End of Year Goal Setting – Episode 596

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, we’re going to be talking about end of year goal setting. Now, most people do this in January. And from our conversation right now between this time period and the end of the year, most people are getting fat and happy. And this is the time to get hustle and what? Hungry? Is that what we’re going to call it? I don’t know. Kim, in the past, you’ve found this time of year to be a really productive time. Why is that the case? Well, I love the ability to focus on some bigger projects. So I have always been super thankful that our business is not heavily end of year oriented. To be quite frank, nobody wants to talk about life insurance in December.

[00:52] And while we definitely have some clients that feel like, oh, okay, you know, I’m just sort of marching through life and now’s now, so I’m going to do it. There’s, of course, very few clients that feel like, oh, gosh, for whatever reason, I need to do something end of year, which thankfully has nothing to do with taxes. So it’s not a requirement. For the most part, people don’t tend to focus on their personal finances towards the end of the year. Might be a really good time to focus on them. Nevertheless, people don’t tend to. And that’s fine. You know, family and time with family and maybe some extra time because of the shopping nature that occurs at this time of year and weather related things, et cetera.

[01:32] That’s all good. There’s a season for everything. And for me, this season, especially between Christmas and New Year’s, is a great time to dive into a big project that takes very focused effort that I find a hard time getting done amongst the normal day to day operations of the business. And so because most of our clients are gone and our team likes some time for free days, which I thoroughly support. If I’m not having family in town, I have a project. Oh, I love it. That’s great. So you’ve found a way to be productive with that. Is it that there’s a process meaning you’re looking forward to it, knowing, OK, this day is going to kick off and now I get to dive into this? What does it look like the ramp up period to that?

[02:26] So I’ll tell you of one a few years ago and then I’ll tell you of what I’m going to do in 2024. A few years ago, I was given the four hour cookbook by Tim Ferriss. So most people know the four hour work week or the four, you know, four day work week, all of four hour body, et cetera, et cetera, all of his books. And I am not a chef. I do not enjoy anything to do with cooking, cleaning, prepping, food. All of it can go by the wayside as far as I’m concerned. Nevertheless, this book was given to me by Dan Sullivan. It’s a hardback book. It’s full of color. It is a big book and I was absolutely determined to read it during that week. So Emma Dogg was in the house at the time. The fire was on and I literally day after day

[03:24] sat in our living room for a good, I don’t remember now, five, six hours reading that book because first of all, it was a gift. It was special. I wanted to get through it. It did have pictures. It had all sorts of bizarre things to learn about that Tim had gone through and shared. And I was just really committed to it. I knew that I could learn. I knew that I could benefit from it and that it would be a worthwhile effort. And I love having a project. So I just dove in. It was very special time. Yeah, that’s, you know, I can picture that book because I have it on my bookshelf, not with me right here, but it’s this beautiful black book. It’s a hardback, beautiful pictures, heavy pages, and it’s all about the art of learning. That’s what it is.

[04:21] And it’s about finding the frameworks of learning. So let’s do this. This episode is going out towards the tell end of 2024. This coincides with Thanksgiving, coincides with the holidays. So before we jump into a project, this is something you’ve said many times. Gratitude will be the fuel. So let’s lead with gratitude and then let’s pepper in, extract out of you some of those end of year goal setting things. So does that work for us to lead with gratitude right now? Absolutely. And really the story that I just shared was that right. Part of the reason that I chose the project is because I was grateful for the gift. And so heading into 2024 time, I am grateful that I get the time. So this particular year, my family came in May. So we

[05:20] did the whole side of kids and grandkids and everybody else, nieces, nephews, sister, et cetera in May. While Todd’s family is local and we do have them over, it’s a one day thing. Right. So that means I have a long period of time with which to get some projects done. And speaking of books, I have my 11th book coming out sometime in 2025. It is titled Busting the Scarcity Mindset. The good prosperity thinkers do. Now the subtitle is still being worked on. Nevertheless, my project is to take the other 10 books and do some pretty major cleanup, update, marketing funnel, creation of video that can go with the book. Of course, we already have all the audibles versions to flesh these books out in a more

