Part of the Building Your Engine of Improvement Series
Alright folks, it’s time to get down and dirty and break down those 10-year goals into digestible yummy chunks. In case you missed it, the last two post have been “Become a Visionary” and “Goals that Work” where we’ve started with the end in mind, building our vision and breaking it down into ten-year goals. Now we’re going to talk about the natural endpoint, the smallest possible goal you can have. The Minimum Viable Goal.
Going from 10 to 1
I’m assuming here I don’t have to babysit you (which, by the way, I am more than happy to do) in breaking down your 10-year goals into 5-year and 1-year goals, or 5–3–1 or however you’d like to split your goals up. It’s as simple as figuring out what you need to do every year to get 10% closer to your 10-year goal. The only thing I have to add, and the reason we have 1 year, 5 year and 10 year goals, is don’t assume a completely linear progression, i.e. DON’T assume a 10% increase every year. Assume it’s going to be much harder to go from 0–100 followers of your blog than it will be to go from 1,000–1,100. …
Part of the Building Your Engine of Improvement Series
Engineer your Life is all about creating a system through which we can achieve a better life for ourselves and those around us. A common misconception is that we can set goals without developing a system through which to achieve them and just expect those goals to happen to us, or worse demand them from others. This is endemic amongst my own generation — millennials — and those after. …
Part of the Building Your Engine of Improvement Series
So, we’re onto the first element of creating your Engine of Improvement and that is building a blueprint for success. For starters we’re going to talk about the importance of having a vision of what success looks like to you. This will be incredibly personal, it will be your vision. Not your parents’ vision, your employers, your teachers, not even your partner’s vision. Yours.
We all know of a famous engineer/inventor or even politicians and business leaders who inspired and drove a team to success based on a vision. Whether it be Elon Musk’s visions of humans on Mars or Henry Ford’s of motorised travel. Contrary to a lot of popular modern thinking, they didn’t do tonnes of market research, surveying and whatnot. That’s not to rule out its importance, but it came later — they started with the vision. …
Engine of Improvement Series
So, we’re jumping in where we left off last week during Part 1. If you’ve not read it yet, I recommend on stepping back and giving it a read. Last week gave the justification behind developing a ‘how’, or a system, for achieving our goals beyond the goals themselves if we want to thrive — this being our ‘Engine of Improvement’. This week I am going to do the title justice and go into more detail about what some of these might look like. There is a proviso to the text below and that is that Engineer Your Life is growing and changing with me and so these elements may change and morph as I delve deeper into them and some may take on more prominence than others as we see what jams with ya’ll and as others fall flat. …
Part of the Build Your Engine of Improvement Series
Okay folks, so I’ve bandied around the expression “Engine of Improvement” now for some time without really explaining what it is, or how it helps us live our lives. I’ve covered why you need a system already in my aptly titled “Why You Need a System”, today I want to flesh out the more important “how” and cover what it looks like and how we can start building.
Rev Your Engines!
The whole Engineer Your Life concept is not truly about setting goals — it is about how we create a sustainable apparatus the help us achieve them! The engine of improvement is that apparatus, it is a metaphorical vehicle that gets us from A to B. …
Engineer Your Life
Theme
With the U.K. and most of Europe heading into second lockdowns I wanted to focus in on a part of what I talked about last week in “The Power of Perception” (which I recommend in addition to this piece for the coming period by the way), which is what exactly is within our circles of control and what’s outside of it. I believe this to be a complex issue because perception is a large part of it; how we perceive what is inside our sphere of control, and what isn’t, is such a huge factor. Yet, the more practised we can become in being objective (a truth outside of ourselves) in classifying ‘things’ will in turn improve our mindset, and as our perception is improved we’ll be better able to do this classification and the iterative cycle produces improvement upon improvement. And that, friends, is really what we’re searching for here right? …
Engineer Your Life
Theme
This week, I want to explore how we perceive changes and how that perception can affect our outcome.
“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.” — Marcus Aurelius
This topic has deep rooted origins in the philosophy of the Stoics but it also has some more modern research to give it some weight.
Blueprint
This week’s part of the blueprint I’ve chosen to express as a formula.
The Importance of Growth
Imagine if you will…
Before I get into some of the main Engineer Your Life concepts, let’s get our Twilight Zone on for this week’s blog post and use our imaginations.
If you never changed
I want you to sit back and visualise what your life would look like if, from this moment forward you never changed or developed yourself. That means no new skills, no chance encounters with ‘the right person’ or the ‘right job’, you might get promoted for ‘time served’ but think about what the reality is based on your current job and others who’ve ‘climbed the corporate ladder’. Take the average of the last month or two and chart the trajectory forward. …
Reflections on how the principles of Engineer Your Life helped me to launch a business in 2020
Okay, so this week was a big week for me. I take no shame in being immensely proud to have launched Steel Viking Fitness to the first members and have it sell out! Combining that milestone and launching Engineer Your Life caused me to reflect on what chief principles of Engineer Your Life so far were instrumental in running a sold-out Steel Viking session. That way I’m hoping you can see how I’ve put them into practice, but also gain an insight into their practical real-world application. I’ve limited the principles to the top three.
1. I Set the Goal in the First Place!!
An Introduction
A few of the eagle eyed among will see that I’ve been experimenting with this idea of Engineer Your Life in some of my blog posts. It seems it has legs, so I’m launching it into a whole new beast of its own. So, what’s the big idea? Let me explain.
What are the aims of Engineer Your Life?
To set out a blueprint of what you can DO starting today
It kindda does what it says on the tin. There’s a lot of content out there on goal setting and personal development and that’s all fine and dandy. Often however, we set about doing them for a couple of days then life gets in the way and slowly but surely those aims are pushed to the back of our minds and eventually forgotten. Engineer Your Life instead sets out a blueprint, a blueprint which you take part in drawing up to help give you tangible actions to about achieving your goals. …
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