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This episode is brought to you by D2DCon4, the #1 business conference in the door-to-door and direct sales industry with an unmatched speaker lineup, exclusive workshops, handpicked vendors award, high-level networking and more. Come and learn from the one percenters in the business and leadership industry. David Goggins, John Maxwell, Tim Storey, Hal Elrod, Bradley, and Sam Taggart. Go to D2D.com to reserve your seat today. Limited Tickets are available. Don’t miss out, go to D2dcon.com and get your tickets before they sell out.
Sam Taggart 00:59
Hi everybody. This is Sam Taggart with the D2D podcast. And I am here solo today, which is going to be exciting. I’ve been working on this book achievement framework. And I’ve been trying to share some of the principles and practices and this is just one of my ways of writing the book is kind of speaking through some of the stories, talking through some of the principles. And you know, before I get started, reminder door to door con is coming up January 8, and ninth we are doing a live a lot of the speakers David Goggins john Maxwell, how Elrod Tim’s story Bradley and many others we’ve got chance alread and Paul Dixon, VP of the uninstaller. And now sunrun, and you’ve got guys like, Casey VA, who was one of the VPS they have an ink you have guys like man there’s there’s tons Brandon Hall and Alex all on recruiting, they were senior recruiting directors, you have guys that are doing finance, you have guys that are talking on business and strategy like David Barnes, who helped be the mergers acquisitions, guys, for protection one and bought like many companies and took many companies public.
I have guys like Jonathan Gibbs, who sold this company for 50 million plus you have guys, you just have a lot of really cool strategic speakers. They’re very high level, you have Travis Chappell, who’s one of the top rated podcast, build your network interviewed guys like grant, Cardone, and you have john Rohn, you have also sorts of cool workshops. So I think a lot like my workshop lineup is stronger than most mainstage lineups. And anyway, the fact that we’re having a live event should should excite A lot of you guys. So anyway, I don’t want to I don’t want to hit that too hard. I want to dive into this. This is a huge focus of mine is just the difference between a promise and a goal. I feel like so many times, people get so attached to goals, and they’re like goal setting new year’s resolution. And what’s your goal today? What’s your goal this week, when I think goals are kind of crap, I’ll be honest, like, I found that a lot of people and maybe if you’re listening to this, you disagree. I’d love to hear your guys’s feedback and comments as I read this book. But what happens is a goal is, you know, in the Merriam Webster’s dictionary, there’s this the definition of goal is the end towards which effort is directed. That’s it, the end towards which or the end toward which effort is directed. Okay, so we have a goal. And then the definition, then same Dictionary of promise is a legally binding declaration that gives the person to whom it has made a right to expect or to claim the performance or forbearance of a specified act. So if you’re to ask yourself, like, which one would you think would be more likely to happen? The promise.
And the promise is something that we it’s like a covenant, it’s an agreement between three people, yourself, someone you choose to make this promise with meaning there’s like a reciprocal to a promise. And this is a huge part in a difference between a promise and a goal. And then the third one, which most people aren’t by thinking of is their audience. And the audience could be an antagonist. It could be your community that’s watching you rooting for you, the cheerleaders, your social media fans, your company in and of itself. And what ends up happening is when we make a promise, there’s going to be some kind of consequence, pain reward associated to where if we break this promise, there might be shame, we might lose relationships, we might lose, lose out on a lot of respect, clout, where if we don’t have a goal 99% of time, there’s no repercussion, like it’s just straight up like, Hey, you didn’t hit your goal, like who cares? And you nine times out of 10 don’t care and so you know, a lot. A lot of What I want to talk about is there’s these three major problems that I look at when we talk about goal setting.