[06:16] thorough fashion so that people can benefit from it. I’m so grateful that most of the podcasts work you and I do tends to be evergreen. There’s some exceptions. And the books that I write are absolutely evergreen and there are no exceptions. And so while it’s wonderful to refresh them, and most of that is just branding and other little things that are tiny and updating some pictures, it is a joy to be able to pull together some of these other resources that we’ve had for quite some time, but they’ve never really been together in a book funnel or a way that other people could benefit from them very specifically because my books tend to be probably about half and half of them are larger picture

[07:01] what people would typically call financial planning. I call prosperity economics, the big picture stuff. The other half are very specific. They’re about college funding, they’re about retirement, they’re about mortgages, they’re about life insurance, they’re specific products, if you will. And so it will be fun to support the readers that we know, some learn by reading, some learn by listening, some learn by watching, so I’m really excited to get the videos done, some of which are done, but they just are not in a good place for them to look at them, and then some learn by doing, and so I’m excited to create, to the degree that I can, some things that people can get their hands on as it relates

[07:43] to each of these books, and that is the project for 2024. So there was a vision first, right? We visioneer first, we get a sense of what we want to be working on, and I’ve had that sense for the last two or three months. Then we get to the goals, because the goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and with a time frame. So I have an Excel spreadsheet where I’ll be populating all these deliverables, I have specific goals, I have a accountability buddy named Kristen Huggins, who is the co-author for the 11th book, and I have some coursework to do, and a very specific structure that I’ll be going through towards the end of the year. That’s excellent. So do you mind, I’m going to do some extraction real quick,

[08:30] because I want to pull the framework out of what you’re doing here. So one, you led this with an internal fire, meaning there was a desire to do something. Second, was that you started to create and play the movie in your head, The Visioneering. After you did that, you said, okay, well, in order for us to get this movie to be playing in the studios of other people, the theaters of other lives, there needs to be some goals with that. So you set some goals, they were smart goals, and then in order to achieve that, you had to carve aside and set something in motion. And lastly, what you did is you had an accountability person, someone else that, and it’s not because you’re not going to do it, but it’s always nice to have, we’ll call it

[09:27] the second in command, taking the will while you’ve got something else going on, or at least someone else that you can bounce it off of, or if when it gets really hard to say, oh, I have to report to them. Is that a decent framework? Absolutely. And a quick example is I did start it on those past weekend, and I did some work over the weekend that I didn’t necessarily want to do. Not all projects fit into our God-given talent. Sometimes we have to pull in some of the extra things, but I had committed that I would get her, it’s actually a list of other book recommendations, I committed that I would get it to her by today. And I knew today was going to be really busy, so I knew it had to happen. And so I had fun walking

[10:12] around. I made it fun, right? It wasn’t necessarily something I wanted to do, but I turned my phone recorder on and I walked around and opened up all the cupboards in our house, because I have books spread all over this place. And I just looked through all the titles and listed the ones that I thought should go on my recommended reading list, and now she has it, and now somebody else can find the proper title, write down the author correctly, because I never spell the names right. Pull the Amazon link, et cetera, et cetera. I love it. That’s great. So really valuable lessons inside of this episode. One is we’ve now unpacked the framework for setting those goals, putting it into action. Two, we started with some gratitude in here,

[10:58] some things that you were grateful for. And again, it could be the book for you as a listener. It could just be that right now you’re hearing this episode and saying, yeah, you know what? I don’t have to wait until January. I can start it right now. This is the time. So Kim, grateful for you and grateful that you could share this with all of our listeners today. For anyone that is looking to make this impact right now, and you need that accountability, you can send an email to helloatprosperitythinkers.com and just mention what’s going on. We’re a community here. So do that. Helloatprosperitythinkers.com. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit ProsperityThinkers.com.