I was also motivated by the fact that if I did not sell, I would not make any money. So I applied myself to figuring out what I needed to do to succeed at this game.

Even though it was very easy to become an insurance salesman at the time, it was very hard to become a good one. Very few people made a lot of money, and very few lasted more than a few years in the profession. I had many examples of failures, but not so many successes.

One reason it is easy to fail as an insurance salesman is because you can be terribly busy but not have any results to show for it. I guess it is like that with most things in life, but the problem with being an insurance salesman is if you do not have results, you do not get money. I wanted the money, so I needed the results. To do that, I needed to figure out what gave me results and what did not.

I discovered that it is very simple. I need to get leads, that is, contacts of people who might be interested in buying insurance. Then I needed to contact those leads to make appointments with them, turning them into prospects. I needed to see those prospects and pitch my products to them. If they bought my products, I needed to make sure that their paperwork got done and submitted.

In essence, those were the important things I needed to do to get sales. I needed to get all of those steps done. I could not only see prospects all day because then I would run out of them. I could not only get leads and never make appointments because then I would not sell.

It was very simple, as you can see. The more I could do of all of those activities, the more products I sold. Even if one person did not buy my product, if I went to see another ten prospects, my chances of a sale increased.

My problem was that I did not like to use a telephone. I liked talking to people in person, but I did not like to pick up the telephone to speak to them. I knew it was not a good use of my time or money to drive to people’s homes to ask them for appointments. I needed to pick up the telephone to make appointments. But I always found an excuse not to do it. I realized I needed to make a plan. So I decided to play a little game with myself.

Design your own game.

I made up a game that I played at work every day that motivated me to do enough of the right things to get to my results. It started with the telephone calls that I hated to make. I worked out a points system where I assigned a certain number of points for each activity that I had to do. If I reached, for example, ten or twenty points for the day, it was a successful day, what I called a perfect day.

Most people would think that I would need to do all of the things – generate leads, make appointments, have meetings, make sales and do the paperwork – to have a successful day.

Others, especially salespeople, think that they need to make a sale to have a perfect day. They do not see the days on which they do paperwork or generate leads as successful days.

I realized that those ideas are wrong. As long as I do enough of all of those activities consistently, I would have great success.

I set up the game with my weaknesses in mind. Remember, I did not like to use the telephone. I gave a disproportionate amount of points to myself if I made telephone calls. For example, I always got discouraged if I finally motivated myself to make a call, and the person did not answer. So I decided I would give myself one point for making a call, even if no one answered. If I made a call and gave my pitch, I got two points, one for making the call and one for making the pitch. If I made a call and it ended in an appointment, I got three points, one for making the call, one for the pitch, and one for the appointment. I was incentivizing myself to get to the outcome that I wanted, but I also made it possible to have success if I did not get that outcome.

Sure, I could improve my pitch to get more appointments, but sometimes the person simply was not interested. I did not have control over that person’s response, only over myself. If I happened to get ten people in a row who were dead set against meeting with an insurance salesman, I would get discouraged.

I found out that my feelings of confidence and discouragement had huge effects on my results. I realized that I had to design my game so that I do not get discouraged. If, for example, I needed ten points to have a perfect day, I could make ten phone calls and, even if no one answered, I would have a successful day. Designing my game like that kept me motivated. It kept me in the habit of taking action, even if it was only small actions. All those actions over time culminated into big results. I built up confidence, and I built up momentum.

Play to win.

I always tell my students that it is their game and that they must play to win.

To play to win, however, you must know that you can win. It is good to have a big, audacious goal to inspire you, but you can stretch yourself to the point of breaking. That is why your PowerGoal? should be the big, audacious goal that inspires you, but, daily, you need to know that you can succeed every single day.

I see many people make this mistake. They set so-called realistic goals of what they want to achieve in a year or five years or ten years, but they place impossible demands on themselves in terms of what they want to do every day and every week. Placing unrealistic or unsustainable demands on yourself daily is a sure way to get to failure. If you do not get to everything on your to-do list each day or even on most days, you will start thinking of yourself as someone who does not get things done and who does not reach their goals. You will become demotivated. You will lose momentum. You will lose motivation, and your dream will fizzle away because of your feeling that you can never reach it.

