SUMMARY 

• Identity Creates Behaviour – It’s not the other way around. Choose a superhero version of yourself, give that a name and see how your behavior starts to follow suit and match who you’re striving to be.
• Set Magnetic Goals – Goals that pull us into action. Goals that make us want to be productive. Setting massive goals makes them magnetic.
• Focus on What Matters Most – Focus on the outputs that matter most. What is going to create the most amount of positive movement?
• Determine What You Need to Learn, and From Whom – When you do something you haven’t done before, it requires you to learn something new. 100% of the knowledge that you need to achieve your goals already exists so go out there and learn it!
• Schedule time to work on the things that matter most.

TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever felt that you’re just trying and trying, but nothing seems to work, you’re just not getting ahead? Well, by the end of today’s message you’ll have five simple steps that you can use to achieve more success.

Hi, my name is Eric Partaker and as a peak performance expert and an award-winning entrepreneur, I know a few things about what it takes to get ahead in life. But it hasn’t come easily. It’s come through a lot of trial and error and experience, but I want to teach you today five things that if you use, right away, can help you up your game and achieve a lot more success.

So number one is to recognize that behavior follows identity, it’s not the other way around. For example, the other day, I bought my son a Captain America costume and as soon as I put the Captain America costume on him, he started running around and behaving like Captain America. And I didn’t have to at any point, sit him down and say, okay and this is what you need to do next to behave like this superhero, he just got it. He knew immediately what to do. And that’s because behavior follows identity. The moment he took on that identity of a superhero, the moment he became and started behaving like that superhero. And why am I telling this story? Because when I ask you to recognize that behavior follows identity, I’m not asking you to do something that you don’t already know how to do. As children, we all knew this inherently. It was just a part of our play. And we would choose to be people all the time and then once we made that decision, once we made that choice, it immediately impacted our behavior and how we were showing up and interacting in the world.

But guess what? That doesn’t need to leave us and we can still do that today. And it’s such a critical success tip to realize this it’s empowering. It’s invigorating. You get to go back to your youth in your quest to become your best. And what I would encourage you to do is choose an identity who is it that you are at your best and give that a name. Maybe you’re the world’s best at something. Maybe you assume the identity of somebody that you admire, but choose. Who’s a superhero version of you, give that a name and see how your behavior, if you constantly remind yourself of that identity will start to follow suit and match who you’re trying to be.

The number two thing we need to do to get ahead and have more success is we need to set magnetic goals. I mean goals that pull us into action goals that make us want to be productive towards them rather than goals that we’re like, meh I could kind of work on this but it doesn’t really mean that much to us. We need goals that magnetize us. And how do we do that? Well, one is we need to make sure that the goals are big enough. We lose that sense, once again using an example of going back to our childhood, when we were kids we had big dreams. We thought everything was possible, everything was achievable. And we need to remember to do that again. Setting massive goals makes them magnetic and it does so for a variety of reasons.

One is when you choose a goal that’s huge you have no choice but to commit before you’re ready, because there’s no chance that you’ll ever be ready enough to go after it. And that’s one of the biggest things that I see getting in the way of people. They think, oh, I’m not just ready yet. There’s this one more thing I need to do. One more course I need to take, one more book I need to read, one more conversation that I need to have, another year to go by for me to feel confident. Well, guess what? When that time passes, your life is passing and so are all the opportunities. But if you set a big magnetic goal, a massive goal, it’s going to inspire you to take action because you have to commit before you’re ready, you have no choice. But since you’re picking something that’s big and massive, and that inspires you from a dream point of view, it’s going to make it more exciting and enjoyable to work towards. And also when you pick a massive goal, it makes you hyper aware of your time, because it’s so big you have no time to lose. So you end up being a lot more productive as well because you have no choice. It’s big. It’s massive.

The other thing too is massive goals prompt us to create plans, to create 90 day plans, to break them down. We have to, once again, because they’re so big. And the beautiful thing about being forced to break down a goal because of its size is that it makes it more magnetic. Why? Because by breaking the goal down we bring it a little bit closer to us. There’s a milestone there that’s not so far in the future. And the closer we can taste success, at least in a first instance, the more magnetizing that goal will be.

Once we have our magnetic goals in place, we then need to focus on what matters most. Not all things are created equal, life is not linear, and so it goes as well for working against our goals. We can’t do absolutely everything when it comes to working on our goals, we have to focus on the outputs that matter most. What are the things that are going to create the most amount of positive movement? A way to think about it is if everything else were to stay the same in relation to the work you’re doing on a particular goal, where’s the one area, the one thing, which if you created the most positive momentum would have the biggest impact on your overall progress for that goal.

And what I’m really getting at here is getting you to think about what’s called the 80-20 Principle. So rather than focus on everything, once you have your magnetic goals in place, what’s the 20% of things that you could be doing to focus on that will create 80% of the result. The 20% that creates the 80%. Focus on what matters most, the biggest bang for the buck maneuvers. If you’re writing a book what’s going to matter most is the amount of time that you spend writing. For what goal ultimately? For getting the book written. So are you tracking that, for example, are you tracking the amount of time spent writing and do you have a clear deadline for when that book will be published. And all of the things that fall outside of focusing on what matters most to the greatest extent possible you should seek to delegate that stuff, eliminate it or automate it. Delegate, eliminate or automate it, but we really want to reduce it because we want 60% of our time in a given week spent on what matters most in relation to achieving our goal. The other 40% minimize as much as possible.

Number four success tip for getting ahead is determine what you need to learn and from whom. When we’re trying to do something we haven’t done before, it’s going to inevitably require us to learn something new, to require us to do something that we’re not familiar with, that we don’t have practice with. And the beautiful thing is, is that all the knowledge that you need to achieve your goals, all of it, 100% of it, it already exists. And that’s a liberating thought when you think about it. It already exists. It’s out there somewhere. You simply need to connect your way to it. And that then becomes your goal. What are the skills, the things that you need to learn, and how do you connect your way to the expertise that’s going to help inform that skill development? And that skill development, the informing of that skill development could come from things, it could come from books or courses or online research you do, or it could come from a person in the form of an individual, a group, or maybe a mastermind that you joined. But everything that you need knowledge wise is out there. But what you need to do to get ahead is determine what is it that I need to learn? What is it that I need to up-skill and how will I acquire that knowledge?

And then last but not least to really get ahead, we need to get into the habit of scheduling our time to work on the things that matter most. So if you have a set of activities that you know you should be doing or objectives that you should be working on, you need to schedule that time in your calendar. If I was sitting next to you, and if I opened up your computer and looked at your calendar, could I see, very concretely in the course of your week on specific days, what you’re going to be working on and when? Or is your calendar just full of back-to-back meetings or full of meetings with other people and then just like a lot of blank spots. It’s those blank spots that need to be filled with appointments with yourself to work on the activities or the objectives that matter most.

You’re so good at scheduling an appointment with someone else and you show up on time typically for that appointment, I bet. And when you’re with that person, you don’t just suddenly walk out of the room. So don’t do that to yourself. The same respect that you pay others, you’re so good at paying others, pay yourself the same respect. You’ll get a lot further ahead in life if you schedule into your calendar the things you want to be working on. You show up for the appointment just as you would with someone else because it’s an appointment with somebody even more important, it’s an appointment with you. And during that appointment, just as you would respect someone else, just work on that activity. Don’t start going on your phone and don’t start going off doing other things or walk up and leave the room. Stay there, focus, with that appointment with the number one person in the world that’s going to determine whether or not you become successful. And that is you.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed that. And if you head over to my website at ericpartaker.com, you can also subscribe to my weekly Peak Performance Insights newsletter.