Tim Ferriss

So what makes goal setting effective?

What makes goal setting effective?

different frameworks for this you know like the smart framework specific measurable achievable right with timelines and so on okay like there are there are better and worse ways of defining your goals to make them more likely to be achieved right if you have accountability and you have timelines you have a deadline you have deliverables etc all that makes goal achieving easier

All right, well, what's fear setting?

Fear setting, it's really simple.

So if you have the thing that you're worried about, and this is what I still do to this day, I probably do it once a quarter.

The thing you're nervous about could be

starting your own business could be writing or finishing a book could be getting cancer yeah it could be getting cancer right it could be getting older could be uh one of your parents dying could be whatever it might be

uh and to be clear fear setting doesn't doesn't automatically solve all these things but here's here's what it does it defangs a lot of them so you can take action let me explain what i mean so if you're saying super simple let's say the example is in my case i'll give a real like one of the very first huge examples was i'd started my own company i was i was completely burned out around 2003 2004.

had been working seven days a week and i wanted to take four weeks off all right running my own business how do you do that right i've created this monster i'm running it i have single point of failure me

And so all of these disasters came to mind, right?

So what did I do?

I wrote them down.

And there's an alternative approach called morning pages, which is slightly different, but I'll explain it.

That's from Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way.

Really, really interesting.

incredible practice but i'll come back to that so in fear setting like at the top i would put taking four weeks vacation that's the thing i'm considering then in the in the first column just write down all of the things that are freaking you out that could go wrong in in as much detail as possible right so i would write down

to be overseas and i'm going to miss a letter from the irs and then they're going to shut to do this and this and i'm going to get audited and blah blah blah okay write it down boom like some miss irs letter blah blah blah blah all right what's the next one next one is there's going to be some supply chain problem and like blah blah blah blah okay write that down all right like the president at the fulfillment company is going to

get sick and then boom like orders aren't going to ship and there's going to be this huge disaster i'll get right down and so you write down all these things like aim for volume right like 10 to 20 things

All right, that's column one.