Instead, do the opposite. At first, decide on the smallest, easiest, least amount of things that you can do every day that will move you towards your PowerGoal?. That is why I ask myself what the most important thing that I can do today to reach my PowerGoal? is. Even if I only did that one thing, it would be a successful day. Start with that one thing and build up from there. As your confidence grows, you can add more to the list. What was hard before has now become easy, so you add something else to the list. What was easy has now become a habit.

For example, not eating sugar or exercising are things that I have been doing so long that they are habits. I do them almost without thinking like most people brush their teeth. They are part of my daily routine. But for you, doing only one of those things might be major. So start with only one, and break it into the smallest, easiest task possible. If you were playing my game of points, perhaps you would give yourself a point for a whole day of not buying anything with sugar in it. Or maybe you would get a point for taking the stairs instead of the elevator. As you gain confidence and success, you ramp it up.

The important thing is to move forward every day in whatever way makes sense for you and your PowerGoal?.

Track yourself.

It is very important to do things and to keep on moving, but you want to make sure that you move in the right direction. I, therefore, started tracking myself. I tracked two things – the actions I took and the results I got.

I broke the actions that I had to take down into the smallest possible components, as I explained to you. I got points for doing them, so I needed to keep a record of what I did. I kept a simple log of all the things I had to do and the days of each week, and I would tick off or write in how many I did.

These days, I use a simple Excel spreadsheet. Some people like to use pen and paper, for example, in their journals. Do what is easiest for you. Do not make it overcomplicated. But whatever you do, track what you do.

The other thing that I realized I need to track is the result. For me in that context, it was the number of sales and the value of those sales. By tracking both input and results, I could start picking up trends. For example, I saw that there were certain ratios that I had to adhere to. For example, every hundred leads would generally turn into ten prospects resulting in one sale. Therefore, increasing my leads and prospects increased my sales.

But I also asked myself how I could increase those ratios. I would try different things and see what their results are. With half of my leads, I would use one type of pitch to get an appointment, and with the other, I would use another type of pitch. Tracking my input and results allowed me to finetune my process to get better results. Tracking kept me accountable, kept me moving in the right direction, and enabled me to improve my process to get better results faster.

I was doing all of these things, but I was taking time to observe myself too. Many times people get so busy doing many things that they do not allow themselves time to observe whether their actions are moving them in the right direction. Tracking yourself forces you to make time to evaluate whether you are doing the right things in the right quantities to move towards your goal.

But, Hannes, you might say, it is easy to track sales. My goal is not so easy to measure.

Yes, certain things are easier to measure than others, like sales and financial goals. In some cases, you might be able to convert your other goal into a financial goal. However, in most, if not all cases, it is possible to find some metric which gives you an accurate enough indication of how you are progressing towards your goal. And it is always possible to break down what is required to get there into daily actions.

For example, many people want to lose weight. They exercise and eat healthily. They are doing things, but very few people track what they are doing. I like to wear a smartwatch so that I have a record of how long I kept my heart rate above a certain level. Using this method, I now know if I keep my heart rate on average above 130 beats per minute for more than 30 minutes a day, I get the results I want.

Research has made it clear that calories consumed have a much bigger impact on weight loss than how much exercise you do. Diet accounts for roughly 80% of weight loss and exercises only for 20%. Yet very few people who want to lose weight keep a food log to track their intake. If you want to lose weight, but your exercise and healthy eating are not getting you the results you want, the best way to get better results is to follow the same type of tracking system I used as an insurance salesman.

Here is another example: many people want to improve their relationships. For example, let us say you want to improve your marriage. It is very difficult to measure, right? Well, actually, some excellent research has been done that defines what a happy marriage is and what actions have the highest likelihood of ensuring that your marriage is happy. Dr. John Gottman’s extensive research led to six predictors of divorce with a 93.6% accuracy rate. The biggest predictor of divorce was found to be contempt for your partner. He also found an antidote – showing fondness and admiration. If you know that contempt has snuck into your marriage, you can measure the number of acts of fondness and admiration you do a day to improve it.

