Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. And today I want to talk with you about New Year's resolutions, goal setting.

I want to talk with you about how awesome it is to set goals. I want to encourage you to establish New Year's resolutions. And I want to give you some thoughts and ideas that will help you to be more accomplished and effective at doing that for yourself. One thing I've noticed throughout my lifetime is that it's generally considered to be quite hip to bash New Year's resolutions.

I don't know why that is. I could come up with some reasons why I think that is, but I do not think that New Year's resolutions should be derided or mocked in any way. New Year's resolutions are fantastic. They are wonderful. The New Year is a fantastic time to sit down and consider your life and imagine the future.

It's just such a beautiful marker in the sand for you to consider where you're going and how you want to get there. I genuinely believe that New Year's resolutions and New Year goal setting is awesome. And I am convinced that the only people who will ever criticize you for setting goals or for making New Year's resolutions are losers.

Losers are the only people who criticize you for trying to better yourself because losers and leeches around you want to pull you down. And if you are going to embark upon a program of self-improvement, of lifestyle enhancement, of going after a bigger and better life, you better get used to the fact that most people around you don't actually want to see you succeed because most people live in a world filled with envy and greed and they want what other people have and they're not willing to be happy for other people and then put in their own work.

They want to take from other people. And unfortunately, it seems to me that we live in an era in which this envy is rewarded on many, many levels. So recognize that if you set out on a program of New Year's resolutions and self-improvement, get used to the idea of other people trying to tear you down.

But the people who have what you want, the people who have accomplished what you want to accomplish, I don't think those people are ever going to pull you down. Winners will congratulate you. Winners will encourage you. And winners will share their strategies with you. For example, just imagine that you are a 10-year-old boy and you have a dream of someday playing in the NBA.

A classic dream for a young 10-year-old boy. Well, if you go to the circle around you, which is probably not in any way filled with NBA players, and you share that dream with lots of people, they may indulge you, but they will very quickly start talking to you about practicality and setting practical goals.

And some people will start to tear you down. But if you're sitting in a room full of NBA players and you start sharing your dream of someday playing in the NBA, you're not going to hear a negative word from any NBA player. You're not going to hear anybody say, "It can't be done." You're going to hear each and every one of them encourage you and then start to share with you strategies of what you can do now at the age of 10 so that at the age of 20 you are potentially prepared to play in the NBA.

A lot of life works like this. You want to be very careful who you share your goals with. You want to be very careful who you share your resolutions with. It's fine to share them with nobody at all. But if you do share your goals or if you do share your resolutions, recognize that the only people who are going to criticize you for establishing resolutions for yourself or goals for yourself are losers who want to pull you down.

So if you are concerned about setting goals for the year or setting resolutions for the year, if you're thinking that, "Oh, maybe it's not hip for me to set goals for myself or maybe it's not hip for me to establish New Year's resolutions," abandon that thinking. Winners are going to congratulate you.

They're going to encourage you. And then they're going to share the strategies that have been effective for them. They're going to share their fine-tuning strategies to help you. And that's my goal in today's podcast episode is to share some of the strategies that I think that have been effective for me and some ideas that I hope will help you.

But this isn't a one-stop shop. Goal setting is a skill. It's a skill that has to be developed. And every step along that path, every experience that you have, every win and every loss, every positive experience, every negative experience, every success and every failure, this is all data that becomes part of skill development.

There's not a person out there who has been successful from the start. There's not a person out there who has been able to keep every New Year's resolution that he's ever set. It doesn't exist. So in this episode, I'm going to share with you some detailed strategies and ideas to help you effectively set goals so that you can accomplish all of the things that you set out for yourself in this coming new year in 2023.

I want your resolutions to be exciting and motivating, and I want you to exceed in them. Now for a limited time at Delamo Motorsports, get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3. Featuring the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally, you're not going to find a better deal on front row seats to a championship winner.

Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Delamo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours. Offer in soon. See dealer for details. To begin with, I want to establish a metaphor. We're going to use a couple of metaphors in this discussion. And I believe that metaphors are very, very useful for us in a subject like this, because you're going to have to fill in all of the specifics of your personal goals.

And to accomplish your personal goals, you're going to need quite a lot of specific knowledge. I can't talk generally about your specific goals, but what I can do is I can share the helpful metaphors that we can all relate to. And my favorite metaphor to use when talking about goal setting is to compare goal setting to travel.

We can all understand the concept of travel. We have all traveled to some extent and we can understand it. And it's a perfect metaphor to use with goal setting. To begin with, setting a goal. What is a goal? I think of a goal as a dream destination, a place that you want to go.

It's a destination. So let's say that we're going to imagine the places that you're going to travel this year. You start by thinking about your dream destinations. I want you to pause for a moment and think about this. If you were going to list three destinations that you would like to travel to this year, what would they be?

Make a list of those destinations, three of them. What are your three dream destinations? Now, keep that list of three dream destinations in mind as I talk about some of the destinations that you could choose. The first thing to notice is that you will choose your dream destinations quite naturally.

And your dream destinations will be different than mine. Some people have a dream destination that is quite close to home. Some people have a dream destination that's far away. Some people have a dream destination that has a certain feature to it. Ask a surfer what his dream destination is.

He's going to list a specific wave that he wants to surf or a specific region of the world that he wants to surf. Ask a diver, a scuba diver, what his dream destination is. He might list a certain reef or a certain country that has features that he wants to surf.

