How To Get Your Shit Together

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We are dropping a mini-series focused on being your best self. I'm giving you mental models, strategies, and tips to get you in the right mindset before the new year. That means instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. In this classic episode originally published July 12th, 2021, I talk about a framework I use to map out my life for the next 90 days, all the way to the next 10 years. In other words, how I get my shit together. Let's hop into it.

A process called traction

A few weeks ago, I walked you through a process called traction, and traction is basically an operating system that we use at Morning Brew in order to set our company vision or values and plan for the future. Without traction, we would be lost. We'd been in constant catch-up mode, putting out fires and reacting to what's happening around us versus proactively setting goals for the business and focusing on achieving them. And given the profound impact this process has had on our business, I had this crazy thought last week. What if I use a similar process in my life? After all, we spend so much time not working and we have just as many goals and aspirations for ourselves personally as we do professionally. So why not have a system that allows us to plan ahead, focus on the things that matter to us, and set measurable goals that ultimately help us achieve our long-term plans, right? It's like so obvious. And as I say this, I want to make a few things clear. I'm not saying you should treat your life like a business. This exercise isn't about productivity or profit. And I'm not saying you should have every minute of your life planned out. I'm a big believer in serendipity, and I would never want to create a system that is so rigid that I can't be spontaneous. But what this is really about is codifying the shit that actually matters to you in your life and who you want to be while giving yourself the best chance of making it happen. I call it a life map and to help you build your own life map, I'm going to walk you through the first version of mine. How I approached this was to start big and broad and funnel my way down to something that is progressively narrower and more specific. And luckily the traction process that we use for Morning Brew naturally has you set up a plan in this way.

Clarify your vision with a 10-year plan

That brings me to step one. The very first thing I did for myself was to clarify my vision. I look at my vision as the ultimate filter for my actions. In a business, a vision defines who and what your company is, where it's going, and how it will get there. In life, it's no different. Just replace Morning Brew with Alex Lieberman. And the way I define my vision was establishing my core values and my ten-year target. By defining these two things, I have a sense of my ultimate destination and the characteristics I want to embody to ultimately get there. My ten-year plan is simple, but really exciting for me personally, if I can pull it off and this is what it is: I will live an intentional life where I feel fulfilled and at ease. Obviously this is really ambitious, but by setting this as a north star, I very quickly have a filter that forces the question of, am I doing the things today that give me a chance of reaching fulfillment and ease in a decade? And is there anything missing from my life that I need in order to achieve this goal? When you do this part of the exercise, you're probably going to feel a bit strange. You'll probably feel uncomfortable. You'll feel like it's ambiguous. You'll feel like it's ridiculously aspirational. That is totally fine and normal. Remember your ten-year plan is a component of your vision and your vision should feel big and broad, but give just enough direction to help you get more specific.

Define your core values

The second part of your vision is your core values. How I think about my personal core values are the traits that I want to live by that if combined with my short term goals consistently, it will give me the best chance of hitting my ten-year target. In a company, your core values are timeless guiding principles for your business and as an individual, your core values are the timeless guiding principles for your life. As I thought about my core values, I tried as hard as possible to keep them between three and seven. And I thought about it through a pretty unique lens. I said to myself, if I was writing my own epitaph, what are the ways that I'd want to describe myself? Very morbid, I know, but really effective to force yourself to strip away the excess and get to the essence of who you want to be. I found the exercise difficult, but it felt really good once I got down to my list. I ended up with six values and my six personal core values were: Alex does the right thing. Alex goes the extra mile. Alex lives in the present. Alex keeps his word. Alex has a childlike playfulness, and Alex approaches life with curiosity. And what's also fun about these values is that they're aspirational by definition. They're almost a ten-year plan in themselves as several of these things are things that I feel deficient in and I want to grow into them more fully. 

