Stephen Duneier: How to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals

What you get by achieving

your

goal is not as important as what you become by achieving

your

goal and that is today's thought. Welcome to 7 Good Minutes. I'm Clyde Lee Dennis, thank you for joining me for what I believe will be seven of the

most

enriching minutes of your day, our guest today is Stephen Denier, a professional investment manager, strategy consultant, speaker, author, artist and holder of the Guinness world record. He's with us today to talk about how to

achieve

your

most

ambitious

goals

. Here Stephen, you see what stands between us and

achieve

ment. Even our most

ambitious

dreams have much less to do with possessing some magical skill or talent and much more to do with how we approach problems and make decisions to solve them.

Even a marginal improvement in our process can have a big impact on our bottom line, but the kind of marginal improvements I'm talking about are easily achievable by every one of us in this room from kindergarten to my high school graduation. high school, every one of my report cards basically said the same thing Stephens, a very bright young man. boy, if he would just calm down and focus, what they didn't realize was that I wanted that even more than they wanted it for me, I just couldn't, so from kindergarten to second year of college I was a really consistent cc. - student, but then, entering my third year, I had had enough.

I thought I wanted to make a change. I'm going to make a marginal adjustment, so that year, instead of faking it again, I could suddenly calm down and focus on things. more than five or ten minutes at a time I decided to assume I wouldn't do it, so I made a marginal adjustment if I was assigned a task, say reading five chapters of a book. I wouldn't consider it five chapters. Don't even think of it as a chapter. I would break it down into these tasks that I could accomplish that would require me to focus for just five or ten minutes at a time, so maybe three or four paragraphs, that's it.

I would do it when I was done with those five or ten minutes. I'd get up, go play basketball, draw a little, maybe play video games for a few minutes, and then go back from that point on until graduation. -one student Dean's List President's Honor Roll each semester Then I went on to one of the best graduate programs in the world in finance and economics, same approach, same results, then I graduate, start my career and I think this worked very good for I, you know, you take these big concepts, these complex ideas, these big tasks, you break them down into much more manageable tasks and then, along the way, you make a marginal improvement in the process.

You know the odds of success in your favor. I'll try. and I do this in my career, so I did it, it gets 2001 and I'm thinking this whole idea worked really well in school, it has served me well as a professional, why am I not applying this in my personal life like everyone else? ? Those big ambitious

goals

I have for myself, so one day I was walking to work and at the time my commute was a walk from one end of Hyde Park to the other in London, it took me about 45 minutes each way, hour and a half. one day seven and a half hours a week 30 hours a month 360 hours a year when I was awake, aware that I was basically wasting time listening to music on my iPod, so on the way home from work that day I stopped at the store and bought the first 33 Pimsleur German Language Program CDs I ripped them out and put them in my iPod, so 10 months later I listened to all 99 German Language Program CDs, listening to each one three times each.

They went to Berlin for a 16-day intensive German course. when I finished I invited my wife and children to meet me we walked around the city I spoke German with the Germans they spoke German to me my children were amazed I mean they couldn't shut their mouths but you and I know that there is Actually, it was not surprising at all what I have just done. I made this marginal adjustment to my daily routine, this marginal adjustment to my falling in love process. I'm Missi indulge and now I can speak some German, so at that moment I'm thinking.

It's not supposed to be that easy for a guy like me, an older guy, to learn a new language, it's supposed to be done when you're a kid, and yet here I did it with this marginal adjustment, so what? Do I have other big and ambitious goals? I've been holding on to putting off until retirement something I could potentially achieve, but I only made a marginal adjustment to my routine, so I started doing it. I got my auto racing license. I learned to fly a helicopter. D. rock climbing. skydiving and learned to fly acrobatic airplanes. But what I want you to realize when you hear these things is that I'm still that c-student.

I'm still that kid who can't calm down or concentrate for more than five or ten minutes at a time and I'm still a kid. Possessing no special gift of talent or skill, all I do is take really big, ambitious projects that people seem to marvel at, break them down to their simplest form, and then just make marginal improvements along the way to improve my odds. to achieve them and therefore, The only reason I am giving this talk is that I hope to inspire several of you to take some of those ambitious dreams that you have for yourself off the shelf and start pursuing them by making that marginal adjustment to your routine.

Thank you, please continue. Note that this is about half of the entire speech. If you're up for it, you should definitely listen to it in its entirety. You can do this by clicking the link labeled watch the full video on YouTube in the show notes that do so for this episode. from 7 Good Minutes, please take a moment to rate and review the show on iTunes and Google Play. If you have questions, you can ask them by going to 7GoodMinutes.com/askClyde or hit me up on Twitter and Clyde Lee Dennis until next time, let's be civil. each other thank you for listening