Most people choose goals because the end result is the thing they want.

The problem is that most people have never really sat down and figured out what they want. They are chasing things that society has told them would be good to have. Or that they envy other people for having.

Some common goals:

• More money.
• Nice house.
• Better job.

Setting a goal for the end result is a recipe for misery.

Because the feeling you get from the end result will be fleeting.

The good feeling we get from achievement or reaching our target is a big rush of dopamine. This will last for a short while before our baseline is reset. When that happens, we will not be any happier than before we got what we were chasing.

So here is a better way to set goals:

Set your goals by how you will have to change to achieve them.

Think about the kind of person you want to be.

Choose a goal that, in the pursuit of it, will force you to grow into that person. What skills do you want? Choose a goal that will force you to learn them.

The end result will still be a reward, but now the journey will be just as rewarding.

Who you become is more important than what you have.

This is why many lottery winners or people who come into quick wealth lose the money. They didn’t grow into their wealth. But now that you know, you can set better goals and grow into the person you want to become.

Tons of businesses make the same mistake as my dentist. They send out B Pile marketing mail.

Legendary marketer Gary Halbert had a concept he called A Pile, B Pile. When people get their mail, they sort it into 2 piles. Pile A is what they will open and read. Pile B goes straight in the trash.

You know B Pile mail:

• New Credit Card Offers
• Extended Warranty Notices
• Obvious Business Postcard Adverts

Businesses spend thousands of dollars creating and mailing ads out just to have them thrown away unopened.

Because they look like an ad.

When I told my dentist about this, he laughed because he had just sorted thru his own mail the same way just an hour earlier. Standing next to the trash can throwing out everything that looked like an advertisement.

Here’s how you get into the A Pile:

Place your mail in a standard envelope with a first class stamp.

This will help it look like it came from and individual, not a business.

It may be more expensive, but right now you are spending money to put paper in people’s trash cans. Unread paper. Avoid the envelopes with the little windows and avoid postcard style mailers.

If you can, pay someone to hand address the envelopes.

Very few people will throw away a hand addressed envelope without at least opening it.

Second best is a cleanly printed name and address. The key here is to not make your marketing mail look like marketing mail. Remember the added cost will be returned by significantly higher open rate.

Add some way to track responses.

Doesn’t matter if its a unique coupon code, a text signup, or a website url to visit.

You need some way to see how effective you mail is being. Otherwise how will you know if you are wasting your money.

Many thanks to Gary Halbert for sharing this wisdom.

I was not nearly as detailed in my instructions as I thought I had been.

I made the mistake of comparing a feature I wanted to a feature in an old game. There is a new game with the same name that comes up in a search that is completely different. I hadn’t looked up the game of course because I knew what I was talking about. This made me feel a little silly.

When you are hiring someone else to make something for you, you must be extremely clear with what you want.

You cannot have too much clarity when describing something to a programmer.

If you are vague, you will either get their best guess or they will wait for clarity before continuing.

Time is money when you hire someone else. It could even be your time as you manage them. In this case, the first version of the game the developer created was not even the right genre. If you have high clarity, you will get what you want in a timely manner.

Here is how you create clear instructions for fiverr contractors.

#1. Google your own instructions and examples and see what the first result is.

If the developers are not familiar with what you are talking about, this is likely the first thing they will do.

After you Google this, grab the links to the sites that have the info you think will be relevant and add them to your instructions.

#2. Add images to your instructions.

Visual references add so much value to your written instructions.

Get the Google images results from the same searches that you did in step 1 and add them to your instructions.

#3. Ask a friend or family member what they think each instruction means.

Not everyone thinks the exact same way. See if you can have someone else tell you what they think you mean from your instructions.

After several passes I finally ended up with a game surprisingly close to what I had envisioned. You can get something built too if you will take the time to make it clear what you want.

There are 3 easy ways to prototype a card game.

After your initial design of the game, you need to playtest. To playtest you need a prototype. You need cards you can shuffle, move around on a play surface, and visibly recognize.

Here are three ways you can get started testing out your card game idea at home.

• Use Card Blanks and Dry Erase Markers
• Use Cards from Other Games and a Legend
• Use Printed Cutouts and Card Sleeves

Use Card Blanks and Dry Erase Markers

This is a great option.

Easy to change cards around as you discover flaws in your game. It can be fast to get setup and is very flexible.

If this is your first time making a game though, you likely won’t just have card blanks laying around. Add to this that these could smudge as they are being shuffled and handled (card sleeves might help with this).

Use Cards from Other Games and a Legend

Use regular playing or poker cards, Uno cards, MTG commons, whatever works.

Make a paper or digital map of physical card to card from your game. Digital works better for changes as you are iterating and testing. This can be a little clunky as you have to reference back to the guide every so often for each card.

Use Printed Cutouts and Card Sleeves

This is the option I most recently tried out.

Its great because you can create a custom layout to get a feel for how your cards will actually look. The card sleeves let you use standard paper to save on printing cost. I recommend using a laser printer and going with black and white.

It is a little time consuming to set up at first and to cut out all of the templates. But the result is a great prototyping experience.

You can put old playing cards behind your cutouts in the sleeves to make them easier to shuffle. And you can use pencil on the templates to allow for changes as you test.

Tom Bilyeu has achieved amazing success in multiple unrelated businesses. Billion with a “B” levels of success. How did he do it? He follows a process that he calls the “Physics of Progress”

Foundational Rule

Before you start the process you have to follow a foundational rule.

“Avoid a mortality event.”

Don’t do something, that if it fails, will take you out of the game. Don’t risk everything on a single play. With this in mind you can begin the process.

The Physics of Progress

Step 1: Decide what you want with high levels of clarity.

Set a clear goal and a date. You should be so clear about what your goal is that what you should do in the next 15 minutes is obvious. Even if the next step is googling about things you don’t understand.

Step 2: Identify the problem between where you are at and where your goal is.

If it is a new problem, then you need to be able to solve new problems. Or you need to be able to hire someone who can solve this problem for you.

Step 3: Come up with your best guess as to how your are going to solve the problem keeping you from your goal.

Remember the foundational rule: this should not be something that could ruin you or “kill” your chances.

Step 4: Try out your best guess and see if by implementing it you can solve the problem.

If your guess from Step 4 works, great you are done. Its working and you are achieving your goal. If not, you have learned and now you run thru this process again with the new information.

Remember, this is a loop. You are meant to go thru it more than once.

You can see Tom talk about this process yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkSy218Aosc