The Secret To Achieving Your Goals In A Week

The Secret To Achieving Your Goals In A Week

No matter how often hustlers are extolled, one thing is undeniable: Hard work doesn't scale.

During the past year, I have had an astonishing insight that has had significant ramifications.

Let me explain.

I'm a medical student. And although I've always done well in school, I wasn't always a standout. Yet, I decided last year to strive for an All-India Rank 1 in the next NEET admission test. The USMLE's Indian counterpart is this test. The outcome of these exams will determine which college I attend and which residency I am accepted into.

I won't get into the specifics of the test, but I will say that it is one of the most challenging examinations in the world to pass for a few reasons:

Given that India is already overpopulated and that practically all Indian parents are going to their children to become a doctor, the rivalry is strong.

The syllabus exceeds your comprehension.

Notwithstanding these realities, I made up my mind to work hard to ace this exam.

This choice quickly led me to the realization that, in order to succeed, I must work harder than anybody else for two reasons: First, hard effort alone won't bring me where I want to go. Most of my rivals are already exerting as much effort as they can.

A hard effort has a limitation and cannot scale as there are just 24 hours in a day.

As a result, I began investigating and coming up with ideas for techniques to increase my efficiency in an attempt to be smarter than any other students in my profession. My objective might be stated as follows in one sentence:

"One hour of studying by me should be equivalent to four hours by someone else."

I now understand that there is no true method to quantify this. What I'm trying to convey is that this is an excellent mental goal to pursue since it drives you to consider other approaches to achieve your objectives. It drives you to develop an efficiency-focused attitude and a propensity to seek out the most intelligent solution to every problem simply because perseverance does not pay off. clever labor does.

After making this move, I gradually began to discover a lot about how to accomplish this. And it produced outcomes. The more fake tests I gave, the higher my results were. I started to give these tests at the same time as a handful of my friends, but I advanced far more quickly.

I'd like to talk about a few mental images that I used to operate very smartly in this essay. I first encountered them while studying medicine, but over time I've discovered new ways to use them in my daily life. You will also be able to accomplish that. Let's start now.

The necessary mental model is that without the foundation of consistent activity, the clever effort is pointless.

I have had to inform everyone about the non-negotiable requirement for smart work, that being that you have to engage in constant physical action in the direction of your objectives before I can share with you the mental images with which I learned how to work smart.

Many individuals spend lots of time thinking but little time actually doing anything in their search for the smartest method to accomplish something. This puts them in a losing position.

Consider it this way: Attempting to construct the first story of a building before even constructing the bottom level is similar to seeking cleverer methods to do things. No matter how skillfully you build the first level, it will collapse and your efforts will be for naught since you neglected to lay the foundation.

You must thus figure out a means to act consistently. It is not required to labor hard. Nevertheless, it is constant labor.

For instance, I resolved to learn for 4 hours a day when I established my aim to achieve rank 1. I had plenty of free time because COVID had forced the suspension of my college courses at the time. I didn't attempt to study for eight hours every day, though.

Nope. I was leisurely. I barely spent four hours studying, but I did it every day. Never fails. also during the weekends. In truth, I had a happy New Year's Eve spent studying in my room.

Thus, commit to acting consistently in the direction of whatever objective you wish to attain.

If you have enough consistency over a long enough period of time, say a year, you can outperform others significantly. Even working shrewdly won't be necessary. Simply because it's really hard to remain constant for a whole year, even though people may do it for a few days or a month.

Of course, what one person means by consistency may not be the same for another. It may entail some people that work every weekday and take it easy on the weekends. But it mattered every day to me.

Consistency ought to be a non-negotiable to you, regardless of what that definition may be.

Adding levels of responsibility to guarantee consistency is a positive suggestion I would make in this situation. I had two levels of accountability in my situation.

In reality, I studied for four hours, using a timer. I advise utilizing a timer as well if you choose to spend a certain amount of time on any project. A timer is not essential if your daily achievable objective is something else, such as contacting 10 clients or producing 1000 words each day.

I used to keep streaks on the Coach. Me program. 

This made it easier for me to really keep up with logging the hours each day since I would lose my streak if I missed one. Another advantage of keeping streaks is that it demonstrates your length of effort. For instance, I had a computerized record indicating I had studied for a solid four hours each day for 180 straight days when I was six months into achieving my objective. This indicated that I had already invested 720 hours of great work into my art. This has increased my faith that I will see results. Success, in my opinion, was inevitable.

After discussing the need of establishing a strong foundation of consistency, let's discuss the various mental models.

Here are 3 quick tips to help you reach your objectives in around a year:

1. Sort your options for action by their return on investment.

There are countless possible activities you may take in order to accomplish any given goal. And this is the crux of the issue. So although all acts may slightly shift the needle, not all activities significantly do so.

