471 Brad Borkan ~ Goal Setting for Adventures and Life

Transcript

ITW Episode 471 (Released Aug 1, 2022)

HOLLY: Hello Brad, how are you doing today?

BRAD: Great, great to be here Holly.

HOLLY: I am excited to have you back on the show. This is going to be your third time.

BRAD: Yes that’s right, we have got an exciting topic to talk about.

HOLLY: I know, I like it. So why don’t you start out by telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

BRAD: Sure, hi everyone I am Brad Borkan and I have written two books about great people and great endeavours and how great people achieved great endeavours and looking at goals and looking at achievement and looking at decision-making. And prior to that I worked for large software companies and, as you can tell from my accent, I am American, just like Holly is, also another displaced American –  another American living in the UK and loving living in London and the whole environment over here.

HOLLY: Nice. So we are here today to talk about goals and goal-setting and I think that is a really important topic, both in life and for our outdoor adventures. And that is a topic that I didn’t grow up learning. It is something that I had to learn quite far into my life when I trained as a coach, and of course as a coach everyone talks about goal-setting and things. And it makes me angry that no one ever told me this when I was a kid. Maybe if I had done more sports when I was a kid I would have heard about it, I don’t know, but it just wasn’t talked about and I think this is a really important topic. So let’s start out by discussing what are goals?

BRAD: Sure, I like to think of them as two things. There are goals and there are desires. And having written a book about building the Panama Canal and the building of the railways in Britain and the quest for archiving the North-West passage and getting to the South Pole, those are goals, these are big, grand, endeavours, done by explorers and engineers and statesmen. And we, in our lives, have goals that are big thing as well: careers and family and other things like that. I think a lot of what we have are desires and one of the avenues that I have been thinking about recently is, for my goal to write a third book, is that a goal or is that desire? And what does it mean to not achieve a goal? Because if I make it a goal you have got this sense of, perhaps this is more about me, thinking: if I don’t achieve it, then I have failed achieving that goal which sounds all quite negative, as opposed to saying, it is a desire, maybe I am not going to achieve it, but that’s not such a big deal, because it was just a desire.

HOLLY: And I think that is a really good point because I think a lot of times if we do “fail” (and I am saying that with air quotes) to achieve a goal, a lot of times we turn that into a bigger thing than what it is and we make that to mean thing about ourselves: oh well, I guess I am not good at this, or I am not good enough, or whatever. And I actually did an episode recently on there is no failure only feedback, because a lot of times our goals change but yet we stick with those goals but yet we are not as interested in them. Or life changes, our life circumstances change, so it makes it harder to achieve that goal, it means that we need to change the deadline for the goal, things change… and if we stick with this fixed idea of what a goal is and a fixed deadline then we can start thinking that we are a failure if we haven’t achieve them in the time that we wanted to achieve them in, because life isn’t static, it changes.

BRAD: Yes, so I think that is one of the most amazing things when I am looking at early Antarctic Explorers, none of them, Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, they never achieved their primary goal and yet they were successful in varying ways. And I think that this is one of the things, having a goal and achieving a goal, at business school we are taught to have goals, obtain your goals and you become successful, or the way to achieve success, taking that equation differently, the way to be successful is to have goals and attain them. But the equation is much more complicated than that, because taking the case of Shackleton trying to get to the South Pole in 1907 and he didn’t make it, he got to within 100 miles of the South Pole but turned back because they were running out of food. He did get further south than anybody had ever gotten, so achieved a certain goal, but he didn’t get to his real goal. But had he got there he would have died on the return journey, so he became famous because of that, because he didn’t achieve it, but he achieved something. And I think this belief that you have to have a goal, or you have to achieve a goal, to see success, it is more loose and more complex than that.

HOLLY: And I think also sometimes when we don’t achieve our goals we still learn things, we learn things about how we do things, we learn about how we want to do things and I think that of itself is a kind of success, because you have got more information to approach the goal, or the desire, differently the next time you approach it.

BRAD: Yes, absolutely: I pursued that goal and didn’t get it, do I still want to pursue it? Or do I want to do something differently? A little story, when I arrived in Britain, you are talking about 30 years ago, one of the things I noticed, I always held the desire to own a Rolls Royce, not that I would be able to afford to own a new one. I was quite surprised that you could buy a used Rolls Royce, an old one, for not very much money at all and you could buy a used Rolls Royce cheaper than you could buy a Ford Escort. For £10,000/£8,000, partly because they are very expensive to repair and the parts are very expensive. So I had this desire, this goal, ‘oh yeah I will get to England and I will buy an old Rolls and Royce and it will be fun to have’. Arriving here and realising that the roads are very narrow!