Then, set a 3-year plan

Now that I have my vision, which is a combo of ten-year plan and my values, it's time to zoom in and get specific. But first let's take an intermission. That was a shit-ton of information. While you do that, stand up, stretch the legs, grab a drink, pet the pooch, and subscribe to the show if you're enjoying it, whether it's on Apple, Spotify, or the podcast player that you use. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you think you have any friends who would enjoy the show or need to get their shit together, share with them, send them the link, okay, let's hop back into it.

There are four practices that I have taken from the traction process to begin setting my plan and taking ten-year plan and values to the ground floor. The first is setting a three-year plan. My three-year plan takes this ten-year vision and it starts making it specific to the actual things in my life that I currently believe will help me live out my long-term goals. So how I think about that is, if my ten-year plan is to be fulfilled and at ease, my three-year plan should contain the things that I believe I need in my life to feel those two things. So here are a few items that I put in my three-year plan. Number one, be married with child one on the way. Number two, feel challenged and fulfilled by the work I'm doing. Number three, feel really happy about my mind and my body. And there were several more in the list, but these are just examples. And so, as you can see, the three-year plan takes the ten-year vision and just takes it one layer deeper. And that leads to the next practice, which is taking the three-year plan and moving forward and setting a one-year plan. The one-year plan is basically an outline of the intermediate steps I need to achieve my three-year goals, a few of which I just mentioned. So let's keep on with an example. One goal I just mentioned was feeling really happy about my mind and my body. So if that's my three-year plan, I need to have a one-year goal that sets me up to feel great about my mind and body. And so for this specific goal, my one-year plan includes a few sub-goals. The first one is refining my exercise plan based on specific metrics I've set for myself and how I'm going to do against those metrics. Number two and three are the same things, but instead of exercise, it's for diet and for mindfulness. These one-year goals ladder up to my three-year goal of feeling happy about my mind and body, and I'd obviously have similar tangible one-year goals for all of my three-year goals in my life map. Right now, we're just focused on the mind and body one. 

Get more granular with a 1-year plan and 90-day goals

Once I've set my one-year goals, the third practice from the traction process is putting my one-year goals into action with 90-day goals, the shortest goal setting in my process. Let's just use this same example again: If my one-year plan was hypothetically refining my eating plan based on specific metrics that I've set for myself and how I'm doing against them, my 90-day goals should be steps that need to be accomplished to get to that one year eating plan goal. These steps should be ambitious, but attainable. The steps I chose to focus on within my eating plan over the next 90 days include one, getting educated on food and diet and how it impacts my physical health and two, very clearly defining what's important to me in my relationship with food. So now we've talked about ten-year plan. We've talked about core values. We've talked about three-year, one-year, and 90 day goals. The final practice that rounds out the life map and holds you accountable to your short-term goals, which ultimately ladder up to your long-term vision is something that the traction process calls meeting pulse. And what meeting pulse is, is every week I have a 30-minute catch up with myself to make sure that I am staying accountable to the 90-day goals that I've set. Each meeting pulse has the same exact agenda. There are three things: First I check if I'm on track or off track in my 90 day goals, second, I bring up any key issues that are stopping me from hitting one or several of my goals. And finally, I create to-dos that will help me solve key issues that are preventing me from realizing my 90-day goals. So basically it's all about how am I doing my goals? What are big issues with my goals? And how do I solve those issues? The meeting pulse is the final ingredient for me to stay on track quarterly, which if I can do that consistently for long enough, it helps me achieve my long-term vision.

I want to hear from you

Okay. There's a lot here, but I truly believe that being intentional about what we want for ourselves, who we want to be, and how we can get there is the best formula for living the life we want to live, just as we think about building the company we want to build. If you have any questions about creating your life map or have any ideas for future episodes that relate to this topic, shoot me a note, send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista. As always, thanks so much for listening to Founder’s Journal. If you enjoy it, please let others know who you think would enjoy the show or need to get their shit together. Thanks again. And I'll catch you next episode.