Page 107 - Hard Goals

98 HARD Goals

being fat. I want to lose the weight. Heck, I start a new diet
almost every day. I just can’t seem to fi nd the commitment to
stick to it.”
Lou’s big life changer, the moment when his desire to lose
the weight became a required goal, came when his doctor diag-
nosed him with hypertension and type 2 diabetes during a yearly
exam. “Reality has fi nally checked in,” Lou told his wife a few
hours later when she found him throwing out all the junk food
in the house. “This time the diet is no joke. I’ve got to lose this
weight or I could die.”
It took the equivalent of a saber-toothed tiger breathing
down Lou’s neck for him to stop procrastinating and do some-
thing about his weight. He was lucky; he got the message, felt
the urgency, and lost the weight. But the lesson here is not that
you should wait for your equivalent of “Eat even one desert in
the next 72 hours and you will suffer a heart attack” to reach
that same place of “required” with your own goals. Instead, I
want you to learn how to stir up that same kind of urgency about
your goals anytime you want to make something happen.
Intellectually, we know we should have a much greater sense
of urgency about our goals. We know that putting things off
is bad. We overpaid our taxes by hundreds of millions because
of procrastination. We wasted almost $7 billion in unused gift

cards. In 2010, the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s annual
retirement survey found that a paltry 16 percent of workers are
very confi dent about having enough money for a comfortable
retirement. Self-defeating behavior is generally considered the big-
gest preventable cause of death, and yet, societally, we postpone
quitting smoking, drinking, overeating, and having unsafe sex.
As of right now, tomorrow is offi cially off-limits. It’s time
to stop getting tripped up by how your automatic brain views
future events (like goals) and pump up the volume on your