Year End Mindset – Friday Fundamentals

Year end mindset

Here we are in December of 2019, with less than 30 days left in this decade! This is the time to reflect on your 2019 goals and progress and start planning for an even better 2020!

First, let’s reflect on your year. Think of how much you’ve changed over the past 12 months, how far you’ve come, and all you accomplished. Hopefully, and likely, you are proud of how the year went. It’s hard to see how much you change over time, being that you see your own life each and every day. But imagine what someone else would notice if they saw you once and then 12 months later. What would they notice? Perhaps you’ve gotten in better physical shape, improved your mindset, become happier, more motivated, and have started taking steps towards a better you. Sure, there’s always room for improvement, but you’ve likely had a killer year filled with tons of positives when you look back.

Looking forward to 2020 and beyond, use your reflections to plan your next year and more. People tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade. Just look to overzealous new year’s resolutions for proof. Start with a 3-year plan, and then figure out what the first steps are to that long term goal. This will help you visualize and outline what your next year needs to look like so that you can eventually accomplish that 3-year plan.

Let’s look at how to build your 3-year plan, 1-year goals, and subsequent action steps.

3 Year Plan

Your 3-year plan is more of a vision of your life and everything in it. Think about how you want to live, earn an income, who you want to spend your time with, where you want to live, what you do for fun, fulfillment, and challenges. This 3-year plan will help you create the vision for your future. Don’t short yourself here. 3 years is a long time and you can accomplish more than you think. Just look back three years in the past at your own life and look how much has changed since then.

1 Year Goals

Working backward from your 3-year plan, you can start to outline your goals for the next 1 year. You have a vision of where you want to go, and now you have to make a plan to achieve that vision. Let’s say you want to achieve financial freedom as part of your 3-year plan, which means you’ll need to build a passive income stream of $5,000 per month. Starting out in year one, let’s say you need to build $500/month in passive income and grow exponentially from there, working toward that 3-year plan. Great!

90 Day Goals

90 days goals are a great amount of time for you to break smaller goals into. 90 days is long enough for you to accomplish large goals, but also short enough to keep you pushing. Brian Moran outlines some great reasons why these quarterly goal periods are beneficial in his book, The Twelve Week Year. Brandon Turner is also a proponent of this 90-day goal setting strategy and has built a daily journal designed around setting 90-day goals, with weekly action plans, called The Intention Journal. Both of these are highly recommended! The 90-day goal-setting period is designed to identify that first short term goal, and breaking it into action steps you take every single day. Going back to our 3-year plan of financial freedom, we decided we need to build $500/month in passive income in year one. Let’s assume that means you’ll have to buy 2 rental properties that generate $250 per month each. Our first 90-day goal-setting period might be laying all the groundwork to buying those two properties. You’ll have to select a market, build a team, search for and analyze deals, make offers, and eventually close on a property. You can break each of these into daily, weekly, and monthly steps. This is where you’re really making progress towards that 3-year plan. Work on your 90-day goals for the next 3 years and see where you end up! I bet you’ll surprise yourself and your wildest imagination.

I want you to understand that you are capable of achieving your wildest dreams. You just have to live intentionally, figure out what you want, and pursue that with all of your efforts. You can have anything you want in this life, all you have to do is decide! You’re already on a journey of self-improvement, just by listening to this podcast. Keep it up, continue investing in yourself, continue to take massive action, and aim high. You’ll look back on your journey one day and be amazed at just how far you’ve come.