The Triangle - Systematic Goal Settting

Have you ever stopped and thought “wait, wtf am I actually doing with my life?”

I have, and I’ll show you how I tackle the problem.

There are a couple of ways you can approach life:

1. You can go with the flow and see what happens, hope that you can “manifest your reality” through some pseudoscience
2. You can map out the path you want your life to take and use a systematic approach to reach your goals.

Today I’m going to speak about the rather creatively named “Triangle” which focuses on the second approach. This isn’t particularly complex or any kind of new innovation; it’s just simple planning and structure.

Note, that the Triangle can easily be applied to a business in isolation in addition to your own personal life.

Introducing The Triangle

The origins of the Triangle are unknown to me - I was browsing a random subreddit many years ago and someone posted a pic of the Triangle without any comments.

I looked at it and thought “huh - this is actually a great visualisation” so I downloaded the pic and decided to ponder further.

Here is a picture of the glorious Triangle:

There are generally two main types of thinkers:

• Big Picture Thinkers?- visionaries who are creative and strategic. An entrepreneur/visionary would be a good example
• Detailed Thinkers?- systematic, process-oriented and organised. A CFO or COO might fall under this bracket.

The benefit of the Triangle is that it accounts for both types of thinking - you focus on the big picture first and then work down and design a detailed plan to achieve your goals.

This provides both clarity and a systematic approach you can use to map out your future.

Start From The Top

The Triangle is best used as an overarching roadmap for your life, however, it is possible to apply it independently to different areas such as work, business, health etc.

Let’s work down the Triangle starting at the top and explain the different sections and how to apply them.

20+ Year Mission (Blue)

This is your moonshot. If you’re not familiar with the term moonshot, it can best be described as:

“An ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking idea or project undertaken without any expectation of near-term profitability or benefit”

The issue that many of us (including myself) face, is that we get caught up in the day-to-day routine of life and don’t take a step back and look at the big picture, and really challenge ourselves as to what we could be capable of accomplishing.

Some “big picture” examples of a 20+ year mission could be:

• Become a billionaire
• Solve climate change
• Colonise Mars
• Extend human lifespan
• Provide clean water and sanitation to humanity
• End world hunger

Reading the above list, you may think these are crazy goals, however, if you don’t set crazy goals, then you will have a close to 0% chance of accomplishing them (unless you get there through pure luck).

If you set a moonshot and have a framework to work towards accomplishing it, your chances will improve (even if only by a small margin) and you will be further towards your moonshot than you were before doing this exercise.

Your moonshot should link to your?raison d'être ?(the purpose of your existence).

What are you passionate about and what matters to you?

https://80000hours.org/ ?is an awesome website which highlights some of the key problems in the world.

If you’re passionate about solving world peace, then building an international weapons company probably shouldn’t be one of your moonshots.

Throughout the rest of this article, we’ll use the example of becoming a billionaire as our 20+ year moonshot.

10/5/3 Year Mission (Green)

Now that we’ve set our billionaire moonshot, we want to focus on the high-level goals/milestones that will be required to achieve this.

You don’t have to go into too much detail on these since these goals are far in the future, and you will need to constantly iterate and review your plans on an ongoing basis.

An example of working through the Triangle at this stage may look like this:

20 + Year Mission (moonshot)

• Become a billionaire

10 Year Vision

• Started 2nd/3rd company and focus on emerging fields like?agritech ?,?biotech ? ,?cleantech ?etc.
• Become a?venture capitalist/capital allocator ?- invest in other companies to grow my wealth
• Have a very strong network of high-net-worth individuals and investors
• Deal flow for potential investments and funding for future businesses I decide to launch

5 Year Vision

• Achieve complete financial security so I never have to work again
• Money = freedom to achieve my goals
• Have a diversified investment portfolio primarily focused on cash preservation.
• Allocate 1-5% of portfolio focused on “moonshot” bets in other companies
• Have built a multi-million ￡ company and secured an exit
• Be a recognised?“thought leader”
• Strong media & social presence to attract other like-minded individuals to me

3 Year Vision

• Own a business which is making at least ￡5 million per year in sales with a 33% net profit margin. Look at potential acquisitions/mergers
• Operate at a high level of personal efficiency. Optimise health, productivity, knowledge & learning

12/3/1 Month Goals (Yellow)

Next, we move to the not-too-distant future and focus on Annual, Quarterly and Monthly goals:

We break down our 3-year vision further, so let’s work down the tree using the previous example:

• 3 Year Vision
• Own a business which is making at least ￡5 million per year in sales with a 33% net profit margin. Look at potential acquisitions/mergers
• Operate at a high level of personal efficiency. Optimise health, productivity, knowledge & learning

The idea would be to incorporate both key points (business & personal efficiency) into this section; however, let’s just focus on the business aspect for brevity.

?? Year 1 - ￡100k Revenue

?? Annual

• Launch a company which becomes?default alive ?(it has enough cash flow to sustain itself) by achieving ￡100k recurring revenue by Q4 end.

