With Kroger Brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season. Because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices. And with a money-back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite. ♪ These are a few of my favorite things ♪ Whether you shop delivery, pickup, or in-store, Kroger Brand has all your favorite things.

Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ 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. I am your host.

Thank you with your patience for being absent the last few days. I told you to come back on Monday, and I wasn't here. I was the one who failed on you. Thank you for your patience with that. I failed at that goal. It's all right. Failure is an event.

It's not a person. My apologies. Let's press on. Because today, I want to talk to you about the importance of setting goals that you don't know how to achieve. And I want to give you permission to set goals that you don't know how to achieve. Thus far in this goal-setting series, I've tried to speak very practically.

I've tried to talk about things in a very tactical and tangible way, strategically. I've not engaged in any kind of woo-woo thinking. I've not talked about, "Ella, if you can believe it, and you can dream it, then you can achieve it." I haven't tried to rev you up. I've just talked to you about the process of setting goals, which is in and of itself simple.

You have a place that you want to go. So you sit back and you consider how to get there. And you decide if you're going to commit to getting there all the way. If you are in Miami and you want to drive to San Diego, or you want to go to San Diego, you've got to sit down and you say, "Well, why am I going to San Diego?

How do I want to get there? Do I want to fly? Do I want to drive? How? Etc." And then let's say you want to take a road trip there. You've got to figure out some of the logistics of the car that you're going to drive. You've got to get a map, and you've got to start going.

And along the way, you course correct, and when problems occur, you fix those problems. You have a flat tire, you run out of gas, you take a wrong turn, well, you fix those problems. And eventually, if you don't quit, you get to San Diego. And it's that way with every single goal in life that you could possibly set.

You have an idea, a vision of where you want to go. You try to figure out where you are. Try to figure out a vehicle that's going to get you from where you are to where you want to go. Count the costs, see if you think it's worth doing.

Start working on it. Along the way, problems are going to come up. You're going to be derailed by this thing, that thing, etc. You course correct, but as long as you don't quit, you will eventually arrive at your goal. You will eventually achieve your goal. So this is not woo-woo stuff.

This is not any kind of metaphysical thing. This is very practical. But yet, what if you want to set a goal and you don't know how to achieve it? What if you want to set a goal, but you're not quite sure what vehicle would get you to the place you want to go?

Should you still do it? Well, my only goal and ambition in today's show is to say to you simply, yes. You should set a goal, even if you don't know how to get there. And in fact, if you're not setting goals that you don't know how to achieve, you probably aren't setting goals big enough.

You probably aren't going to challenge your own personal potential. If you're only setting goals that you know how to achieve, frankly, you probably don't have a list of goals. You have a list of projects, a list of actions. You have a to-do list. One component of goal, the whole concept of setting a goal, should be setting something that excites you, even if you don't know how to achieve it.

And then just simply part of achieving the goal is figuring out, how am I going to achieve this? But it's fine to set goals. In fact, it's important to set goals that you don't know how to achieve. I'll give you one story from my own life that proved this to me.

I remember very clearly, I was working at my first job out of college. I was working as an entry-level analyst at a marketing company. My starting salary was $38,000 a year. I remember I would do goal setting at that point in time. And I set a goal of making $100,000 per year within three years.

I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I thought I was going to do it at that company. And I thought, "Okay, my goal is to make $100,000 per year." So I looked around at the company, and I understood different people. I said, "I bet those people make $100,000 per year.

So all I've got to do is I've got to develop myself, and I've got to learn the skills to go from this entry-level or kind of middle-ish." It wasn't just grunt work, but kind of middle-ish marketing level to become a senior marketing consultant. That's what I've got to do.

And then I'll achieve my goal of getting to $100,000 per year. And so I would sit down every day. I, Joshua Sheets, earned $100,000 per year by this date. It was about three years out. I would write it out every day, every day, $100,000 per year. I earned $100,000 per year.

And then I would do the work, and I was making progress. I remember I got a raise. I went from $38,000 per year to $43,000 per year, which was nice. But it kind of felt like, "I don't know what to do about that because, after all, here I am sitting here, and I don't really know how I'm going to get to $100,000." That wasn't enough.

I needed to go from 40--in order to hit my timeline, I needed to go from 38 to 68 if I'm going to get to 100. But I kept on going. And then at some point at that time, I kind of lost the habit of doing my daily goal setting and just kind of faded away.

Then I wound up getting laid off from that job. And after a while, I wound up taking a job in--it was just after I'd gotten a pay raise, I think, so it was about a year or so into this three-year process. I wandered around for a few months after getting laid off, then wound up going into the financial services business.