Ask a traveler what his dream destination is. And he might list a certain set of features. Ask somebody who has more normal life experience. And his dream destination might be closer to home. Notice that there is nothing inherently right or wrong about any of these dream destinations. If your dream destination is to go and take a hike through a beautiful national forest that's 100 miles away from your home, that's just as valid of a dream destination as the guy who says, "I want to fly across the world and see the ancient pyramids." It's just as valid to say, "I want to go to Indonesia and surf around Indonesia," as it is to say, "I want to go and see the Vatican City." It's just as valid to say, "My dream destination is to sit at home in this beautiful place where I live, but to tour every museum in my city." It's just as valid to say that as to say, "I want to go on some far-flung expensive destination." So you're going to choose and establish your dream destinations based upon your experience, your exposure, what you think is interesting to you.

This is why we all wind up setting different goals. For some people, it's interesting to travel across the world. For other people, it's not. They don't want to deal with foreign languages, foreign cultures. It's interesting to them to travel around their home country. For some people, travel is not in any way interesting.

So envision your destination and recognize that whatever destination you choose in life, that's fine. You don't have to choose other people's destinations. Now when you envision your destination, there are going to be certain features and attributes that come along fairly automatically with how to accomplish that destination. I'll give you an example.

I'm born and raised in South Florida, on the coastline of South Florida. And so for me, beaches generally have had very little appeal because I've grown up all my life around beaches. Disney World has virtually no appeal. I've gone to Disney World a handful of times. I don't have any emotional connection to Disney characters or to the Disney world, meaning the world of their characters and whatnot.

I've been to Disney enough times to know, "Eh, I don't enjoy it. It's not fun. I have no interest in going." So if you talk to me about dream destinations, I'm usually going to come up with things that are different than what I have experienced. So I'm going to list three destinations.

First, I like mountains. And so I like to ride motorcycles and I like mountains. And one of the things that is fairly common is that motorcyclists often like riding through the mountains. There's a very famous road in Tennessee called Tail of the Dragon, where motorcyclists like to go and ride their motorcycles.

It makes just a very windy road where people enjoy all the curves. That would be an example of a dream destination for someone like me. I enjoy the mountains because it's different than the flat beaches where I'm from. I enjoy the cool weather, et cetera. I like Tennessee. I like that region of the country.

And if I like motorcycling and I want to set a destination, if I want to go and motorcycle to the Tail of the Dragon, I think it's Deagles Gap, Tennessee, then this is a great dream destination. There's a great trip involved with that. That would be one example. Another example for me of a dream destination is that I've always had a dream to take a year off and take my children all around the United States.

When I was a young boy, I traveled a lot around the country. We always camped. We stayed in national parks and state parks. We learned a lot. I really enjoyed that time of family togetherness. I also really enjoy history. I feel that one of the valuable gifts that we can give to children is to expose our children to history and to experience, to a diverse array of experience and sites and cultures, et cetera, so that they can understand some of the options that they have to choose from in life.

They have a sense of confidence in themselves to be able to choose, and they have a wider board of options. For me, a dream trip or a dream destination is that someday, when it's appropriate with my children's learning, I will take a year off and I will travel around the United States in an RV so that we can really enjoy being in those places that I like to be.

A third dream destination for me is to take my family to mainland China. I'm fascinated with Chinese culture, and I'd like to take my children. I'd like to show them the Great Wall of China. I'd like to take them to the Forbidden Palace. I've seen these things. I've been there.

I've done it, but I would like them to get an idea of this great world power and some of the features and attributes that it holds. Those are three that are for me. I'll list one more just as an example, but this one's not appropriate to me. Some people might have the idea.

Let's say you're from Denver, Colorado or Chicago, Illinois, and you've always dreamed of the beaches. You've seen the videos and the pictures of all these beautiful beaches around the world, and you dream of sailing around the Pacific Islands with your family and with your children. If we describe these three simple goals, goal number one would be take a motorcycle trip to Deals Gap, Tennessee.

Goal number two is take a year off and travel with my children around the United States. Goal number three, take my family to mainland China and explore some of the famous Chinese heritage things, the Forbidden Palace, the Great Wall of China, and many of the other national heritage sites that are there, the UNESCO World Heritage Sites that are located in China.

By the way, did you know that I think China and Italy are the two countries with the most world heritage sites now? China's been working hard at improving their numbers. So lots of historical and interesting things to see there. Now, when you envision your trip or envision your destination, it will basically set most things in order for you to accomplish it.

If you envision a goal, you can see that some goals could be accomplished in the short term, some goals could be accomplished in the longer term, some goals will require more planning and more preparation. And once you envision the goal, most of your work is done. Now it's just a matter of taking the steps.

If we compare the motorcyclist's dream of taking a trip to Tale of the Dragon to ride this famous stretch of road in Tennessee, now we know some certain things, right? I don't have a motorcycle. I don't... Do I want to go alone? I'm going to need a motorcycle, right?

That's the first thing. The second thing is, am I going to go alone or am I going to go with buddies? Most motorcyclists have friends that ride motorcycles and a lot of motorcyclists enjoy being together. So I need to get some buddies to get their motorcycles and kind of pick out a time.

But the accomplishment of that goal is fairly simple and straightforward. If I don't have a motorcycle, I'm either going to need to buy one or rent one. I'm going to need to make a date. I'm going to need to save the necessary money to get there and I'm going to put it on the calendar and go and accomplish it.

And many important goals are just like this. They can be achieved very, very quickly. They might require a little bit of money, a little bit of forethought, a little bit of planning, but they don't take much. These goals are perfectly valid. There's no reason to have all of your goals be huge and monstrous things.