And and I’m not saying don’t have an end in mind, don’t have a destination don’t have benchmarks in life that you’re trying to accomplish. I’m just saying, make them more of a commitment. And the three main problems that we run into with goals is the first one is negotiation. The second one is false dopamine. And the third one is there’s no plan. And there’s a statistic that says 92% of 17 million people that try to quit smoking each year fail. 95% of people who lose weight fail to keep it off long term. 88% of people who spend years on resolution New Year’s resolutions fail at their attempt at 10% of the population in specific well defined goals. But even then, seven out of 10 of those people reach their goals 50% of the time. So you ask yourself, it’s like, okay, that’s the statistics. Are goals meaningful, then? No. I mean, we’re talking the 90s 90% times, I have a golden goal to stop smoking by the end of the year. It’s like, Okay, how many years have you said that? So it’s funny, because I had a goal to get a six pack, and I still do by the end of this year, and I was about 185 pounds my whole life. And, you know, a lot of times, I’ve tried to lose weight. I’ve talked about dieting, and it’s like, I have a golden rule meal plan. I’m going to do this, I have a golden, like, have a six pack. I’ve called the look good. Like, there’s been so many times that I’ve done that, but it’s like, the reality is, it never happened. And it wasn’t until I made a promise not to myself, but to my administrative assistant. And I said, I promise to pay you $1,000 every time I eat sugar between Monday and Friday, and my remember the first time I had lemonade, I did Mr. 1000 bucks. And I contemplated like, Well, I didn’t even know I had sugar like I totally spaced I forgot. But then it’s like, No, but I made a promise. Wasn’t the goal about the six pack, it wasn’t a goal about the sugar. It was simply I made a promise that I said if I eat sugar, I promise to pay 1000 bucks. And there’s been many times since then I paid her 1000 bucks. And she gets excited, obviously those days, but she has nothing to gain. She has she has no skin in this other than she collects money so unfair to her or unfair to me, maybe not. Because maybe you guys are like, why would you do that do that deal with me. But I looked at it and I go, No, I’m doing a deal with myself.
Because a goal does not have that deal. So when we look at the reciprocate of one, the promises made with ourself first. So I promised not to make or eat sugar between Monday and Friday, I could very much so lie I could very much so fib the other day, I had a marshmallow and I had a bowl of cereal and I kept just caving, it was a Thursday night. And I look back and I go interesting. I I ate sugar. And I’m not going to tell malar. And so two days later, I’m feeling this insane guilt trip because I like to be very honest with people. And I like to be very honest with myself, it’s one of the things I’ve really tried to work on. And I got to the point where I was like, it’s not worth my integrity, the 1000 bucks isn’t worth breaking a promise not to her, but to myself. And, you know, when we set out to sell a certain amount of sales, or when we try to commit or maybe we give our investors a promise, and we say hey, I’m gonna, I promise to hit this revenue mark, or I promise to sell this much, or I promised to go out and work all the hours. That’s a different, that’s a different conversation than I have a goal to sell this much. And it should have some different meaning. And, you know, you’re not going to take a promise lightly. I think a lot of times people, they, they take a goal to lightly why because they artificially spit out whatever imposters wants our meaning like society imposes, these goals that they feel like validated from by being like, Oh, I’m gonna sell this much, I’m gonna make $100,000 because that makes me feel validated, but they never made it.
They never really internalize why they want to make $100,000 they don’t even they don’t they just throw out a number because it feels good. And someone else is asking for a number from them. And they didn’t really put much thought to it. And so, you know, I look at it and I go there’s a thing called leverage and if you study coaching and as a consultant, I work with a lot of people. It’s I tried to get leverage, which means what’s the pain associated and what’s the pleasure associated?
If we were to not or or accomplish the goal, right? And I thought about like different business leverage factors and so I listed these out the first one is pain. So are the pain factors is B, letting someone down, getting beat by competition, losing money losing people, a lot of times you lose these relationships, legal repercussions, cost of not changing repeated results. Everybody hates insanity, when they’re just doing things over and over again, you have overhead or expenses, if you don’t grow a lot of people forecast growth.
And so they tack on a lot of overhead now, in anticipation of profitability, relationship costs. So if you start to stay, let’s weigh and put an actual tangible value to the pain associated if I don’t hit my goal, or I don’t hit my target. And actually, like, remember that on a constant basis, and then also associate the pleasure. So the business pleasure, the business factors of leverage could be, you know, change in salary or pay out. So it’s like, Hey, I can finally start paying myself more. And that’s been something I’ve started to actually like, taste for the first time and three and a half years of business is it’s like, oh, I’m hitting revenue targets, where I’m actually going to pay myself like, this feels really good. And then change in profit margin stress level, I’m actually getting to a point where we’re hitting our targets where I’m like, Oh, I can take a weekend off, and I feel bad I can be, you know, I’m gonna go disappear for a week.