And I remember a few years later, I was cleaning out some stuff, and I found my goals notebook. And I opened it up, and I couldn't believe what it said. There was my goal of "I earn $100,000 per year," and there was the date, by this date. And I looked around, and I said, "Here I am in a completely different business with a completely different set of circumstances." And at that time, I didn't have the capacity to earn $100,000 per year because it was a salaried business.

And here I am, and this was a little bit before I earned $100,000 per year, I said, "Here I am with a $100,000 potential job." It struck me because I couldn't believe it. There was this goal that I set. I didn't know how to achieve it. I was working on it, I was trying it, but then I kind of forgot about it.

And then all of a sudden, I turned around, I find the notebook, I find the date, and here I am on track to earn $100,000 per year, although I had not worked on that goal for a while. But circumstances happened, I got laid off, I wound up starting a new career, a new business, boom, boom, boom.

All these things I could never have predicted. Now, in hindsight, it's rather obvious. At this point in time, if I were coaching the me of that age, I would have said, "Well, obviously, you're not going to be able to earn $100,000 a year here. So obviously, you should make a plan to pivot into a different business or a different job of some kind." And then I could have easily coached myself and said, "Well, what are your skills, abilities, interests, what do you want in your work life, etc." And then we would figure out a way to make that happen.

And financial services was a natural fit for somebody like me with my personal interests, etc. But I didn't have a coach, and so I was just figuring it out the hard way. But the goal basically kind of pulled me through. I wound up achieving the goal, even though when I set the goal, I had no idea how to do it.

I've since seen that happen again and again and again. Another business and finance related story for you. Starting from the time I was about 15 years old, I had a dream of -- this was right at the beginning when you could figure out how to make money online. I had a dream of figuring out how to make money online.

I had a dream of working from home and making money online. But I didn't do what I should have done, which is pursue it aggressively. It was just kind of a dream. I didn't have a goal that I set, "I'm going to learn how to make money online." I wish I had.

I wish somebody had come along when I was 15 years old and said, "Joshua, you live in one of the most exciting times in human history, and by the time you graduate from high school, you could have an online business that would support you completely." I wish somebody had told me that, but I wasn't creative enough.

I didn't have the ambition. But I thought that would be cool to one day do that. Then fast forward high school, college, didn't earn money online. But I never forgot about it. I never lost that goal. I never forgot that that was something that I'd like to do someday.

I always had two visions in my head that went together for me. Number one was I always envisioned Tom Clancy, who was my favorite author at the time. When I was in high school, I loved Clancy's thrillers. And he was always what I envisioned. I always envisioned, of course, it's not that way for a writer, but I always envisioned sitting out on the back pool deck with a laptop writing.

That was always something that I thought someday I would like to be able to sit out on my back deck by a pool with a laptop writing really cool stories. And then the other thing that I always did is I used to love to listen to talk radio. I'd listen to political talk radio, nonpolitical talk radio.

And I always thought, "Man, the job of a talk radio guy, that's something that I would really love to do. I'd love to do that. That just seems like an awesome--." How could you not want to go to work when your job in going to work is to sit down and speak on a microphone?

Who wouldn't want to go and do that? But at the time, I didn't know how to set goals. So no one set this today. I could coach the 15-year-old me, the 18-year-old me. I could lay it out as a formal goal. We could work on a plan for it.

And it could have happened in no time. But I didn't know how to set goals, so I just kept them as dreams, just ideas. Well, fast forward a few years, went to college, graduated from college, worked at the marketing company, pivoted into financial planning. The thing that always annoyed me with financial planning, though, is I couldn't fulfill that vision in my head.

I couldn't--you know, I could meet with clients by their pool, but--and I did that sometimes, but it wasn't quite the same. It wasn't me with my laptop at a pool. I wanted a laptop lifestyle. I wanted to be able to work through my laptop. That was my vision. I didn't know how I was going to achieve it.

Well, I had an opportunity after about three years in the financial planning business where a friend of mine was working at a company that was just starting to go big. And I decided I was going to quit financial services and go and work with him. And I did. Quit financial services, left, started working with him.

Now, thankfully, I didn't close out all my contracts and such in the financial planning business at the time. I didn't do anything, so I just stopped showing up at the office every day. And I started going to this other place and started working on my laptop. And I discovered that working on a laptop wasn't all I had always dreamed of.

I discovered it was kind of lonely, and I discovered it wasn't in my core skill set of expertise. And then--so I did it for a month or two. Then I decided it wasn't working out, so I went back to financial services and did financial services for another few years until I left to start Radical Personal Finance.

The point is that when I look back at what I--and I see what I do now, I can look back and I can see it took me 15 years to figure out how to make money online, to figure out how to sit by my pool and write on my laptop and figure out how to speak on a microphone for a living.

And I don't feel like these things really are working. Like, these are things I love to do. They don't feel like work. All the technical minutiae of this business feels like work, but in time I won't need to do that stuff anymore. Whereas speaking on a microphone doesn't feel like work.

