Five key enablers for achieving your goals

How can I achieve my goals effectively? Discover five key enablers to help you set, pursue, and accomplish your goals with confidence and clarity.

This an excerpt from a summary of Benjamin Hardy's book 'Willpower Doesn't Work.' You can access the full book summary via the link icon.

After setting a goal, you need enabling conditions for pressure.

Compete above your skill level—in public

When we compete, most of us like to do so with those of a similar or slightly lower skill level. This is a direct consequence of our ego, a desire to feel good about ourselves. However, it inhibits the depth of our progress. We can adapt quickly to a more challenging environment if we allow for the proportionate emotional response. We can grow faster if we are willing to take the hit. More so, when we compete in public, we can exacerbate the effect.

Context-based learning

Research has shown that we learn best by doing. This is how this type of (context-based) learning works:

  1. Learn a concept at a surface level.
  2. Practice and apply it in real-world scenarios to deepen understanding.
  3. Receive immediate coaching and feedback to refine your skills.
  4. Repeat the process with increasing intensity and shorter timelines to achieve automaticity.
  5. Enhance your progress through coaching and feedback.

Do not ‘consume knowledge,’ it doesn’t work. Rather, seek to find creative ways that require you to apply the thing you are learning.

Invest in (a mentor for) yourself

Due to compound interest, every dollar invested in yourself will yield a hundred-or-more return. A great way to invest in yourself is contracting a mentor that can enhance the learning process of achieving your goals. Only through a mentor will you turn something that is ‘good’ into something that is excellent.

A mentor may make you dissatisfied with your work. But dissatisfaction is the product of heightening expectations and personal standards. Dissatisfaction with your own work can become a powerful driving force.

Track your progress

When you measure your performance, your performance improves. When you report on your performance, you can be held accountable for it. This is true for self-accountability. However, holding yourself accountable to others is much, much more powerful.

Embrace the unknown

The emotional need for clarity and fear of the unknown leads people to abandon their dreams. Instead, they pursue more straightforward ambitions in less demanding environments.

Goal clarity is essential to high motivation. This clarity is abundant in simple (1–3 step) goals. For ambitious dreams, involving many, many steps, this goal clarity is lacking—there are too many steps. In these cases, it’s clarity about the next 1–2 steps that you should find. Acquiring this clarity is the key to achieving your dreams.

We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by [the presence of] a clear path to a lesser goal.

Robert Brault

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