?? Quarter 1

Start business and plan go-to-market strategy

??? Month 1

• Complete business plan & financial model

??? Month 2

• Incorporate company
• Start website build and write content
• Set up social media channels etc

??? Month 3

• Launch website
• Start ad spend (Google Ads etc.)
• Start cold outreach to prospective clients
• Increase personal & business social media presence

???Quarter 2

• Get first 10 clients to generate ￡25k in recurring revenue
• Test marketing channels and customer acquisition strategy

??? Month 1

• Acquire 3 clients
• Continue cold outreach

??? Month 2

• Win 3 new clients
• Refine paid ads strategy

??? Month 3

• Win 4 new clients
• Refine social media strategy

???Quarter 3

• Get next 15 clients to generate ￡37.5k additional recurring revenue
• Refine marketing strategy & systems

??? Month 1

• Win 4 new clients
• Increase paid ads spend

??? Month 2

• Win 5 new clients
• Increase social media activity

??? Month 3

• Win 6 new clients
• Outsource social media & ad management to free up time

???Quarter 4

• Hire first staff member
• Get another 15 clients and to generate ￡37.5k additional recurring revenue
• Focus on systems & onboarding (don’t want to grow too quickly here, build to scale)

??? Month 1

• Win 5 new clients
• Process map service delivery model & revise task management systems
• Hire & onboard staff member, set up payroll etc.

??? Month 2

• Win 5 new clients
• Update internal processes and knowledge base
• Pass over X% of existing client work to staff member to free up time

??? Month 3

• Win 5 new clients
• Focus on automation throughout the business

You get the idea, so I’ll do a shorter version for Years 2 & 3 which just focuses on quarters:

?? Year 2 - ￡1mm Revenue

?? Annual

• Achieve ￡1mm revenue by expanding operations and seeking investor funding

???Quarter 1

• Update the Triangle again
• Prepare investment deck, update financial model etc.
• Close ￡Xmm of funding

???Quarter 2

• Allocate ￡X to marketing spend
• Hire X more staff members (admin, sales, client support)

???Quarter 3

• Hire X more staff members
• Increase marketing spend by ￡X
• Forge new strategic partnerships

???Quarter 4

• Hire X more staff members
• Further increase marketing spend by ￡X
• Build additional revenue streams into the business model

?? Year 3 - ￡5mm Revenue

?? Annual

• Seek next 2 rounds of investment capital for ￡Xmm amount, aggressively scale out sales, operations and additional revenue stream

As I said, I think you get the idea by now, so I won’t go further with Year 3 ??

Weekly & Daily Goals (Pink)

This is where we get to the nitty gritty - the “boots on the ground” work.

How can we make sure we’re pushing the needle every day so we’re making small steps toward our ultimate goals:

The Weekly section covers your key targets for the week, while the daily section (as you may expect) covers what you need to do each day.

These would link directly to your monthly goals which were detailed in the previous section. An example:

??? Month 1

• Acquire first 3 clients and continue cold outreach

?? Weekly goals

• Add 70 target clients to outreach list
• Send 50 cold e-mails to prospective clients
• Write 2 blog posts
• Send 20 LinkedIn messages

?? Daily To-Dos

• Add 10 clients to outreach list (1hr)
• Send 7 personalised cold e-mails (2hr)
• Work on blog post (45mins)
• Send 3 personalised LinkedIn messages (45mins)
• Etc.

I’ve written a blog?here ?about how I manage these areas in relation to my own life. An extract:

My day is generally built around filling the time blocks that recurring tasks don't take up.

So, for example, in Recurring tasks, I've got things like:

Morning protein shake & start work every weekday 0645

Walk every weekday 1045-1115

Workout every Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri 1445-1615

Cooking & cleaning every day at 1715-1830

This gives me the following free time blocks:

0645-1045?- I try to allocate "deep work" or accounting/finance technical tasks in this block as I prefer to get them out of the way first.

1115-1445?- Free block to clear WIP. I'll work on anything that's required here

1615-1715?- Admin block. Dealing with any admin or replying to e-mails

1830+ -?I'll spend around 45mins in the evening updating ToDoist, Roam Research and plan the next day out hour-by-hour

Implementation

???20+ Year Mission

Figuring out your 20+ year mission is the hardest part of this exercise - once you’ve done that, you can work down the Triangle and populate the rest of the Triangle by conducting data and gathering more research.

Some prompts to help you with your 20+ year mission:

• What am I passionate about?
• What matters to me?
• What worries me about the world?
• What would I do if I could not fail?
• How do I choose to measure success/failure?
• What am I avoiding, or running from?
• What makes me unique?
• What excites me?

This is the most important part of the Triangle - don’t rush it.

Establishing your 20+ year mission may involve a lot of soul searching and take you 1 month, or it may take you 1 day.

???10/5/3 Year Vision

Establishing this section will likely require a bit of research before you can complete it.

Some questions to ask yourself:

• What historical figures have done similar? What path did they take?
• What positive and negative global factors could arise in the following areas over the next 10 years, and how can I leverage them?

The?PESTLE ? framework is a good standing point for this:

• Political - Global events
• Economic - access to capital, rise of decentralised finance
• Social - societal trends and shifting attitudes
• Technological - new technology
• Legal - regulation, taxes
• Environmental - climate change

Anything can happen in life over the next 10 years and factors outside of your control can put your plan into disarray, so plan as best as you can, but don’t overanalyse too much.

???Annual/Quarterly/Monthly

This will require a lot of work as you map out your key objectives for the year, I would recommend you take a?systems thinking ?approach to this area.

You definitely want to spend a lot of time and analysis on this area, and it will likely take up the bulk of your time when completing this exercise

???Weekly/Daily

Read my blog and use recurring tasks to manage this:

https://kevinsteel.substack.com/p/todoist?

Final Thoughts

My last post was titled?“Consistent Execution” ? but this is the first post I’ve done in around 6 months, so I need to follow my own advice and be more consistent ??

I’ll aim to get another post out around the end of September, but hope you enjoyed this one.

Adios!