It feels joyful. It feels fulfilling. I picture you on the other side of it, and it really is satisfying to me. It doesn't feel like work at all. And to me, it's just fascinating to reflect back and say, "Huh, that dream I had when I was 15 years old, I've achieved.

I've achieved it." And it took me far longer than it needed to take because I didn't understand about goal setting. I hadn't learned what I needed to learn. So it took me this circuitous route, and in many ways I'm glad I did. I don't know that--I don't think I could do what I'm doing now if I hadn't had this interesting circuitous route.

But when you set a goal and you have a dream, pay attention to that and don't be scared to write it down even if you don't know how to achieve it. Again and again and again, I have experienced that if I just simply notice I have this goal and I set it, when the time is right, I'll figure out the plan.

When the time is right, I'll notice the opportunity. If you don't set the goal, you don't notice the opportunity when it comes along. Back to my $100,000 a year story. If I didn't have a goal set that was $100,000 a year, would I have noticed an opportunity when it comes along with $100,000 a year?

My answer is no. Most people don't. Most people don't set goals. They don't have clear ambitions. They don't know what they're trying to accomplish. And so because of that, the opportunity just comes zooming past them. "Hey, the house next door is for sale. Somebody should buy it." They don't even think about them buying it.

You know, "So and so is looking for a new employee." They don't think about their taking that job. Or, "Look, here's a franchise that's for sale. If you take it, you can buy it and make money." They don't think about doing that. Most of us don't. But if you set a goal, all of a sudden you start to notice things.

And the goal gurus have a word for it. They call it--the example it's always used. And I think it's a true example. So I don't mean to disparage the goal gurus. I'm not a goal guru. But they talk about how, you know, when you first think, "Okay, I'm going to buy a red sports car." And all of a sudden you see the red sports car everywhere.

Or, you know, so you notice the car, a certain car that your brother just bought or something like that. That's the way they describe the goal-setting system. They call it the reticular activating system. Where if you set a goal, previously you didn't notice all the ways that you could accomplish it.

But now you do. And I've seen that again and again in my own life. So I want to keep this simple. When I was talking about don't be scared to dream, I really meant it. Don't be scared to dream. Even a dream that's not captured on a piece of paper, even those kinds of dreams can have power.

Just like my dream of working from a laptop. Or listening to talk radio hosts and thinking, "That's pretty cool." Or thinking about Tom Clancy sitting down on his laptop writing stories that I love to read. Those dreams are worth paying attention to. Now, you can capture a dream and you can put it on paper.

And when you can do that, the chances of you achieving it increase dramatically. It took me over 15 years to achieve my laptop lifestyle. But it did not need to take nearly so long. It was just that I was fairly inept at goal-setting. Back to the $100,000 goal. That goal was a much better one because it was more clearly written out.

It was more clearly identified. But still, I wasn't a very good goal achiever in those days. I didn't see then what I see now. Today, if I were coaching the me of that day, it would have been easy. But at the time, I didn't see it. But even just the mere fact of writing it down ultimately led to its achievement.

Don't be scared to set a goal just because you don't know how to achieve it. Your brain will work on it in the back. And you'll notice the opportunity when the time is right. So set those goals. Even if you can't put out a detailed plan, set those goals.

Identify them. Now, where we crank it up significantly is when you start to have either a fuller understanding of the goal-setting process or a good coach. Somebody who can come along and who can explain, "Listen, it's one thing to set a goal and then that's it. You write it down.

This is my goal. It's another thing to set a goal and then go through the process of learning how to achieve it. That way you can achieve the goal far, far faster." But that's next work. I invite you to read--I invite you to go to Radical Book List and sign up for my reading list.

And the first book that you'll get--spoiler alert--the first book of that list of 12 financial books on there is a book on goal-setting. I am personally convinced that goal-setting is the cornerstone skill of success and achievement because it's basically goal-setting that gives you the process to achieve anything that you want in life.

And finances are one component of that. Financial goals are one component of that. So if you've never read a book on goal-setting, this is the time to do it. Get it now. Such an exciting time. I love setting goals at the beginning of the year. I love it. Everyone loves to poo-poo resolutions.

I've poo-pooed resolutions before, but you know what? Goals are exciting. I don't care when you set them. Set them on January 1. Set them on August 1, whenever. But I love setting goals at the beginning of the year, and it's just such an exciting time. So as we go, if you want to read a good book on goal-setting, go to RadicalBookList.com, RadicalBookList.com.

Get my reading list there, and you'll find all of my follow-up recommendations on that list as well. RadicalBookList.com. Thank you. With Kroger Brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season. Because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices. And with a money-back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite.

Whether you shop delivery, pickup, or in-store, Kroger Brand has all your favorite things. Ralph's. Fresh for everyone. (upbeat music)