HOLLY: Yes, they are!

BRAD: This is a big car. Someone told me a set of tyres might be about £5,000, it is like repairs are way more costly than the vehicle in itself as a used car and I thought, that’s just a stupid goal and I never did it and now I don’t own a car, because I used public transport and public transport is so good here. So it is a bit like saying, well yes that was a goal but then walking away from it, you are saying, that’s not practical. A pre-pandemic goal, one for me was being a public speaker and realising, ‘yeah I did some public speaking and got paid for it and realising that’s over. That’s not something that is going to come back quickly’. I love being on podcasts now and that’s not a paid endeavour, I just do this for the fun of it, for free. But it is saying, ‘well I am moving away from goal and saying well there’s another one, can I be on more podcasts and have interesting conversations with people?’

HOLLY: Yeah, I think this type of conversation I think was really helpful to people during the pandemic and of course beyond because you are making connections with people, you are meeting people and you are having interesting conversations during a time when we couldn’t leave the house very much and now when people are working from home a lot and not having those connections they used to have, when they were used to working in an office, so it has been a great change in that sense.

BRAD: Yeah and a lot of people’s goals got disrupted and are still getting disrupted. And the desire to travel is still being somewhat disrupted and so in a sort of way we are constantly reevaluating: whats our goal?, what’s our goal?, what’s our goal in this moment? and evolving.

HOLLY: So why is having goals or desires important in life?

BRAD: There is an interesting story, I think Tony Robbins likes to tell this in his webinars and books and things, it is something like the Class of Yale University in 1953 they assessed all the people, ‘here are all the ones that had goals and here are the ones that didn’t have goals’. And looking at their lives some years later, the ones that had goals out-earned the ones who had goals, 3% of the people had goals and 97% of the people didn’t have goals and the 3% out-earned the 97%. In sum total, all of the earnings of all of the people in this study, like 97% in combination didn’t out-earn the 3%. So in a way this was a remarkable statistic. But having goals helps, it does help to add a focus. When I had, going back for many years, a goal to be an author, not having written anything. I co-wrote a book with a Professor when I was in grad-school, but that was quite different because he was the lead and I was “with”, so his lead name in big letters and my name in the smallest letters you could possibly imagine. It sparked something in me, that this would be great to one day write a book. It was my goal without ever knowing how I am going to do this, because I am working a full-time job, but always having that and thinking how do I achieve that?, was exciting. Well, you have written many books, you have written ten/eleven books or something.

HOLLY: Yeah and I used to write books when I was a kid, that was one of the things that I did as play and then didn’t write for many, many, many, years and then I got the idea that I wanted to write a book about ten years ago. From there it took me a good four years of thinking about it before I finally sat down and wrote a book. My very first book that I wrote was completely different to the original book that I wanted to write, I still haven’t written that book. But yeah, it took me a while to get started, but I had that dream in my mind, I had that vision and I stuck with it until I finally sat down and wrote the first book. I think that’s the important thing, goals or desires and being clear on what you want in life and what you want to experience in life, and in your adventures, it just gives you a direction, otherwise you are just floating around. I feel like that’s what I kind of did for the first 35 years of my life, I was kind of floating around doing stuff, but there was no direction to anything. It was like, ‘I did that, and then something else came up and I did ‘, and I did great things, I ran a very successful business for 10 years, but it kind of fell in my lap, it wasn’t something that I dreamed about. I feel like my life really, really, changed once I took on the concept of goals and setting goals and having a direction in my life.

BRAD: Well I think that’s great and that happens with a lot of people. For me, and it might be an interesting story for people. I had a goal, I was working for a big software company and I had a goal to get to Vice President level. In a software company of 100,000 there might be a 1,000 people with the title of VP, maybe not 1,000 maybe 800, there are a lot, almost everyone has the title of Vice-President! I couldn’t get there and I realised and got to an age in my life where I thought, I am not going to get to that level, it is just not going to happen. Whether it is my temperament, my work ability, whatever, I am just not going to get there. And that’s when I thought I would take in the lesson from Shackleton, I’m not going to get to the South Pole, what am I going to do? I am going to declare my south and turn around and do something different and that’s what I did. I thought ok now is the time to get serious about writing a book.