For instance, there are several steps you may take to become a digital writer. To sound wiser, you may spend an hour acquiring superior terminology. Rather, you may dedicate 30 minutes a day to thinking up more good suggestions for your reader.

Theoretically, both of them will improve your writing and shift the needle. Yet, the latter will have a higher return on investment than the former.

Hence, you might also argue that, although learning a sophisticated language could theoretically make you a better writer, doing so in practice is foolish because there are so many other things you could be doing with your time.

You should concentrate primarily on the activities that will have the most impact because you have a limited amount of time. Only engage in acts that provide a high return on investment. I'll give you some examples:

As a future physician:

As I have stated, a medical student's course load is incomprehensible. This implies that someone who attempts to learn everything really learns nothing. I made the decision to ignore everything else and focus just on mastering the most crucial subjects first. Let me describe to you in detail how I achieved that.

The typical study strategy appears like this: The student reads a whole chapter first, then answers chapter-related questions. Pretesting is a technique I used after turning the process around.

I began by answering the questions. I read the chapter again after that. As a result, when reading the chapter, I focused more on the parts where queries were raised and ignored the topics where none were (at least for the time being). I was able to spend more time on critical issues and less time on unimportant ones as a result.

Let me add one more side note to this.

In India, medical school entails 19 disciplines. And because I thought it was a crucial topic, which it is, I used to devote a large amount of time to studying surgery. My test analytics, however, informed me that I would be already performing significantly better in Surgery than my colleagues once I started administering exams. But, I struggled with other topics like biology and anatomy.

I quit studying surgery and began studying biochemistry as soon as I learned this. The explanation was simple enough: I gained more from studying biochemistry for an hour than I did from surgery for an hour.

Being a writer

You can do a lot of things as a writer, as I've already indicated.

You may develop your title-writing skills.

It is possible to develop your vocabulary.

You can pick up tips on writing effective conclusions, etc.

While all of them have varying degrees of impact, I focus most of my study time on these two activities:

Creating catchy headlines (since, at least for now, titles are important in digital writing) and supporting those titles with catchy thoughts to avoid becoming clickbait

I don't really invest much effort in expanding my vocabulary since I don't think it is beneficial.

Simply said, even if you have a lot of options, you shouldn't strive to accomplish everything. Instead, concentrate on the comparatively few activities that have the most impact while requiring the least amount of work from you. We refer to them as high ROI actions.

Here's how to go about it:

Step 1: List every step you may possibly do to go closer to your objective.

Step 2: Sort them according to ROI. To achieve this, conduct research and heed the guidance of industry professionals.

Step 3: Concentrate most of your focus on the activities at the start of the list.

It is how one approaches infinity.

Remember that this list is changing rather than static as well. What has a good ROI today could not be so tomorrow, for instance.

For example, if an obese guy wants to seem more handsome, his best bet would be to regularly work out at the gym and monitor his diet.

But, there is a person like me. I'm already rather muscular and slender. Even if I'm wearing clothing, I don't necessarily appear shredded. Therefore, if my aim is to seem more attractive, investing in fashionable clothing would yield a larger return on investment for me than constantly worrying about my weight.

Buying stylish clothing is simple if you have the money to do so, but obsessing over calories is considerably more challenging.

I must monitor what I eat, so I'm not saying I don't have to. I also do. An objective of mine is to have a lower body fat percentage. I'm only suggesting that if I wish to be more attractive, purchasing nicer clothes is a better investment than stressing out about my diet.

The takeaway is so straightforward: keep considering what actions would provide the best return on investment in relation to your objective; try to rank them; and concentrate your efforts primarily on the activities at the top of a list.

2. Make other people's flaws your greatest assets.

A chain's strength depends on its weakest link. — Proverb in English

Medical school has 19 disciplines, but not all of them are made equal. Some are naturally simple, while others make pupils want to rip out their hair.

For example, dermatology is a very simple topic because there isn't much to memorize. On the contrary, hand, because the majority of it must be remembered, biochemistry is among the hardest courses in medical school.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of medical candidates struggle with the subject of biochemistry.

Thus, in order to beat the competition, I made the decision to specialize in biochemistry and other memorization-intensive courses. I made the following steps in that direction:

I bought a Pixorize membership. By method is to create mnemonic devices in the form of drawings, this platform enables medical students to learn concepts like biochemistry considerably more quickly and easily. For each issue, they develop a scene and a sketch and then use movies to guide us through them. I am the only one in my college batch of 100 that has a Pixorize membership. I consequently benefit as a result.

I devoured a plethora of books on recall tricks written by grandmasters and world champions. This assisted me in learning a skill that allows me to transform my weakness in remembering into a strength.

