In this episode, I explore why setting “SMART” goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound — might actually be the thing holding you back. While SMART goals are great for achieving incremental progress, they can also make your goals feel like checklists, leading to disengagement and boredom. Instead, I challenge you to set an “impossible goal” — a goal so big and out of reach that it forces you to tap into your creativity and problem-solving skills. By setting a 10x goal, a failure goal, or simply one that feels impossible, you can ignite excitement and engagement in the process, rather than just ticking off boxes. Listen in to find out how to reframe your goals to make them not only achievable but exciting!
Key Takeaways:
The Weakness of SMART Goals: SMART goals can reduce creativity and engagement by making the process too clear and structured.
Set an Impossible Goal: Choose a goal that challenges you beyond your current abilities, requiring creativity and problem-solving to achieve.
Creativity Over Checklists: When setting big, difficult goals, you activate your creativity and maintain engagement with the process.
Failure Club Concept: Embrace the idea of setting goals with a high probability of failure, which frees you to experiment and learn.
Relevant Goals Only: Make sure the goals that seem impossible to you are still highly relevant to your life, career, or business.
Commit to Growth: Focus on figuring out how to achieve the impossible goal over a set period, using failure as a stepping stone for learning and growth.
Un-Edited Transcript
Are you smart? Of course, you are. You are listening to my podcast.
But let me tell you. What if the key to achieving all of your goals, everything you wanted, was to stop being so smart? No. I'm not talking about intelligence, and I'm not talking about being dumb. I am talking about smart goals. You probably heard of them, s m a r t. Smart goals, they're great, they work, and they may be the very thing that's holding you back from achieving something truly great.
Stick around to find out why. Welcome to yes and, the podcast where we explore the powerful idea of saying yes and instead of yes, but and how you can use it in your career, your business, and your life. I'm your host, Avish Parasher, and this is yes and. Welcome back, my friend. Or welcome for the first time if you are a new listener. If you are, I am very happy to have you here. I am back today with another solo episode. Yes. This is my 2nd solo episode to kick off 2,025.
We're kinda kicking off the year with a bang, talking about being motivational and setting goals and lining up the year. Next week, I'll be back into the regular rhythm of, interview. I got a great interview lined up for next week and then solo episode where I dig deeper into it. But I wanna have one more solo episode because as I was getting ready for the end of the year and leading into the beginning of this new year, I really wanted to what do I wanna convey? What do I wanna talk about?
And 2 topics came up. 1 was about your persistent yes, buts. And this is what I talked about in last week's episode. So if you haven't listened to it, go back, check it out. It's all about how the answer to your problem, the very solution might be already within the realm of what you know. So go check that out. Then today, I wanna talk about this idea of setting an impossible goal, and I've heard this referred to in a few different ways, an impossible goal, a failure goal, a 10 times goal.
Basically, it's about setting a goal that you don't know how you're going to achieve. And the opposite of that is what most of us were taught, whether it was formally in, like, a project management type class or workshop or informally just from reading or talking with friends. We've learned about smart goals. If you're unfamiliar with a SMART goal, SMART is obviously an acronym for SMART. And I've heard actually a few different definitions, but the most common one I hear for SMART is it stands for set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Now I'm gonna touch upon those real quick. I'm not gonna go in-depth.
If you wanna learn more about smart goals, just type it into Google. You'll probably get millions of results. But the basic idea is that you want to set a goal that is specific and measurable. So instead of setting a vague goal like, oh, I want to be healthier, set a specific and measurable goal. I want to lose £10, or I want to be able to bench press my weight. Right? That's specific.
It's not broad and vague, and it's measurable. £10, whatever your weight is. Also set goals that are achievable. So if you set a goal that is way too big, like, hey. I wanna bench press, you know, 3 times my weight in the next month. Like, your mind's gonna shut down because it's not achievable. Set goal that's relevant to you.
So if you're like, hey. I want to launch a jewelry selling business, but at the end of the day, you don't really care about selling jewelry. It's not really relevant. Maybe people are like, oh, here's a great opportunity for you. So you want to be relevant to you, and finally, time bound. If I say, hey.