They can just be simple things that you want to accomplish, feelings you want to have, etc. They can also be larger. So the biggest of the goals that I described is the goal of traveling around the United States. Like I said, take a year off. That's a much more substantial goal.

It requires a lot more planning. I have to think about my money. I have to be able to not earn money for a year or have to have some form of income that's going to come in while I'm traveling. I need a lot more infrastructure. I might need an RV if I'm going to RV.

What kind of RV? There's going to be a whole lot of planning involved with that. How am I going to make this work with my children and their school schedules and all of these other things? Where are we going to go? What's our trip going to be like? The United States is a huge place to see the whole country in a year is not possible in any reasonable way.

So what's going to be the organizing principle of our trip? Are we going to travel to all 50 states so we can check the box and say we did that? Are we going to travel to all the national parks so we can check the box and say we did that?

Are we going to focus on historical areas? We could go to many regions of the United States and spend months there. Are we going to focus on natural beauty, on environmental changes, or geography, or cultural distinctions? So we're going to have to envision more details and there's going to be a lot more planning involved.

But there's a different set of planning than going to China. Going to China means I'm not going to take an RV. I'm not even going to take a car. I can't overland in China. It's very hard for individual travelers, even if they have their own vehicle, to come into China and bring their own vehicle into China.

And so if I go into China, it's naturally going to involve airplanes, maybe train travel on the ground there, although I could train travel. Let's say I wanted to start in London and take the trains to China, I can do that. It's going to take me some weeks to do that, especially difficult right now because all the Russian border crossing for trains are basically closed.

But in normal times, then I would be able to take the trains. That would be a cool adventure. Or am I going to fly directly into Beijing? What am I going to do? And so my point in describing these is that when you envision a destination, then you start to think about what you're going to do with that destination, what you're going to mean at that destination.

That destination kind of sets in place the requirements. And then now you've got to say, do I want to actually do this? Because there's a cost involved with all of these things. Goal setting is not free. And so you have to understand the cost that you're going to pay to accomplish a goal.

And as you think about that, think about, do I really want to do this? Should I really take a year off, spend $100,000 traveling around the United States, not save money for my retirement? Is that really something I'm going to do? Well, for me, yes. For you, maybe no.

You might have a totally different perspective on this thing. You just have a different goal. So recognize that once you've envisioned the goal, and once the goal is fully formed, fully envisioned, it will guide you in and of itself. That's the reason we set goals. Goals keep us on track while we're on our way to their achievement.

They guide us kind of like a GPS does. The classic example is this. If you set out from Miami, Florida, and you program in your destination that you're going to drive to Manhattan, then as you go, you're going to have directions. And along the way, you're going to meet stumbling blocks, you're going to meet road closures, you're going to meet all kinds of issues.

But the GPS has programmed in it that we're going to go to Manhattan. And whether it takes you 19 hours to drive there, or 17 hours to drive there, or 27 hours to drive there, whether you do it in one day going straight through, or whether you do it in 10 days going along the way slowly, or whether you get stopped along the way, whether your car breaks down, et cetera, all of these things are going to happen.

But at the end of the day, if that GPS is programmed that I'm going to Manhattan, it's going to guide you at every turn. If the car breaks down, we fix the car and we press on. If we want to stop along the way, that's fine. We stop along the way, but we can't press on.

If the road is closed, we take a different turn. And that's what goals are. The goal keeps us on track and it orders our life decisions. We know we want to accomplish this thing. We want to have this result. And every obstacle we face is just a normal part of the trip.

There's going to be obstacles. That's how life is. Setbacks are normal. Don't let them detour you. Don't let them stop you. Recognize this is normal. Just like on a trip, you have problems, setbacks, et cetera, it's normal. The goals keep you on track. That's why we set them. So we can make sure that over time, we'll be able to look back and appreciate our progress.

More on that in a little bit. Your goals should always be exciting to you. Whatever they are, they should be things that are important to you. Exciting sometimes is too strong of a word. Some people connect really strongly with emotion. Some people don't. I myself am more emotional. So I tend to think in terms of excitement and passion and enthusiasm, et cetera.

Some people are not. Many people have much more calm, sanguine personalities. Totally fine. Just choose things that you care about, things that are important to you. Your life is very short. Why should you spend it working on things that aren't important to you? Spend it focusing on things that are important to you.

Back to New Year's resolutions. One of the common jokes that people make about New Year's resolutions is about how the majority of New Year's resolutions are not kept. And people don't like to be failures. One significant reason people don't set goals is because they're afraid of failure. There are other reasons, but I want to talk about this.

Failure in reaching goals is no big deal. In fact, it's more than that. It's expected. It's inevitable. Failure is inevitable. It's no big deal. Now let's start with some basic ground rules. To begin with, I am convinced that if your mind can conceive and believe a goal, it can achieve it.

If you can conceive and believe a goal, I believe you can achieve it. The restriction here is not on what's possible for everyone in the world. The restriction here is on what you believe is possible for you, on what you conceive and what you believe. Let me give you the best examples I can come up with.

It is impossible for me to be the world's greatest horse jockey. It is impossible. I am far too large, far too heavy, and have zero experience riding horses. For me, at my age, to set a goal of being a horse jockey would be to set a goal of something that's completely impossible.

But the good thing is I have zero interest in being a winning horse jockey. My mind has never conceived and believed of that as being a goal that I want. Have no interest in it. Now if there were something else related to horses, certainly I could achieve that. If I wanted to own a horse, I could achieve that.

