Episode 271.

Late Night Internet Marketing.

In this episode of the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to talk about the seven reasons people fail with their goals and how the Align framework the very framework we talked about in Episode 270, can save you from certain disaster. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason.

Hey, hey, hey. How's everyone doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the chilly little studio in Dallas. We got into the low 20s last night. The wind chill was even lower than that and, as I've mentioned many times in Texas, that's pretty cold for us.

So I'm hunkered down here in the studio and we are talking this week about ways to avoid failing at your 2025 goals, and the best way to do that is to understand the most common things that cause people to fail. I've got seven of them for you today and, as a bonus, we're going to talk about how the Align framework that I presented last week actually prevents you from making these seven deadly goal mistakes. And, just as a recap, in case you missed episode 270 or you slept since last week and you don't remember Align Framework, it's the letters in a line standing for assessing your vision, which really means reflecting on your aspirations and understanding your why, and then listing your steps to achieve those goals, breaking them down into 90-day milestones followed by weekly milestones so that you get a clear roadmap. The I is for initiating actions, taking purposeful daily actions using the 3-2-1 daily check system that we talked about last week, gauging your progress, holding yourself accountable and tracking results, using the powerful technique of weekly reviews and making adjustments to your plans as needed. Fundamental and sustainable, celebrating wins and building resilience so that you can make progress each and every day, moving towards those big goals that you set when you were assessing your vision. So that's what we talked about last week.

Now, this week, what we're going to be talking about is the seven things that people, the mistakes they make and I see this year after year that cause them to fail to achieve their goals. I've got seven of them for you here and we'll talk about how these common mistakes happen and how the Align framework prevents them from happening. So the first mistake and we've talked about this many times in the past is that people set vague, unrealistic or too far in the distance goals. Their goals aren't good, they're not well set, and the most common thing I see is the goals are just super vague get fit. Or I want to make more money, and it doesn't specifically set exactly what's going to happen, or the expectations aren't realistic I want to be a millionaire by next year when I'm starting out with nothing, that sort of thing. So we solve this in the Align framework, in the letter A, when we assess the vision and we talk about this idea of visualizing what we want to be able to say in a year and then chunking that down into specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound 90-day goals.

We talked last week about how it's really important that you narrow your focus down to what's going to happen in 90 days, because anytime we're talking about something that's a year or more away, while that's great for dreaming, it's not so great for doing. So we really want to use the leverage of the ideas that are presented in the 12-week yearbook, which is one of my very favorite books, and we want to make that a 90-day goal that we can achieve, and the promise of that approach is that you can do in 90 days which is things that take most people a year or more to accomplish. An example would be we have a goal that's like get fit, and that's not a very good goal. We can transform that goal into workout four times a week for 30 minutes each day each week for the next three months so that I can achieve a goal weight of 212 pounds or whatever, something like that. So we want to get very specific so we know exactly what we need to be doing and we can measure our progress against that goal. So that's the first failure mode that I see is that the goals aren't really very specific. And a bonus there is when we have those specific goals, those well thought out goals. Let's write them down and put them out there where we can see them, whether it's on our computer or taped to our monitor or on the bathroom mirror. So every day we're reinforcing those ideas.

I think the second step is related to this. We don't break the goals down into manageable steps. We have goals like start a business and create revenue and maybe it's very specific start a new business that has $100,000 worth of revenue by the end of the year. We want to break that down into manageable steps. What do I need to do this quarter? We talked about this in the last step, but really, what are the main steps that I want, week by week, to accomplish? I mean, maybe the very first thing I need to do is lay out a credible plan, and in the first week I'm going to have a plan, and in the second week I'm going to build my online presence or I'm going to build the product that I'm going to be selling. Whatever, it is the mistake that I see over and over and over again is that steps don't get broken down into manageable steps.

Now, with the Align framework, the L in Align stands for listing steps, so we want to create that clear roadmap, and sometimes this is just as simple as opening up something like Apple notes and writing down the logical steps. And you know, sometimes we don't know exactly how to do the steps. We know we need to put a course in a course platform, but we've never done that before and we don't know how to do it. That's okay, you'll figure those things out. That's the purpose. When you get to the week where you need to be loading your videos into the course platform for the very first time ever, you're going to be able to figure that out. You'll get on YouTube and figure out what you need to do, so we don't need to worry about the fact that we don't know exactly how to do something In this step. We want to figure out what the steps are, what the what is in this sort of actionable set of steps, and so that's really important, and I see this all the time, and this is something that the Align framework addresses directly.

