#011: 3 Story Hacks to Reach Your Goals

Today we are talking about three sure fire ways to reach your goals. You may have heard me tell Jane McGonigals' story before. On her way to finishing her PHD in Game Design Jane was in a major accident in 2009. A concussion left her with a lot of complications. She constantly had a headache, was fatigued, couldn't read, type of look at a screen of any type. Jane fell into a depression because her life was put on halt. She physically couldn't do what she loved and devoted her life to doing. Her outcome is astonishing. She used the principles of Game Design and applied them to her life to to get better, reach her goals and have fun doing it. She documents the accident in her book Superbetter. Why do I tell you this story? Jane is a huge proponent of Self Efficacy. What is self Efficacy you may ask. Basically SE is your belief in yourself to accomplish your goals. Psychologist show the more you believe in yourself accomplishing your goals, the more you will accomplish your goals. Novel Idea. But what happens if you are not feeling it? What happens if your body won't let you accomplish your goals? Here are three hacks to help you build self efficacy and defeat the narrative of being self effacing. Hack number one comes straight from Jane's book super better. In the book Jane tells a story of a woman who tricked herself into exercising, and being social even though those 2 traits where not in her wheel house. How did she do it? You may laugh at this but she started playing an online game called the sims. The sims is an online simulation game of life. You can create an avatar and make the avatar act in certain ways. The game prompts you to take certain actions to make your avatar feel well. A huge part of "winning' in the sims is how your avatar feels. Things like food, exercise and social interactions helps your sim feel good. And the computer prompts you to make your character feel good. There is one huge caveat to why this works. The virtual human interaction lab founded by Dr Jermey Balinson shows self efficacy grows when you watch an avatar of yourself do the action in which you want to do. The tactic is called Vicarious exercise. Participants in a study who watched an avatar that looked like themselves exercised for a whole hour more than those who didn't. They walked more, took the stairs more often and spent more time at the gym. In order for this hack to work, your avatar has to look just like you. This creates what Scientist call a mirror neuron effect. Mirror neurons mimic the brain activity of people around us. because the participants felt closer to the avatar because it looked like them, they in experienced the mirror neuron effect. Crazy!! Go play the sims, make a character that looks just like you and watch them work. Hack #2 is a little more straight forward. Its called Minimum Viable Product / Minimum Viable Progress. Think about the goal you want to achieve. Next you identify the most important aspect of that goal. If you are wanting to create something you want to focus on a minimum viable product. What ever you create you are only focusing on one feature, the most important thing. If you are wanting to reach a personal goal where there is no product, like loose weight, you want to focus on a minimum viable progress. Say your goal is to start a business. A MVP is the one thing you would offer starting today. If you dream is to open a gym, jump right to one thing you can do to add value to your customer today. So a dream of a gym is out of the picture, but offering a running group that meets twice a week is something you can do today and charge for. You are now one step closer to your goal. If you are wanting to change something about yourself, or your surroundings, focusing on a minimum viable progress looks like finding the one thing that will make the most difference. If it is loosing weight, commit to one thing like eating the same boring salad and tuna for lunch. or 5 minutes of burpees every morning. If you are writing a book, just commit 15 mins to writing every morning and don't touch it for the rest of the day. MVPs work because it free's your brain of having to burn calories of planning a huge process, and never having to accomplish it because you spent all that mental work on preparation and don't have any willpower left over to actually do it. Willpower is a finite resource, MVPs maximize your willpower as a resource. Hack #3 is to implement what I call the one touch timer. I use an app on my computer and phone called Comodoro One and commit to work in a cycle of 25 mins of work and a 5 minute break. I make sure I commit to finish the work in one touch. I will not come back to it, so If I don't finish it, I ship it out half baked. Half baked is looked down upon in our society, but perfectionism keeps us from reaching our goals. I like to embrace the truism Done is better than perfect. If I commit to a one touch timer I have to stick to it. This has helped with finishing small projects, making sure I don't overcomplicate things with perfectionism and makes sure I focus on my most valuable resource, my time. So to recap: Hack #1 - Watch an avatar to build self efficacy. Hack #2 - Find a Minimum Viable Product or Progress to get you started. Hack #3 - Use the One Touch Timer method and ship a half baked product rather than not shipping. You can follow me on all social media @nick_ovalle. Until we chat again, I hope you live a great story.