Making Goals Happen For Five Dollars

You can make your goals more likely to happen by doing the same thing that large corporations pay billions of dollars for — and it will cost you roughly five bucks, or even nothing.

Large corporations brainwash you with ad messages over and over again, until they are embedded into your subconscious. It’s a simple formula: Whether you like it or not, if you’re exposed to advertisements, they will be imprinted in your mind. There is no way you can prevent this, which is why it’s good to minimise your exposure to unnecessary advertising if you can. Unfortunately, although we can minimise our exposure to advertising, we can never fully escape advertising if we want to live in the modern civilisation.

However, what we can do is to use the same techniques the multi-billion corporations are using — but in our own favour, and without aiming to influence anyone but ourselves.

Corporations push their stuff into our heads. So why don’t we push our stuff into our heads, too?

What I’m suggesting is that you start advertising to yourself — creating your own ‘ads’.

And what should you advertise to yourself? I think that your goals are the best place to start. If you hear your list of goals each day, you will be more inclined to take action towards them.

Besides your goals, you can also ‘advertise to yourself’ anything you want! Such as:

• Your dreams
• All things that are important to you and you don’t want to forget
• Things you are grateful for
• Reminder that life is short and you want to get the most out of it

Ask yourself: If you could hire a personal coach to remind you of things that are important to you, what would you want him to say to you on daily basis?

OK, that’s what to do. Let’s talk about how to do now.

I think that audio format is the best. If you have a microphone with acceptable sound quality, you can just record the “ad” yourself. But if you don’t, I think that Fiverr is exactly what you need. If you have never heard of it, Fiverr is a place where you can hire people to do things for $US5. There are dozens of voice gigs, where professional voice actors record anything from 30 seconds to 5 — just for 5 dollars. They can often even change their voices, mimic celebrities, add background music and effects, and do all sorts of awesome stuff. So, you can get your ad produced for 5 dollars, and the delivery time is usually just a couple of days. By the way, you can also get designed a matching goal-wallpaper for your computer desktop.

Now, once you have your own audio ad produced, I suggest that you listen to it as much as possible. One of the simplest ways of ‘running’ the ‘ad’ is to use it as your morning alarm sound.

Make your alarm sound count. Why listen to some annoying beep beep beep noises in the morning, when you can have your personal coach enumerate all your goals for you? Just set your smartphone to play your mp3 goals ‘ad’ in the morning to wake you up.

Starting your day by doing the most important thing is one of the most powerful time management techniques (More on this in Be Successful First Thing in the Morning). Having an extra motivational boost and goal reminder right after waking up might be the one missing ingredient in your recipe for success.

Believe me, multi-billion dollar corporations would love to wake you up with their ad messages and would happily pay insane amounts of cash for it. Fortunately, they can’t. Better, then, that you can exploit this opportunity yourself.

This is just one low-tech example of advertising to yourself. In the not-so-distant future, when augmented reality glasses are widely available, it will be possible to use ad-blockers to replace real-life billboard ads with your own custom messages. You will look at billboard — and instead of the original ad, you will see something like “John, you are awesome. Make X happen.” That’s the world I want to get closer to. Photo remixed from z0w / Shutterstock.

For the past 7 years, Jiri Novotny+ has been working on creating the best task management software for Windows. He likes to think he’s getting there.