I want to lose £10. Great. That's a very different goal than saying I want to lose £10 in the next 3 months or whatever timetable you set. So if you've been around the personal development or goal setting or project management space for any amount of time, you're familiar with SMART goals. And they've been around forever because they work. They it's a great way to set a goal. It gets you out of the ambiguity.
It it helps get you focused, and I use smart goals as well. Now what I have found, however, is that sometimes the strength of a smart goal is also its biggest weakness. Because the strength of a smart goal is that once you've established your smart goal, because it's specific, because it's measurable, because it's achievable, relevant, and time bound, it takes creativity and thought out of the process. Essentially, what you do is you set your smart goal, then you make your plan to achieve it. And now what you've got is a checklist, and all you have to do is go through that checklist every day. Check check check check check check it off, and in theory, you'll eventually achieve that smart goal. And a lot of that comes because you crafted it in this way that makes it achievable and relevant and measurable.
The challenge though is, as I said, it takes away thought and creativity. That's the strength. It's great when you have clarity. You just wake up, like, oh, what's on the checklist? Yep. Let me do that thing next. The problem though is that what I have found in 30 years of performing and teaching improv comedy and 20 years of being a speaker and 30 plus years of setting my own goals is that it often becomes a drag.
It's almost disengaging sometimes. Right? You have got this goal. You crafted this nice little plan, this checklist. And over days or weeks or months of executing that plan, it loses momentum. You lose engagement. You lose motivation to do it.
Now right now, you might be listening thinking, well, you're weak. I am a person of great discipline, and I just wake up, and I knock off the items on my to do list because I am a goal oriented person. I'm gonna achieve my goals no matter what. Hey. Good for you. This podcast episode is not so much for you. I know people like this in my life.
They are awesome. They're high achievers, and they just find a way of digging into this level of discipline and just going about their business and following that checklist. And it works for them, But everyone is different. Everyone has a different path. If you are like me, and you have issues with ADHD and issues with dopamine and needing stimulation and procrastination, which I have struggled with my whole life, The common solution often given by those disciplined people is just suck it up and do it, and that's that's fine. We all gotta do that sometimes. But I have found that if we take it at a higher level and the types of goals we set can actually really help mitigate that boredom and that feeling like things are a drag, and overcoming procrastination.
Because when you set a goal you don't know how to achieve, you have to use your creativity, and that in and of itself creates a level of engagement. Now before I go deeper into that, let me ask you a very simple but potentially controversial question. What is the greatest rock and roll band of all time? Just think about your answer. If you're alone, you can call it out. You can yell at me about what your answer is. Now I'm sure you've got great answers, and I've asked this question to a lot of audiences.
And I heard a lot of great answers, and frankly, sometimes the occasional weird one. But my answer to that question is the Canadian power trio known as Rush. Yes. I am a giant Rush fan. I've seen them in concert many, many times of all their albums, listened to them all the time. They are the best band ever. Now I know it's a subjective question, so don't start texting me or emailing me right now about how wrong I am, but I love Rush.
And if you're unfamiliar with Rush, they're this 3 man band, and sadly, they're no longer in existence. The drummer passed away a few years ago, but they put out about 19 studio albums. At one point, at the height of their popularity, they're selling out arenas, massively famous. You probably heard some of their songs if you're unfamiliar with them. If you don't know them by name, but you probably heard the songs. If you've seen the movie I love you, man, with Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, Rush is the band that they bond over. Now Rush is known for being sort of nerdy and for writing very technically challenging difficult music. Right? Their songs are very complex, different time signatures, very complex things they have to do.
The bass player is playing the bass while he's singing and playing the keys at the same time, and it's very, very difficult music to play. So one of the things they're known for is very complicated, very challenging music to play. And their most famous song is probably a song called Tom Sawyer. This is one that's been featured in commercials, in movies. It was in I Love You, Man and other some TV shows like The Goldbergs. It was on there. So this song came out in 1981, and it was their biggest hit song off what ended up being their most successful album called Moving Pictures.
And this is, as I said, that height of their popularity when they're selling out arenas. Now because this is their most popular, most famous song, they ended up playing the song at every single concert they ever performed. Every time they did a concert, they performed this song live. And this went on for 30 plus years over and over and over again, playing the same song. At one point, they're on tour. It's like their 30th anniversary, and a journalist asked them, hey. You've been doing some of these songs over and over again for decades.
