Setting Your Priority: Pursuing and Appreciating the Things that Matter (#008)

How do you keep track of priorities? Get help from an external force. Find an accountability partner, mentor, or coach. Having people who will hold you accountable and monitor your progress will certainly help you to stay focused. In this episode, Sean and James encourage listeners to learn how to appreciate and be grateful for everything, even the unpleasant things in life. When you do this, you set an offensive attitude towards life — attacking your goals one step at a time. Key Takeaways: Be gracious to yourself. While you have priorities in key areas of your life, learn to appreciate when you’ve tackled, even just one. Be proud of your wins, even if these are small ones. Use your core values as an anchor in weighing things that you should focus on instead of the things that you just want to do. When listing goals down, create broad tactics. Under it, list simple steps to take to be able to achieve it. Stay focused and on track by recruiting the help of a partner, coach, or mentor to keep you accountable and track your progress. Be grateful, even for failures. Look at it as lessons learned and stepping stones to get closer to your goals. Episode Quotes: How can you have one priority when you have several goals for different aspects of your life? James [00:04:13] Maybe what this professor was talking about in your Berkeley class was, by setting one priority, as long as you did that one thing. Yes, there is a secondary list of things that you can take care of. But as long as you attack the day and get that one thing done, then it's a win, and you should be proud that you're able to do that. How can you track your progress and be accountable for the goals you set? Sean [00:21:01]: I think that element of just having accountability buddies, or partners, is huge. I still have them to this day. That's why I think mentors and coaches exist. Right? You're actually paying someone to keep you accountable for things. I think that's the beauty of having a business partner, like Survy, we keep each other accountable on different tasks. Again, not because we're incompetent, but because frankly, life is busy. Thoughts on having an offensive mindset towards your goals James [00:27:15] When I think about authenticity, I think that it's about taking action, taking steps, going towards your goal. It's like attacking your goals. Right. And so, I thought one way that you could practice gratefulness is by breaking down what's the one thing that you can do today that brings you closer to a goal that you set for yourself. Then once you actually take that action and take that step, then you can break down what are the things that you were able to do to take that one single step? Right? Why is feedback more important for startups than results? Sean [00:29:30] As a startup, we are after testing the hypothesis. That is our job as a startup, especially in the earliest stages. A false response is still a response. This is not the thing that we expected, right? When we're testing a hypothesis, the important thing is to do the actions and get responses. It's not to expect everything that we're going to test is going to pan out to be true or is going to work out in our favor. Thoughts on the fallacy of retirement: Sean [00:36:40] I don't think humans are designed to just work and then not work. And what I mean by work is contribute their time to something, to society, and then stop contributing. I think contribution, as we mentioned, is one of the core human needs. There is actually a very strong impetus for humans to want to contribute. And you can only contribute if you're continuing to learn. Show Links: Busting the Retirement Lies: Living with Passion, Purpose, and Abundance Throughout Our Lives (Busting the Money Myths Book)