Why Choosing Goals You Can Control is the Key to Achieving Them with Corey Fradin
If you’ve ever struggled with the stigma surrounding goal setting then this post is for you. Corey Fradin, founder of QuickBooost, shares some key ways we can achieve goals that align with fulfillment instead of force. We’re chatting about what drives him to create, and achieve, fulfilling goals and breaking the stigma surrounding goals to start creating your own fulfilling goals. Corey also shares tips on how to plan for a productive life, why you should choose goals within your control, and how to prevent goal failures.
Who is Corey Fradin?
Corey Fradin is the founder of QuickBooost, a blog that helps you achieve your goals. Through his work, Corey shows you how to create a life of meaning and fulfillment, one of true goal success. His blog receives thousands of visitors each month, and he's been featured on sites like entrepreneur.com, MSN, Addicted to Success, Thrive Global. Elephant Journal, and many more.
Corey started his blog three years ago writing about personal development, with freelance writers to help him out. But he quickly realized that if he wanted to really do well in this space, his writing needed to be completely in his own voice, his own experiences & lessons. Now, he publishes a new post each day to share his tips and experiences on a day-to-day basis.
Where Does the Drive Come From?
Keeping a day-to-day routine, getting everything on my to-do list done, is a constant struggle. But Corey seems to have another type of drive behind him that keeps him productive. He says “there’s a lot to it. But the most important thing is that I find I get a lot of fulfillment out of writing, I feel it's something I enjoy doing. So if I didn't enjoy doing it, it'd be a completely different story. But I love what I write about, and I love the process of writing.” The difference with writing for him is that it always flows, it’s always natural.
He assumed he’d quickly run out of things to say, things to write about, but he compares it to “kind of like how you know, with your spouse, or a boyfriend or whatever, you just always seem to have more and more to talk about, even though if you spend all your time together, you think you've run out of stuff, but you just somehow find a way. It's the same thing with this.” It’s even as simple as reflecting on his day and what he learned, what he searched for and then phrasing “that in a way that's helpful for my reader.”
A lot of what Corey writes about revolves around self-development, specifically “being more intentional with your time. So that ends up being things like productivity, time management, goal setting. Sometimes I talk about books, sometimes I talk about focus, but a lot of times, it seems like the big two are goal setting and productivity.” He also likes to speak on resilience and the motivation to continue even when you fail.
Corey has always been drawn to the topics of productivity and goal setting, but when he started QuickBooost, he started out by writing “about anything self-development related.” But over time, he was able to narrow down what he truly enjoys writing about, and what his audience enjoys reading, and productivity and goal-setting were the most clear. Right now, Corey even has over 10 goals that he’s actively working on, “so it just kind of one of those things that I had a natural interest in it, and I just kind of the writing just kind of ended up going in that direction.” Not only was it where Corey was naturally drawn to write, but productivity and goal setting have been life-changing for him because “to become really good at something, you should teach that thing, or by teaching something, you'll become really good at it. And so by writing so much about productivity, and goal setting, and planning, I feel like my life, looking at productivity, is that much more efficient, looking at goals, is that much more fulfilled.”
Getting Deeper with Your Goals
When it comes to goal setting, there’s become a stigma that causes us to remain surface level and just say “I want to be productive, because I want to get things done faster, or I want to achieve goals, because I want to achieve those goals. It's very like, it is what it is kind of thing.” But there has to be something underneath that, something to work towards, there’s a reason to “want to do things faster, there's a reason that you want to work towards things. And in my experience, and what I'm doing now is everything is based on fulfillment.” So his reason for wanting to be more productive and to do things faster is so he can work on the things that give him fulfillment, or “the goals I set for myself are all rooted in a living a fulfilling meaningful life, myself.” The stigma of goals has become very much, okay everyone is saying that I should be setting goals, so I’m going to set goals, but if we “take a step back and say like, why do I want to set goals? What can these goals allow me to do, I think you can create something much more substantial for yourself. And that's kind of what I write about now is setting these goals, and how to set these goals that will result in a more fulfilling life for yourself.”
One of my favorite stories I’ve heard about Corey is that he has a goal to have $100,000,000 before age 25 and I mean hey, we've been there. Like we've all dreamed big. We've all been there. But over time we start to realize “the things you can and can't control and really the things that add more meaning to your life and things that don't.” So how do we switch to the mindset of seeing things differently and having deeper goals that bring us fulfillment? For Corey, it took “failing at so many things,” and realizing “even if this went really well, I don't know how happy I would have been doing it.” He had a dream of living in Silicon Valley and working in the startup tech scene, he even “ended up working for a local, a local tech company, and I didn't enjoy very much. And I realized I'm so happy I didn't get any jobs up there.” He realized he was hoping and working for this thing but it wasn't even something that fulfilled him. So from there, he’s “worked my way towards realizing what is adding meaning to my life and what isn't?”
