A Millionaire Said, “Crazy Things Happen When You Keep The Promises You Make To Yourself.”
Imagine if You did everything You said You would do.
Entrepreneur. Millionaire. Woman. That’s who Danielle Leslie is.
I came across the following Forbes article featuring her story and was captivated. Here’s someone who was working in Silicon Valley as a top leader and then let go. Turns out being fired was the best thing to happen to her.
Losing the comfort blanket that comes with a high paying job thrust her full time into her own enterprise in which she’s thrived. One of her Instagram ads has the following quote, “Do you know the crazy things we can create in this world when we keep our word to ourselves?”
As a budding Entrepreneur myself, I decided to apply this quote to my life. For the next three months, I embarked to keep every promise I made to myself. Here are the results of that experiment.
The Self Promises
First things first, what does a promise to ourselves look like? The best scenario is where we hold ourselves accountable to do something that we said we would do. Whatever the task is, we make it known to ourselves that this is something we would like to accomplish.
We make these promises because they tie into our desires. We desire to look a certain way, feel a certain way, have certain things. Desire fuels our wants, needs, and aspirations. And in order to add these to our lives, we promise that we are going to work hard towards those them.
So how does this look like? Ideally, you have your goal, break it down into steps and boom, you’re off to the races. And at a high level, that’s what it entails. But far too often, we often fail because we want to be millionaires in ten years, but we fail to see how going to work on a daily basis gets us there.
The 12 Week Year is an excellent book that takes our goals and dreams and breaks them into actionable steps with specific timeframes.
First, ten years: You imagine what you want your life to look like in ten years.
Next, three years: You create goals that you need to accomplish in three years to make your ten year dream come true.
Next, one year: You break those three year goals down further into one year goals.
Finally, quarterly: You create three month goals that tie into your one year goal.
The takeaway is that these three month goals need to be accomplished to lead to the yearly goals, which lead to your three year goals and so forth.
The Experience
So I had my three week goals and I was ready to go to work. I was able to create the following goals:
a work goal (what I wanted to accomplish on the job),
a financial goal (how much I wanted to put towards debt),
a stretch goal (what I wanted to accomplish that was outside of work), and
a learning goal (what new topics did I want to learn).
From the month of October to December, I had these goals on my mental radar.
By consistently reviewing these goals, I found myself making checklists. For example, with my learning goal, I wanted to learn how to write really good articles. The first step was to enroll in a Medium Course. I found Dave Schools course on Udemy and signed up. The next step was to study each lesson by a specific time. So week one, study lesson one, week two, study lesson two. I applied this same methodology to all my goals.
As you can imagine, my productivity went through the roof.
In addition to utilizing the 12 Week Year to break my promises and goals down to day-to-day tasks, I also implemented David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. I had action items for each task, next steps for that task and so forth. With so much productivity going on, along with the burden of a 9–5, the burnout crash was bound to happen. And yes, it did.
There were days where I’d look at my to-do lists after a long day and not want to do anything. Once 5pm came, my brain was done with any kind of high level thinking.
In times like these, I was able to find energy in the quote. As I reflected on my days daily, I’d ask myself, “did I keep the promises I made to myself today?” Did I accomplish what was on my checklist? Did I make good use of my time? This constant review made me more selective of how I spent my time.
During this trial period, I also encountered the Learning Curve. Whenever we start something new, it’s fun. We’re excited by the possibilities and how we are going to make positive changes.
This was me in October. My productivity was at an all time high. But eventually, we encounter challenges, setbacks, discouragements. This was my November. When the holidays start to creep up, things that you didn’t factor for start to appear.
Fortunately, I kept reminding myself that “Crazy things happen when you keep the promises you make to yourself.”
So I preserved. I became more diligent with my time. I found out that for me, what worked best was to accomplish my hardest task for that day first. In addition, I needed to account for how I would spend every hour that day. This time management skill went from frustrating to satisfying as in December, I could see how much progress I had made on all my goals.
Long story short, I hit 75% of the goals I made for myself. I accomplished my financial goals and my work goals. I made great progress on the learning goals and stretch goals, but they weren’t completed. This reminded me of Les Brown’s quote, “Shoot for the moon and if you fail, you end up on the stars.”
Takeaways
It was pure bliss when I accomplished my financial goal. That goal in particular taught me a valuable lesson. Put yourself first. When it comes to your time and energy, put yourself first. So often we let other things, such as emails, notifications, friends, etc., take our time and attention that it ultimately drains us in the end. We need to remember how to say “NO” so we can focus on what really matters. Ourselves. Our goals. Our dreams.
When we focus on ourselves, we don’t have time for anything else. This is especially true of distractions such as the big three: Netflix, Facebook, Twitter. We spend hours on these platforms, sacrificing our goals and our dreams for another day. If we keep the promises we make to ourselves and look at what we need to accomplish towards our goals, we’ll have no time for distractions.
“Distraction is the only Luxury that the poor can afford” — Dan Lok
The lasting takeaway from keeping the promises made to myself was the habits I formed. Four months in and I still wake up and prioritize what’s the biggest thing on my plate today and how can I get it done. My mornings are effective enough to where my main priorities are done by noon. These small habits, compounded over time, only lead to more opportunities. Who knows where this path leads?
Probably somewhere crazy.
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