#010: Define and Track Your Personal Progress
Life does not improve by coincidence
Everyone has aspirations, dreams, plans, wishes, ambitions or goals.
If you want to get as close as possible to achieving your dreams you need an action plan with measurable objectives and metrics.
Intentional step-by-step or year-by-year iterations will inevitably bring you closer to achieving your goals.
The problem is that most people don’t plan and track their iterative progress which makes their goals always appear as unrealistic dreams.
Metrics are more important for your personal life than in business
No matter if you are employed or independent, in your professional life everything is measured and tracked: goals, objectives and key results, performance, revenue and first and foremost growth.
These objectives and numbers are regularly reported to the stakeholders.
Based thereon, they then decide if they should continue investing in the business or in you as an employee for example.
Business and employee performance are typically measured and reviewed twice per year and deeply assessed at least once per year.
Do you review your personal performance regularly?
There are a lot of reasons why you should do your own performance review on a regular basis while there is basically no reason why you shouldn’t do it.
If you care about how your life is going to look like in 1 year or in 10 years then you better make sure you are taking intentional decisions today in order to get there tomorrow.
Your life is optimal if you minimize regrets
If whenever you took a decision you always aimed for achieving your goals at the time of decision-making — then you will never have to regret anything.
Thus, you need to define goals, measure and track them.
My personal performance system
Many people — rather jokingly — tell you that they have a New Year’s resolution.
I never heard anyone telling me that defining such a resolution changed anyone’s life.
Instead, for myself, each time I turn a year older at my birthday I take a moment to think about my goals for the next year and I write them down.
I want to define my goals for the next 12 months and at the end of the year see if I managed to accomplish them.
The reason why I started doing this is because I believe it helps to improve myself with respect to whatever I consider important as opposed to just living through my life without clear objectives.
It also allows me to better understand if I am living up to my expectations and if I manage to turn my ambitions into actual value.
At each birthday, I also review my goals and performance that I had set for the last year and I think deeply why I have or have not achieved them, if they are still relevant to me and I write down my results.
I categorize my goals into:
Family objectives:
What I want to achieve as a family or specifically enable for my wife and son;
Personal objectives such as
- Network: how I want to expand my personal network (e.g. meet X number of new people related to a specific area I am interested in or meet Y number of people of my existing network at least once per quarter, because with those people I have the highest bandwidth-conversations with)
Sports and health:
Workout once per week and go running at least twice per week for a minimum of 50 minutes. Or establish a specific habit to increase my sleep time.
Learning:
Define one or several areas where I want to gain or broaden my expertise in (e.g. investing, Crypto, AI in biotech, etc)
Personal career objectives
Financial objectives
- how and how much to invest?
- earnings and expenses forecast?
Generally, I like to set ambitious goals as they are by far more inspiring than setting goals that I may achieve anyway even if I don’t specifically define them.
You progress faster if you measure your pace
I now have an archive of yearly goals and performance since I’ve started to measure it a while back.
I regularly review my goals during the year and I am generally aware of what I want to focus on.
Besides, it also gives me clarity on my priorities and thoughts.
This very simple framework only requires half a day per year of investment to write down what’s important to you.
Yet, it will help you take decisions with intention throughout the year as it automatically defines a certain mindset in your everyday life.
I can only recommend it as I truly believe it has been transformational to me.
I am able to take decisions with conviction and actively control where I am going.
As I also have 10-year goals I can say that I am getting closer to achieving them at a significant pace.
Key takeaways
- Set up a personal performance system by defining what matters to you in life.
- Define objectives in those areas with measurable yearly goals.
- Review them once per year (e.g. on your birthday) and set the new goals for the next year.
Don’t miss the next post to get more actionable insights on how I optimize my life.