Set Goals You Can Control
If you’re in a place in your life where you’re searching and yearning for what gives you true meaning and purpose, the first thing Corey recommends doing is sitting down, and writing down “the various aspects of who you are. So for me, I'm a husband, I'm a father, I have a physical health side of me and mental health side of me, there's the community aspect, philanthropy, there's the knowledge side. So like the part of me that's a continuous learner. Consider all the various parts of who you are, write those down, and then take some time and consider what meaning or fulfillment looks like for you in each of those categories.”
All of the answers might not come to you right away, and that’s totally fine, you can just put a “TBD” there. Some categories could come right to you though, so write those down and then start setting goals in that direction. For Corey, as a continuous learner, a meaningful life means knowledge, “constantly reading books, listening to audiobooks, taking courses, because I like to learn. It adds something to my life. So once I figured out this is an area of my life, this is what the filament looks like to me in that area, then I went about setting a goal in that direction.”
One of Corey’s current goals is to read at least two books each month, he read fifty-three books last year and is on track to read even more this year. Knowledge and being a lifelong learner was a clear category for Corey. So he then asked himself “what would a meaningful life look like for me as a lifelong learner? And then I ended up saying something like, someone that's constantly learning through art, books, audio books, and courses.”
Corey realized that if he wanted the identity of a lifelong learner, he needed to figure out how to earn that, but having that identity component to his goals and attaching the feeling of it has been way more powerful. He sees it as the direction he’s heading, he knows what “fulfillment looks like for me in that direction, and then I set goals to get there. So it's almost like I know where I want to go, I just have to use the compass to navigate me there. And then the process of setting the goals, putting the goals in place, then helps you become that thing.”
When it comes to setting goals, there are two different types: achievement and habit goals. Achievement goals are a one-time thing, a single achievement. And habit goals are just that, habit-forming goals, and Corey’s personal preference for fulfillment. Because “with a habit goal, that consistency develops, that lifestyle, you develop, you become that person that you want to be.” Having those habit goals, the ongoing goals, you’ll continue to “build into those levels of fulfillment for yourself.”
When Corey first started focussing on goal setting, he did the “very standard thing. Like I want to lose this much weight by this time. Like that's a classic goal that everybody says. I realized I cannot control what the scale says, I can influence it. But I can't control what it says. So every time I miss it, I just get down on myself.” When we’re putting in all the work but aren’t seeing any results, it can be super discouraging and we often end up just giving up. Corey realized that by setting goals that are within your control “allows you to kind of celebrate the things that you are doing. You kind of take the reins and say, I'm going to celebrate the things that I'm doing well.”
Planning for Productivity
If you’re anything like myself and Corey, you’re big into planning, you really want to plan things. For Corey, he finds that by planning, you can take back some control, you can “really influence your day in a really positive manner. So what I do every Sunday is sit down and plan out my week. So I say on Monday, I have these two meetings. On Tuesday, I want to do this and that. And Wednesday, I look at my goals. And I choose what days I want to work on the goals and when I am going to work on them.” For example, one of Corey’s current goals is to go to the beach twice every month, so he looks at his calendar and sees that “my Wednesday is pretty light. Let me plan right now to go to the beach on Wednesday.” He creates a super detailed plan like when he’s going to wake up, have breakfast, drop his daughter at daycare, how long he’ll work, and “that way, I know that I have enough time for every single thing that I want to do in that day. So it's like exercising and writing, playing with my daughter, all these different aspects that add meaning to my life, I'm making sure I have time for all of them.”
On the other hand, if you’re anything like myself and Corey, you also have days where you aren’t motivated and you don’t get everything on your list done. It happens, motivation can “fade really quickly. At least in my case, I find motivation to last for maybe two weeks. Like whenever you set a new goal, it only lasts for a couple of weeks, and then you're just stuck doing the work. And so how do you ensure that you continue to do the work day after day after day? That's the hard thing.” Structuring his entire day has been super helpful with this because it doesn’t leave any room for thinking, he just goes on to the next “inevitable part of the day.” But that still doesn’t mean there aren’t days that his motivation is running low, but there are so many tactics to help in those situations. Something that’s been effective is removing friction, “so making it as easy as possible for you to do the thing that you're supposed to.”
For example, Corey’s friend procrastinated through YouTube. He was starting a blog and had all of this work to do, but always ended up on YouTube, wasting time. So Corey suggested “setting his home screen as his blog. So every time he opens up a new chrome window, it takes you directly to his blog post, it's the first thing he sees.” Another great, and common example, is avoiding exercise. Corey says if you wear the clothes that you work out in, keep your shoes nearby, “so when the time comes, you just stand up, and you just go make it happen.” In Corey’s case, he procrastinates a lot when it comes time to read, he finds it easier to just play on his phone, so he keeps a book on the table in his living room, he “will often lay on the couch. And instead of playing on my phone, the book is right within arm's reach. And so I can just reach over grab it. And that's it.” Removing those extra steps, that friction, can be all the difference.
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Affirmation
I embrace productivity as a spiritual practice and base my goals on true fulfillment in every aspect of my life.
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