If I wanted to be a skilled horseman, I could achieve that. All of those distinctions about me, my age, I could take lessons. No reason I couldn't learn to ride. Lots of people learn to ride. My size, I'll buy a Clydesdale and have that for a saddle horse. Many people have done it.

No big deal. So I can solve for anything that my mind can conceive and believe. I've never conceived and believed being a horse jockey. So if you're worried about your ability to conceive and believe a goal and you say, "Well, not everybody can achieve everything." Of course not everybody can achieve everything, but you can achieve any goal that you conceive of and believe in.

Your brain is not going to feed you a goal that is beyond your capacity to reach it. Your brain is automatically going to filter your personal goals and ambitions by your experience, your exposure, your resources, et cetera. And you're not going to be bothered in the least by the things that you can't achieve if you're focused on the things you're excited to achieve.

Goal setting is a skill. As you conceive of and believe the goals that you can set now, and as your skill of accomplishing those goals increases, then the size of the goals that you can conceive of and believe will be bigger and you'll be able to move towards those things.

So if you can conceive of and if you can believe in a goal that you want to set for yourself, I'm convinced you can achieve it. Now on that basis, if you can conceive and believe a goal, there are no unrealistic goals, but there are unrealistic timelines. And I think this is the key factor that derails most goal setting.

There are no unrealistic goals, but there are unrealistic timelines. As human beings, we tend to think so short term that we ignore the progress we can make if we add just a little bit more time. Conceive and believe in your goals. Put them on a timeline, and if you don't reach it, don't give up on the goal.

Just ask yourself, "Did I set a realistic timeline?" This has been my biggest failure throughout life in reaching my goals. I've often been good at conceiving and believing goals. Goals that were right for me. Goals that I chose. Goals that I truly was capable of accomplishing. I just seem to never hit them on time.

I'm always a little bit after the goal setting. And then I would get frustrated, or a little bit after the deadline that I set. Then I get frustrated and annoyed and I say, "But I set this goal and I really wanted to accomplish it." And I wake up a few months later or a few years later, and I did accomplish it.

I just didn't accomplish it by the hyper-aggressive deadline that I had set for myself. This is why you need to always make sure that you're looking forward to the process of achieving the goal. One of the lessons I have learned that I'm sharing to help you is that when I was younger I thought that the reason to set goals was to accomplish the goals.

But then I accomplished the goals that I set and I realized that the high, the emotional high was a very temporary phenomenon. Think about your own life. Every goal that you've set was a temporary phenomenon, meaning the emotional experience. The best almost universal example I would give is something like high school graduation.

You spend 12 years in the US system, 12 years looking forward to this thing called high school graduation. You're told that if you don't graduate from high school you're guaranteed to be a loser in life. You're told it's a big deal. You spend all your time thinking about your grades and keeping your grades up and going through this pre-planned curriculum that someone has laid out for you.

Along the way somebody tells you that the reason you're graduating high school is so you can go to college, but you still understand that this is a big deal. I got to graduate high school. And then for most of us, we did it. We graduated high school. I can remember that euphoria of finishing classes.

My senior year I went on a senior class trip. So we got to finish classes several weeks earlier than we went on a big senior class trip. Finished up our senior class trip, came back, had all of our senior week excitement and joy and then the graduation ceremony and you have all these parties and you're going to your friend's parties, et cetera.

You accomplish it. And then what? A couple of weeks later you're on to the next thing. The emotional high fades away and you realize that the graduation was in some ways totally meaningless. How was it meaningless? Well, for most of us, that graduation was just necessary to tick the box to go on to what our real goal was going to be, to get a college degree, right?

Because now you're going to be a loser if you don't get a college degree. That's why I went to college, my opinion at that time. Only losers didn't go to college. I wasn't a loser so I was going to go to college. Of course, it was just an automatic thing.

Question was not if I went to college or not. The question was simply where to go to college and what to study. So you realize, oh, that goal was just necessary to get me on to the next goal. What's interesting is you look back in hindsight, not a single time have I ever given any evidence of any kind of my having a high school diploma.

Not once. No job interview has ever come up. No, I've never submitted my high school diploma. I've never gone and gotten my high school transcript in any way. I guess in theory maybe I must have gotten it for my college admission. So maybe that was wrong. I must have submitted that.

But since then, the point, like what I mean is in the real world, quote unquote, the job world, et cetera, I think it's just always been assumed that I had a high school diploma. And so it really has not, other than getting into college, which didn't, the high school diploma wasn't necessary.

It's just never been that big of a factor. So you can look at your goals, accomplishment, you say that was such a big deal. Now it's not a big deal. But you're going to flip it on the other side and you say, well, it was a step on the way.

So the next one is we go on and get to college. Okay, got to get to college. Get into college. I get my SATs up. Got to make sure I get my college acceptance, you know, my accepted into the college I want. Then you get into college. Got to make sure I study what I want.

Got to graduate college. And again, the same kind of thing. Going on to this goal accomplishment. And then you get to graduation. You get your diploma. Boom, I did it. I went to college. But then there's another goal. And you have that euphoria and then that loss of euphoria.

Doesn't have to be a negative thing, but you have euphoria and then loss of euphoria. This happens with everything. After college, it's getting a job. Once you get one job, you got to get another job. Once you get a job, want to get married or you want to buy a house or you want to get a dog or you want to get out of debt or you want to make $100,000 or you want to make a million dollars or you want to save $100,000 or you want to save a million dollars or you want to save $10 million.

At every single stage, the goals have a momentary high of achievement followed by the elimination of that high very, very quickly. So once you go through this for a while, you got to recognize that the accomplishment, the certification of accomplishment cannot be the goal. The journey and the process has to be the goal.

