We're over halfway through the year and you may be sitting on a list of goals that you haven't yet started or if you have, you've lost the momentum and it's not clear to you how you're going to achieve these goals before the end of the year. And respectfully, this video isn't about using manifestation or half your vision boards to get closer to that. Not because those things don't have their place, but when they're used alone or hyperfocused on, they don't allow people to get close enough to these really challenging long-term goals.
What I am going to share as a senior engineer in the tech space are the frameworks and principles that I have borrowed from engineering and applied to my own life to achieve multiple challenging goals sometimes at once. They're everything from growing in my career to growing here on YouTube to fitness and to creative. They can be applied to any domain.
So if you're serious about changing course and achieving your goals by the end of the year, then let's just get into it. So the first principle I actually want to draw out is around systems thinking and design. Now I we have an approach to looking at our systems.
That means we don't just focus on the individual components that make it up like the blocks, but how the whole system works as a whole, how they're interconnected and the dependencies. One reason we fail in our personal life when we have multiple goals is because we see them as separate entities and we set goals and objectives in isolation and don't think about how these things are interacting in both positive or negative ways. You're seeing career, health, social, content all in separate buckets like they never interact.
And I'll give you a prime example of this. You have said that you're going to go to the gym at 6:00 a. m.
in order to achieve your physique goals and get that in. But you also have career goals that mean you have to be at work a certain time, do a certain amount of hours, and put a little bit more energy in than usual. But you also have a goal to sleep 8 hours at night in order to be rested and, you know, able to execute on all this.
And at the same time, you're sit at your desk at 11:00 p. m. editing content because you have goals about growing your brand and your socials.
And because you set all of these goals in isolation and then try to force them to come together, they're all now interacting in what are quite negative ways. They're overlapping or there's not enough time and resources within your system that is you to actually execute on all this. And so what's probably going to happen is you'll fail in one or more of these areas and you'll be disheartened, right?
It'll be really hard to continue or you'll just burn out. And on the flip side though, because you have planned all of these things in isolation, you're not seeing how you can stack and form synergies between them in a way to optimize your time. For example, maybe you have goals that relate to running, right?
You want to run 45 minutes 4 days a week, but you also have a goal to read five business books by the end of the year so that you can develop and expand what you're building there. How can we maybe change the way that we consume the books? For example, instead of reading, we tap into audio books, which means we can now actually listen to the audio book whilst we are running, doing that 45minut run.
And suddenly we can alleviate some of the stress in our system by forming synergies and stacking some of these goals. And so what I would say is as much as it's important to have detail in these individual goals, it's really important when you are setting them, when you are making your weekly plan, your monthly plans, your seasonal plans to take a step back to see the system as a whole and how things are connected. So the next engineering principle that I want to get into is about embracing risk and failing fast.
In tech, we want to avoid major outages, things that crash our system. But we also understand that if we try to aim for perfection 100%, we'll never innovate. We'll never push anything out because the safest thing is just to stay the same in effect.
And many of us stunt our own growth, especially in areas where growth is nonlinear, by trying to be perfect, right? we're not going to put out that piece of content because it's not 100% perfect or we're not going to apply for that job because we don't meet 100% of the requirements. Right?
This idea that we need to embrace a level of risk in order to to push ourselves to the next level, but we have to embrace the fact that we might fail so long as we fail fast and recover, that's okay. And I can speak to this personally, but right now your desire for perfection is leading you to encounter the point of diminishing returns. you think that you're putting more in so that you get a better outcome, but what you're actually doing is just delaying getting the out there, taking the action step, and getting real world feedback.
Let's say, for example, you have a goal that relates to content, right? And you want to grow your YouTube channel, and you're sitting there and trying to make this video perfect, right? You want it to be the the video of the year, but that means that you're never actually going to press publish and get it out, right?
You're never actually going to be able to innovate and learn from those lessons, feed back into your system, and go again. the things that actually allow you to move forward. Embracing risk and failing fast is not about chaos and your system always crashing, but it's about accepting that we can have some level of risk here and we can recover because our system is robust and that's how we're going to move forward.
The next principle is about eliminating toil and automation. There's a saying in tech that you should be trying to automate your way out of the job. That is, if there's something that you toil over, a process that you do every day or every week that requires your energy, you should be trying to find a solution to automate that, not just continuously putting energy towards it.
The same is true for some of the actions that are going to allow you to get closer to your goals. And I'll give you a few examples of how this could work in practice. Let's take the example of investment and saving goals.
Right now, perhaps every month when you get paid, you put that money into the separate accounts with the hopes that you're going to get closer to those goals. But because you are doing that manually, one, there is a time expenditure on that. But two, there is the chance of human error causing problems.
What do I mean by this? Well, because you have to manually decide to put that money in those accounts, but you know that there are a lot of external forces that are also after your money, that email notification, that Instagram ad. Now, there's a chance that you could be throwing off course because of those external factors, right?
Human error could introduce a bug basically into this that means you don't get closer to your goals. However, if that process is automated, if you have an automated step, that means on this day of the month, the money automatically goes into those accounts and there's a number of apps that allow you to just seamlessly do it. Well, now, one, I don't have to think about setting out time to do that, but two, I'm less likely to get thrown off course because it's automated away.
