Alright. Welcome to the Growth Mixtape podcast, and I'm your host, Bob Mathers. Now before we get started, you know the deal. If you're not already following the podcast wherever you listen, please do. I don't really understand why, but apparently, it really does make a big difference in promoting our profile, giving us more visibility so we can bring you more awesome content and guests. If you hear something you like and you wanna share it with somebody else, please do that. And if you want even more of what we're serving up here, join my one hundred percent free Substack at substack dot bob mathers dot com or grab the link in the show notes. So, normally, this is where I introduce our guests, and I talk about how awesome they are and about all the amazing things that we're gonna talk about. That's not happening today. Today is another Bolo, another Bob solo episode, and I'm really excited about this one in particular. You know, I talked to so many amazing people on this podcast. I get to talk to people in my work and just in life. And this is my opportunity to take all those ideas, mash them up with things happening, with things I'm hearing, reflect on them, and serve them back in the hopes that I'll come up with something that might be useful to you too. So do you ever come up with an idea or hear something and all of a sudden it's everywhere you look? That's what happened with this episode. I remember the very first car I bought, and I was so excited to buy something kinda different and cool. Now I ended up buying a Saturn, which is not interesting or cool, and they don't even make them anymore. But I remember driving off the lot, and all of a sudden, all I could see were Saturn's on the road. And I'm sure you've had this happen. And when it happens to me, it's a signal that I need to pay attention. I need to reflect on it. The universe is trying to tell me something. Maybe it's trying to tell me it's time to record a solo episode about it. So I've been thinking and talking a lot about goals. And it seems like a good time of year to be talking about them since it's usually around now. We start thinking about what we wanna do for the next year. Now if you have a regular job, you're probably already starting your twenty twenty six planning. This isn't really about that. It's more about the personal goals that we tend to set for ourselves every December. You might even call them resolutions. But since ninety percent of resolutions fail by mid February, let's rethink that terminology. Now here's a secret I've never really said aloud. I don't set goals. I never really have and I've always been a bit embarrassed to admit it because setting goals we're told is what successful adults do. You want to achieve something, set a goal, make a plan, and get to it. I've never really done that. Maybe it's my fear of failure. Now if I say something out loud and I don't achieve it, I feel like a loser. But if I never set a goal, I can't possibly fail. Sounds perfectly reasonable. Now the truth is most of our goals, we're not really very good at achieving them. And there's a simple reason. We actually don't have nearly the control over the world that we think we do. It makes us feel better, but control is an illusion. And I often think about the planning that companies put into their five year plans in twenty nineteen. I bet they felt great about the future already for whatever was gonna be hurled at them. And then a global pandemic hit, and it was all useless. Every word of it. Now you might say, well, that was different. Nobody could have seen that coming. But that's the point. The things that derail our plans are always the things that we never could have seen coming. There's just too much we can't control. So when we set a target and we put in place a rigid plan to get from a to b and something goes awry, we abandon it because we failed and it feels like shit. Now make no mistake. This is not always an awesome approach. There are definitely parts of my life where more planning would have helped. I've never been great with money and now as I can see retirement, I'm not nearly as prepared as most of my friends. But I'm also not ready to move to Florida and start golfing yet, so I still have time. So this advice is for maybe for nonfinancial goals. I'm not sure how it applies to money, so maybe we don't start there. But although I don't set goals, I've done some amazing shit in my life. So how can this be? If goals are the way that adults achieve meaningful things, how can it be that somebody's never really set a goal has done that? I was listening to a great episode of Rich Roll lately, and I've been binging on him. He is awesome. And he was advocating for something that hit me right between the eyes. He said, because we don't have the control we think, we need to hold our goals loosely. Hold our goals loosely. Man, I love that. So maybe it's not the idea of goals necessarily that's the problem, but it's the plans that we put in place to get there. Because when we set a goal, we are necessarily saying no to other things. And those other things might bring us more joy and happiness than the thing that we're trying to achieve. And it makes me wonder what opportunities we're missing by staying too steadfastly to our plan. So for me, I'm thinking about it in terms of direction. I'm not concerned with the destination because I can't control where I'll actually end up. There's too much I don't know. But if I know what direction I'm heading in, I can stay curious and try different things to keep moving in that direction without worrying about where it'll take me. I'm done agonizing over a destination I have no control over. Instead, I'm choosing direction and momentum. I'm choosing curiosity over the illusion of certainty. And I think it just might change everything. Daniel Pink talks about this in a recent post called the feel good advice that is secretly holding you back. It's amazing, and I'll put a link in the show notes. One of the worst pieces of advice, he says, is make a plan and stick to it. Now we've all said it. We've all tried it. And the reason it so rarely works is what DP describes as the difference between instrumental reasons and fundamental reasons. Instrumental reasons