Is it still fun for you? And the drummer, Neil, thought about it for a moment and then said, you know what? They are still fun because those songs are sufficiently difficult to play, that they are still interesting. Sufficiently difficult to play that they stay interesting to play. He's saying, oh, you know, when I'm when I'm doing Tom Sawyer and I'm playing one of the fills, it's challenging, and I gotta really focus. And when I do it successfully, I get a little dopamine hit because I I did it well. He didn't say, oh, we've done those songs so long.
I can just phone it in. I just go on autopilot, and then my mind can wander, and I can daydream, which is fun. No. He said the songs were sufficiently difficult to still be interesting to play. And when I heard that, that really triggered these bells in my head. Like, that's such an interesting way of looking at it. Because so often in our lives, we want to reduce challenge.
We wanna reduce difficulty. We wanna reduce complexity. We just want things to be simpler and easier. And if we felt like if we did that, we would have more fun. We'd be more engaged. But maybe the answer isn't to make things simpler and easier, but rather to make them sufficiently difficult to still be interesting. Right? You've got your life, and you've got your goals, whatever they are.
And a lot of times, I wanna shrink the goal, and I'm gonna get into shrinking the task, which is different than shrinking the goal. We're like, oh, if we make this goal smaller, it won't be overwhelming, and then I can achieve it. And this is kind of where smart comes into play. Right? You wanna make it attainable. You wanna make it measurable. You wanna make a time bound. And all that makes sense for most of our goals, and I'm not saying you have to apply this sufficiently difficult methodology to everything in your life cause that will be overwhelming.
But what if in the 1 or 2 or 3 at most, but what if in that one area that matters most currently in our current season? What if in that current area, instead of trying to make things simpler and easier, we made them harder and more complicated. We made it sufficiently difficult to still be interesting. Now going back to smart goal, the one part of the small role I still really think is important even more so for these kind of goals is the r, relevant. If you try to set a sufficiently difficult goal about something you don't care about, you will not increase engagement and motivation. You will increase overwhelm and frustration, and you will give up. But if you think about that thing that really matters to you, improving that relationship with that person in your life, building that business you have to bring you the financial abundance you deserve, advancing your career in a way where you can start making an impact to the organization or to your employees or to the world in the way that you want. Right? Something really relevant and make it challenging.
Suddenly now we are going to be more engaged. Now how do you do this? Right? This is easy to say.
Oh, just make it sufficiently difficult. Well, for this, I'm gonna turn our attention back to the Canadian rock trio of Rush one more time because before the album Moving Pictures that had Tom Sawyer, 2 hours before that, they had an album called Hemispheres, which I love. It's got one of my favorite songs, probably my favorite rush song on there, an instrumental called La Villa Strangiato. But this album was very complicated as many of their art, but this was even more so. It's a full length album that only has 4 songs. The first song, Hemisphere, is the title track is 20 minutes long. 2 of the other songs are 10 minutes long, and one has a more normal radio ish song of 4 minutes long.
Very challenging songs. When they were being interviewed as this album was coming out, they're talking to the drummer again. And when he talked about it, he said, you know, when we wrote hemispheres, we were writing music that was beyond us. Again,
Speaker 2bells went off
Avish Parasharin my head. It was such an interesting comment. What did he say? Writing music that was beyond us. What he was saying is they wrote music that they were not able to play when they wrote it. It was beyond them. It was too challenging for them to play.
So what did they do? They learned how to play it. They practice their skills. They develop new technology. They worked on it over and over again until they could play it. And this to me is how we make things sufficiently difficult to still be interesting, not by making them simpler, but by writing music that is beyond you. And the way to translate that away from music is simply to set a goal you don't yet know how to achieve.
Now, I heard this from Rush and from Neil, the drummer. And as I went out in the world, I started coming across this idea more and more. I heard it very similarly phrased by a speaker I know named Mike Rayburn, who was a hall of fame speaker within the Speakers Association.
He plays guitar with his, keynotes. He's very talented, very funny, great speaker.
You should check him out. And I was sitting in his audience once, and he said, almost very similar to Neil. He said, write music you don't know how to play, then learn how to play it. Very similar sentiment. It's another way of phrasing it. Right? Write music is beyond you.