I am not introduced into that flow anymore. Another example may be using AI notetakers when you are in business or career related meetings. Now, you may be struggling right now to keep up with that, toiling over trying to take the notes and then clean them up afterwards.
Instead of using an AI noteaker actually within the call to make sure that you're capturing the key information, the information that allows you to deliver more on your projects or remember key things that the person said that help establish that relationship about maybe a birthday or a family, right? Because that's being extractive away, the AI is taking care of the note-taking. You could be there and present right and sharp in that sense, but also you have all of the wealth of information that you need to do the best job that you can with your career or your business.
And I'll give you one more example of this. You may have particular health goals that require you to eat in a certain way, right? And therefore, every week you need to get a certain set of groceries.
Now, you can manually go to the store and get this, right? you know, walk over there and pick everything out. Or you can use your app and pick or you could automate this process.
So the grocery list that you know contains all of the highquality and nutritious food that allows you to get the objectives you want, that all happens on a schedule every Sunday. That is delivered to you and you don't have to think about making sure that you pick the right things. And again, introducing human error because, you know, maybe you're influenced by the fact that the Chili Heatwave Doritos are on sale.
very specific example but I think you know what I'm talking about here. Eliminate those parts of the process if possible automate them away so that you have that time freed up and you don't introduce human error. The next principle is about datadriven decisions and a single source of truth.
So in tech and engineering we try to avoid making big decisions about our systems based on speculation, opinion or feelings. Instead we try to use highquality data to support the decisions that we're making. Now, whilst I'm not suggesting that your gut or your feelings and emotions should have no say in this, but if you are using those alone to drive your decisions, these things that are very susceptible to external influences like how you're feeling that day or what you just watched on TV or what you just scrolled past or what somebody said to you, it's possible that you can easily throw yourself off course.
For example, you may have decided that you want to build your personal brand in order to develop some of your business goals, right? Say you have a tech startup. Now you can make decisions about how you're going to do this based purely on feelings right or emotion or opinions or you can use data data about platforms about where your target audience are about the content and the angles that do the best but also align with you.
So now it's like here's some really high quality data that I can use in conjunction with what I know I do well with to get the outcome that I want to get closer to those goals. And the other beautiful thing is if you are collecting data on your own process, right? how things are performing, what's going well, what's actually not leading you closer to your goals and the opportunities you want.
You can use that data alongside the more generic data and then it becomes specific to you. Speaking of which, if you're currently building your personal brand and you want to join a community of women who are multi-passionate and ambitious and driven to getting the best opportunities for them, then you're going to be interested in the House of Reno, which is my community of women doing just this. Alongside the community, we have fortnightly coaching calls.
We have resources, the personal branding organizer. All of that is available within the community, but I will leave more in the description if you want to find out. So, back to the principles.
So, I spoke about datadriven decisions, but I also mentioned single source of truth in this particular section because you have all of this data that you're collecting and the decisions you've made and even your system design, but it needs to exist somewhere and somewhere that is protected from fluctuations from those pivots. I personally use my notion template or that I've shared on here before and I'll link the video if you're interested in finding out more. But that is my single source of truth where this data exists where the system that I've carefully designed exists that I can refer to especially if I'm starting to feel like I'm I'm wavering or things are influencing me too greatly.
The next principle that I want to talk about is simple systems. Now we spoke in the beginning about systems design and how things can be interconnected in positive ways and sometimes in negative ways. But what this point is about is in tech we try to avoid overly complex systems and too many dependencies that can cause failure points.
What I mean by this is you may have actually too many goals right now, right? There are too many components to your system and the ways they're interacting are not positive for the outcomes that you want. It may be that you need to simplify the system and focusing on the key things that will allow you at the end of the year to think this was a great year.
I achieved some really big things and there's more to achieve next year. Right? The system can continue to evolve in the next 6 months or the next 3 months.
But what do you need to focus on now? Right? How can we make this system really at its core driven by those things?
And the final one is one that I've spoken about before, but I think it's so powerful. And if you haven't heard it, I really want to share it here again. It's about the blameless postmortem.
In tech and in engineering, we understand that if you lead with shame and blame, people are less likely to open up when something goes wrong, right? because they don't want to get in trouble or they don't want to feel those negative emotions that are associated with that. So, we try to create environments that allow people to be open about what went wrong, transparent without fearing punishment.
The same is true for you with your systems and your goals that we're trying to achieve before the end of the year. Things will inherently go wrong. We already know our system is not designed for 100% perfection.
So, in which case, we need to know that we can objectively look at when things went wrong, right? Was it because my system was too complex? Did I not consider the dependencies?
Am I not driven by data? Right? Did I not eliminate enough toil?
We can take a look at these things and think, well, these are where I may have had some weak points and think that I can improve without it just being a case of, well, I was trash. The video flot, so you know, I'm done with the whole thing, right? I don't want to feel any of the emotions.
I'm just quitting. Instead, strive for a blameless postmortem where you dissect it without linking it to your self-worth and value. Now, I know these might not seem like the sexiest, but honestly, I swear by these.
This way of thinking has changed the way that I approach my life and how I can manage these complex goals, these multiple goals at once. And so, I hope that you take something away from this. I will leave in the description some resources including the link to my newsletter, the community, all of the stuffs.