And, you know, like, stress levels, a huge one freedom to do other things time excess ability to conquer other projects. So it’s like, you know, one of the projects that a lot you guys don’t realize I’m focused on is the the doctor or Association. So we’re working on a lot of really cool initiatives with a sex trafficking, education certifications, public relations, a documentary we’re fundraising for. So if anybody wants to get involved on a committee, it’s going to be a very, very global effort and takes a lot of work. So that stuff like if I can’t free up and hit my targets and hit my revenues marks, then I can’t go get back and do something cool like that, you know.
So another one would be the effect on those that you love, like, you know, meaningful friends meaningful family, they see this energy getting sucked out of you. You know, passive income opportunities could be a big one, like, you could have, you know, different side hustles or real estate now coming in, you’re building like actual wealth, if you hit your sales targets and your goals and your budget, right? clout in the marketplace, you know, obviously authority recognition, things like that. So there’s, there’s so many pleasures you could associate for hitting your sales numbers or hitting your, your, your business numbers. And so I’m sure there’s a ton of more and I think it’d be smart that as you set a promise, you actually associate okay to if I hit these promises, I’m going to go and push this right. So we’ve all heard everybody in like a sales meeting. This is this is this is my this my favorite example I wanted to share with, you know, we’re sitting in a correlation meeting with a bunch of sales guys. And everybody says, you know, what’s your goal today, Tommy in there, like four and that’s like, realistic. Then he goes to the next guy that’s sitting next to him who’s hadn’t sold in like weeks, who literally is broken the joke and all sudden, he’s like, five? And you’re like, Well, okay, like, No, no, what? What’s your goal that is like, it is five, like I’ve been studying, I’ve been working hard, and you’re like, and half the team will look at him and be like, okay, yeah, let’s get it man. Like, you got this dude. Like, and like, give him this, like, awesome, like, cheer. They’ll like be like, that’s so amazing. Where I look at it, I go, Wait a minute, stop giving him this praise, because, you know, he’s getting this false sense of dopamine.
And that’s This is the second biggest problem is, we get this false sense of dopamine every time we share our goal with somebody, and they validate that goal, and they make you feel good for saying the goal. But the reality is, you haven’t hit the goal, and you never will, like you haven’t promised you haven’t committed to that goal, and you haven’t done the work or even come close to doing the work to get to the goal. So why am I getting all the validation just by saying, so we get in this fine, great line, because obviously, a lot of the books are like, oh, share your goal with everybody and put it on the wall and like, like, announce it so that you can have some accountability and like accountability is different than recognition.
And oftentimes, in the sales world, we get this recognition or dopamine hit when we share the goal. So be very cautious about you living on a high horse as if you already hit your goal. And, you know, saying I’m committed to this, please hold me accountable to this journey. And I really know that it’s gonna be a long journey. And it sounds crazy that I’m on this journey. But I want you to be aware of like, what journey I’m about to start so you know, haven’t hit yet.
So I want to stay humble. But I’m committed to a totally different and I watched people, you know, really get this false sense of open mean a lot, especially in sales meetings, and I’m like, no, please just sell one before you sell five. Like, let’s just get you on the board, you know, and sometimes just want to call those guys out. And so, and then the last one a third is they don’t have a plan. You know, it’s like people put a goal, but they, you know, it takes like 30 seconds to put a goal. Like I want to make $100,000 like well, that took you literally no thought. And it may take a full day, a week, month, sometimes a year to actually Put a proper plan in business and sales and all the things depending on how intricate Your goal is. And most people don’t have the emotional bandwidth or time commitment or energy to actually go put the plan together.
