Accomplishing Goals: A Guide to Getting Stuff Done

Did you set goals for the new year?

Want to be more successful setting and achieving your goals?

To discover how to accomplish goals, and to hear about the Kickstarter campaign for his new book, I interview John Lee Dumas.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview John Lee Dumas, the host of Entrepreneur on Fire, a daily podcast where he interviews entrepreneurs. John has published over 1000 podcast interviews and discovered a lot along the way. He’s about to publish The Freedom Journal: Accomplish Your Goal in 100 Days.

John will discuss goal setting and how you can gear up for your best year ever.

You’ll discover why it’s important to set SMART goals.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.

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Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

Getting Goals Accomplished

John’s plan for promoting his book

John talks about putting together The Freedom Journal throughout 2015 and shares that he will be launching it on January 4, 2016, via Kickstarter. Although he was inspired by what Seth Godin did on Kickstarter with The Icarus Deception, he’s decided to use Kickstarter in a very non-traditional way.

He says he wanted The Freedom Journal to have a significant impact beyond the people who purchase the book and shares how he decided to partner with Adam Braun of Pencils of Promise, which is a great organization that builds schools in developing countries.

John explains what’s unique about how he’s using Kickstarter; he’s not using it as a way to raise funds to produce the books. He’s using Kickstarter as a platform for marketing and exposure, while allowing people to contribute to a cause.

Each time the project hits one of four different funding goals, John will personally donate $25,000 to Pencils of Promise on behalf of Fire Nation. He recognizes that not everyone can donate $25,000 to help build a school, but says they can buy a journal, knowing part of those proceeds will go toward building a school in a developing country.

John talks about why he’s going to keep his publishing in house and shares other plans for the rest of his 33-day launch campaign.

Someone else who has traveled around the country doing launch parties is Lewis Howes.

Listen to the show to learn about some of the Kickstarter rewards for people who purchase The Freedom Journal.

Why John wrote a book on goal setting

After doing many interviews on EOFire, John says the question he’s most asked about his guests is, “What’s the magical recipe to success?” He shares that in addition to hard work for a long period of time the major commonality is that his guests know how to set and accomplish goals.

After polling his audience, John discovered his listeners struggle with setting and accomplishing goals.

He knew this was something he could solve and explains why he chose to create a leather bound journal instead of a PDF or an online app.

Listen to the show to learn how many interviews John has done for EOFire.

What’s a goal

John defines a goal as SMART, an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time Bound. If something doesn’t have those five qualities, he says, it’s not a goal.

The Freedom Journal starts by teaching you exactly how to set a SMART goal. Once you set the SMART goal, you can go forward to accomplish it.

Listen to the show to discover what John thinks keeps people from succeeding when they set a goal.

John’s military training

John talks about his military service and shares how his military training helped with his goal setting.

He says he quickly learned the value of Parkinson’s law (tasks will expand to the time allotted) and the Pareto Principle (80% of the stuff you do is not resulting in the 20% success that you want, so get rid of the excess stuff, and focus on your core 20%).

When he left the military and entered the entrepreneurial world, John says he had a completely different perspective from a lot of people. He had to adjust to the fact that the code of conduct in the military was not the same as the code of conduct in the rest of the world.

Listen to the show to hear more about John’s military “crash course” in time management.

How to set goals

John offers the example of setting a goal to “lose weight.” The problem is that saying “I want to lose weight” has no elements of the SMART acronym.

He explains a better way to express the goal is to say, “I want to lose 10 pounds in 45 days.” This is a SMART goal. It’s specific (you want to lose 10 pounds), it’s measurable (10 pounds), it’s attainable (losing 10 pounds in 45 days is likely feasible), it’s relevant (it matters in your life, so you will do it) and it’s time bound (you have a hard deadline, but you still need checkpoints).

John set the time period for achieving goals in The Freedom Journal as 100 days and shares why that timeline makes sense.

Within those 100 days, he’s set checkpoints along the way. For example, day one is the first of ten 10-day sprints. John calls these micro goals and describes how they get you 10% closer to your goal.

At the end of each ten-day sprint, you do a ten-day sprint review to see if you accomplished your micro goal, analyze why or why not and decide what you need to do to go forward. If you fall behind, you need to figure out what you need to do to get yourself back on track.