I wrote a novel that was set in the Middle East, it got me on the road to saying, ‘well if writing about the Middle East..’, it was a story about a family and had nothing to do with Middle East politics, but of course everyone reads the Middle East from different perspectives. And then I thought that is not a good thing to write about if I want to get something published, I will write about something else. Antarctica is not controversial at all and so that’s why I focused on it, but it was realising that I am not going to get to this goal and turning around and saying that. And I had the most remarkable conversation with a senior Vice President of the company, after my Antarctic book came out. She was very senior in the company and she said to me, when I did a short presentation about the book to a team, she said, “remember us little people when you are famous!”. And I was so shocked by realising that I am never going to catapult myself to any level of fame pursuing the desire to be Vice President in this very, very large software company but the books could at a very small level, this small Antarctic world of people interested in Antarctic history, yes maybe or maybe not. It was the fun of thinking, yes, ‘I am not going to get there with this focus, which is the corporate side, I am going to get there with something completely different’, which is far more exciting and far more fulfilling. I met people like yourself and being on podcasts and doing talks and sharing these wonderful Antarctic stories with people and thinking, ‘well this is a whole lot more fun! It doesn’t pay the bills but it is a whole lot more fun than being in the world of an enormously large software company’.

HOLLY: Yeah, I think that’s the important thing, to know when to pivot in our focus and there are so many reasons why we might do that, because we realise that something isn’t achievable, or we no longer want it, or whatever. I think it is so important to not stay clinging to that original goal and to know, okay, there is something else that we can do that might be more satisfying.

BRAD: There is a wonderful photograph, this is a podcast so we can’t show it, a photograph of these three men, Shackleton and three others, he was trying to get to the South Pole where they have planted the flag, this enormous British flag, which currently hangs at the Scott Polar Research Centre in Cambridge and you see these three diminutive figures in their very big parkas, freezing in the cold of Antarctica. They are 97 miles from the South Pole, they are standing next to this enormous flag on a flag pole and they take these photographs and they start walking back to their camp. It is such a telling moment, such a poignant photograph of being able to say, ‘plant your flag’. And being able to say, this is as far as I will get in the software company and now I am going to turn around and do something completely different and maybe that will be my success and so on my gravestone hopefully they will say, Brad Borkan, Author, and they are not going to say, Brad Borkan, never got to Vice President level!

HOLLY: Not a VP! {laughing}

BRAD: Not a VP! I used to say I was Chief Nim Num that was my job title! ( laughing )

HOLLY: So Brad what is your approach in trying to achieve your goals?

BRAD: When I was starting to work on these books there were two things that struck me and one of them was, how do I do this? And a friend of mine was very into Tony Robbins things and various tapes, back in the day of tapes, and all the different things that people had that were the self-help stuff. And he leant me some tapes by Brian Tracy, an expert on goal setting and Brain Tracy had this idea that what you do is write down your goal as if you had already achieved them. And you do this in the morning when you are trying to influence your unconscious mind. And I am not religious, I am not religious, I am not into this new age mumbo jumbo stuff and I was like, okay, that might make sense. The concept was that it aligns the universe to help you achieve your goals. And you can’t sit there and say I am going to win the lottery if you never buy a lottery ticket, but you could say and I was writing down every day, ‘I am a famous author’. You are writing it down as if you have already achieved them. Things like, I own a {large} house. Things that I never achieved actually, I don’t own a large house. And as you are writing them you are thinking, is that important to me? Maybe owning a large house wasn’t important to me but being an author, I was always writing down and thinking, ‘how am I going to achieve that?’. The ideas that it helps you align the universe so that when you are talking to someone, ‘oh you are an author’, maybe I should start asking them how they got to that? What did they do? What were the first steps that they took to get there? And it really opened my mind to things I could achieve.