So, you know, the low level people is they just set a goal and say, I’m going to do this, but there’s no actual like power behind that punch for the plan. And, you know, I really liked the word foresight or in forecasts I’m going to talk about the the foresight is really the the the Latin definition of for is, there’s the before, right, the all the things leading up to but then there’s one element that means superior. So four also means superior. So it’s the superior thinking is the higher level of thinking beyond what our natural mind is probably thinking. So how do we have this foresight and forecast properly, so that we can actually plan out a goal and really make this realistic instead of just a pipe dream? And so the foresight really is, has to do with, you know, can we map out plan B? Do we anticipate the problems? Have we? Are we aware of all of our weaknesses and potential roadblocks? Do we know how to do we know how to leverage the team around us and resources that we have? Do we anticipate future systems in different ways we’re going to break ourselves as we scale as we grow. And a lot of times, we don’t have the foresight, we can’t think farther than three weeks ahead of ourselves for three months or one year. And so we’re so limited on our planning. And we’re so limited on our ability to think farther. And that is huge limitation, where if you had a promise, you’re going to say God’s to my head, I’m going to do whatever it takes, no matter all the different roadblocks and challenges that come along the way when we’re trying to accomplish something. And forecasting is the ability to map out benchmarks and forecast like, okay, what’s the clear path to make it easy to go to work, and if we just forecast, okay, year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, and we can actually set the stage, it makes it so much more tangible for everybody to hook their wagon to this train. Because a lot of times our inability to enroll others in our in our in our vision, and enroll others in our goals, and basically, clearly define and forecast what it is we’re going to be doing. This is one of the biggest, like roadblocks that we run into actually achieving what we want to achieve. And it’s easy to be like, Oh, I have a goal to do this. But it’s hard to go forecast like, Okay, this is the timing, this is the bell curve. This is like, it’s gonna be sucky for a year and then all sudden, it’s going to shoot up because of XYZ. You know, it’s that whole theory of like, you know, a lot of times it’s, it’s chiseling, like on marble, you know, it takes 100 hits, and you don’t see anything happen. I’ll send 101 kit, you just all sudden, the marble cracks, and you’re like, well, was it the 100 and first hit, or was it 100 hits that nothing happened.
And then it was 100 first, but it’s that forecasting, like, okay, it’s gonna take 100 hits, but nothing happened. And then 100 first, probably gonna start to crack around then. And then we’re gonna actually start to be able to chip away at the marble. And that’s the ability of having that foresight forecast. And in this goal setting exercise, right. And so, anyway, I want to keep this short. But I really do appreciate you guys supporting me on my mission. I wish I would have had more foresight, I knew that. And I still I think a lot farther in my opinion than a lot of people. That’s what’s helped propel me and my, my success, but I still feel like I’m such a novice. You know, I look back to when I started this little over three years ago, and you would have told me, hey, you’re going to be doing XYZ and then three, four years, I’m out. I said, You’re crazy.
But now I’ve I knew that there was going to be big stages, I knew that there was going to be a lot of congregation of people I knew that there was going to be a lot of people are going to impact through really making a difference. And I knew that I was gonna piss a lot of people off like, I forecasted a lot of rocks getting thrown at me and meaning, hey, I’m going to put companies that have so much competition in so much hate, I’m going to start putting them in the same room and I’m gonna say, Hey, guys be friends. And, you know, a lot of times that’s, that’s a scary thing to do. When you’re, you know, you’re you have nothing to gain and nothing to lose all times. It’s like, I’m starting this nonprofit and I’m like, raising money and I put a lot of money into it. It’s like, why because I I foresee a day where this industry is united.
I foresee a day where some of the big players actually play ball together and they and they put their resources together to actually make a change in legislation and licensing laws. I see a day where rep stops doing money as much and we catch the bad guys in this and we expose them. I see days where companies don’t get away with some of the crap that they do and and there’s a mediator that actually that the answer to and some accountability and and just like another inch And some people are like, oh, that’ll never happen.
And I’m like, No, that’s, that’s, that’s my vision with this whole mission is, you know, the consulting thing funds it. They’re speaking the the university and all the other stuff we do. But the reality is like my mission was to unify uplevel and bring honor and integrity is door space. And, and I’m now starting to try to think, okay, 10 years, 10 years, how do I think farther than one year? How do I think past, you know, where like, I look back 10 years I was 20 years old. I was, you know, like, anyone’s really done this, like at all. And I fast forward another 10 years. And it’s like, man, I believe we can accomplish way more than we believe. And it’s just having that foresight forecast, to actually set out to go do that. And I invite anybody that’s listening to this to start thinking bigger to start practicing, planning and start practicing, anticipating the future in a much more powerful way.
And then to make a promise and not to renegotiate in the emotional thick of the journey, but to say commit, and I don’t negotiate no matter what, anything less than my promise. And I appreciate you guys listening to this. I hope that you got something out of it. And I will see you guys in the next episode.
