Life is simple. There are three steps:

1. What do you want?

2. What does it cost to get what you want?

3. Pay the price.

I can’t help you with step one.

Step three is up to you.

However, step two will trip you up.

Achieving anything has a cost.

The “cost” of something is this: what do I need to give up in order to get it?

When it comes to a short-term goal, you will have to give up significant things in order to hit your goal.

Here is what you need to give up now to be achieve something awesome before 2017 runs out.

. . .

1. Stop Rooting for Colors

“We’re often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don’t even realize we’re in the wrong jungle.”

— Stephen Covey

If your actions cannot affect the end results of something, then you must stop paying attention to it.

What am I talking about?

Sports.

Why do we cheer so hard

As a teenager, I remember crying when my favorite team lost a game. I was crushed.

Later on I found out that half of the team was out partying the night before a game. As a fan, I was more ready and prepared for the game than the team was! I used to sit in a fan section and stand, cheer, and yell for hours during a game.

Let’s focus on the real problem: I was deluded into thinking that cheering for a winning team made me a winner.

Someone recently asked Gary Vaynerchuk about his favorite football team, the New York Jets. The guy ribbed Gary a little bit about the Jets. The comment did not phase Gary. In fact, Gary said one of the most insightful comments about sports I have ever heard.

“You root for winners. I am a winner. There is a difference.”

Stop cheering harder for people that you have never met than you cheer for people you love.

Stop committing more time to colored jerseys than you do to your own goals.

Colored jerseys. That is the difference. Maybe you are cheering for your school or your city. Sure, that makes sense. But I bet there are good people on both teams. Why are you rooting against good people? It is not rational.

Plus, what happens if your favorite player gets traded to a different team — a team that you hate? Does the player immediately became your enemy, or a bad person, now that he wears a different jersey color? Does that team itself actually change? Not at all.

You can still watch sports for fun. I have bonded with my dad and brothers through sports. I know my son loves sports as well.

But you need to stop cheering for jerseys. Or colors. Give it up if you want to move forward.

What else am I talking about?

Politics. Television. Movies. Gossip.

Some of you who do not like sports probably thought that rooting for colors only applied to sports. Sorry, no. It applies to many different areas.

Ask yourself: are the people that I am cheering for going to cheer for me when I am performing? If the answer is no, then it is time to pause and reflect. And change.

Stop rooting for colors. Root for good people to succeed based on doing good work. But don’t compromise your goals in order to root for other people who have no vested interest in your success.

Give up rooting for jerseys if you want to hit your short-term goals.

. . .

2. Stop Rationalizing

“We are not rational animals. We are rationalizing animals.”

— Christopher Sommer

Everyone wants to claim perfect rationality. We all want to believe that our decisions are all logical and coherent. We all believe that we are smart.

A study once revealed that over two-thirds of people surveyed believed that they were above average. Some people are lying to themselves.

In a given moment, we believe that we are thinking about our problems in a logical manner.

But that is simply not true. In fact, our biggest mistakes come from believing that we are being “logical.”

The truth is that most people make a decision with emotion, and then justify the the emotional decision with logic.

But why do you need to give up rationalizing? Because rationalizing means you are making excuses.

Stop.

Someone else has had worse problems than you and has overcome them. Probably multiple people.

One of my favorite quotes about excuses is from Tim Ferriss, who was quoting Olympic coach Jim Conroy:

Just remember: somewhere a little Chinese girl is warming up with your max.

Ouch. But the truth hurts.

If you are going to hit your short-term goal, you cannot make excuses. You cannot rationalize. You must think and act based on reality. If you fail, there is no excuse that you need to tell yourself or anyone else. Failure is the amazing opportunity to learn and begin again.

Adversity makes weak men break, and strong men break records.

Stop rationalizing. Start moving.

. . .

3. Stop giving your ideas to other people.

When you’re a champion, you have a powerful tool available to you. You can lower your voice, pause, look everyone right in the eye and say, “I take responsibility for making this happen.”

— Seth Godin

Stop giving your ideas to other people and then thinking that is equivalent to execution.

There is a release that you get when you tell someone about an idea. This is not good. There should be tension until the idea is executed. Then the release — maybe. Do not let the tension drop until execution is complete.

I have worked in the entertainment and artistic fields for some time. One thing that happens near-daily is that people will contact me and ask me to read their script, review their book, or look at their artwork. Implied in this request is that the person wants to know what I think about his art.

Here is what I think: it doesn’t matter what I think.

Successful people do not walk around asking what other people think of their ideas. Successful people execute and get real feedback in the marketplace — actual data. And then they learn, and either iterate or try again.

The truth is this: some of the best ideas do not make a single penny. Some of the worst ideas make millions of dollars. The only way to know the difference is to execute and figure out what will happen.

Without execution, there is no value in an idea.

Stop giving your ideas to other people and expecting magic to happen.

. . .

4. Stop being good.

“We are kept from our goals not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”

— Robert Brault

Stop being good: not in a moral sense, but in the sense that good is somewhere on the scale that stretches from bad to great.

There is a fundamental problem with “good.” It does not last. It is like a piece of fruit that reaches perfect ripeness. The fruit tastes great at that moment. But if you wait too long, it does not stay ripe. It becomes rotten.

Our own skills and achievements are exactly like the ripening fruit. We need to be able to recognize the process of ripening and also the process of rotting. Often, it feels great to be good at something. It is exciting. But it takes that little something extra to push past the inertia that starts to set in once we can taste a little bit of the ripeness.