These tactics eventually allowed me to get a blatantly unfair benefit over my rivals. A significant edge that the majority of them will not be able to overcome.

Such universal flaws occur in every profession. For instance, while most individuals regularly visit the gym, maintaining a healthy diet is significantly more challenging. I've done the following things in order to transform this typical disadvantage into a personal strength:

being skilled at postponed gratification. I virtually never eat anything just because I want to. In order to exercise stronger self-control, I constantly work to bridge the gap between instinct and action.

never keeping unhealthy food inside. So if something is laying around your house, it's much more difficult to avoid consuming it removing apps for meal delivery from my phone.

Whatever you intend to do, identify the typical areas of weakness along the way and make them your strengths. Compared to the majority, you will advance far more swiftly.

3. Decode first, then code while standing on the shoulders of giants

This is how I like to kick-start my improvement in any area.

Stand on the shoulders of giants: I buy a book or a digital course that will educate me on exactly how to attain whatever objective I have in mind. I let go of my skepticism and stop attempting to determine whether or not their advice is sound. I just give their strategy a fair go and adhere to their advice word-for-word for weeks or months.

Decode: If their advice is successful, I attempt to decode their behavior in order to comprehend the guiding ideas.

Code: After I grasp the ideas, I code further activities that focus on the same principles.

It was a little unclear, so allow me to clarify with an illustration.

Instead of only using YouTube videos whenever I wanted to gain muscle and reduce fat, I invested $50 in Jeremy Ethier's course. Because they offer a step-by-step roadmap and take away all the uncertainty, I prefer to pay for courses.

Several aspects of the course were unclear to me when I first started reading it. The workouts, for instance, were quicker than I had anticipated. Before then, I was exercising more frequently but getting no further. I asked myself, "How can reducing my exercise help?" Yet I managed to suppress my skepticism and adhere to the course exactly.

Sure enough, I had excellent outcomes. It turns out that I was previously making several critical errors, such as failing to log the weight I lift and failing to gradually overload, which caused me to not see improvements despite lengthier exercises. But using the right approach taught in the session, I was able to achieve better outcomes with less work.

Finally, I made an effort to understand the fundamental ideas behind his program guidance. For example, Jeremy's leg routine helped me develop strong legs. This is the suggested exercise that he gave.

A. 3 sets of barbell squats with a rep range of 6–8, then a slow session of 8–10 reps of barbell squats with 70% of the regular weight. He advised me to take four regulated seconds to extend my knees during this slow set, then one second to hoist the weight for each rep.

B. 4 sets of 8–10 repetitions of Bulgarian split squats.

C. then a couple more hamstring and calf strengthening exercises.

Of course, it's likely that hereditary factors contributed to the superior growth of my legs over other body parts. Yet, it's also conceivable that it's a result of the workout's idiosyncrasies. Assuming the latter, I attempted to interpret his advised leg workout and discovered two guiding principles:

Hypertrophy is aided by slow, controlled repetitions at less weight than usual workout sets.

Exercises that concentrate on one side of the body at a time are excellent for eradicating asymmetrical power and eventually producing more power overall.

I attempted to incorporate these concepts into my other routines after discovering them.

For instance, following my regular working sets, I added an additional slow and regulated bench press set. In order to assure symmetrical strength in my pecs, I also performed some unilateral pressing workouts on machines. I used the same guidelines in all of my workouts.

Naturally, I'm seeing better outcomes.

Because it avoids numerous frequent mistakes that other people make, this conceptual representation is allowing me to develop more quickly than others.

For instance, the majority of individuals prefer to study and do things on their own rather than purchasing classes. Yet, in my opinion, purchasing a digital program has no drawbacks and is a huge positive if you can manage it. You may learn from professionals at a reasonable cost and save the time it would take you to sort it out on your own.

Another error people make is to question the wisdom of the mentors or giants they select. It is challenging for them to heed the advice of others who have previously achieved what they aspire to achieve because they believe they know better. Stupid.

The mental model I described above, Stand on the shoulders of giants, Decode, and then Code, enables you to achieve better results more quickly, comprehend the fundamental concepts on a deeply personal level because you see the outcomes firsthand, and then further your growth by applying the concepts.

I really believe that by comprehending that you can hijack your progress by relying on clever effort, you can accomplish your goals much more quickly than others.

Yet, you must learn how to perform consistently before you can even consider working wisely. If there is no activity, there is no room for clever work. Use these mental images to quicken your advancement once you've learned how to act consistently:

1. Prioritize your efforts just on the most important items after ranking the possible actions according to their ROIs.

2. Learn how to use other people's flaws to your advantage.

3. Decode the guidance of the greats to comprehend the guiding principles, then code additional activities in accordance with those principles.