One of my students wanted to track the state of her marriage. They were happily married, but they were going through a lot of change which put pressure on their marriage. Her PowerGoal? was very closely tied to her marriage, so she knew she had to measure the state of her marriage and how her actions influenced it. At the end of every day, she gave her marriage a rating out of ten. It was a subjective rating, but it was the right metric for her because the state of your marriage is tied to how you feel about it. She identified various things she could do or not do that would improve it. One of the things she found had a positive impact on her marriage was to prioritise spending some time by herself journaling. Reflecting on her own life gave her perspective and made her experience her marriage more positively. Another thing that had a positive impact was doing a gratitude exercise with her husband before bed.

One of my favorite mottos is Velle est posse, which is Latin for to be willing is to be able. We know this saying as to where there’s a will, there’s a way. If you have a will to achieve your PowerGoal?, you will find a way. Tracking yourself makes finding the way much quicker and easier. It allows you to eliminate the things which are not moving your forward and to focus on the ones that are. If you have a will to achieve your PowerGoal?, whatever it may be, you can find a way to track it too.

Enjoying success.

It is important to have success, and it is important to celebrate success.

As I built momentum with my game as an insurance salesman, I started seeing results. I did not dread picking up the phone as much anymore. At least I got a point for it. I got more and more leads, appointments, and sales. It felt good. Success feels good.

As you experience success, you can and should raise the standard for yourself. I started with having to get ten points a day, but later I raised it to fifteen and later to twenty points.

You also need to know when to stop chasing success and when to enjoy it. As I hit my targets day in and day out, there were weeks when I achieved my entire target for the week well before Friday. It made me wonder – could I achieve the same results that others do in five days in four days a week or less? At the time, I was achieving way more than most other insurance salesmen do. I wanted to raise the bar for myself, but not in terms of outcome, in terms of time.

As I improved, I found it was completely possible. If I did what I knew I could do every day, I could achieve my weekly targets by Thursday. I designed my own game, I played it to win, and I enjoyed the success of my labor. From then on, I only worked four days a week. I had a whole extra day each week to spend on whatever I wanted. I could spend more time with my family. I could work on improving myself. I could start new businesses. I could do whatever I wanted to.

It is very important to define what success is for you. Yes, success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal, but what is that goal for you? If you are chasing financial freedom but what you actually want is time freedom, maybe you can have that time freedom with much less money than you think. Many property investors are proud of the size of their portfolios. It is so many millions, they will tell you proudly. I do not teach my property students to build big portfolios. I teach them how to build a portfolio that will give them financial freedom. The number is different for every person. The time it will take them to get it is different for each person. What is important is that you know what your number is, or what the goal is that defines success for you.

In 1995, I was at the top of my game. I was at the Top Of The Table for the financial industry globally. I could have kept it ongoing. I could have pushed myself to pursue the next thing. But I knew that I had reached my goal. I could use my surplus for that year and the profit from selling some of my properties to pay off the rest of my portfolio to become financially free. I was 37 years old. I did it, and it was one of the best things I have ever done.

My children were still young at that stage. I had the prime of my life ahead of me. I could spend those precious years with my children, traveling the world. Seven years later, I could start the first of a long line of businesses where I teach others what I did.

It is important to play the game, but it is even more important to know when you have won.

Stacking up success cycles.

I have shown you many tools already that you can use to keep you doing the right things to get to your PowerGoal?. But there is one more which will give you the framework in which to slot all the rest. It is using 91-day cycles. I have already mentioned the 91 Perfect Day Challenge briefly. It is a course that I developed for my students, but my team and I also follow it daily.

The principle behind the 91 Perfect Day Challenge is based on what I have been sharing in this chapter. You break up your PowerGoal? into the smallest daily actions, and you ensure that you do them, consistently, for 91 days. You end up with perfect days, perfect weeks, and perfect months until you get to 91 consecutive perfect days to complete the challenge.

Why 91 days? you may wonder.

A PowerGoal? usually takes three to five years to achieve. Some PowerGoals? maybe a year, but if it is truly a 10/10 for difficulty, it will not be something that you achieve overnight. But three to five years are too far into the future to work with today. You need to break that PowerGoal? into chunks that you can handle. You need to have something tangible and measurable to work towards now. Your PowerGoal? is your dream come true, and it is very inspiring. But most people feel overwhelmed when they think about how to reach it. In fact, if it is truly a PowerGoal?, you should feel overwhelmed. It should be bigger than you.

