I recently came across an article by James Altucher about a daily practice he does every day in order to stay on top of his game. He’s gone through many struggling phases in his life where he has lost everything: millions of dollars, his family, his friends but later came back stronger, in part due to his daily practice.

He talks about having four legs to his practice: Physical, Emotional, Mental, and Spiritual. It’s really all about not over exerting yourself in one area and staying balanced between all four. His theory, based on his life experience, is that if you are weak on one or more of these legs, you will have difficulty mastering the remaining ones. This imbalance leads to chaos and you’ll lose your luck, and quite possibly your success.

I found his particular daily practice to be the most interesting over other knowledge-centric practices because he incorporates other activities that are often neglected by entrepreneurs and people involved in early stage startups! For example, it’s very easy to skip workouts due to sitting at a desk coding all day, or avoiding spirituality because you’re stressed out. It is vital to make your life is balanced if you actually want to expand your network, attract some luck, and be successful. Otherwise, you’re just playing the lottery for success!

In honor of James’ daily practice, I created a chart that can be printed out and posted on a nearby wall in your home or office. After you have read the post about his daily practice, the chart can be used to remind you of your daily responsibilities. It doesn’t track your progress or nag you to do them (that might be a future article and adjoining iPhone/iPad app!), but it will keep you on track as it serves as a visual reminder and “cheat sheet.” Download the PDF below.

Download the Daily Practice Chart (.PDF)

You’re free to use it as you please, including posting it on a website or forum, but please do include some attribution.

In order to accomplish great things, you need a roadmap for how to get there. To create a roadmap, you need to set goals first, so you know where you are headed. If you were building a railroad, you would research and determine what your goals were (destinations), and then build the tracks to connect them; you wouldn’t build tracks in all sorts of funky directions as you went along.

Contrary to what you might have heard, as an entrepreneur, when you sit down to set goals, you need to set them high. For people not looking to be in business for themselves, setting goals just out of reach are OK. But you’re an entrepreneur, so you need to think bigger. Generally, your maximum potential is what you set your goals to. Thus, if you set a goal to make a $100,000 salary and you’ve executed on your roadmap to get there, chances are you’ll come close and make $90,000/year. You might even hit your goal, or just above it. You will probably not have a chance at making $500k/year because that requires a different roadmap… a roadmap you haven’t discovered because you set your sights at the $100,000 salary. You need to set your goals high, even if they seem unrealistic to others. When combined with ideas and a purpose, goals that high become dreams.

One of the things that makes you unique as an entrepreneur is that you’re a dreamer. It seems like everyone thinks you dream too much and have ethereal ideals. Employees don’t dream; sure, they dream in their sleep, and perhaps they have an imagination, but real employees tend to look to others to set their dreams and ambitions for them. Entrepreneurs live and breathe dreams. It’s in their DNA. They work to persevere by making them a reality, even when everything is going against them.

If you don’t dream that you are going to build a $50 million dollar enterprise that revolutionizes the way people power their vehicles, then the chances of you ever making it happen are slim.

How To Set Goals

You may already know how to set goals perfectly. If that’s the case, drop into the comments section of this post (contest is at the bottom), and show your expertise by sharing some tips with the rest of our readers. Otherwise, don’t worry, here is how you get started. There are many ways you can set and track your goals, but here is what I recommend:

1. Create a list of things you want to accomplish. Begin by creating a list, in no particular order and in free form, of all the things you would one day like to accomplish with your business. While you’re at it, do this for your personal life as well, because believe it or not, your personal and business goals have a lot in common and will influence each other over time. Spend at least 1 hour thinking and writing down your goals. Doing this on paper is probably the easiest effort, because you can do it anywhere. Some people find sitting in a spacious park with a notepad to be a really effective way of purging the distractions.
2. Categorize your goals. Beyond “Business” and “Personal”, you want to categorize your goals that are in common. If you wrote down goals like “Start a business”, “Hire a lawyer”, and “Hire 2 employees”, then you might consider categorizing them as “Company Formation.” Other goals might be “Visit Eastern Europe”, “Live in Paris”, and “Skydive in Cairnes, Australia” and mark those as category “Travel.” This step just helps you build context around your goals. Later, when you want to discover new goals, you can pull out the goal list for a particular category so you can have some focus to further refine it. Spend 15 to 30 minutes categorizing your goals, and don’t let this step frustrate you.
3. Map your goals to a timeline. For each categorized goal list, you want to start thinking about when you expect to complete the goal. For example, the previously mentioned goal “Hire a lawyer” would most likely be a Short Term goal. A goal of “Bring in revenues of $1 million” might possibly be a long term goal for you. Ideal timelines would be: this week, this month, this year, 3 years, 5 years, and 10 years. The more frequently you revisit these goal timelines and your goal lists in general, the higher probability that you’ll actually complete them. For some, this step may take hours as they try to visualize when in their lives they think the goal is realistic. Other people might actually do this instinctively.
4. Break down your mega-goals into smaller goals. If you have made incredibly lofty goals, that’s OK. But you need to break them down into more digestible and time-sensitive goals too. A goal of “Grow my business into a multi-national organization with 450 franchises and a gross revenue of $500 million” is most definitely not accomplishable with only a set of tasks as a roadmap. You need to chop it into sub-goals, such as “Grow revenue to $10 million”, “Develop a franchise business plan”, “Setup 5 franchises”, “Establish opportunity in franchise conferences”, and “Build presence in Mexico.” How you keep track of your goals and sub-goals is up to you, but a manilla folder for each category and sheets for each major goal seems appropriate for most people. Others use elaborate Excel spreadsheets, or other custom software.
5. Break your goals into tasks. Now that you’ve set your eyes on what you want for your personal and business lives, it’s time to create a roadmap to get there. I find it amazing that a lot of people have trouble with this part of achieving their goals. You need to spend many hours, and possibly days on this step, although thankfully, you can do this one goal at a time. What are the tasks necessary to accomplish your goal? If your goal is “Start a business” some of your tasks might be “Research types of businesses”, “Purchase books about starting a company”, “Talk to other business owners”, “Do some preliminary market research”, or “Hire a formation lawyer.” If you have trouble coming up with the tasks you need to do for the roadmap of your goal, phrase your goal as a question (“How do I start a business?”) and ask your network for help.
6. Each morning, create a Today List. That’s right, you should be starting every day by sitting down and reviewing what you think you need to do, and then create a list to get those tasks done. There certainly will be interruptions and derailments, but that’s fine, because you can always get back on track. If you’re not starting your day with a clear understanding of what you’re attempting to do, how could you possibly get them done properly? This may be obvious to most, but you would really be shocked at how many people just “wing it.”
7. Resolve your day with some cleanup and reflection. The last thing you may feel like you want to do at the end of a stressful day is sit down and check things off, but you need to do it! Not only is it absolutely rewarding to see all the work you’ve completed, but it’s a way to identify what you need to finish tomorrow. You can also think back and examine if your tasks were on track for reaching your goals. Did you feel like they helped you get closer? Can you clean up your task lists at all to refine your roadmap?
8. Revisit all of your timeline goal lists on a regular basis. Over time you are going to change. Your desires will change, and you will refine your ability to track your goals. You should be revisiting your weekly goals every day, your monthly goals every week, and your yearly goals every month. It won’t hurt to post your goals on the wall on occasion to remind yourself what you’re working towards too. For some, this might be too aggressive and overkill. But, for the rest of us, this is exactly what we need to stay on track.

