In this Blog, I'm going to walk you through a simple, yet incredibly effective series of business marketing and strategic planning exercises that I do each. And every single month. These are some of the absolute best and most effective strategies learned from the top billionaires, as well as the world's top entrepreneurs about how to run, how to grow, how to build a successful business as well as how to lead a relatively successful Life along the way, because, yeah, I guess that's important. The point is, if you go through these exercises, if you take the time to actually put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, pause the video as I mention it, and make sure to complete the exercises, you will have a significantly better year next year. Then you did this year, and it all starts with something called the 525 Rule. Now I first heard about the 525 rule in a famous story about Warren Buffett, when he was talking to his Pilot Mike Flint. Anyway, Mike Flint was Warren Buffett's personal pilot. And one day Warren Buffett, ask Mike Flint. Hey, what are your top 25 career goals? Go ahead and write them down for me dope. My it what Mike Flint does. And he wrote down his top 25 career goals. I've no idea if that's what Mike Flint does. And once he had these 25 career goals written down well, Warren Buffett asked him to Circle his top 5 goals. So with this point, Mike Flint now has two separate lists. Essentially, he's got his top five goals, and then he's got a list of 20 other things that he would also like to accomplish.
So Buffett asked him, what, what are you gonna do with your top five? And of course, Mike Flynn said, well, hey, I'm gonna work on these first. These are the most important. And then Buffett said, well, what are you gonna do with the other? 22 it? Mike Flynn said, well, I'm going to work on them when I can there, they're not the main priority, but they're also going to be there for when I've got some downtime or something to work on. And this is where things get interesting. You see, it's at this point that Buffett said, no, Mike, you've got it all wrong. All of these things that weren't on your top five list, all of these other 20 items. These just became your avoid at all cost lists. Basically, no matter what happens, none of these get any of your attention until you've accomplished all of the items on your top five. When I first heard this story, I was a little bit taken aback. After all, is somebody with a ton of different passions and interests and things that I'm curious about, and things that I want to do. And I want to accomplish in that I felt a little bit restrained a little bit restricted by having to stick to just five things. But that's because I missed an incredibly important part of this story, which is that you can work on those other 20 things after you've accomplished your top five, essentially what Buffett is saying here is later just on now. And this is because not only did Buffett understand the importance of focus and prioritization and things like that. But there's actually a psychological phenomenon that happens. And psychologists call this goal competition. We're essentially you've got too many different goals, and they start competing against each other for your time and your energy and your limited resources.
This is why, whenever you have a new goal or another goal, or another interest, or another passion, or something else that you want to do, it's going to pull attention and time and energy and all of that away from things that you may better off working towards. So at this point, I'd like to encourage you to maybe pause this video really quickly, and write down the top 10 15 20 25 things that you want to accomplish over the next year. Really just write down every single thing that's important to you, and then Circle those top five things, the things that would really move your business, your life in the right direction, the things that you really, really want to accomplish. Alright. Once you've got that done, let's move on to the next point, which is all about understanding goals versus systems. Now, the first thing that I need to share with you here is, is the difference between an outcome goal and a process goal. And outcome goal is something that you accomplished at the very end. So I want to earn a million dollars. I want to run a marathon. I want to travel the world, anything like that. Anything that is outcome-based. These are important to have. But the problem is, especially if you tend to fall more in the type, A personality overachiever thing, is that the second that you accomplish that goal, you quickly forget about it, and you go on to chase the next wall or the next thing, and you forget about everything and all of the hard work you did to get up to that point in all of the hard work. And all of the stuff you did to get up to that point. That's where the real money lies. This is because accomplishing a single goal is fantastic. But accomplishing a series of goals were becoming the kind of person that is able to consistently accomplish goals. That is where the real power is. And that's going to be where you're going to be able to accomplish all kinds of things in your life, ongoing, not just now, but forever. And for that to happen, you need process goals, which means you need to focus on the systems on the actions on the activities on the small, almost micro details that lead you towards that outcome goal. Now, I appreciate the word systems is not exactly the sexiest word in all of business and marketing and success and things like that. But it is where success is going to lie.