With that insight, the way that I frame goal setting for myself and my children is not in accomplishing a certain thing, but in becoming a certain kind of person. Why do we do school? Why do we study? Well, I need to transform my children into learners, into students, into effective learners and students.

I need to give them the basic skills that they need to teach themselves the things that they need to know in life. That's the purpose of school. Then why do I need those tools? Because with those tools, any dream that they want to accomplish, they will be able to teach themselves the necessary things in order to accomplish their goals and their dreams.

And we use certifications along the way as markers that indicate that we're making progress on this pathway. Why is the goal of getting out of debt important? Well, if someone is in debt, very frequently they're in debt because of financial mismanagement. And so the process of getting out of debt is necessary in order for someone to go from someone who manages money poorly to someone who manages money effectively.

And if you can accomplish that transformation of someone who manages money, going from someone who manages money poorly to someone who manages money effectively, then in the fullness of time, that skill set will allow you to reach the very heights of wealth. And by the way, this thinking applies to basically everything.

What if somebody is not in debt because of poor financial mismanagement, but because of poor earnings? It happens a lot. Someone goes into debt because I just don't earn enough money. Well, setting the goal of getting out of debt will necessarily require you to build a skill of earning higher money in order to accomplish the goal of getting out of debt.

And so the certification is useful and is important because the certification is what we can envision. The certification is how we know we've done it, but we need to look forward to the process of becoming the person. And then the best goals are those in which the journey itself is exciting.

The journey is the important part of the goal. Let me share my biggest area of failure and what I've learned from it. My biggest area of failure has always been being fat. And it's plagued me since I was in middle school. I was fat then. I've been more fat.

I've been less fat. I've been very fat. I've been skinny fat. I've been various ranges of fat along the way. I've gained and lost weight about a bazillion times in many different ways, et cetera. But the failure, the single biggest failure for me in goal setting about not being fat has been not understanding how to enjoy the journey and setting end destinations that weren't truly my end destinations.

And I think this is common to most fat people. One of the big distinctions between fat people and non-fat people, I guess there are probably a few that are common, but the couple that are the most important revolve around food and exercise or movement. Fat people often view food as a reward.

Non-fat people have a lesser or a different connection to food. They don't all, right? You'll see lots of people who are very fit who will say, "Well, I work out so I can eat brownies." Okay, maybe it's true. But somewhere along the way, fit people have figured out how to use food as fuel or not to see it as the ultimate reward.

Whereas fat people often see food as the reward. A lot of times we're conditioned that way. We see, "Hey, you did a great job. Here's a cookie. Here's a cake," et cetera. My biggest fear in life is having fat children. This is going to be an extravagant statement, but I mean it, but it's hyperbole.

Hyperbole alert, right? I should add a tone to that. I am persuaded that having fat children is a form of child abuse. Maybe a mild form of child abuse. Obviously I'm being hyperbolic, but I am persuaded that that's how it should be thought of. Having fat children is a form of child abuse.

Because I was a fat kid, I understand that firsthand and I have watched it and observed it firsthand, secondhand my entire life. My biggest fear as a parent is having fat children. I think a lot about this question. How do I avoid having fat children? One way is change your relationship with food.

Food is not a reward. I'm not going to give every food as a reward. It's just food. The other aspect is movement. There's skill development here. Fit people generally find movement to be a rewarding thing, whereas fat people don't find movement to be a rewarding thing. For fat people, movement is a chore.

It's a hard thing. It's a difficult thing. It's not something that they like. There's no aspect of what they like. Because they don't like it, they don't build skill around movement. Because they don't have skill around movement, they don't like it because they're not good at it. Whereas fit people, because they have skill around movement, they're good at it and it feels good when they move and they do active things.

It feels good. They do more of it, et cetera. They get in this positive feedback loop. If you think about this issue that fat people face, you have to basically figure out strategies to where they look forward to the journey. You have to figure out how do I change the relationship with food and how do I change the relationship with movement so that I can become a different person.

When I've reflected on years of failure in this area, I've realized that these are the essentials. I now think if working with fat people and you're trying to help fat people become less fat, then the first thing you have to do is not take away food but to add food.

I think you have to focus primarily on adding food, on adding good food, on adding rich food, on adding delicious food. If you start with that, you can develop an appropriate pleasure center. For example, I personally think that it's probably the case that a calorie is a calorie. All the best academic research I can find is basically, even though people fight about it, I'm personally mostly convinced that a calorie is a calorie.

If you want to lose weight, it's calories in, calories out. The problem is that all calories in are not created equal. Diets that have people eating luxurious foods as a lifestyle are diets that have a higher kind of stickiness for fat people. If I'm coaching me or I'm coaching someone else on weight loss, what I want to focus on is how can we add really high quality nutrition that's very satiating.

This is where steaks, high fat foods, high protein foods, luxurious foods, steak, butter, eggs, things that are satiating, I think are really effective, maybe not for all people but for many people because you're focusing on what you can add in. Then you start to add in nutrition, higher foods with more nutrition, starts to solve deficiencies, et cetera.

Don't worry about calorie excess for a while. Calorie excess can be solved down the road when you have a focus on what I can eat rather than what I can't eat. When you tell a fat person, "Here's what you can't do, you can't avoid these foods," that fat person has gotten dopamine hit from those foods forever.

You've got to retrain the dopamine system and get a person focused on what they can eat and have them looking forward to eating and cause the change over time. I didn't mean to go into this so deep but of course, New Year's resolution for a lot of people is lose weight.