Additional Reading

• wikiHow – How to Set Goals
• Gene Donohue - Powerful Written Goals In 7 Easy Steps!
• eHow – How to Set New Goals
• Dosh Dosh - Social Media Marketing Campaigns: How to Set Goals and Define Your Target Market
• Minnesota Office of Higher Education - 
• USA TODAY – Learn to set goals for your department
• trizle – How to Set Your Business Goals

Contribute and Win

If you have a technique or resource that I’ve overlooked, please leave a comment! I will be choosing a comment at random (on Sunday, November 16th) to receive a copy of Seth Godin’s new book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.

Occasionally when I’m writing, I find that some of the topics that I investigate may sound cliche or generically common. I end up rationalizing my intent to write about it when I realize that even though it may be truly obvious or common sense, I witness too many people not applying the knowledge in their lives. In some cases, they are simply forgetting how valuable it might be and just need a nudge. Sometimes, we forget some of the most basic, but important, life lessons that can give us guidance for true success. Cliches are great ways to remind us of some important knowledge gained from our collective history. One of my favorite cliches is: “There’s no time like the present.” It reminds me that now is the best time, and it doesn’t attach any predefined reasoning of why it’s so. It gives me an opportunity to explore, in my own mind, why using today is such a valuable lesson.

I haven’t published an article in a few weeks because I decided to take some time off, having reached yet another rounded decade in age (a.k.a. my 30th birthday). To celebrate such a historic event, I went with a group of close friends and family to jump out of a perfectly good plane; at 15,000 feet. Rightfully so, I had several moments before the actual leap occurred, to reflect on why I’m jumping, things and events in my life, and shake in my boots. To be honest, I wasn’t frightened by the jump or falling portions of skydiving… it was the anticipation of it happening. The climb up to the atmosphere, high above the earth, in an excessively tiny and rickety plane with no straps or supports, also did not help. There were moments of my life that flashed by, reminding me that we only live once. “Take advantage of today” whispered my conscience.

Then I leaped from the cranky plane, flipped through the air, and viewed the Earth in a way that most people only see in videos. Almost instant acceleration towards the ground felt surprisingly comforting, giving me an opportunity to appreciate the opportunity given to me of being alive. My experience couldn’t possibly have been much different than the hundreds of thousands of people who have skydived since the invention of flight, but it certainly reminded me that I’m alive.

Generally, I try not to write much about my personal life, because most people these days are more interested in newsworthy content, and don’t really want to be bothered by the details of people they don’t know. In this case, my experience hurdling through the air (nearly 3 miles above the surface), gave me a swift reminder that I can’t continue to put things off for tomorrow. I wanted to correlate my life jostling event with one of the most important concepts of life and business.

In business, many of us put off our projects until they are perfected. We want the world to see a product worthy of worship in hopes that it translates to higher gross sales (and hopefully higher profitability; but that’s another topic altogether). More of us lack the confidence we need to network or close successful deals absolutely necessary for the survival of our businesses (depending on who you listen to, 70-95% of all businesses started will fail). And even most of us are frightened by the idea of presenting at conferences and general public speaking. Why are we afraid? Is it because our presentation today, may reflect on how people see us tomorrow?

Everyone will interpret the “seizing of today” differently, but it’s important to spend some time identifying what’s important to you and your business. It’s time to start conquering your fears now, and not waiting until your life has passed you by to feel regret. If you died today, would people who knew you be able to say that you’ve done everything you wanted to do?