But a feeling of overwhelm does not get you moving. It paralyzes you. So after you set your PowerGoal? and reverse-engineered the five levels of transformation, you come right back to the here and now – level one. What is the most important thing you can do right now to reach your PowerGoal??

As helpful as that question is, if you measure your progress against your PowerGoal?, it will feel as if you are not making any progress, even though you might be making incredible progress compared to where you were yesterday. For this reason, it is helpful to work towards your PowerGoal? using shorter timeframes. I have found 91-day cycles to be the best. It is long enough for you to achieve substantial results. It is also long enough for you to learn a new skill or two and cement them into habits. But a 91-day cycle is not so long that it allows you to become complacent. A year is too long. Six months also give you too much rope. You need to be working on a tight timeframe to stay focused and motivated. Completing four rounds of 91 days gives you 364 days.

With one day to spare for that year (two if it is a leap year.) It keeps you focused, round after round, until you reach your PowerGoal?.

It also forces you to switch focus often enough. During one 91-day cycle, you might focus on building your business prototype and making your first sales. In the next 91-day cycle, you focus on scaling that business through marketing. Instead of trying to focus on everything at the same time, you focus on one important thing, get it done, and move to the next thing.

You do not need to plan all your 91-day cycles for the year at one go. You do not even need to plan your days or your weeks ahead of time. As you take action, new things come to your attention. You can focus on the right thing for that moment by taking it day by day. Your focus for your next 91-day cycle is probably going to be very different than what you thought it was going to be at the start of your current 91-day cycle.

Breaking it up into smaller, manageable chunks allows you to achieve success in the here in now while staying aligned with your PowerGoal?. Day by day and cycle by cycle, you are stacking up your success to get there.

Trigger success.

Success breeds success, so when it comes to your actions and behaviors, you want to trigger and sustain patterns of success.

One trick that I have is to change up the way I do some of my regular activities to remind me of my goals. I am right-handed, but I shave and brush my teeth with my left hand. Because I have to pay attention to doing those things with my left hand, I need to do those activities consciously. When I do them consciously, I remind myself of my goals. It reinforces the meaning that I attach to it. You can build such triggers into your own life. Set up reminders and reinforcements of your goal and the person you are becoming in as many places and as often as possible. One of my students set five alarms on his phone during the day to remind him of the person he is becoming.

How you start your day is especially important. For many years, I have been waking up at around 3 am. It is the best part of my day. I meditate, I exercise, I do my most important and creative work. By the time I take Tanja her coffee at 8 am, I usually already have completed my perfect day. Maybe 3 am is not the best time for you to rise, but many people find benefit in dedicating the first part of their day to what is most important. It triggers success for the rest of their day.

I have been talking about success a lot, and in case you might get the wrong impression, I want to remind you of the definition of success. It is the progressive realization of a worthy goal. Many people frame an unwanted outcome as a failure. It is not. I do not even use the word failure to refer to it. I call it negative feedback. If you do something and you get the outcome you expected, it is positive feedback. If you do not get the outcome you expected, it is negative feedback. It is not about good or bad. It just is.

Negative feedback is often much more useful than positive feedback. Negative feedback allows you to learn and grow. The changes that you make after negative feedback can give you much greater results than what you would have had if you got the outcome you expected. Be careful of defining negative feedback as a failure. Sure, the scale might show that you weigh a bit heavier instead of weighing lighter, but that does not mean failure – as long as you learn from it, adjust your actions and keep ongoing. Such negative feedback is what will lead you to your goal if you allow it to. It is part of the progressive realization of your worthy goal, so it is part of success.

Workbook Q7.1: Create your own 91 Perfect Day Challenge.

Do the exercises in the PowerGoal? Workbook.

SECTION 3:

THE SCIENCE BEHIND GOALS.

A note about the PowerGoal? Workbook:

This section discusses a large amount of information that informs all the practical steps we have covered so far. All of it is actionable, but not necessarily in a step-by-step way like the workbook has prompted you to do so far.

For the next three chapters, I suggest that you keep your workbook open and write down any insights you might have. As you have learned to do, immediately ask yourself how you can action that insight – phrase it as an action, give it a deadline and mark it off when you are done.

At the end of each chapter or part of a chapter, there will be prompts to remind you to reflect in your workbook. However, please do not wait for those prompts.

For more information on the Wealth Creators method;