I believe it's important to focus on the journey. What I'm intending to emphasize is that having a journey that seems pleasurable to you is the most important part of the goal. Let me finish it out with movement and then we'll go back to a couple of other examples. Same thing with movement.

Fat people are unskilled with movement. They don't like to move. Walking is not pleasurable. Running hurts. Weightlifting makes them feel uncomfortable, etc. One of the keys is, can I find a movement that is appealing to a fat person? Sometimes you can. Some people might want to go walk on the beach.

Walking for me is motivating. I like to walk. I'm a competent walker and I like the things that I can get with walk. I like how I can bring walking into socialization. I like how I can walk and listen to audio. I like how I can walk and think.

Walking is good for me. Sometimes people can't walk effectively. Sometimes people can't work out. Then you just have to say, "What can you bear? What can you deal with?" And find the minimum effective dose of what you can deal with. And then over time, skill will build and you can build pleasure over time.

But you got to find things where the journey is not so onerous that you're not going to want to do it. And the best goals, the goals that you're almost certain to hit, are the goals where you're excited about accomplishing the thing and where you're excited about the process of it.

Let me go back to college for a second. I believe that the people who should go to college are those who are academically capable. And one of the greatest problems of college statistics is that many people who are not academically capable have been conditioned to think that they need to go to college in order to succeed.

And they go and they try and they try and they try and then they quit. The people who do well in college are people who enjoy studying because they're skilled at it. I study for fun. I enjoy it. I enjoy the process of making my brain work. And that's an effective thing.

Athletes enjoy the process of making their bodies work. So you've got to focus on setting goals where the journey is exciting to you. You talk to travelers. Travelers enjoy people who go to every country in the world or travel just constantly. They enjoy the process of travel. I'll speak as a traveler.

I love being on airplanes. I enjoy it. It's not to say that there's no stress involved. Certainly you get to the end of a 15-hour flight, you're ready to get off the plane. But every time I drive past an airport, every time I see airplanes on the tarmac, I wish I were on them.

When I see a train, I wish I was on it. When I see a car, I think about how many countries I could take that car to. I'm drawn to the journey, not the destination. The destination is just an excuse. I'm drawn to the journey. And you'll find that the goals that you'll accomplish the most easily are those in which you're drawn to the journey of their accomplishment.

And if you're setting a goal that's not a natural fit for you, you've got to re-engineer and come back and say, "Am I excited about the journey, about the process of accomplishing it?" This is one of the reasons I'm so opposed to early retirement in the current iteration that was super popular.

I've noticed its popularity waning a little bit, and I've noticed a little bit of my message that has been a bit countercultural to the FIRE community for the last 10 years. I've noticed that my message seems to be a little bit more mainstream now. So I'm glad about it.

But when I got excited about the FIRE movement myself, it was because I didn't like my job. And I thought, "Oh, I'll just go and I'll work a job I don't—I'll work this job I don't like, I'll live like a miser, I'll make a lot of money, and I'll be financially independent in no time.

Then I'll accomplish my goal." That's what I got excited about. But I failed at that. Because I realized it was a stupid way to approach it. The people who achieve financial independence are generally people who enjoy working. They enjoy making money. They enjoy their life. And financial independence is not the end result.

It's just a natural thing that happens because of having those things. And I realized that the goal of finding a job you enjoy is much more achievable than the goal of working a job you hate, living a lifestyle you hate for five years or 10 years or something just muscling through so that you can accomplish a certain thing.

Don't commit yourself to a goal whose journey of accomplishment is not exciting to you in and of itself. I think that's a sign that either this goal is not for me, this goal is not for me now, or this goal is for me and is for me now, I just need to spend more time being careful and intelligent about how I accomplish it.

Because accomplishing the goal is not the end result. The goal is to become a different person. And if you can become a different person, then the achievement of the goal will just feel like one more step along the process. And you'll already be excited about moving on to the next bigger goals.

Now, if you fail at achieving your goal, so what? So what? Why can I, in front of tens of thousands of people, so easily admit that I have failed at unfatting myself? Well, it doesn't make me proud. But so what? So what? It's fine to assess your progress towards your end goal, but it's more important to assess your progress from where you began.

And if I had never set the goal of not being fat, I would never have accomplished all that I have accomplished. Let's give an example. Let's say that you set a New Year's resolution to go to the gym in the next year. You sign up for classes, you make a schedule, you go to the gym 15 times in January, you go to the gym 15 times in February, then you quit.

This is common in gyms, right? This is how gyms make their money. Is that failure? I don't think so. I think you redefine it. You got in 30 workouts. I don't think that's a failure. You worked out 30 times. You learned some new skills. You collected data about what works for you and what doesn't work for you.

You exercised your mental muscles to move you in the direction of your goals. You exercised courage to believe that you could be the kind of person who could go to a gym and do work while you're there. You're better off than you were before. And so when I look back at where I started from, I know loads more today about health and nutrition.

I know loads more about exercise. I've put in thousands of miles. I've put in hundreds and hundreds of workouts. I've lifted thousands of pounds. I've built skills in many ways. Just because I haven't achieved my ultimate goal doesn't mean that I haven't been improved by the process of working towards it.

I just didn't yet develop all the skills necessary to accomplish that ultimate goal. But I'm still in the game. And the only way that you fail is if you quit. The only way it's possible to fail at reaching your goals is when you quit. And for me, I don't quit.

