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Read time: 3 minutes
Good morning, 66.1ers.
Here’s a fun one for anyone who’s got a big goal and wants to make it happen ASAP.
On big goals and short timelines…
Have you ever tackled a big goal?
Made it happen in less than a year?
Less than 6 months?
Less than 3?
That’s what we’re going to unpack today…
How to get from where you are today to where you’d like to be.
In 6 months or less.
The last time I successfully tackled a big goal on a short timeline was around this time last year.
After moving to Montana, I knew I wanted to provide meat for my girlfriend and I via wild game. Grocery store stuff is mostly gross, the good stuff is expensive, but more than anything?
It was one of those “human skills” that felt important.
Right up there with learning self-defense and staying in shape.
Going into the fall, I knew a few things about this task:
I was mostly ignorant
I had been on a few hunts, but had never been involved with harvesting an animal. And watching episodes of MeatEater is entertaining but mostly useless when it comes to actually filling the freezer.
I was in good shape
My fitness was my biggest asset going into the hunting season. I knew that I could put in more time than most because my body was ready to go. This allowed me to hunt hard for back to back days, getting lots of valuable experience over a short period of time.
I wasn’t going to pull this off alone
See point 1. Because I was ignorant, I needed to find some people with more experience. Fortunately, I made a couple good friends who were much more experienced hunters than I. The result? I was able to iterate 10X faster than I would have been able to on my own.
I would be extremely inefficient
Not a surprise here. Didn’t know what I was doing. Had the physical horsepower to throw myself at it 100%. I spent a lot of time hiking when I should have been glassing (looking through binoculars to find animals before hiking after them), getting cold and wet, and hunting low-potential spots. That’s just what it is for a while. Try stuff, find what works, do more of that.
I took these 4 pieces of information, mixed them up, and got to work.
In my hunting journey, my timeline went something like this:
August: spend way too much time looking at maps (not actually scouting real hunting spots), get overwhelmed.
September: hunt a bunch, kill nothing
October: ask friends if they had ideas on how to improve, keep hunting, still kill nothing.
November: keep on hunting, seeking feedback, and iterating, and eventually harvest a deer (even this one I worked really hard for–experienced hunters would say I worked “too” hard.)
December-mid January: recover (I had hunted 40+ days at this point and my body was pretty beat up)
Late January-early February: focus on a few high-potential spots, eventually harvest an elk on February 15th with 3 hours left in the entire hunting season.
A deer and an elk. 300 pounds of meat. 50+ days hunting over 6 months. Dozens of feedback sessions with my more experienced friends who acted as coaches.
It’s ugly, but this is how growth looks, no matter the realm. This is how life looked while I took pre-med classes to knock them all out in 1 year. It’s how life looks right now as I build a coaching practice.
Applying this to your own goals?
Start with what you know.
Make a list.
Advantages, disadvantages, facts.
Plan on being really inefficient.
That’s ok.
You won’t have to work this hard for marginal results forever.
Your skills and knowledge will compound.
But if you want to do this thing in less than a year?
It’s going to take 3+ months of brute-force effort.
Bringing this back to 66.1 and the topic at hand…
Here’s how your life will look as you tackle a “healthy living” goal.
As you dial in your exercise, nutrition, sleep, and relationships, you’re going to feel overwhelmed for a few months. Slowly, though, new habits will begin to stick. You’ll start to notice changes in how you look and feel. People will start to notice.
Put in the work for 3 months. Build the habits, skills, and mindsets required to be a healthy person. James Clear wisely applies the concept of Activation Energy from Chemistry to habit building in the image below. In short, there’s a certain amount of raw horsepower you have to put in to get the thing started. Once it’s started, though, it gets much easier to maintain your system and continue to reap the rewards.
In time, your progress will look like this:
So, what’s your big goal?
Who do you need in your corner to make it happen?
Marcus
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