Here is the problem: when we are good at something, other people start to give us recognition. We can settle for receiving recognition instead of hitting our goals. Don’t settle! The solution is to keep pushing, regardless of whether we are “good” or others recognize our progress.

Stop when your goal is hit. Not when you are ripe or “good.”

. . .

5. Stop thinking that tomorrow exists.

“There are no ordinary moments.”

— Dan Millman

Tomorrow is a lie. It never comes.

Try waiting for it. You will wait forever. Tomorrow is a figment of your imagination. It is a thought. It is a dream. It is not going to come and it will never will.

The only day that actually exists is today.

If you need to act, it must be done today. No excuses. No mercy. Today is all there is.

Just because you fall asleep that does not mean that the rest of the world stops.

When you need to get something done, never think that you can do it tomorrow. As soon as you hear yourself think “tomorrow” — stop. Do whatever you need to do. The cost today is always less than the cost tomorrow. Always. Never mortgage today to get to tomorrow. Always pay the lower price now.

You start life at Point A. And you end life at Point B. Every day in between you have to crush it.

Stop thinking that tomorrow exists. It doesn’t.

. . .

6. Stop focusing on long-term goals.

Even the longest journey must begin where you stand.

If you want to hit a short-term goal, then you need to temporarily forget your long-term goals.

You need to sacrifice your long-term goals in order to hit a short-term goal. It does not mean that you should not have long-term goals. And this does not mean that you should only think of today. But this does mean that you need to so intensely focus on what is exactly in front of you that you do not think about your long-term goals.

When you are climbing a mountain, your long-term goal is to get to the summit. But your short-term goal is to take one more step. As you climb higher, each step becomes harder. You cannot focus both on that next step and also on the summit. You will end up tripping, slipping, or getting injured. You must intensely focus on the single, next step so much that you momentarily forget, or block out, the long-term goal of the summit.

Achieving any short-term goal requires the same attitude. Focus on your next step — today’s step — and be so intensely focused that you do not even think about the long-term goal — until your short-term goal is done.

Use the gaps — the interstitial spaces after short-term goals are achieved — to return back to the long-term perspective.

I love the story of the man sitting on the side of a mountain as he reads an engrossing book. To enjoy the book, he needs to focus on the 12 inches in front of him. He needs to focus on the words on the page. But to enjoy the mountain, he needs to look up and focus on the magnificence of the expanse before and above him. Your short-term goal is the book. But your long-term goal is the mountain. To enjoy the mountain, look up every once in a while to take in the beauty.

But when you are traversing the difficult path right in front of you, focus on the next step only.

. . .

7. Stop letting other people’s problems become your urgencies.

“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent instead of what is important.”

— Stephen Covey

You can’t solve everyone else’s problems. You can solve some. Maybe a lot. But not all. So what can you do?

Pick the problems that you are going to solve. And then focus intensely on those. You will have to ignore the other problems, at least temporarily.

If you are going to sprint for (let’s say) 30 days to achieve a goal, then you need to focus on your own goals and chosen problems.

Tom Izzo has said, “Every successful person has a little jerk in them.” I think this accurately describes what you need to give up.

Successful people do not seem like jerks because they are mean, but because they are focusing on their own chosen problems, goals, activities, and not even giving any time or energy to other people’s problems.

Here’s another way to think about this: don’t let other people’s problems become your problems. Or don’t let other people’s urgencies become your urgencies.

Stop accepting other people’s problems. If you truly want to help, then set this as a goal and specifically act in a way that will help who you want to help.

Do not deny to the world a person who can focus and solve the problems right in front of them.

I used to do accept every problem that I heard about as my own. The reason why can be boiled down to one concept: I did not elevate the importance of my own goals.

If I were training for the Olympics, then I imagine I could tell everyone around me: “Sorry, I can’t help right now. I need to train for the Olympics.” I hope my sacrifice would be self-explanatory at that point. But for many goals, you treat them differently.

Previously, I would have thought that my goal is considerably less important than the Olympics, in my own mind. And so when someone would ask me what I’m doing, I would not even think about my goal, or that my goal requires me to sacrifice.

I love the people around me. I always want to help if I can. But here is what I tell myself: If I never achieve, or hit my own goals, then over time, I will never be able to help others — especially the people that I love.

And this doesn’t mean don’t spend time with your family, close friends, or other important relationships. If any issue arises in those groups, those issues become my short-term goals that I need to focus on and solve.

Do not let other people’s urgencies take up real estate in your mind without your permission.

. . .

8. Sacrifice perfection.

“Perfection is the enemy of done.”

— Jeff Goins

Perfection is a god, and she is mean, cruel, and unforgiving. We cast our work before her, so she can destroy it. For 30 days, we need to ignore perfection and focus on another deity: execution.

Quality is imperative, but quantity creates quality.

The filmmaker Robert Rodriguez has referenced the book Fear and Art as one of the most influential books in his life. My favorite story from that book is about a pottery class.

In the pottery class, the teacher divided the students into two groups. The first group would be graded strictly on quality. Those students would submit one piece of pottery at the end of the term and the teacher would grade the single piece on its quality.

The second group would be graded only on quantity. If 100 pieces of pottery are submitted, then the student would receive an A, 80 for a B, and 60 for a C.

At the end of the term, the results shocked the teacher. The students graded on quantity only had incredibly better pottery. It was not even close. The students graded on quality initially spent a lot of time on each piece. But the students graded on quantity rapidly made pieces. The intense focus on producing lots of pieces in a short time caused the quantity students to get better faster.

Stop trying to be perfect.

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