So I'd rather talk about my failures and learn from them than deal with the idea of being a quitter. Because my success in life is not tied to the number of pounds reflected on the scale or the size of my love handles. These are reflective of other things. I just haven't yet built the skills, the routines necessary to accomplish it.

By the way, if you're worried about it, I'm making great progress. I've got a coach. I'm making great progress. I've got great streaks going. Every indicator is in the right direction. But I have had to learn over the years from all of these failures. And you try something, learn from it.

Try, learn. Try, learn. Try, learn. No matter what, any goal that you set and you work towards, that's success. Because you're exercising the muscle. Accomplishing the goal is not the only acceptable outcome. There are many other acceptable outcomes. Working towards a goal is a perfectly acceptable outcome. Let's say that you set a lifetime goal that's very large and you're working towards it systematically.

Let's say that you're a golfer and you say, "I'm going to golf the top 100 golf courses in the world." You print out the list from your golf magazine. You staple it to your wall. You start checking them off. You say, "I'm going to do two a year." That's a great goal for a golfer.

You do two a year. It gives you an organizing principle to your life. This is going to organize my vacations. I'm going to go to two golf courses a year. It's probably a very enjoyable thing. You want to play well. So now you've got a focus to your practice.

You're improving your technique. It's a wonderful social goal. You probably have some buddies that you're working towards. A great organizing financial goal. You're going to need to save for this. If you become a saver and you're working towards these golf vacations, that's going to help you transform your finances.

You're going to earn more money so you can afford the more expensive fees. You're going to meet fancier people if you need to get into a certain private club or get an invitation somewhere, etc. This is a great goal. Let's say that you set that lifetime goal that's very large and you're working towards it systematically.

Then all of a sudden you up and die at 50 and half your list is unaccomplished. Imagine what all those people are going to say at your funeral. They're going to come to your funeral. They're going to stand up at the microphone and they're going to say, "What a sucker Joe was.

Joe set a goal of going to 100 golf courses and that loser only got to 50 and then he up and died. What a sucker that dude was. Loser Joe. Oh man." Of course not. Of course not. Every single one of your friends is going to talk about the good times.

They're going to tell the story of when you golfed at Pebble Beach or you were at, I don't even know all the famous golf clubs, not my deal. But they're going to tell the stories of where you went. They're going to tell how you fell in the water when you hit the ball wrong.

They're going to tell of when you ran from the alligator in South Florida. They're going to tell of when you froze golfing in Scotland. They're going to laugh about how you drank too many beers at the 19th hole and you had to sleep at the clubhouse. They're just going to tell all the stories about your life and enjoy talking about it.

They're going to admire you that you were working on this list of 100 goals or 100 courses. It's the same for every kind of goal. Life is not a binary yes or no, win or lose kind of thing. It's a journey. Big goals that are exciting to you, that transform you, so you don't reach them.

You're better off just working towards them. Let's pretend that I never have a six pack. I never grace the cover of a men's magazine. It's very unlikely, but am I not better off for being out there exercising? Am I not better off for the hundreds and thousands of miles walked with my wife and the time that we spend together?

Am I not better off for the time with my children out hiking in the woods? Am I not better off for going to the beach and playing in the sunshine? Am I not better off for going to the gym and working it out? Am I not better off for the time spent with my coaches?

Am I not better off for improving my diet and maximizing everything that I can, even if I never have a six pack? Am I not better off for learning from my issues with food, from when I was a fat kid and ate all the junky food and then helping my children to avoid that and sharing the lessons with them?

Am I not better off for talking to you and to the many fat people in my audience who want to lose weight and saying and sharing some of the things that I've learned? Am I not better off for the compassion that I've gained along the way for the things that don't come easily to me?

Imagine if I just had everything great, right? My brain works pretty well. Never struggled with anything involving intelligence. I have a lot of abilities, but what if I didn't have an area where I wasn't great? Imagine the ego and the pride. Imagine how hard that would make it for me to relate to.

But I've always had sympathy on fat people and ugly people, on handicapped people, et cetera, because of my life experience. So don't judge it and say to yourself, "I'm not going to have the courage to press forward." Recognize that if you set a goal of reaching 100 and you get to 20 and then you're done.

The people at your funeral are not going to laugh at you. They're going to be proud of you because you set out an ambitious goal and you work towards it. What are some other ways of not achieving a goal? Well, what if you change your goals? It's one of the best things that can happen to you.

You set a goal, you start working towards it. Then you realize, "I don't want this goal." I'll give you a couple of examples from my life, little and big. When I was younger and I first started setting goals, one of the goals I had was I wanted a black Harley Davidson.

I wrote it out every day. I forget the model now, but I printed it out, had it on my vision board, wrote it out every day. I'm going to have this Harley Davidson, this Harley Davidson, this Harley Davidson. As part of the process, one weekend I went and I rented one.

I enjoyed it. I loved it. I had a great time. Came away from renting that, a buddy of mine went and rode all weekend together. I said, "I don't care anymore. I don't want a Harley Davidson. I'm not going to ride it enough for it to matter. I don't want to ride it on a daily basis.

Not going to enjoy it. It was fun to ride it on a rental bike, but I don't enjoy it." I crossed it off my list and I went on with my life. It was not a materialistic goal that was important to me anymore. Did I fail at achieving that goal?

Not in any way. I just realized it wasn't that important to me. Another one was when years ago I first got involved with financial independence. I would write down every day my number. Here was my number, 4% rule number. This is my net worth. This is my net worth.

This is my net worth. This is my net worth. I would write that number down every day and I would imagine it. I would plan how am I going to accomplish it. After about 8 months or a year, I realized there is no plan between here and that number that is exciting to me in the moment.

