How to achieve your 10 year plan in 6 months | #04

How to achieve your 10 year plan in 6 months

No. 04 — read time 7 minutes

Welcome to The Soloist, a weekly newsletter where I share timeless ideas and insights about life, business, and art.

In December 2014 my little business was barely what you would call a business.

We had less than $3,000 in monthly revenue. But it seemed to be growing, sorta.

Somehow, after 2 failed attempts, we got into Y Combinator (a prestigious startup accelerator in Silicon Valley) the following month.

In one of the 1:1 sessions with then-President Sam Altman (who now runs OpenAI), he asked how much revenue we were doing.

Sheepishly I told him.

His exact words: "Great! By March you need to hit $100k in monthly revenue for you to be interesting to investors".

Huh?

I ran the math in my head.

"That means we need to 3x every single month for the next 3 months".

"Yup. Good luck."

By March we hit $52k. Roughly 2.4x every single month.

Years later I joined the founding team of a deep-tech aerospace startup where we flew the first ever hydrofoiling ground-effect vehicle in history in under a year.

The point?

Big plans take time, but with the right planning, urgency, and hard choices you can absolutely accomplish what takes some people 10 years in under a year.

Here's what I learned about achieving 10 year plans in 6 months over the past few years:

​Dream Big

In order to make unreasonable progress in a short amount of time, your goal has to be ambitious.

Anything that's reasonable won't feel all that heroic if you accomplish it in 6 months.

For that reason, start with a vision of the future.

Write it out, or if you're a visual person like me make a vision board.

The point here is to put pen to paper and say what big thing you would be excited about in 10 years.

Admittedly, this is going to be the most fun part of this exercise. It all gets much harder from here.

But it is a useful starting point. If we don't know where we're going, which direction won't matter all that much.

Takeaway: Open a blank page and just write in bullet form some big goals for Year 10. Click here I started one for you.

How Much Time Do You Really Have?

We have 720 hours in a month (30 days x 24 hours).

If you're getting 8 hours of sleep every night (you should if you aren't) you're down to 480 hours left.

Let's say you work 40 hours a week, you now have 320 hours left.

If you spend 3 hours a day on life things (eating, grocery shopping) you'd have 230 hours left.

Where does all that time go?

If you're a parent like me some of it goes to doing kids stuff, or you may have a commute to work.

Still, that seems like a lot of extra time.

Where is it all going?

Mindset and Beliefs

One of the biggest barriers most people have is that they aren't aware of how they spend their time. It's unconscious.

You might be shocked to learn that on average we spend 3.5 hours per day on our phones. And that's the average. Nearly half of people in a study conducted in 2021 reported 5-6 hours per day!

This is unconscious or mindless.

Most people can't tell you what they ate yesterday. Just wandering through life.

There is only one way to break this chain and that's to be real with yourself about how you spend your time unconsciously.

My favorite thing to do in cases where I feel there might be a problem but I'm also sorta kinda not sure (i.e. still lying to myself) is to just audit my time.

Takeaway: For one week we're going to audit our time. You can use a time tracker app or just use Google Sheets. Click here I made one for you.​

The second part of Mindset and Beliefs which is important and will come back later down the read is a bit dark.

Robin Sharma, a best-selling author on leadership and mindset, says "nothing will fill your heart with a greater sense of regret than lying on your deathbed knowing that you did not live your life and do your dreams.”

Like I said, a bit dark.

The point stands though. If you ONLY had 6 months to live what could you accomplish.

Program Planning

The point of planning is to list out all of the things that will need to happen in order to achieve a desired result.

Resources. Time. Dependencies.

What needs to happen? What needs to happen in order for that to happen? How long do I estimate it to take? What resources do we need? Which items literally cannot happen before the first thing happens?

Your plan won't match reality one-to-one but that isn't the point. The point is in the planning.

Some resources to get you started:

• ​Notion Templates (mix of free and paid)

• ​Dan Koe's Power Planner (free)

• ​Clickup Template (free for personal use)

If you're clear on what you want to accomplish, you have a good sense of where your time is being allocated right now, and you are willing to adopt a "death bed" mindset, you're ready for the final step.

​Performing Sacrifices

You know what you want.

You have a good sense of where your time is being spent.

You're willing to put everything you have towards your goal like your life depends on it.

And you've mapped out how you think you'll accomplish it.

The last step will be the hardest.

You need to perform sacrifices.

Everything in life has a price. Trade-offs.

Know the price of what you're about to do and then be ruthless in paying the price.

That might mean disappearing for 6 months.

That might mean saying 'No' to social outings with friends.

It might mean telling your significant other that you need to be heads down focused for 6 months on this one thing and having that hard conversation.

Like I said, this will be the hardest.

But then again, I didn't promise you an easy way to accomplish 10 year goals in 6 months.​

Final Thoughts

You might fail. That's OK.

Remember my story in the beginning about my company growing from $3k/mo to $55k/mo in 3 months? The goal was $100k.

So was that wasted time and effort since we only hit half of the goal?

Not at all! We learned what fast growth requires. We learned the price we would have to pay personally. We learned about the different inputs that drive outputs.

And at the rate of growth we had we ended up hitting $100k less than 2 months later. That's $36,000 in annualized revenue to $1,200,000 in annualized revenue in less than 6 months.

The last thing I'll leave you with is this.

You don't need to be constantly be crushing 10 year goals every 6 months. Take time to think about what's important.

If you actually had 6 months to live, there's a good chance most of the goals you think you want would magically go away and you'd be laser focused on what's actually important to you with the time left on this earth.

Takeaways

1. Write out your 10 year goal

2. Audit your time meticulously for 1-2 weeks

3. Be real with how your spend your time

4. Imagine your deathbed scenario

5. Plan out every step needed to achieve the goal

6. Sacrifice everything needed to be all-in on the goal

I hope this week's newsletter was helpful as we kick off 2023. If you enjoyed it, hit reply and let me know what you want to achieve in the next 6 months. I read every email.

Till next week.

-Tom

P.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. If you save a lot of bookmarks on Twitter (like me), try dewey. —
   the easiest way to organize Twitter bookmarks (I'm one of the makers).

2. If you're looking for coaching on audience growth book a slot here.

3. I’m putting together a course on how to network online to grow faster. If you’re interested sign up here.

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