Achieving Your Most Ambitious Goals Smartly

All those who think they could reproduce this photo of Brad Pitt using only pencil and paper? Well, I'm going to show you how to do that. And by doing that, I will give you the crucial skill to become a world-class artist. And that would take only about 15 seconds. But how many of you can recreate this image of a gray square before doing that? All of us. And if you can duplicate a gray square, you can render 2, 3, or more. What matters is that, if you can only make a gray square, it would be challenging to say you couldn't make all the necessary gray squares to replicate the image completely. And there you go. I just gave you the skills to be a renowned and famous artist. I know what you think. "It's not true art, and it certainly wouldn't make me a great artist."

So let me present to you, Chuck Close. For decades, he has been one of the best-paid artists in the world and creates art using that technique. So, what is between us and the achievement of our most ambitious dreams has much less to do with having magical abilities and talents, and more about how we deal with our problems and the decisions we make to resolve them. And because of the nature and frequency of these millions of choices that we face regularly, a small improvement in our process can have a significant impact on our efforts. And I'll show you by taking a look at Novak Djokovic's career.

In 2004, after becoming a professional tennis player, and ranked 680 in the world ranking, Novak's career changed until the end of his third year, when he rose to the world's third position. His earning spiked from $250,000 to $5 million a year, only in prize money, and, of course, he started to win more matches. In 2011, he climbed to number one position in the tennis ranking, snuggling $14 million a year in cash prizes and dominated 90 percent of his matches. Now, here is the most exciting part of all these outstanding statistics. Novak does not the slightest control on any of them. What he controls are all the minutest decisions he needs to make to move up his success probability to achieve those results. Taking into account the percentage of points he earned, we can quantify and map his progress in the area.

As in tennis, a common point depends on one to three decisions, and I like to refer to this as the success rate of his choice. So, going back to when he won 49% of the matches he played, he won 49% of the played points. Then, to climb to number three in the world, with a profit of $ 5 million per year for moving a racket, he had to boost his decision success rate by only 52%. And to become not only number one but perhaps one of the best-ever player to have played tennis, he had to capitalize on his decision success rate to only 55%. And I am repeating the word "just". I don't want to suggest that it's easy; obviously, it is not. But the kind of little improvements that I'm talking about is easily attainable by each one of us in this room. And I'll show you what I mean.

From kindergarten to high school, all my result cards said the same thing: I would be a brilliant boy if I could only calm down and focus. What they didn't know was that I wanted this for myself more than they wanted it for me. So, from kindergarten to the twelfth year of college, I was a mediocre student. But, from the third year on, that had been enough. I wanted to make a change. I'm going to make a little adjustment; I will stop being a spectator of my decisions and become an active participant. And then that year, instead of pretending, again that I could suddenly calm down and focus for more than five or ten minutes. I decided to assume that I would not go. And, if you wanted to achieve the things I wanted, performing well in my studies, I would have to change my focus. So, I made a little adjustment. If I'd had a task, for example, reading five chapters of a book, I didn't think of it like five episodes, I didn't even think of it as a single chapter. I divided it into small tasks that I could do, where I would have to focus only for five or ten minutes at a time, maybe three or four paragraphs, and that's it.

I did, and when those five or ten minutes passed, I got up. I was going to throw rings, draw a picture, maybe playing video games for a few minutes, and then go back, not necessarily for the same reason or for the same topic, but for any task that requires a few minutes of attention. Since then, all my graduation, I was one of the top ten students outstanding students every semester. Then I went to one of the best graduate programs in the world in finance and economics. The same approach, same results. And later, I graduated. I started my career, thinking about how well it worked for me. You know, you take these great concepts, these complex ideas, these significant tasks, and breaks it into much more manageable parts, and on the way, you make small improvements in the process. This leaves the probability of success in your favor. I will try to do that in my career. And then I did it. I started as an external dealer in Swiss credit derivatives. This led me to excel in the banking sector and also helped me have first-class returns as general manager of hedge funds for 12 years and founder and CIO of two award-winning hedge funds.

So we got to 2001, and I think this whole idea worked very well at school, it has served me well as a professional, why don't I apply it in my personal life in all these high ambitions that I have for myself? One day going to work, it took me about 45 minutes each way, an hour and a half a day, seven days a week,30 hours a month, 360 hours a year, that I was awake, conscious, basically wasting time, listening to music on my iPod. So that day, I stopped at a store on the way home. I took the first 33 CDs of the German course of the Pimsleur program; I downloaded it and put it on my iPod. But I didn't stop there. Because the truth is that I am an undisciplined person, and I knew that at some point, I would leave the language course and listen to music again.

So I removed the temptation, deleting all the songs. This left me with only one option: Listen to German lessons. So, ten months down the road, I listened to CDs in the German course. I listened to them all three times each. And I went to an intense, 16-day course in Berlin. I invited my wife and children to meet me when I finished. We walked through the city. I spoke German with the Germans, and they also talked to me. My children were delighted. They gasped. But you and I know that there is nothing incredible in what I did. I made a small adjustment to my daily routine—a minor change in my process. And now I can speak a little German. And at that moment I thought that's not expected to be easy for an old man like me to learn a new language. You do this as a child. And still, I did, a little adjustment. And how many other ambitions have I had? Postpone until retirement, what could I have accomplished if I had made a small adjustment to my routine?