I don't really care about this goal. What I want to do is not be financially independent. What I want to do is I want to live a life that I enjoy. The simplest and easiest way to get there is to build more freedom into my life and that's what I did.

Now I'll eventually be financially independent but I don't even write it down regularly. I still have a number but it's not a major goal for me because it's not really material to my life. I'm not going to change anything different when I achieve it or not. It's just a sign of the progress that I'm on.

I'm more interested in spending more money now than I am down the road. I'm not that frugal. I'm frugal on things that don't matter to me and I'm not frugal on things that do matter to me. So, changing your goals is fine. It's normal. It's expected. You don't have to set out a goal and say I'm going to go to all 50 states and then go and accomplish it.

You can go to 15 states and have all that you need. I think in terms of travel terms. If you are a traveler, there is no possible way that you can travel to everywhere in the world. It's not possible. You can travel to your list but you can't travel to every possible list in the world.

You can't travel to every country in the world and every TCC country in the world and every no man mania region in the world and every top hotel in the world and every top beach in the world and every world heritage site and every state and every world's... I mean I'm making things up in the world of travel but you can't do it.

So at some point in time you got to realize there's a limit and you don't have to accomplish everything that's out there to accomplish. So it's fine to change your goals and adjust them. So what I hope I've accomplished by now is to share with you some ideas that if you will pursue your goals, have courage and set them out, they will order your life in a way that you can enjoy.

And if you'll just make sure that you enjoy the journey and that you're not just arbitrarily picking things, then this year can be an exciting year. There was a... I think it was W Clement Stone, although it may have been Oz Guinness, there's this famous quote that I don't even know who to cite it to, I could look it up, but it's the quote that I find so helpful.

"Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal." Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. And I think that that is such a powerful statement. That achieving goals, meaning actually accomplishing them, finishing them, ticking the box, is not going to bring you happiness. But the process of working toward goals that matter to you and then systematically making progress is the key.

So how do you achieve happiness while you're working towards goals? The most important way is not to gauge your level of success by your distance from the goal, but to gauge your level of success by your distance from where you began. Goals are like a mirage. It's something out there that you want, but as you get closer to it, it's going to just move down the road.

You're pressing towards it, you're pressing towards it, you're pressing towards it, it's just going to move. And I promise you, every goal that you have is just going to move. The biggest goal you set, "I'm going to have $5 million." You're going to get to $5 million, you're going to say, "Oh, that's probably not enough.

I need more." You get to $20 million. "Okay, I got $20 million. Ah, maybe it's not enough." And even if it is enough, you realize, "Ah, it was never about the money." And you got to set something else. You go and say, "I'm going to run an Ironman triathlon." Or you're going to accomplish it.

Then you're going to say, "Yeah, but I could have done it faster. So let me do another one." And then you're going to want to say, "Well, I want to be the first one to do one." On every continent, right? You start going bigger and bigger. So you have to recognize that goals are always going to be pushed out.

And so if you measure your happiness or your success, or if you use as a metric the distance from your goal as a measure of your happiness, you're destined for a life of misery as an overachiever who's never happy and never satisfied. Rather, turn around. Look forward at your goal as something exciting that's pulling you forward, and then turn around and reflect on how far you've come.

Take pleasure in every single step that you have made. Celebrate yourself. Rejoice over the progress that you've made. Be excited about how far you've come. And every goal has that. Enjoy the person that you are because of this. Even in your greatest failures—that's why I try to share about failures, probably too much sometimes—but even in your greatest failures, you can celebrate yourself as the kind of person who had the courage to set goals, who had the courage to try.

Always assess your progress from where you began, and then take your sense of satisfaction and happiness from that distance, not from how far away you are from your end destination. The only way it's possible for you to fail at reaching your goals is to quit. Set goals that matter to you.

Think carefully about the process and make sure you're excited about the journey. If you've had a string of failures, wonderful! Learn from those failures about how to set smarter goals. I haven't given tons of examples of this, but if you will, let's use exercise for a moment. I said a number of years ago that one of the great reasons I was failing with exercise is that I hadn't discovered a form of movement that I enjoyed, that worked for me, that was something that I could deal with.

And so I set a different goal. The goal is, how can I discover a form of regular movement, something that's good for me, keeps my heart healthy, keeps my body strong, etc., that I enjoy? And that became my goal. Well now, trying things and quitting them is just part of the journey of discovering it.

And you can go through your list. Imagine that you set that goal. You might try tennis. No, that wasn't for me. You might try surfing. No, not so much. You might try hiking in the mountains. Yeah, that's a winner. Oh, no, that's not a winner. What about walking on a treadmill?

Well, maybe that's a winner. No, what about riding a bike? There's any number of things. The world of movement is huge. There's tons of things that can be done. And your goal now is just to discover a form of movement that you enjoy, that fits your body's strengths, etc.

And so I think I've said enough. I hope that these ideas help you. I hope that they encourage you and they give you some ideas. But this next year, today is all you got. For all you and I know, this time next year, you're dead. I'm dead. One of us is dead.

Millions of people are going to die this year. So don't be stupid about your goal setting. Learn from your mistakes, from your experiences, from your wins and your successes. Analyze those things. Choose goals that are important to you for your own reasons. Not other people's goals for your life, your goals.

Lay them out. Write them down. Imagine the journey and the steps necessary to accomplish them. Work towards them. Those goals will be like a GPS. They'll pull you towards them as long as you keep going. The only way you're going to fail is if you quit. So resolve not to quit and make sure you enjoy the process.

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