Write music you don't know how to play, then learn how to play it. Another where I heard this is what in a book that was co written by Dan Sullivan, the strategic coach, and doctor Benjamin Hardy. They have a book called 10 times as easier than 2 times. Similar sentiment, which is that most of us when setting a goal wanna increase by 2 times. Let me let me get better. Let me get a little bit better. Let me double my income or revenue if you're a business person or let me be healthier.
You know, let me lose x stuff. Basically, a reasonable goal. Right? An achievable goal in the smart sense. The premise there is when you set a 10 times goal, it really forces you to change and adapt and get creative. And the other place I heard this, one of my favorite ways I came across when I was researching this, there's something out there called failure clubs. And what failure clubs do is they encourage you to set a 1 year goal where the probability of failure is incredibly high.
Where it's like a 90, 95, 99% chance that you will fail at this goal. And and then you go about trying to achieve it. Now I love that because that is the exact opposite of a smart goal. Literally setting a goal with a 99% chance that you will fail. Now the failure club mindset is that when you set a goal like that, where you're like, I will most likely not achieve this, it takes away so much pressure. It takes away so much stress that you can approach it from a creative playful standpoint and just go out really kinda without a care and play loose. And it's amazing how, again, it's such a high likelihood you won't fail that even if you don't achieve the goal, you still make tremendous progress, you still grow as a person, and you still learn. Hey. It's Avish with a quick promo break.
Ready to take your team's skills to the next level? My interactive business training workshops blend improv and strategy to create dynamic learning experiences that stick. Discover how my training programs apply yes and to leadership, change, teamwork, innovation, and more at avish parsha. com. Now let's get back to the episode. So bringing this back to you and your persistent yes buts, your goals for setting up this year, and the idea of smart goals and their opposite. So what you do is you take that persistent yes but from last last week's episode, then make a goal out of it that is big enough that you don't yet know how to achieve it.
So instead of just, I'm going to, you know, lose a little weight. Make it I'm gonna run a marathon. Instead of, oh, we're gonna increase my revenue by 10%. Make it, oh, we're gonna 10 times our revenue this year. Instead of, oh, you know, I'm gonna really, work hard to get a good review at my job this year, make it. I'm going to get a promotion either here or at a new place of employment that's gonna double my income. Right? And I know the 2 times was 10 times, but I think doubling income is like a 10 times goal if you're talking about a salary.
But, basically, set a goal where your initial response to yourself is, yeah, but. And the yes, but response is, yeah, but I don't know how to do that. Or, yeah, but I don't think I can do that. Then commit to swinging yes and say yes and let me figure out how. Because, again, your temptation is gonna be to shrink the goal to a point where you then say, yeah, and yes and I think I can achieve that.
Like, without any thought. You'll say, yeah. I think I could do that. It's reasonable. But again, that's what's gonna get boring. And for most of the goals and projects in your life, that's fine. But for this one, this really big dream, this persistent yes, but this goal that would really change everything for you, set an impossible goal.
Set a goal with your first thought is I don't know how I'm gonna do that. Then figure out how to achieve it. Now when you do this, you have to start using your creativity. Right? You gotta brainstorm. You gotta start letting your mind play. You gotta explore ideas that are stupid or impossible or that you would never do.
Just to let your mind play because obviously all the logical stuff is out the window. Right? If you're like, how do I 10 times my revenue? All the stuff that's top of mind is not gonna work. You just gotta be playful and creative. You gotta learn. Right? You gotta start talking to experts, people who are well beyond the process.
You gotta get books and watch videos. Maybe take a course. I don't know. You gotta follow the path. You gotta explore everything. You gotta be open to new ideas. Number 1, you're gonna learn new ways of achieving this goal.
Number 2, that's gonna help you grow as a person. Right? Because as we learn, we grow. And then what you're gonna find is as you're doing this, as you're creating, as you're playing, your subconscious mind starts working on it. Right? Ideas pop in your head when you're in the car, when you're working out. You know, you go to sleep and you wake up with an idea that you wanna try.
