How to Reach Your Goal - Part 5: Create an Action Plan
Action plans force you to associate goals, timeframes, and resources with your dreams.
Stick around, and I’ll tell you exactly how you can create an action plan that will help you achieve your greatness.
I close out day 5 of a five-part series where I help you reach your goal, lead you to your 365-day exit strategy from your job, help you start a business, help you declutter, and clear your mind so you can achieve your greatness.
In this step, I’m going to tell you how to create an action plan. Why it’s necessary and how to make sure this action plan ignites you into accomplishing your mission and achieving your goals.
The fact of the matter is if you don’t associate your goals and your dreams with an action plan, the likelihood of them coming true are slim to none.
There’s a saying that I absolutely love from the book The Alchemist written by Paulo Coelho. In the book he says, if you want something badly, if you want something really bad, all the universe conspires to help you achieve it, and I love that because that’s my life.
Like when I am going after something, I feel like all these things start happening and it starts lining up, and I started achieving it, but what the book doesn’t tell you is how does the universe know you want something really bad. Well, I think the answer to that is, you live it, breathe it, talk about it, do it, work on it, think about it all day that means you want it bad.
If you have something just sitting in your head and never verbalize it, you never express it, you never tell anyone about it, you never work towards it, how the hell is the universe going to know you really want it?
If you keep it all bottled up inside, you got to let that out. You got to tell the world. You have to make it known in your actions, in your desires, in your wants, in your dreams, and put it out there so that the universe can help you achieve it.
Today, I’m going to give you 5 steps and help you create an action plan to ignite your success and help you reach exponential greatness.
- S.M.A.R.T.
The very first one, I’m sure you’ve heard, is to create S.M.A.R.T goals. S-M-A-R-T is an acronym.
The S is to set your goal and make it Specific.
The M is to make sure it’s Measurable.
The A is Actionable.
The R is Relevancy.
The T is Time based.
Specifically, I want to leave my corporate job and focus on my side hustle. More specifically, I want to have enough income that it matches my corporate job. I want my side hustles to make as much income as my main job was making when I was working it at the end of this year.
Measurable, can it be measured? That’s the M. Yes, it can be estimated. I’ll know that I’ve achieved my goal when I have the monthly income, continuously, that matches my regular job, my standard 9 to 5.
Is it Attainable? Of course, it is. I have to work towards it. I have to work hard, but I can achieve this goal.
Is it Relevant? Relevancy is a hard one to define, but is it relevant to my interest, hobbies, and abilities? And the answer is yes as well. All of my side hustles, they deal in business, deal in consulting, deal in international relations, and deal in intelligence. These things are fields that I worked in and have done for a very long time and can recreate in my own personal sphere outside of the corporate sphere.
And the final is time based. The title of my action plan, my 365-day exit strategy, is the time. I want to accomplish this in 365 days.
That’s my S.M.A.R.T. goal. What’s yours?
- Determine the actions that will help you
The second step in this five-step plan is to determine the actions that will help you complete your goal.
Again in my situation, I have to break down all of my side hustles. I list them one through in, and I have about 10 of them, and I determine which one of these I need to prioritize that will get me to my goal faster?
In my case, which ones will make me the most money the quickest, and that’s where I need to focus my attention. I need to calculate how much time I have to give? I have a 9 to 5, which sometimes is a 6 to 6, so I only have so many hours in the day. No matter how many extra hours I create using my Create More Time in your Day Strategy.
What are my resources? What actions are going to lead me to my goal? Do I need to be networking more? Do I need to be reaching out? In my case, I want to create some products, some actual physical products, so I need to reach out to design people. I need to reach out to manufacturers, do some market research, do market analysis, and make sure I’m doing all these actions to help me reach that those goals.
And that’s just one piece, one part of several of my S.M.A.R.T. goals.
- Create a timeline.
The third thing I need to do is create a timeline, and the best way to create a timeline is using a Gantt Chart.
For those of you who don’t know what a Gantt Chart, it’s basically a time phase chart, where you can see your goals being accomplished, and when you put this out on paper, it helps you prioritize. It enables you to plan. It helps you schedule.
And you have to schedule these things around life occurrences. Is there an important event coming up? Is there a vacation you have planned? Is there’s something going on that year you need to make sure you’re around?
That you’re able to focus on achieving your goals in lieu of those other things that are happening, and it helps you plan out the whole year, or the entire month, or the entire week, so you actually do accomplish your goals.
Because you put them to a paper, you visualized it, and you’ve seen the schedule, and you know what you can or can’t accomplish.
- Find your resources.
The fourth step you need to do in achieving your action plan is to find your resources.
In this case, resources are defined as people, money, and time. You need to figure out who will help you, if anyone, accomplish your goals, and I hope there’s someone.
You need to figure out how much money you can throw at it. That’s going to require a budget. That’s going to require taking an actual assessment of your funds. I’ve mentioned before the book, Your Money or Your Life. Read it. Listen to it. Read the Cliff Note version. Get with it, so you can figure out how much money you have to accomplish your goal.
Finally, Time. Time is a resource. It’s finite. I’ve said this before again, I’m referring back to my previous video, Creating More Time in your day. You need to figure out how much time you have in your day to help you reach these goals and if you need more time, find it, add it, and do it. Do the damn thing.
- Adjust as needed.
The fifth and final step of creating an action plan to last and help you achieve exponential greatness is to adjust as needed.
This is the friendliest and the easiest one.
You create a plan. You write it down. It looks perfect. It can change. It can change in a few hours, it can change the next day. It’s going to change the following week.
Don’t hold yourself. Don’t pigeonhole yourself. Don’t beat yourself up if it changes. It’s supposed to be living and breathing. It’s going to change. This is just you figuring out what you can do at that moment. As those moments change, adjust.
Be flexible.
You can do it. You can reach your goals. You can achieve exponential greatness, and you can have phenomenal results at the end of this year, or at the end of 9 months, or 6 months, or 3 months, or whatever you set as your goal.
I wish you all the luck in the world in going through these steps to help you achieve whatever it is that you want to change.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this five-part series, where I showed you how to create more time in your day, get organized and automated, create atomic habits, prioritize stress management, and create an action plan.
Once you’ve accomplished those five things, you are ready to hit the ground running and get started with your own 365-day exit strategy or whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish.
I wish you all the luck in the world. I will be here every day to root for you, cheer you along, and let you step into my life, see how I’m accomplishing my 365-day exit strategy, and reach my goals and exponential greatness.