So for example, let's say you have a goal to get in shape or to lose 10 pounds or 20 pounds, or gain 10 pounds or 20 pounds. Well, that's an outcome-based goal where's what you really want. And what you really need is a system based goal, a process based goal, something that's going to help you get to that point. For example, your system in this case, could be to work out every single day at 8:00 am for 20 minutes. The beauty of this is that you have control over that aspect. There's a ton of different things that could affect your ability to either gain this thing or lose that thing, or accomplish this or whatever. It is extenuating circumstances beyond your control, whereas anything that you can do personally, anything you can take direct and immediate action for those are great processes to have, because they're going to lead you in the right direction. Another example, an outcome-based goal could be to write a best-selling book. Now writing a book is within your control, but the bestsellers part. Well, that's going to be relevant and sort of applicable to a couple different factors, including supply and demand in the marketing, and the messaging and the timing and all kinds of other factors that you can plan for, but aren't guaranteed. Not to mention the whole writing a book thing. It's a pretty big deal. So this is where you want to have a system based goal, or a process based goal like every day at 11 am. I'm going to sit down and write 500 Words again. This is something you have complete control over, and we'll have basically no other conclusion. No other logical outcome in to lead you in the path that you want to go. Of course, even with your systems, even with your processes, you want to take that main outcome goal, and then break it down into more bite-sized or manageable, or at least mentally accessible tasks or Milestones, or kind of key Stones along the way. For example, if your goal I'll just use the book when, again, the goal of the end of the years to write a book, well, let's say it's going to have 12 chapters.
Each one's going to have. I don't know, let's say five thousand words. Well, you could now break it down to writing, say, a chapter a month, or writing a thousand words a day, or whatever it is. But by breaking it down, and by putting it on your calendar, you make the odds of success two times three times, possibly even ten times more likely for you to actually achieve it. But of course, some of the tasks, some of the activities that you're going to do, they're going to be more important than others leads me to my next point. The 80/20 principle. Now, the 80/20 principle, or Predators principle is probably of my favorite business life, even marketing hacks Of All Times. Essentially, if you're not already familiar with the Prados principle, or the 80/20 rule, it's that 20% of your efforts are going to lead to 80% of your results. What this means is that it's your job, possibly your main and most important job, to find the 20% of things that you can work on, that you can influence, that you can impact that are going to lead to 80% of your desired outcome. The reality is that not all tasks are created equal. Some are simply we more important than others. For example, let's say you're a business owner who's trying to grow your business, and there's a long list of things you need to do, including accounting and bookkeeping and social media management and hiring and firing, and all of the other things that go into a business. But some things are going to be more important. For example, let's say you take a look at all of your business activities, and you determine that your highest leverage activities are doing sales calls or managing your team, or possibly even creating content. Well, what this means is that if you really want to impact your growth, you want to achieve your goals and do them faster with less time and less money and less energy invested.
You want to delegate or Outsource, or possibly even delete all of the other things that simply don't drive the business forward. Anyway. The beauty of the 80/20 rule of protos principle is that it applies to pretty much everything, regardless of what we're talking about. For example, the busiest 20% of all roads of all streets get 80% of the traffic, the biggest 20% of our all of the cities in the world hold about 80% of the world's population and the biggest 20 percent of companies and of businesses while they do around eighty percent of all the sales and all the revenue. And the reverse of this is also true. 80% of the roads and all the streets out there only get 20% of the traffic 80% of the city's only have around 20 percent of the world's population living in them. And 80% of all companies. Well, they only do about 20% of all of the revenue, all of the sales. So when it comes to having your best year in business, her what this means is that, at least, statistically speaking, 80% of your activities of your day-to-day doings are only accounting for around twenty percent of your productive output. Ouch, tough pill to swallow at first, I know. But the reality is that even as you become more effective, more productive, more efficient with what you're doing. Well, this is still going to apply. There's always going to be room to grow and to improve and to sort of trim the fat, cut the fluff and make yourself that much more effective.
