My Notes
The name of the book is actually Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals. As the title suggests, it lays out the process to set and achieve goals that can help you create the best year in your life so far. It takes a holistic approach to goal setting.
There are 10 major aread of life, namely, physical, vocational, avocational, emotional, financial, spiritual, parental, marital, social, and intellectual. Each influences the other and is critical to living a fulfilling and successful life. To create your best year ever, you need to devise a practical plan to succeed in all aspects that you will follow through. Take stock of where each of those areas stands right now. If you need help, the author has a free life score assessment that you can take.
It’s important to address any mental blocks you may have before you get started. As cliched as it sounds, it all comes down to your self-belief. For eg., Martin Luther King Jr, Roger Banister, and others challenged the perceived limits of the masses and literally changed the course of history by adopting the belief that change was possible. Past failures should not deter future endevours. Failures provide useful advice.
It’s important to set ambitious yet attainable goals. Once you’ve set a goal, take steps every day to move towards them. Break down goals into tasks and take small actions. You will soon become addicted to daily action. Do daily, weekly, and quarterly reviews to ensure that you are on track to achieving your goals and calibrate as needed. Prepare in advance for possible scenarios where you might get derailed. Also, remember – stay true to your goals and not your plans. It doesn’t really matter how you get to the destination as long as you do reach it. Enlist support in the form of peer groups or accountability partners. Masterminds work great too.
I listened to the audiobook on Audible and it was an engaging listen. The book doesn’t uncover any astounding truths that you didn’t know but it is structured in a way that helps you think through and set clear goals for yourself. It was a good reminder for me to fine-tune my own 2020 goals and ensure that I’m working towards them in a practical manner.