Fractals and Goal Setting

A Word on “Big Goals”

It’s time to start talking about the end of the year.

I have 4 big goals for 2025: 

• Add 800,000 subscribers to my personal YouTube channel (The Deep End)
• Write two books and publish one of them
• Master a new stream of income that I am not going to talk about here
• Solidify a new production protocol (an advanced SOP of sorts) to turn business playbooks into licensing materials for colleges

In this issue I want to take you into three of these and show you the nature of “fractal goal-setting.”

People have different names for them. Cal Newport calls this working in “scales.” You can scale up or scale down the ladders of different goals.

The way you would describe “scaling” in mathematics is by calling it a fractal. So we are essentially discussing the same ideas using different words.

A Definition to Start With

Let’s define a fractal:

In mathematics, a fractal is a shape that keeps repeating itself, no matter how much you zoom in or zoom out. It’s like a magic pattern that goes on forever, getting smaller and smaller but always looking similar.

Imagine you draw a triangle, then you draw two smaller triangles inside of it; then even smaller triangles inside those. No matter how close you look, the triangles are always there. (Funny story: part of why my TWC brand has a triangle in it is because I love things that are fractal)

Some things just work all the time, no matter how big or small your business is.

There’s one famous fractal called the Koch Snowflake. It looks really weird but it has a bunch of triangles in the middle of it. You can see these triangles here:

Then when you zoom out, the whole middle is a giant triangle. No matter how deep you go, it’s just a bunch of triangles.

Call me a nerd, whatever. But I can’t help but noticing how much of life is actually fractal: we think it’s a isolated issue, but in reality, it’s just a bunch of interconnected issues stacking on top of each other to create a bigger issue.

I see this all the time in my work with clients. The crazy thing about business is, no matter how much you try, you can’t completely separate it from your personal life because you as a person are the common denominator.

The Goal Setting Formula

The best form of goal setting works like this: set big goals, then turn them into little goals.

This is how you make big progress manageable. I can immediately tell when someone hasn’t thought deeply about a year when you ask them what they want to accomplish and they give a revenue number. That’s it? Just $8 million? Just $30 million?

It’s not that revenue targets are bad. It’s just that they are dumb. 

The achievement maps that come out of big organizations usually follow some sort of science (my favorite system is a tool called “OKRs,” pioneered by Google). In our “8-figure Teams” playbook we teach extensively on OKRs and how to tie team members to different targets in the business.

Here’s how it works: when each target is hit, you exceed the revenue goal for the business. The “OKR: stands for the following:

• Objectives
• Key results

I’ve adapted them and add a third layer, called “Assignments.”

When each assignment is completed, you will hit the key result. If 80% of your key results are hit, you’re going to exceed the objective. When all of the objectives are reached, you will knock your goals out of the park. I’ve written extensively on team-building. You can find a complete breakdown in my book “The Wealthy Consultant” and a bit about team culture here.

Motivation, Drive, and Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm is the juice that keeps you fueled up day-to-day.

It will be impossible to achieve long-term, “100-year” type missions without the requisite enthusiasm to keep going when it’s difficult.

One of the keys that makes my style of goal-setting work is the psychology behind “sequence-based progress.”

Angela Duckworth’s book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” (2016) shares a lot of important evidence for how much enthusiasm is linked to perseverance. A study by Ryan and Deci (2000) in the journal “American Psychologist” lists several ways intrinsic motivation (enthusiasm) supports sustained activity towards long-term targets.

My goal as a student and a teacher has always been to link the science to the process.

If I just set a goal to do $10 million next year in The Wealthy Consultant (or $100 million; the number doesn’t matter much), I would get very bored. Or I would turn into a psychopath…

When our lives are limited to making money and that is all we focus on, our lives become very shallow.

But, if I use fractal goals and separate them out, here is what I know:

• If I add 800,000 subscribers to YouTube, our view times and brand will grow tremendously
• If I write two great books and publish the best one, it will generate a lot of leads and a lot of business for my companies
• The stream of income I want to master will be a lot of fun and probably make me more money than all of my businesses, combined, have made in the last 10 years 
• And if we successfully navigate licensing, we will positively impact the next generation; there’s money there but it’s a long-tail derivative that I won’t have to worry much about

The gist of it is simple: by focusing on the highest fractal I can get to, all the other fractals underneath it will work themselves out automatically.

This also works in reverse: if I execute on the fractals at the bottom, the big picture will stack itself together whether I try to force it to or not.

I will be teaching about this concept in detail in our January issue of the Consulting Digest newsletter.

The Point of Achievement in a Nutshell

There is a lot you can do with a million dollars that you can’t do with ten thousand dollars. There is a lot you can do with ten million dollars that you can’t do with a million.

But after a certain point, the added optionality diminishes. From my experience, the difference between $100 million and $10 million are much smaller than the differences from $10 million to $1 million. This works all the way up. I’ve never made more than $100 million but I’ve studied those who have.

It’s important for me to set the criteria for what constitutes a “good life” before I am at that level.

The goal for me is to enjoy my journey and to make life better for the people around me. Any goal that does not support that is a failed initiative that should be removed from my list of goals.

Cheers to a great 2024 about to end and an even better 2025!