How to achieve your goals faster with the rule of five
Parent Post
When you have a
When you have a goal, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with all the information that’s readily available to you.
The problem is, if you can’t decide which information to choose, it can cause analysis paralysis, decision fatigue and even inaction on your part.
If you don’t know what to do, where do you even begin?
If you’re an entrepreneur
If you’re an entrepreneur and have a monetary goal, you could email five new prospects a day or take five unrelated actions, such as:
- Creating a finance tracker on Excel and updating it daily.
- Making one cold call.
- Writing copy.
- Fixing a bug on your website.
- Reading 10% of a Kindle book on marketing.
Maybe you can’t always
Maybe you can’t always take five actions but it’s important to do something.
For example, if your goal is to run a marathon and your current daily action is to run 8 kilometers, if you’re pushed for time one day, run 4 kilometers instead.
If you’re feeling really ambitious, you can track your five daily actions or even ideas for your five daily actions on an Excel spreadsheet.
The rule of five
The rule of five is inspired by Canfield and Hansen’s teacher Ron Scolastico’s analogy of a lumberjack cutting down a tree. If you would go every day to a very large tree and take five swings at it with a very sharp ax, eventually, no matter how large the tree, it would have to come down.
With that advice, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen created what they called “The Rule of Five”: A commitment to taking five daily actions that would quickly move their goal towards completion.
Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.
The Rule of Five
The Rule of Five is effective because it forces you to think outside the box and consider actions you wouldn’t have previously considered.
If you want to go on a diet, what five daily actions could you take that would help you lose weight? The obvious would be exercising and eating healthily, but what other actions could contribute to your long-term goal?
These could include: learning a new healthy recipe, taking the stairs instead of the escalator, emailing a health professional for advice, reading an article on weight loss, and adding a picture of your ideal clothing size to a vision board to motivate you when you feel challenged.