Maybe I have only achieved half the things on my list, I am sure, but I think all the good things that have happened in my life: meeting my wife, having my daughter, all the things that happened because I was writing down my goals, these were some of my goals (I was single) and it was a process. This is something I would encourage people to try, I was doing it every day. A story: my daughter was trying to get into a school in the UK and you had to take tests to get into this school and she was not very good at maths and I started saying to her, she is young about 10/11 years old, and she was terrible at maths, and she wouldn’t mind my saying that. I would say, if you have got to walk somewhere and it is going to take you twenty minutes, and you start at ten minutes past ten, what time would you arrive? She just couldn’t do it. I started having her write down: ‘I am good at maths’, ‘I enjoy doing maths problems’. And all of a sudden this mind shift, she had a tutor and all of a sudden her mind-shift changed and she actually got pretty good at it and it was just this mind shift that it could be slightly different than she thought, ‘oh this is awful and I hate doing it’, to, actually, ‘I can do this’.

HOLLY: That’s a really great example because not only was she doing the mindset work of writing it down every day and changing that perspective but she was also doing the practical stuff of having a tutor and having someone to help her with the practical side of getting better at maths.

BRAD: Right and she was applying to several different schools and when she applied to one school they actually gave her some maths problems to do on a whiteboard in front of the person interviewing her, and she did them all and they said, ‘oh you are really good at maths, you must really enjoy it’. And she was so thrilled (because she still sort of hated maths!) and it sort of worked.

I have talked about this idea to so many people and so few people have ever done it. She had a friend who was in the theatre from her high school who had a great desire to be a actor and playwright and I told her about this idea and she did it and she attributes that to her moving forward with her acting career, as a way of being more self-confident, so yeah so it works.

So it is worth looking at these sorts of approaches and thinking well what would work with me? You have got to play around with the language, it has to to be present tense, but you have got to find things and a language that works for you. It can’t just be, ‘I have stopped smoking’, when you are sitting with a packet of cigarettes on your desk, but maybe thinking ‘I catch myself maybe not needing a cigarette’. Or something that is a little bit different, and more nuanced, more something that you are not going to break.

I literally would have a notebook next to my bed and if I woke up (I don’t do this all the time now, but I should because I have got more goals) but literally before I got out of bed I would open the notebook and most times I was copying from one page to the next page, it is that process of writing — it has to be handwritten, it can’t just be thinking about this — and it works. One thing about money side of things, you can’t say, I am earning 100,000 if you are currently in a job earning 5,000, what Brad Tracy said was that you can ask for 30% more, you can write out ‘I earn 30% more money than I earn today’. 

And I will tell you a little story, if I could just continue to rabbit on here. So I was writing down, this was  about 14 years ago, I was working for a software company and I was writing down ‘I earn exactly 30% more than I was earning’ and a headhunter calls me with a job at the software company that I went to, and said, ‘I have a job that might be interesting to you but it is not what you are doing now, it is something different’. And I interviewed for it and they said, I thought I was a pretty strong candidate for this, the company said, ‘how much are you earning now?’ And I said, ‘I am not going to tell you. What does the job pay?’ I don’t want it based on my current salary, I want it based on what is the job salary and they came back with a number and it was 30% higher than my current job.

HOLLY: I love stories like that. That’s just great!

BRAD: Yeah and I took the job and it sort of worked.

HOLLY: Yeah, it totally worked.

BRAD: I encourage everyone to try it, it doesn’t take much time at all, it takes 3-4 minutes and you start getting into the habit of it and you don’t have to write a lot, it can be a few goals. ‘I am good at maths’, ‘I am a famous author’ (present tense), and a lot of them can be more vague, ‘I see opportunities and I act on them’. I think something like that, one of the things that we miss so often in trying to achieve our goals is that there are so many opportunities that we are missing that could help propel us towards that.

HOLLY: How does this help? How does it work? Why does it help to write your goals down and then re-read the list on a daily basis or on a regular basis? How does this work?

BRAD: I think it aligns… Brian Tracy was always saying that it sorts of aligns the universe. I think it is more aligning your ability to think openly. Thinking back now to when I was writing these, I was writing things like ‘everyone wants to help me achieve my goals’, that was one of the things that I was writing and what was surprising was that everyone did. The more that I thought that was the case the more I would see something, even if it was negative, well, actually this has helped me achieve my goals. When people were saying to me, my best friend said to me, ‘a book about the Middle East is not going to fly’, that helped me to achieve my goal of realising, ‘ok that’s not going to get me to be an author’. I can finish the book and all that but I am not going to publish it. Seeing as, he is telling me something negative and taking that as something positive. So I think there are ways to see the world and I think that helps.