And then we start bringing more engagement to our work and our activities because we're being playful. And we're going back to last week's persistent yes, but episode, we're thinking about experimentation not execution. So, oh, let me try this today and see how this works. Suddenly, we're excited about engaging in things and trying new things as opposed to just checking off a list being like, alright. I gotta do this today. So let me share an experience I had with this. This sort of happened over the pandemic when things were shut down, and, you probably heard me talk a little bit. If you
Speaker 2listen to the holiday episodes,
Avish Parasharyou heard me talk about my in a world of improvised movie homages podcast. When that came about, it's not this idea I had for a long, long time. It wasn't as much a persistent yes, but. But it was an idea when I first thought about it. I was like, I don't know. So I had towards the end of the 1st year of the lockdown in 2,020, I had started doing a weekly Facebook live with my buddy, Mike, who's my best friend. We had an improv comedy for a long time.
And it was just a weekly Facebook live where we would talk about eighties movies. We both loved eighties movies. And each week, we'd watch 1 and then talk about it on Facebook live. That's it. Type of thing a lot of people out there are doing. And then as I started thinking about my business and my life, I was like, you know what I really wanna do? I really want to make a show.
Like, I don't just wanna be a speaker at this point. I started out as an improviser. I wanna come up with a show. And I love movies, and this kind of sprung out of this me doing this with Mike. And I got this idea for an improv comedy show podcast. And my first thought was, like, how is that gonna work? I guess, anyone gonna listen to this.
How are you gonna do improv in an audio format? And, how are you gonna get it? The market was so crowded.
It's so different. But you know what I did? I started playing around with the idea. And suddenly, my life got interesting. And then I pitched the idea to Mike, and he liked it. So we just did a test. We said let's try this.
Let's just set up a call. We'll record one time and see how it goes. And that first one was so much fun. It was an Indiana Jones parody. We had a great time doing it, and we thought there was something there for it. Now let's go back a little bit because before this, even as a, quote, unquote, motivational speaker, I went through a long bout of trying to figure out what am I interested in. Like, I was going through the motions for a lot of things, trying to build my business and trying to be a good dad and be a good husband and But my fun was mostly like, alright, let me watch some TV, read books, or play video games.
Like, I wasn't feeling engaged. And I was like, what can I do to be engaged? And then when I thought about this When I start working on this podcast, it was such a big goal. Like how can you take a podcast, make a rise in the charts, take something no one's ever really done before, which is taking short form improv games until long form stories in a movie parody. How you gonna translate these games to podcast? How you gonna translate these games to 2 person format?
But, man, I loved it. And I literally do remember mornings where I woke up being excited because I'm like, I get to record an episode today. And me and Mike started doing this. We started recording episodes and thinking about it and building the website for it, which usually working on websites is such a drag. But working on the website for this project was engaging and exciting. And it was it brought back that motivation and it's exact example of what I'm talking about here. When you set a big goal that's exciting to you that you don't know how to achieve, that you then need to turn on that creative problem solving side of you, it just creates so much engagement and fun.
Now the end result of this, as I said, this is a failure club. Did we end up turning this into a number one podcast that got sponsorships, live shows, and all this great stuff? No. Sadly, it didn't quite get to that point. We had we did it for about a year. We got 40 plus episodes. Had fun the whole way, but it never quite reached that point.
But you know what? Number 1, the engagement was there. So that year was awesome. Number 2 is I still learned and grew as a person. Number 1, I had this WordPress website theme builder that I've been paying for an annual basis for about 5 years. Never used it. So when I decided, oh, let me make the website for this, I had to learn how to make a new website.
So I use that. So I use as a that motivation as opportunity to learn how to use this new website builder.
Well, guess what? A few months later, I rebuilt the avishparsher.com website from scratch using this knowledge I had learned. Much better website than I had before, changed my business, in that level. So that's the learning piece. Right? I also had to develop a whole bunch of new improv games and figure out how to do them in audio format. Now some of those games have worked their way into my keynotes and into my training workshops, stuff I hadn't previously considered on how can I use this in my business?
Because I did it there, I was able to use it in my business. And number 3, I like to think on some level that podcast that show idea is on pause, not dead. So even though I haven't yet achieved it, it is something that is still in my head. It's still in my to dos. It's just a little bit lower in my priority list. If you listen to the persistent yes, but episode, it's still a persistent yes, but. I'm going to say yes, and to it.