The third thing I'll say is that we don't take consistent daily action, and this is something that the reason that this is highlighted in the Align framework is that a lack of daily structure causes procrastination and inconsistent progress, and that has happened to me. So this Align framework is something that over years, I've developed for myself and worked on with other people that I've coached. Because of these things that I see, and the way that Align solves this consistent daily action is that it asks you the night before every day to pick three critical tasks for the next day that will advance your weekly goals. Have two habits that reinforce this progress. So maybe that's a nightly review, maybe it's the habit of planning in the morning, maybe it's the habit of doing one deep work session over lunch. I don't know what your habits are going to be, but identify two of your weekly habits that you're going to nail down that day and make sure get done, and then schedule one deep work session for focus effort against one of those critical tasks that day. This means put it on your calendar, treat it like a doctor's appointment or an airplane ticket or something that you really can't move, and go ahead and do that during that time. Those deep work sessions are critical. They allow you to get into flow state and you might be amazed at how much work you can get done if you shut out all other distractions and work on a single focused task for an hour. And the habit that can support this is to spend 10 minutes organizing your workspace each day prior to the deep work session, so the clutter is gone and you can get started going.

The fourth thing that I see is people don't hold themselves accountable by tracking their progress. Fourth thing that I see is people don't hold themselves accountable by tracking their progress. You know we do what we measure, what gets measured gets managed and what gets managed gets done. And if you don't monitor your progress, it's super easy for you to drift off course or lose motivation. Align solves this with the G in the word align. It allows you to gauge your progress by incorporating weekly reviews to track your achievements. You can track them more often, but I find personally that if you are, if you're looking into the details of your progress daily or hourly, like you're checking your blog posts downloads every hour, that's just a distraction. I think the optimum situation is for you to check the things that you're measuring in your progress weekly. Be honest about it, know the score and act accordingly. And if you need to adjust your plans to add in an extra deep work session next week to catch up, you do that and that keeps you on target because you know the score, you know where you are.

This isn't a time when you're gauging your progress to beat yourself up. Rather, it's a time to be honest with yourself about what's really going on in your life, because life happens Life happens to me, it happens to you and taking care of making the adjustments that you need to make to get where you want to get. I use a Sunday evening review process to assess my weekly milestones and then I pivot the next week and I'll be honest with you. Every Sunday it seems like there's something that I was hoping to get done that I don't exactly get done this week, and that's okay. We'll prioritize it next week if that's appropriate. Sometimes on a Sunday evening I'll say you know what I'm not satisfied with that. I'm going to do it right now and that's just like an extra bonus. That happens to me sometimes on Sunday nights. It's super helpful.

So the fifth thing that happens to people is they sort of lose motivation during this year-long goal-setting process or even in the 90 days, and that's almost always because they never were really clear on why they were doing the thing that they were doing. And that's why, in the A portion of a line, when I'm talking about assessing your vision, I talk about focusing and uncovering the compelling why behind your goals. You know, in my engineering life I work a lot in the quality space, and when things fail, we always want to find out why they fail, so that we can put in place an irreversible corrective action to prevent it from ever happening again. It's one thing if you have some kind of failure. It's another thing if you have the same failure over and over again. So corrective action is a really important idea in engineering. The challenge is whether or not you're actually correcting the true root cause of a problem, and one of the ways that we get at these root causes is what we call the 5-Y method. Now, this 5-Y method could be a whole podcast, but applied in this context, when you're assessing your vision, you should ask yourself why you want to do something more than once, and the rule of thumb we use in engineering is five times.

I want to lose weight. Well, why do you want to lose weight. Well, I want to lose weight because I want to look better. Well, why do you want to look better? Well, because I don't like the way I feel when people look at me. I'm embarrassed when people look at me. That's why I want to look better because it's embarrassing the way I look now. Well, why are you embarrassed? Well, I'm deeply insecure about the way I look because when I was a kid, I was picked on. Well, why didn't you like being picked on? Well, it made me feel really bad. And so the real reason that I want to lose weight is because being overweight makes me feel really bad.

When I get in touch with that true root cause, that helps me remember why I need to go ahead and get up and go to the gym and I can leverage that true deep feeling, that true root cause, against the problem of not being motivated to go to the gym. So make sure you understand your why and that will help you keep your motivation. As a bonus there, you can also help with your motivation by having some kind of accountability partner. Lately my wife has been helping me. We plan our weeks together and we review the previous week together and I talk about how she's doing in her photography business with her and she talks about how I'm doing in my online business with me. That's very powerful because I don't want my wife to see me as a guy who doesn't get his stuff done, and so that's a little extra motivation to me because I don't want to be that guy, so I want to get my stuff done so I can claim victory when I meet with my wife every Sunday.