Listen to the show to learn how to know if a goal is relevant.

The Freedom Journal exercises

John explains how everything in The Freedom Journal continues to point, re-correct, pivot and adjust you toward achieving your 100-day goal.

He says that when you’re working toward a goal, you need to make minor adjustments every single day and night. Accomplish those ten-day sprints. Then look back over them to make sure you had the right ten-day sprint and determine how to improve the next one.

John shares one of the exercises from his book, called quarterly reviews. Every 25 days (day 25, 50, 75), you complete two full pages that go through what’s happened the last 25 days. You identify your two major struggles and two major wins, as well as what worked over the past 25 days (25% of your entire goal) and what you need to do to pivot moving forward.

Listen to the show to discover the purpose of micro and quarterly goals.

Accountability

John talks about how his Podcaster’s Paradise community started doing accountability matchmaking 6 months ago. He says they give people a choice of being matched with one person or a mastermind of three to four people. They’ve discovered that people who get matched up with an accountability partner are finding more success and enjoyment from the Podcaster’s Paradise community.

So while the book is designed as an accountability partner, John says he’s also designed a free app that will ask you if you’ve accomplished your day’s goals, your night goals, your ten-day sprint. In addition, people who purchase The Freedom Journal can join a Facebook group where people will be encouraged to match up and become accountability partners for their 100-day goal.

Listen to the show to hear why the book is not just for entrepreneurs.

Discovery of the Week

The BuzzSumo Chrome extension shows you the share counts on any site you are on for all of the different social networks, including Twitter, which recently shut off the API that allowed third-party tools to collect Twitter counts on articles.

If one of the metrics you track is the number of shares each piece of content gets on Twitter, this plugin will reveal that data for you.

There are a couple of other cool features that let you view which Twitter users shared a page you’re tracking, the backlinks pointing to that page and other content from the page’s author. You can also see some of the most shared content on that site and even analyze the website.

The BuzzSumo Chrome extension is free but requires a free or paid BuzzSumo account.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how the BuzzSumo Chrome Extension works for you.

Other Show Mentions

Today’s show is sponsored by Social Media Marketing World 2016.

You can now sign up for Social Media Marketing World 2016. It’s the world’s largest social media marketing conference. By attending, you’ll make connections with 100+ of the world’s top social media pros (plus 3,000 of your peers) and you’ll discover amazing ideas that’ll transform your social media marketing. Speakers include Guy Kawasaki, Mari Smith, Michael Hyatt, Jay Baer and Michael Stelzner.

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See what attendees experienced at our 2015 conference.

The event takes place in San Diego, California on April 17, 18 and 19, 2016.

The networking is going to be off the hook. We have our opening-night party on an aircraft carrier, the USS Midway.

This year, we’ve added 90- to 100-minute workshops, which are included with your ticket price. These workshops go more into professional-development topics, such as how to write a sales letter, how to improve your public speaking, how to improve your voice, how to do videos and more. These are the areas of professional development that you didn’t learn in college, but are necessary for the job of the modern marketer.

We have the best pricing you will ever find going on right now. Click here to check out the speakers and the agenda and grab your early bird discount.

Listen to the show!

Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:

• Connect with John on his website.
• Listen to the EOFire podcast.
• Check out The Freedom Journal.
• Explore Kickstarter.
• Listen to Seth Godin’s Social Media Marketing podcast and read The Icarus Deception.
• Check out the Adam Braun interview on the EOFire podcast.
• Learn more about Pencils of Promise.
• Listen to Lewis Howes’s Social Media Marketing podcast on his recently released book.
• Explore SMART goals.
• Check out Parkinson’s Law and the Pareto principle.
• Learn more about Podcaster’s Paradise.
• Check out the BuzzSumo Chrome Extension.
• Follow me, subscribe and listen to the Social Media Examiner weekly blabs.
• Watch our weekly tools show on YouTube.
• Learn more about the 2016 Social Media Marketing World.
• Read the 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

Ways to subscribe to the Social Media Marketing podcast:

• Click here to subscribe via iTunes.
• Click here to subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes feed).
• You can also subscribe via Stitcher.

What do you think? What are your thoughts on setting goals? Please leave your comments below.

SMART goal photo Compass photo from Shutterstock.