It's just a little bit lower, because again, we can't say yes and to everything. So I'm just prioritizing that a little So what does this mean for you? This means that if you're feeling stagnant, if you're feeling frustrated, if you're feeling like you're just going through the motions, and you set goals in your life periodically, and maybe you achieve a little, maybe you don't, maybe you're a New Year's person who sets New Year's resolutions or goals, and by January, like everyone else, they sort of fallen by the wayside, And you always try to be reasonable. Like, let me find something that I feel like I could do so I don't get stressed and overwhelmed. Maybe try this approach this year. Identify your persistent yes, but. Set an impossible goal, a failure club goal, a 10 times goal, one that no one would ever say is smart by the smart definition.
Make it a dumb giant goal, but make sure it's relevant to you. That when you think about it, underneath that stress, and anxiety and and questioning of how am I gonna achieve it, underneath that, there's number 1, not only excitement about how life could be once you achieve it, but some level of positivity and excitement about engaging in the creative process of figuring out how to achieve it. And once you've got that, set that goal and then resolve, I'm going to figure this out. I'm gonna spend some time, this is where time bounding helps, a month, 3 months, a year. For the next 3 months or a year, I'm going to focus on figuring out how to achieve this goal, and I'm gonna experiment, and I'm gonna try things, and I'm gonna learn, and I'm gonna grow, and I'm gonna see what happens. Now quiz quick side note, I am not saying that you always need to be externally stimulated and engaged that we must exercise anything from our lives that is not super exciting and engaging and stimulating. Right? Discipline is good.
Discipline is important. Boredom is good. Boredom is actually important. In fact, here's a slight side note. I, for a long time now, I came across this idea of setting a one word theme for the year, and I've used different ones. I'm seriously considering making my one word theme for 2025, boredom. I feel with my issues around dopamine and procrastination ADD that if I spend more time being bored, I'm actually gonna achieve more and have more opportunity to be more successful and more engaged ironically.
So I'm not saying that discipline isn't good. I'm not saying that boredom is not good. And if you're like me with that procrastination, that ADD, those dopamine issues, you could use a little more boredom and discipline in your life too. But again, if we are gonna be bored, we're gonna be disciplined. What is it for? We don't wanna just be about put our nose to the grindstone and achieve without ever enjoying it. And we don't wanna just achieve the results.
We wanna achieve the process. And that's what this impossible goal, this making things sufficiently difficult that they're still interesting, these failure goals. This is what this is all about. And just to be fair, I talked about my, past ones. Here's some of my current ones. Right? Number 1, I already mentioned the old podcast.
That's one of my failure glove goal. That's one of my impossible goals. It's how can I rejuvenate that? My partner who I did that with might be a little busy now to come back, so that has a whole level of complexity. But instead of giving up and saying I can't do it, that's on the list. I am working on a novel. Actually, in 2,024, I finished draft 1 of a novel, and, I've never edited a novel, so that has been kicking my butt.
And I'm thinking about giving up, just being like, hey. It's an achievement writing it. But I not only wanna edit it. I wanna edit it to make it an amazing novel, and I wanna do something I've never done, which is successfully leverage social media to build a following and actually have this book sell. It sounds crazy. I've been doing this for 20 years, and I've never actually launched something successfully. Everything I've done has had this slow build.
So when I think about doing that, to me, it feels like an impossible goal. Like, you know what?
That's not for you. It's just something about you. You're not able to do it. So I wanna figure out how to do that. And most importantly, most relevantly to my business is, continually improving with improv games. There are some improv games that I used to love playing as a, performer. But those games require multiple talented experienced improv performers who practice together to play well.
When I go and do keynotes or workshops, it's me solo with audience volunteers with no improv. And there's a bunch of games that I can just write off and say, you know what? I'm never gonna be able to do that. And I've gone through this before, and every time I've put my head down and said, you know what? You gotta work through this persistent yes, but. You gotta work through this impossible goal. Figure out how can you do improv comedy without experienced improv partners that is still super fun and super engaging.
My keynote's gotten better. And if you go back and listen to that persistent, yes, but story from the podcast, I talked about how I went back to the drawing board. I made my keynote much better. This is exactly what I did. One of the biggest things I did is up until that point, I had been playing improv games that would work, quote, unquote, work. I could work them with the audience because they're simple, but they weren't great. They weren't super exciting games to play or for the audience to watch.