So the sixth thing here is that we ignore the power of habits. You know, a lot has been written in this space over the last several years, and habits are a really powerful tool that you can leverage to achieve goals. If you focus just on the goal without building supportive habits, that can lead to burnout or a lack of motivation or failure. A line solves it by adding that in in there Nurturing habits, which helps you to sustain routines, using habit stacking and triggers and other things that are well covered in the book Atomic Habits. For example, you might pair your morning coffee with 10 minutes of daily planning, and I actually do that. I actually go, and I God Dave Ramsey would hate me for this I actually go to Starbucks, get a cup of coffee and plan my day every morning. I do my time blocking in the morning and so forth, and I just love that, sitting there talking, you know, drinking my normal coffee. I know the barista. I'm sitting there doing my planning. I do that every day during the week and, yes, I probably should be putting that money in a Roth IRA or in my 401k or something. I know this, but I like my coffee. Item seven and the last tip for today is and I think this is a big one, it's one that I learned years ago as a manager in a Fortune 500 company A big failure that we see is people don't celebrate their wins and they don't see setbacks as learning opportunities.

So you know, if you don't celebrate your wins, you're just missing out on an opportunity to build momentum and confidence. Even if it's a small win. You figured out a small thing in some software or you checked off all the items on your list you should celebrate those out loud or whatever's important to you, whatever things you can think of that are fun for you. You should attach those to successes that you have as a way to build more momentum, reinforce the right behaviors and so forth, and you should also have the grace to understand that when you have a setback, that's actually what we call learning. It's not failure.

Failure is what happens. If you quit and you're done and you decide not to go on. That's failure. But if you make a mistake or you can't figure something out, that's actually just you learning. That's what learning feels like, and everyone knows the story of Thomas Edison tries a thousand different materials for a light bulb before he figures out that tungsten in a vacuum is the way to go. And you know, if he had quit I'd really have trouble filming this podcast because it would be dark, so probably I'd go outside and use the sunshine. But you get the idea. We need to understand that. We need to celebrate our wins and take it easy on ourselves when we fail, because that failure is really learning.

So celebrate your milestones with something that you might not otherwise do and learn from your failures. For example, if you have a marketing campaign that doesn't work, now you know what doesn't work. Refine your messaging and figure out what does your messaging and figure out what does. So I'd love to hear from you Feedback at LateNightInternetMarketingcom. What's a mistake that you've made that isn't covered here? What's the eighth mistake that you think I should have covered that I didn't Tell me. If this helps you, I'd love to hear from you. I answer each and every email message and head on over to each and every email message and head on over to alignproductivitycom. The Align Productivity course is coming out soon. It should be out in the month of January and it will be free, at least initially, to listeners of this podcast. So go over there, sign up, get on the waiting list and as soon as I am finished filming the videos, you'll be in and you can enjoy that for free. That's the only time it'll ever be free here is during this launch period, and free just for the listeners of the podcast and people that are on the late night internet marketing newsletter, which, incidentally, is a fantastic thing for you to do as well. Just head on over to latenightimcom forward slash news to join that newsletter. So great.

So next week we're going to be back for episode 272. I have something special for you in episode 272. I have something special for you in episode 272. I'm going to tell you about all the life lessons that I've personally learned from Zig Ziglar. I think you're really going to enjoy that. I've got a story to tell you about how I learned about Zig, and that was 40 years ago that I learned about Zig Ziglar, and I'll tell you how that happened and all the things that I've carried with me for 40 years that have influenced the way I live my life and I get things done in my online business. Until next time, I hope you have an amazing week. I hope you take the time to plan your week and get some great things done using this Align framework that we've talked about in the last two episodes, and until next week, I wish you all the best and ciao, you've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Be sure to visit LNIMpodcastcom today to leave feedback for Mark, download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time.

I have really enjoyed taking the time to really fully document all of the stuff that I've worked on over the years to improve my own personal productivity. This is really fun. This is one of the really great things about creating content, about having a platform with a podcast like this, about having the ability to create courses like Align Productivity to help people. It's because you can take the things you've accumulated or that you're passionate about or that you care about. You can bundle them together and you can put them out there in the world and see the impact that people have or that those things have on people, and I think that's one of the unique things that you can get from being a solo entrepreneur or from being someone who is out there running an online business trying to make the world a better place.

At least, that's what I'm trying to do and it's one of my whys. So when I talk in the Align framework about knowing your why, when I go to do things, one of my whys is almost always helping people, and I hope this podcast helps you, and if it does help you, that makes me smile. So, and if this podcast has helped you, that makes me really happy and it really makes me smile. So thanks to you for making me smile. Have an amazing day, ciao.