are the building blocks of plans, and they're all about where a decision will lead. For example, I will take a job I'm not excited about so I can make enough money to do something else I really love. Fundamental reasons are the opposite. They are the antithesis of planning because they are not made with any outcome in mind. I will try doing this thing even though I have no idea where it will lead because I'm curious, and I think it'll be fun. Now most of our decisions are instrumental because we're told that results matter. And whatever we need to do to get from a to b, that's what we do. That's the adult way. But it simply doesn't work very often. Things change too fast. There is too much beyond our control, and we walk around feeling like failures. So what if instead we switched our default mode to using fundamental reasons? What if we chased our curiosity not knowing where it will lead us? Rick Rubin calls this following the emotional charge. When faced with two options, choose the one that has the strongest emotional charge. If doing what we've always done doesn't work, doing the opposite must be better. Thank you, George Costanza. It can lead us to places we never could have anticipated, places more aligned with what matters to us most. One of my favorite guests from those last this last year is Cindy Gallup, and she had a quote, do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you. What if your goal for twenty twenty six was to do more interesting things? What if you did one interesting thing a week? I guarantee you'll end up in some in some surprising places you never imagined. That feels like a way better way to approach a new year. Go to a party. Tell people about it. I bet you come away with ten new interesting ideas, and I guarantee you inspire other people to try it too. I also talked to Lacey Heals about this in a recent episode where we talked about experimenting. We can treat our life like a laboratory. It's our life. Why not? We conduct experiments, many of them small, to see what we learn. Now here is what I love about that. I've been experimenting a lot lately and trying new things. Last month, I recorded my first podcast in front of a live audience. Now in the past, I would have agonized over every detail to make sure that everyone in the room got the best experience and that we captured every moment perfectly so we could create a great episode out of it. I would have created visuals and did sound checks and did all the things, and I would have lost sleep or trying to make sure that every little thing was perfect. But when I decided to treat it as an experiment, all the fear of failure went away. Hey. It's just an experiment. Now I certainly did a lot of prep, and I did everything I could do to make sure it went well. But I didn't try to control everything. And case in point, on the night of the event, we had a huge snowstorm. We probably had half the people we expected to show up, and that would have been devastating to me. But we went ahead, and the people that came were super engaged and energized. The event couldn't have gone better. And because I wasn't stressed about it being perfect, because it was simply an experiment, I was more relaxed, and I think I delivered something even more authentic. Now what it went so well that I'm gonna do it some more. Now maybe it's the thing that sets me apart from other speakers. Everybody wants to be on the radio. I can deliver an amazing engaging experience and help everyone live out their rock star fantasies. Maybe people love it. Maybe people don't. But it seems like a gift. A gift I have to try. And if I had a goal, I never would've tried a live podcast. It just wouldn't have fit in with my plans. Now other things I know I wanna experiment with this year, for example, video for my podcast. Now I could just saying it, I can feel, oh my god. Now I have to worry about my resting bitch face and how I look when I'm talking to people. I'm already self conscious enough about all that stuff when I put clips on Instagram and LinkedIn. But screw it. It's just an experiment. And so I think, what else do I wanna experiment with? Well, I don't know yet, and that's the point. I'm not supposed to know because that would be a plan. I'll just do an experiment, see what I learn, and move on to the next one. Now I can't tell you how freeing this feels. So twenty twenty six for me is a year of experiments. I wanna help a hundred thousand people rediscover their curiosity and live a bigger life. Now that'll come from speaking and coaching and podcasting, the things that pay the bills today. But I guarantee there are other things that will come up that I can't possibly conceive of yet. Just like the most exciting things from this past year, I hadn't conceived of a year ago. As long as I'm moving in roughly the right direction, momentum is the only goal. So whatever you wanna do more of or less of in twenty twenty six, what if you set a direction instead of a goal? What if you conduct experiments instead of making a plan? Maybe you have a plan, but it's simply a list of experiments. Try it for a month and experiment a week. You're moving. You're acting. You're not wasting time planning, trying to control things out you can't control, and then agonizing and beating yourself up when they don't go your way. Have more curious conversations. If there's something that you're curious about or wanna try, reach out to somebody that's already done it or knows something about it. Send them a text or an email and ask them, hey. I've always been curious about how you started to grow up in your backyard or whatever it is. Do you have thirty minutes to chat? Who wouldn't say yes to that? I'm super excited about twenty twenty six. I'd love to know what you think of this. Drop me a line in the comments to this episode or email me at bob at bob mathers dot c a, and let's get after it. The growth mixtape podcast with Bob Mathers is produced by Bespoke Projects. Music by Jumapelle Walter Cronkite. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to follow and rate us. When you do this, it helps to raise our podcast profile so that more people can find us. If you wanna connect, you can find me on LinkedIn using the link in the show notes.