So I took a list of games that these games would be awesome from the stage. Can I make these work without other improv comedians?
And I did. I figured out a bunch of games, how to do them without an audience with just an audience volunteer, without another improviser, and that's the point in that story. Go back and listen to it. That's the point where my business started getting better, where the word-of-mouth got it better, and the business and money got better. And that's I gotta continue to do that. It's easy to get complacent, and that's the thing also even with impossible goals. And this sort of happened to me with the podcast, is it's easy to fall back into that boring checklist system.
Because in that inner world of podcast, once we got to about the 4, 5, 6 month mark, it sort of became a checklist. Alright. What are we doing next week? Alright. Here's a genre. Alright. Let's schedule a time. Okay. We'll record it. Okay. Mike's gonna edit it with the audio. Alright. I'm gonna do all the post production work with the with the promotional stuff and the blog post.
And the creativity and the problem solving and the engagement sort of went away, which is probably one of the reasons why it did eventually drift off, why it was okay for both me and Mike to say, alright. Let's stop doing this now. So we need to consistently reevaluate. Right? This is where the time bounding can help. It's like after 3 months, after 6 months, after a year, am I still engaged in this? No. Okay. I gotta get reengaged, and one way to do that is to make a nude 10 times goal, a new impossible goal.
And that's happened to me in my keynote. I spent a bunch of work, made it much better, and then coasted on it, and it became a checklist. Here are the games I do. Here are the stories I tell. So for 2025 now, it's like, oh, let's revisit this. Let's set a new impossible goal. Let's figure out how to do a guessing game or a gibberish game or a or a game that requires someone who's done 5 years of experience and is still challenging.
And that is my approach to this year. So how about you? That's a lot about me.
How about you? What is your persistent yes, but? What is your impossible goal? What is a goal you can set that is so big that it's 10 times bigger than what you previously thought? That is so big, it's a failure goal. You're like, you know, as a 95% chance, I'm gonna fail at this goal. Or what's an impossible goal?
That when you set that goal, the first thought you have is, yeah, but I don't know how to do that. Yeah, but I'd never be able to achieve that.
Pick that goal. Right? Again, go back to the brainstorming.
Maybe dump out a bunch. Don't edit and pick 1. Pick the one that's the most exciting for you. Again, this is about engagement and creativity, so pick the one that's the most relevant, that's gonna make you the most excited to go tackle. Set a time frame, 3 months, 6 months, a year, and commit. I'm gonna start today to figure out how to achieve this impossible goal. Whenever those yes buts come up, switch them to yes and, keep going, and then regularly revise and revisit.
Has it become a checklist? Have you achieved a certain level of progress, but now you're just sort of check listing your way through it? Revisit it, change it, regrow it, keep going until you either achieve that goal or get to a place where you're like, okay.
I have now decided. I have taken this as far as I can and as far as I want. It is now my choice to move on. But, hey, look at all I achieved.
Look at how much I learned. Look at how much I grew. So thank you very much.
Again, happy New Year. I hope 2025 is the year you achieve all of your impossible goals, all of your 10 times goals. Make your life sufficiently difficult to be super engaged, super interesting, and super invested. If you've got questions about this process, you can go to my website, avishparasher. com. Send me an email. All my contact info is there. It's avish@avishparasher.com.
Let me know about questions, and let me know what is your impossible goal. You're gonna send me a short email letting me know, hey. I was inspired by this. This is my impossible goal for this year. I would love to hear about that. And if you could, share this podcast. If you think this is useful, if you think other people might benefit from this, share this on your social media.
Send a link to the episode to some friends who maybe have been feeling a little stagnant, who are like, I'm not sure. It's kinda going through the motions or I feel like I'm meant for more. And maybe they're not even using those words directly, but you can tell. You can tell they're sort of just gone to this point where the life is one big checklist. Send them this episode. Right? Maybe it will help them out.
And if you like this episode, head on over to wherever you listen to podcast. Give it a 5 star review. And if you feel so inclined, a short 2 or 3 sentence, review would be amazing. That is how this podcast grows. That is how other people can discover the magic of yes, and. Thank you very much, and I look forward to chatting with you again next week.