HOLLY: There are and I think, when you are writing down your goals or desires on a regular basis, as you said it really helps you to decide if you really want that goal and it helps you to see if you no longer want it. I recently went through a thing earlier this year where I was writing down my goals, one day I just started writing them down differently because I realised the timescale that I had set for myself wasn’t easily achievable and it was stressing me out and so I just kind of changed the timescale on a couple of goals and it completely changed everything. I now realise this is doable, I am now working at a different pace towards them and I am feeling more positive about the goals, but that came from writing the down and realising, ‘can I do this by that date? Maybe I can, but I am going to be really stressed out’.

BRAD: Absolutely it is a way of refining what your goals are. And also thinking of them as desires as well as goals. I might desire a larger house or a better car, but do I need them and is that really what I want? And so, I think it is a bit of looking at something critically and as you are writing them down day after day, after a month you might feel, ‘this one isn’t so important to me anymore’. Or this one becomes more important so I will focus my energies on it.

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine, an author, because I was saying, ‘I am really stuck, I want to create some videos based about decision-making, I want to write more magazine articles (I write for several different magazines) and I want to work on my ew book and I have got other things I want to do, and what should I do?’ And she said, ‘what’s your goal?’ And I realised my goal was to write books and maybe they are not going to sell a lot but I think I have got something to say to an audience and I am currently writing a book about teams and it is so fascinating. And I hope that it becomes successful and maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but now I know my number one goal is to write this book. And I just finished another chapter last night which was very exciting. But the sense of saying, okay some of the goals are lesser and can be put to one side and can be done later, they don’t go away, they help prioritise, go write this book for a year, because there is so much research required for this book, but my co-author and I can achieve it, and I am now more focused on it.

HOLLY: I think that is a really good point because a lot of us have a lot of goals, or a lot of desires, or a lot of things that we want to do, but if you don’t prioritise them then it can feel really overwhelming because you have got all of this stuff you want to do, but what’s the most important? And that is an important thing to identify and to be clear on, so that you know where to focus you time and energy and efforts.

BRAD: And it is easy to get distracted in this world, partly because there is so much fun stuff to look at: YouTube and all this stuff and then there is the politics and the craziness that is in the world right now and you can sit there and get caught up in the current thing with the Prime Ministerial race in the UK and the politics in the US, and the January 6^th Commission, all this stuff is so fascinating and distracting. My only caveat is, I also have a goal to learn more about politics and one day write a book about politics, so in that regard I am looking at political decision-making. I am trying to get my co-author interested in and he is less interested and it may never happen. But that concept of saying, where do I focus my attention? All that politics is interesting but keep focussed on my current goal which is the teams book, that other stuff is secondary, stay focussed on the primary goal.

HOLLY: Speaking of this, how are you able to stay on track and achieve your goals? How well do you do with this system?

BRAD: I wish I did better, not well, because there is a lot of distraction and I am easily distracted. I actually was better when I was working full-time for a software company, but I was literally working 15 hours a day, because I was working 10 hours a day for the software company and give them my very best hours because they were paying me and then try to do 3/4 hours a night all on the book. I was more focused but it was not a sustainable lifestyle.

HOLLY: I have actually heard that from a lot of people who have gone from working a full-time job and managing a business on the side, to then leaving the job and having a full-time business and there is a big transition period where you are kind of reorganising your time and how you use it.

BRAD: Yeah and I thought ok, I have now been out of the software company for a year, well certainly by the end of a year if it took me two years for me and my co-author to do each book, each year was a two-year endeavour, surely in one year, when I am not working, we could propel a book forward and get it finished, and that wasn’t the case. We changed topics for the book, part-way through, it was that I needed to slow down a little bit but then again I am not working 15 hour days, which is quite nice, I am working at a leisurely pace which is quite different.

HOLLY: Good, good. So speaking about this, how can we achieve our bigger goals when we have got a full time job, because obviously a job takes up a lot of time you have got to commute or work from home, but a lot of people do still have to commute and a job takes up 8-10 or maybe more hours in a day, so how do you fit your goals into this lifestyle?

