What You Should Do When You Don’t Know What to Do

To take your life to the next level, there are countless options in front of you. Should you read this book? Study this language? Start this side project? Try a new marketing tactic? Start a blog? Start a YouTube channel?

And it also creates the question: Which one of these should you do first?

While the specific answers depend on your situation, I’ve found a simple framework to make better decisions and avoid getting stuck. It’s a 3-step approach to help you get clarity on your next steps so you won’t feel overwhelmed and can make more progress in your life. Here’s how:

1. Create Your Specific Goals

Many people lack specific goals. When you ask them what they want in life, they’ll shrug their shoulders and say, “Make more money,” “lose weight,” “travel,” etc., but it’s too vague and ambiguous.

The problem is it’s impossible to be decisive if you have no idea what you want to achieve. After all, it doesn’t matter what you decide if you don’t care where you’re going, which makes it harder to choose in the first place.

On the other hand, some people have way too many goals. They want to accomplish many things, but because they’re going in countless directions, they can’t make progress on any one thing.

Creating your goals is always Step Number One because they shape your process and help you focus. For example, becoming a doctor versus a basketball player leads you down two completely different paths in life.

Pick a few life goals you want to achieve and make them specific. Instead of “make more money,” you can say “create a freelance business making $1,000/mo,” “buy a rental property,” “get a 10% raise at work,” etc. With that kind of specificity, you can work backward and find out what you need to do to achieve it.

2. Say “No” To Everything Else

Having a few specific goals is powerful because it guides you on what to do and, more importantly, what not to do.

Noah Kagan, the serial entrepreneur and founder of Sumo, picks one single goal for his business, focuses on it, and avoids the rest. Years ago, he wanted to get “1 billion downloads” for SumoMe—so whenever there was any decision, opportunity, or question, he asked, “Will it help us get to our goal?”

“If it did not help that goal, I said no… And it makes it so simple… someone asked me, like, “Hey, well, with this product, do you think you can do more of it?” I’m like, “Well does it help towards our goal?” “No.”

I got a question two weeks ago. “Hey, your iPhone app. Hey, this is not working. Do you think you could fix it?”…I’m like, “Does it help SumoMe grow?” “Nope.” “We don’t do it.”

It’s a powerful framework that gives you clarity and creates your strategy: Any question you have in your life, business, relationships, and more, you can simply ask, “Does it help me reach my goals?” If “yes,” you’ll consider it; if “no,” you don’t.

There are always countless tactics right in front of you. But as Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

3. Pick the Highest-Leverage Actions

After you set your goals and say “no” to everything else, there can still be a ton of confusion about what you should do next.

For example, if you want to grow your email list from 50 to 50,000 subscribers, there are countless options and possibilities just to do that one thing. So how do you decide between what works and what doesn’t? What should you do first?

I always ask a simple question to help me set my priorities:

“What will move the needle the most?”

Or, put another way:

“What will create the highest impact?”

Then, do that first.

Take your various options and rank them in order based on what you think will have the biggest impact. (I say “think” because you won’t know the actual results until you get started.) How likely are you to get more subscribers? How much time do you have to spend to do it?

Then, start at the top of your list and knock them out, one by one. Test each option for a few weeks, track the results, and see how you did. If you got great results, keep doing it; if not, move on to the next thing.

This is all about targeting the highest leverage things you can do with your time like in the 80/20 Rule: Which 20% will get you 80% of the way there? Do that first. Only after you crush that 20% and get great results should you shift your focus to the remaining 80%.

The problem is people often focus on the most insignificant things that make them feel like they’re working, but don’t create real results. For example, to get 50,000 subscribers, they’ll post on social media several times a day or start a podcast when they only have 50 subscribers.

But those are not “high impact” things to reach their ultimate goal (based on their current level). They’ll waste hours on them and maybe get a handful of subscribers while that same effort could be spent on a guest post for a popular blog that gets 500 subscribers.

Now, if you’re still unsure about which activities to focus on, you can also ask yourself, “What will get you to your goals 2x or 3x faster?” This question can further help you find the best next steps instead of inconsequential ones.

You can’t do everything. There’s an opportunity cost to every decision. And rather than having a scattershot approach where you go in a hundred different directions, it’s far more impactful to laser in on one thing at a time.

Be selective of what you focus your attention on because your attention is all you have.

Learn how to say “no.” Learn how to prioritize and focus on the few things that actually matter.

Start asking what will really move the needle in your life and bring you the biggest results.

Once you find your answers, get to work and make it happen.