Thus I started doing them. I have my race car license. I learned to fly a helicopter I went up, parachuted. I learned how to do airplane stunts. Well, if you were like me in 2007, You must have the same goal as me. I had just returned from London, and I was about 11 kilos overweight, and I was out of shape, and I wanted to fix that I could follow the usual path you know, sign up for the gym and never go. Or I could swear to myself that I would never eat those foods that I love again, but they are doing all the damage. And I knew that by following this path, we rarely get what we want. So I decided to become an active participant. I thought about the passions and habits that I developed in my life, and I thought, "I can make a little adjustment to them so that they are for me instead of against me? So I did it. I have a habit of walking an hour and a half a day for the past seven years, and I acquired a passion for being outdoors. That year, I did not gain to lose 11 kilos like the goal of the new year. I set myself to walk the 33 trails from the first field of the Santa Barbara mountains. And I've never made a trace in my life before. But what matters is not the 33 tracks. 

You have to break the big goal in these most straightforward decisions; the kind of decisions that must be made correctly on the road to improve the chances of achieving the type of result you want. It is not a trail. It's about these little decisions, for example, when you spend a little extra time at work. Or are you lying on the sofa, changing channels on your remote control, or by swiping the Facebook screen, and at that moment, you decide to hang up. You wear your hiking clothes, go out the front door and closes it behind you. You go to your car, get on, and drive down the path. You get out of the vehicle at the beginning of the trail, take the first step, then second, and the third. I just described each of these steps as a small decision that must be made correctly along the way to achieve the result. Now when I say I want to make 33 tracks, people think of the top of the mountain's top choices. And it's not about that. Because if you don't make the right decision when you are on the couch, no decision takes place on top of the mountain.

So by the end of the year, I had made all 33 trails on the front field. I did it a few times each. I even did some in the backfield. I lost 11 kilos and finished the year, making the world's most challenging half marathon: Pier to Peak. In 2009, I was very ambitious, ambitious for a boy who, until today, can't calm down and focus on something for more than ten minutes at a time, and I wanted to read 50 books. But again, it wasn't about reading 50 books.

It wasn't even about reading a book. It is not about learning a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence. It's about that decision when you're sitting at your table at the end of the day, or are you lying on the couch or by swiping the Facebook screen, and drop your phone. You take a book and read a word. If you read one word, you learn two, three terms; you read a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter, a book; You read ten books, 30 books, 50 books. I was very ambitious in 2012. I set 24 new year goals. Twelve of them were what I call voluntary targets, and I wrote charity goals that did not involve signing a check. But they were not perfect targets. I tried to donate blood, and they rejected me because I lived in the UK. I decided to give my hair, but nobody wanted gray hair. I was, trying to do something that would make me feel better, and it had the opposite effect.

Anyway, I also had the 12 learning objectives to learn 12 new skills. And when I learned unicycle, "parkour", "slackline", jumping stilts and drums, my wife suggested that I learn to knit. To be honest, I wasn't passionate about knitting. But one day, I was sitting under a 12-meter eucalyptus, which was 4 kilometers away on the cold spring trail, and I thought that tree would look great in a scarf. So I went home, Googled, and I discovered that it is something that people do, graphite knitting: involve public structures with weaving. And the second international graphite weaving day, It would be in 82 days.

For the next 82 days, it didn't matter where I was, and if I was at a board meeting on a commercial floor, on a plane or in the hospital, I was weaving one point at a time. And 82 days later, I made my first graphite fabric. And the result of that surprised me. So I continued with bigger and more ambitious projects which needed more artistic skills. And in 2014, I set out to involve six considerable rocks in the Los Padres National forest on top of the mountains. But if I had to do that, I would need help. At the time, I started receiving packages, many packages, 388 employees from 36 locations in 50 states. And in the end, I didn't involve a rock, and I included 18.

And then, I continued with bigger and more ambitious projects. Along the way, I stopped knitting. I never really liked that. But...I want to crochet. So, I started making these 18cm granny squares, because this is grandma's square pattern, and I thought on the way: "Why stop at 18 centimeters? I need great things." So I started making much bigger grandparent squares. And one day, I came home after a business trip and had a grand plaza, and I went to the Guinness website. I was curious about the world's largest grandmother's square. But there was no category for that. So I presented, and they rejected me. So I appealed, and they rejected me, I requested again and said, "Okay, if you do a ten by ten meters, we create a new category, and you'll be a Guinness Record Holder. "So for the next two years, seven months, 17 days one stitch at a time, I reached over half a million points, I used more than 48 kilometers of yarn, and now I'm an official Guinness record holder for the largest crochet square.

Along the way, I received a lot of attention from my adventures. But what I want you to understand when you hear this is: I am still a student with a score of seven. I'm still that child who doesn't settle or seal for more than five or ten minutes. And I'm still the guy who has no unique gifts or abilities.

Conclusion:

All I do is achieve a great goal that people are surprised, break it down into its simplest form, and then make small adjustments along the way to accomplish this. And the reason I'm giving this talk is that I hope to inspire many of you to catch some of those ambitious dreams you have for yourself, take them off the shelf and start chasing them, making those little adjustments to your routine.