BRAD: Thinking about them all the time, because the opportunities to help achieve may be in that we don’t have to work 100% of our time in a job and only think about that and never think about something else. I can be thinking about writing a book about teams and being at work, I am seeing teams all the time at work, so there is there material that I can bring into this. I write for a magazine called Strategy plus Business, an online business magazine, so I am constantly looking for content for that. I may catch ideas for that from other sources. You enjoy hiking and running and all these things and there is nothing to say that when you are hiking and running you can’t be thinking about the other things, in a way it helps clear the mind. So it is sort of never thinking of doing one or the other, you can be multitasking on these things. For me, one secret I will share, which is I struggle with, how am I going to be a full-time author and work for a software company and give it my best effort, and I hit on an idea. We may have shared this idea on the other show, I think I mentioned this to you at one point, that what I would do, I was writing in the evening and before I went to sleep every night I would read what I had written, I would print it out and read it. Then your subconscious mind will think about it overnight and I would do that all week, because I could put more focused time on the book at the weekends. So even if I wasn’t doing anything on the book that night, the Wednesday night or the Thursday night, because I was so focused on the job or family things or whatever, I would re-read what I was writing in that chapter and by the weekend my brain had processed all this time, assembled all this stuff, and I could sit down and immediately start writing. Because the challenge with non-fiction, and I am reading about the the Panama canal, there are books and books about the Panama Canal, I was reading about Roosevelt, but how does that coalesce into the chapters that I want to write and the messages that I want to convey about what do we learn from them about building the Panama Canal? And my brain processes that overnight, I think your brain does a certain amount of processing at night when you are asleep, why not try it?

HOLLY: I think that is a great technique, I have never done anything like that, that’s really useful for creative projects like writing. So how can we apply these techniques to outdoor adventures and fitness and adventure goals?

BRAD: My guess is thinking of some of those outdoor pursuits, are desires not goals. Maybe running in a marathon is a goal, I have to train every day, rain or shine, but when it is cold and rainy and awful out and you miss a day, is that like I haven’t achieved my goal for the day? Maybe that’s your desire for the day and maybe not think of applying it quite like that. I think having the goal helps and not seeing failures as downside.

HOLLY: I think for me writing them down has been really, really, helpful. Writing down ‘I get my blackbelt’. Originally this year I was going to get it on the summer course and now I have changed it to the winter course, because that didn’t happen in the summer, but that was one of the things that I changed because I realised that I just wasn’t going to make it to be ready by the summer course. And there are only two times a year in my school when you can do the advanced gradings. So writing down, I get my blackbelt, in the winter course. Last year I had a couple of races that I signed up for, I successfully finished, or joyfully finished, my 100k race. I didn’t want to just complete the mileage, I wanted to enjoy it and I did. I find it useful to add the emotional side to things, ‘I easily run 100k’, or ‘I joyfully run 100k’, because again, I want to enjoy the experience, I don’t want to suffer it.

BRAD: That’s quite critical. I think this is the most important part of this whole thing, you have got to enjoy the journey and not the goal. When you look at the people who climb Everest and they are on the mountain top, at the very peak, for a minute, a couple of photographs and they are down. Partly because it is very crowded and partly because it is cold and windy and dangerous and you have got a very, very, difficult climb down. Right now I am reading a book about 1953, the Hillary ascent of Everest in 1953, you have got to enjoy the journey, that is what these climbers did they enjoyed the journey of the mountain, the challenges of doing that, it is not the finished book, you have got to enjoy the journey of the writing of the book, you have got to enjoy the journey of the running before you get to the race, the training, and see that as fun. If your only focus is the goal and achieving that goal when I am going to be happy it is so fleeting. ‘I am only going to be happy when I am retired’, ‘I am only going to be happy when I have got a million dollars in the bank’. It doesn’t work that way, it has got to be the journey of that.

HOLLY: Yes absolutely, because if you hate running, then why would you sign up for a marathon or an ultra marathon? You have got to enjoy the training process that it takes to get there.

BRAD: I think you are right. That’s something I also did with writing down my goals. It is also the adjectives that go along to describe the journey of that and it is never easy, I was listening to a podcast the other day about someone who is a famous author and they were saying that every book is exceedingly hard to do and that’s true, I think that’s true, it is a difficult thing to attempt. Just like marathon running, just like mountain climbing, like the people I know who go down to Antarctica and try to walk across to the South Pole. These are difficult endeavours and you need to figure out what is going to be pleasurable in all of this?

