We don’t usually break our 2-week rhythm for Jolts, but it’s June 21st, and it’s put a big old monkey wrench in our planning.
Today is the longest day for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the point at which we’re at our maximum tilt towards the sun.
From now on in, the nights draw in. Ugh.
Try as we might to slow the clock, time flows through all of us like a river. And the older we get, the faster it seems to rush.
Suddenly, my friends, it’s summer.
Time Is What We Want Most, But What We Use Worst.
Time is binary. You can’t cheat it, but we try. We all overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can do in ten. How many times have we been on the receiving end of a big company goal that was supposed to take a year, but actually took 5 times longer? Probably many.
In business, the longer-term outlook usually wins, and it does so over a much longer period than anyone dares admit - even though we fight tooth and nail to make it fit our fiscal.
Goal setting is the barometer of this human conundrum.
It’s why my Jolt co-founder and I created a system to compare our goals outside of the noise of work and the pressure to close a year. It’s a buddy system that takes the formality & one-sided fiscal stiffness out of goal setting and puts the honesty, zest & life back in.
We’ve been doing it for years.
But the longest day got us thinking…
Tick Tick - Bloom.
…that summer, is the new poster child to set our goals to. Mother Nature knows it. She’s in the absolute full bloom of life right now.
So why aren’t we? Well, maybe we are, but we’re just looking at it differently.
Despite the naysayers, people gravitate to optimism when the summer season comes around. It’s powerful. Even when the news cycle sucks as it does right now, summer brings a sense of hope and growth. And if that feeling didn’t quite jibe with you when you opened this, there’s always a chilled glass of wine & a google search for the Maldives to help you get into it.
Instead of thinking of summer as the time to take the foot off the gas and blow a vacation sized raspberry at the world, what if we look at summer as the time to bloom big?
And set our goals, just like nature intended.
Buddy Goals Template
My co-founder and I use a simple template to set our goals, and I’ve attached it here. It features 6 goals; no more. It has none of the fluff that ties typical goal-setting sheets into knots of excel under-achievement, with more dates and check-in’s than you’ve had hot dinners. This is summer, after all.
Simply choose & name a goal that is the MOST important for your long term growth. Not what’s important to anyone else, and especially not what’s important to your boss. Don’t show off. Keep it grounded and genuine to your sense of self.
Then clarify your AIM for that goal, and put in place an achievable ACTION step you can take over the summer to move it forward. Even just a notch.
Finally, find a close BUDDY and send these goals to them. Ask that they send their goals back to you in exchange. Now you have an accountable deal. One that is much harder to break. Agree to connect three times on your goals over the summer; once a month, from now until September. Then recast your goals again from this new vantage point. It’s a powerful way to enable and drive change.
Don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t over-burden yourself. Think of the long game.
Remember, there will never be enough time to do everything we want, but there is more than enough time to do the things that are most important to us. This is the secret to a successful life - and a successful summer.
With Love,
The Jolt.
PS These are not our actual goals. Though we quite like them.