Snippet 6: The Simple Way To Achieve Your Goals - Hasan Kubba
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Right, so there's a bunch of different frameworks out there for how to achieve your goals. But one really simple one that I use all the time is the idea of simplicity and clarity in setting a goal. And this is what I'm discussing with my friend and life coach and business coach and author of The Unfair Advantage, Hasan Kuba, in this episode of the Deep Dive Snippet. And we're talking about how to use this framework for goal setting in the context of me writing my book. But to be honest, you can apply it to basically any goal that you're working on.

So I was working on a draft of chapter one this morning, which is all about why you shouldn't really set hard goals and you should actually focus on setting easy goals. That's sort of the somewhat counter-narrative argument that I'm trying to make, that screw smart goals, focus on goals that are within your control. And once you've got a goal, then think of it purely as a destination and then just completely forget about it because at that point, fixating on it or even thinking about it at all is, at least for me, not a very helpful thing. And it should be.

Like, you know, imagine the treasure at the end of the rainbow and then that will motivate you to do the thing. But at least for me, I find that imagining the treasure at the end of the rainbow does not at all motivate me to do the thing. And instead focusing on the bits that I can control, focusing on the journey, focusing on, okay, my only task right now is to just...

write one really shitty first draft of this next of this chapter. I'm on 2,700 words. Cool. Let's just keep on going. And then anytime I think, Oh, but like this sounds bad or, Oh, but I should probably edit it over here. Oh, but like, I think, Nope, stay on task. Enjoy the journey. I've got my music in the background. I've got my coffee. I've got my milk, whatever. And I'm just like banging stuff out speed, speed running, writing the first chapter. Oh, cool. Um, and that seems to be working, but I often find myself like,

I think one of the issues with these sorts of nonfiction books is that really, it's not really about what's true. It is about what's useful. I think in a self-help book like this, like, you know, James Clear, you know, Atomic Habits, the four things that make a habit stick. It may not matter that this mental model is 100% true. Yeah. But if it's a useful way of modeling the information and it's true enough that people can use it and apply it to their lives, you know, similar to left brain, right brain analogy, like

that's not actually how the brain works. Like, oh, right brain is creative and left brain is not. But like just having that model is still somewhat useful where you think, you know, if someone said it describes themselves as a more like right brain kind of person, or if someone says, oh, I'm really high on trait extroversion, like, you know, the ocean personality traits, it's not actually how the brain works. It's just a model that we've taken to put on top of it to kind of simplify things

And as long as it's useful, it's all good. But at the same time, I keep on like poking holes in my own argument where I'm like, yeah, but you know, my point is that for me, setting more achievable and easier goals is better than setting harder goals. But also if you look at the evidence, actually, there's a bunch of evidence that setting challenging goals is better than setting easy goals. I'm like, what the hell? How do you? And I keep on kind of second guessing myself. How do you deal with that? Right. Yeah, this is important. And I think what you're doing is you're thinking on paper. It's like what I said about coaching. Like I said that,

One of the biggest takeaways is you don't know what you think until you hear yourself say it. And similarly with writing, that's why writing is so valuable. That's why journaling is sort of a good analog to coaching, specifically if you follow a good structure. It's you're figuring out what you think by writing it down. That's what's happening there. And I'm impressed that you're disciplined enough to not edit as you write because I still ended up doing that quite a bit. But the more I stayed away from it, the better it was.

Yes. So going back to the whole idea of mental models, I think this is huge. And I talk about that in the book. I was like, so why did as I went meta and said, okay, look, there's two...

two models, extreme models. One is success is all luck and the other success is all hard work and merited and earned. And success, if it's all fate and luck and unearned, that's the other one. The truth is in the middle. And then I talked about this kind of tension between the two. So that's one approach is you could describe it as a tension and you could talk about how, yes, you could do hard goals, but you can also do easy goals and here's how to think about it.

But yeah, the whole thing about mental models is fascinating. That's one thing that I got out of economics is in economics, it's too complicated. Just like the human body. It's way too complicated. Any guru out there telling you, well, this is to burn fat and this one's to turn your body alkaline or some shit like that. It's

all oversimplified for the most part nonsense for the most part even when they sound like they're using scientific language and they're saying insulin this and ghrelin and leptin and all this stuff it's like okay yeah but it's actually super super super complicated and this is an oversimplification but you know what the patients whose doctors tell them well you know the saturated fat that you're eating is just furring up and clogging your arteries that's not actually how it works but if it's a simple model for them to use and if saturated fats were actually bad which is

is very it's a whole other kettle of fish but the point is that you want to help people to change their behavior and transform so this goes back to the online course i'm doing so you could be a youtuber and you can be an educational youtuber obviously you could do comedy you could do whatever you can do drama the point is to be an educational youtuber is a whole category and you could then teach physics and maths but then there's another sub-segment of educational which

I said transformational creator. So you're helping people to transform. And that's what you're doing with your book. You're helping people transform. What is that? That's mindset and behavior change. Ultimately, it's behavior change really because that will also change the mindset and the identity and all of that stuff. So for behavior change, how do you motivate people to change their behavior? You oversimplify behavior.

That's one thing. And then you make it power. Yeah, exactly. You empower and oversimplify to give them clarity to be like, okay, simple. I just need to do this. Yeah. Um, now that's an overly simplistic, you know, self-help book, which does that. It's kind of too, can be too far. So you might want to make it deeper and talk about how the people go back and forth, but here's what's worked for me. And here's what I want to do. So the, the phrase I always like to go back to is the map is not the terrain or the map is not the territory. Um,

So whatever you're mapping is not going to be the actual thing, otherwise it's a useless map. Imagine you had a one-to-one map that had every single detail. That's not a useful map. So what you're trying to do is you're mapping reality and you're saying, "Okay, here's one way, here's our approach." It sets easy goals, as you call it. And basically, are you saying process-oriented goals in that sense? Yeah, more or less. So what you have to do is set your own glossary and start to define your own terms.

And then within your own universe and what makes sense to others. Because one of the things is initially when we're using the word productivity and you say, well, productivity isn't just about output over time. And you had a great podcast episode with Unjaded Jade and you were discussing that. And well, I mean, you have to realize that you're taking liberties with the word productivity to include productivity.

- Like intentionality and meaning and like enjoyment and joy and all that jazz, which wouldn't traditionally be in a technical dictionary definition of productivity. - And therefore you could say, let's redefine productivity to mean this. - Yeah, and then I can do what I want because now I've laid out my-- - And then you do it, you've redefined it. - Got it.