HOLLY: Exactly, what am I going to get out of it? I think that’s another important thing when you are writing down your goals, what is this going to give you? What is writing a book going to give you? What is running a race going to give you? What is hiking a trail going to give you? How is that going to improve yoru life or how is that going to bring joy to your life? What is it going to give you?

BRAD: Actually, I know we are coming towards the end, but thinking about the Panama Canal, when Teddy Roosevelt had the goal to build the Panama Canal, he never saw the Panama Canal finished. It was a ten year endeavour, finished after he was president, started in 1903 and didn’t finished until 1913, but he was still alive and he never saw the finished thing. Partly because he was on other adventures in Africa and South America and partly because it was never about the building of the Panama Canal was the goal of the building of it, it was the naval dominance that it gave the United States and the ability to move ships from the West coast of America to the East coast of America because it meant goods could now go down to the bottom of South America and it was not the goal but the benefit of the goal. This is something that we all need to keep in mind, what’s the benefit of me writing a book, what’s the benefit of not seeing the finished book? It is not that I might one day make $10 or $1000 from being an author, it is about telling the stories and the story of great Antarctic canal and the great railways of getting this into people’s minds so they see, how do you achieve goals? How to people persevere through every obstacle? And millions of people saying to them, it can’t be done, you can never build a canal across jungles and swamps and rainforests of Panama, you will never build a railway across Britain and go at any speed. You will never be able to get through the Northwest passage, people had been trying for 400 years and the Great British Navy couldn’t achieve it, and Amundsen takes a small team and does it. That thing of persevering and not listening to everyone who says it can’t be done.

HOLLY: And to take it one step further, inspiring people with these stories that you are telling them in the book and making people realise, maybe that don’t want to build a bridge or a railway, but big things are achievable and big things might be possible for them and I think it opens up people’s minds and expands their perspective on what is possible for them.

BRAD: That was my title for my second book, I was constantly trying to find another title and we said no, let’s keep with what we had, Audacious Goals, Remarkable Results. Sometimes you are not going to achieve your audacious goals and sometimes you will change your audacious goals and so if that audacious goals is running, or hiking, or travelling, or just depending on your time of life, or if you audacious goal is like that army colonel, Sir Tom, the person who raised 40 million pounds for the NHS, he was 99 years old and walked around the perimeter of his courtyard where he was living and wasn’t a walker, but look at what he achieved with one simple goal, just remarkable.

HOLLY: I think another thing that is important, when we achieve goals in our personal and professional life, that can help us with our adventure goals, and when you achieve adventure goals that can help us with your professional life. Because when you are expanding outside of your comfort zone and doing bigger things and thinking of bigger things for yourself, I think that just has a ripple effect in all areas of your life, so it kind of bounces off each other.

BRAD: Yes and it makes you a more fun person. It gives you so many more things to talk about and also when you start seeing other people, you learn about their goals and what motivates them and you also see, well, what can I learn from them that can help with my goals? You are seeing the synergy that comes from that, I think there is a lot of fun in that. I don’t have goals that are your goals of running and blackbelt and kickboxing and things like that, but we all have goals. The commonality of people who have goals, they are fun people to be around because they are people who are striving for something, they may never get it, it may be that they have to say, we’ve got to plant the flag and didn’t get that goal, but go find some other goal. Those are fun people to be around.   

HOLLY: It is like a contagious energy.

BRAD: Exactly. There is a lot for people to take away from this.

HOLLY: Absolutely, I hope it inspires people to think bigger about themselves or think differently about themselves and to think about where they want to be headed in life and then to keep writing that down and seeing how that changes. So Brad, thank you so much for joining us today and talking about goal setting, this is a topic that I love. Where can people find you online and find out more about what you do?

BRAD: My website is: extreme-decisions.com and I am always happy to have people contact me through the website. The books are listed on the website, the first one is called When Your Life Depends On It, and the other one is Audacious Goals, Remarkable Results. They are both available through Amazon across the world and in the US and UK in audio format as well. They have both won awards as well. The audio book is not read by me, they are read by the narrator Dennis Kleinman who has such a remarkable voice and brings a life to the book in a completely different way, I would encourage you to try listening to them. They are not long, only six hours each. The books are not long to read and hopefully they are enlightening and inspiring. They are inspiring stories of people who set goals, many times didn’t achieve them, and just kept striving but never listened to people who said that it can’t be done.

HOLLY: Absolutely, great advice. All right thanks again Brad.