Why Most Goals Fail (And How to Beat the Odds)

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John Jantsch (00:01.277)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jon Acuff. He’s a New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including his most recent, All It Takes Is A Goal, the three-step plan to ditch regret and tap into your massive potential. Translated into over 20 languages, Acuff’s work is both critically acclaimed and beloved by readers. He’s a top leadership speaker named by Inc.

And he has addressed audiences worldwide, including FedEx, Microsoft, and Chick-fil-A, known for blending humor. With insight, he once opened for Dolly Parton at the Ryman Auditorium. So John, welcome to the show.

Jon Acuff (00:41.378)

Thanks for having me, John. Looking forward to it.

John Jantsch (00:43.089)

Should we blow little time hearing that story? It’s in your bio. Yeah.

Jon Acuff (00:46.392)

The Dolly Parton story? Yeah. That happened like most of those things happen via my dentist, obviously. I go to what I say, the dentist to the stars and Jon Acuff. So famous people go there and also me. And he said one night, he was like, Hey, I’ve got a charity event at the Ryman. Would you be willing to open for Dolly Parton? And I said, I guess, guess I can do that. So I did 20 minutes of comedy, just straight comedy. The audience was dentists. had some.

John Jantsch (00:51.867)

ha ha ha!

John Jantsch (00:57.139)

Okay. All right. All right.

Jon Acuff (01:16.076)

killer mouth jokes that would not be funny if I told them to do right now. And I met Dolly, she did a 75 minute show that started at like 9 PM. She’s unbelievable. She’s everything you hope. You know, they always say never meet your heroes, but definitely meet Dolly Parton. I would have that photo of us on my driver’s license if the DMV weren’t such jerks.

John Jantsch (01:20.679)

Ha ha!

Wow.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:29.821)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:35.027)

Yeah, I a, I can’t remember what it was. of it was a series of podcasts, but it was a serial where somehow the person met and ended up like doing all these interviews with Dolly Parton. He turned it into almost a book length podcast and it was so good. It was so good. Yeah.

Jon Acuff (01:49.804)

yeah, I heard it was great. Yeah, yeah. I don’t know any. It’s like, there’s only three people in America. Nobody hates. It’s like Dolly Denzel and Tom Hanks. think like it’s hard to find somebody who’s like that Tom Hanks. I hate his stupid face. I think they’re universally loved.

John Jantsch (01:58.003)

Yeah. Well, I, my like opening for joke was, I actually used to talk about, the fact that Bill Cosby opened for me. Now, technically he was the closing speaker at an event and I happened to be the next morning’s opening speaker, but

Jon Acuff (02:20.405)

yeah, that counts. I’ve counted month distance. Totally same arena, that counts.

John Jantsch (02:24.923)

However, that joke hasn’t held up as well. I don’t use it as much anymore. Yeah, I have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. So let’s just start with the obvious. Put you on like the defense right off the bat. Does the world need another book on gold setting? I mean, there are a few of them out there. So what, what in your mind said, yeah, I’ve got like something that hasn’t been written before.

Jon Acuff (02:26.892)

Nah, dude, you’re gonna wanna retire that one. You’re gonna wanna, that one has, yeah, that one has a different feel in this current year.

Jon Acuff (02:43.64)

Sure.

Jon Acuff (02:48.824)

Yeah.

Jon Acuff (02:55.34)

That’s a great question. well, habits had already been done. mean, James Clear wrote Atomic Habits. If you ever write a book about habits, God bless you that that one’s been done. No, for me, what, what I felt like was missing in a lot of goal setting books was how easy the initial goals should be. I think our culture does a really big job of going go big or go home. And what happens is people usually go home. And so I was teaching goal setting techniques for

John Jantsch (02:58.991)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:14.481)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (03:18.536)

Yeah, yeah.

Jon Acuff (03:24.642)

five or six years to real folks accomplishing real things and felt like that was a big part of what was missing is, okay, how do you, you know, how do you do that? And then the second thing I thought was missing was that a lot of goal setting books, their first step is come up with a 20 year vision for your life. Like, and we’ve misinterpreted Stephen Covey’s begin with the end in mind into if you don’t know the end, you can’t begin. And so I kept seeing people.

John Jantsch (03:41.586)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:47.965)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jon Acuff (03:49.812)

run into what I call as a vision wall. And so I wanted to write a goal setting book that started from the past, meaning the first thing it did was say, what are the things that have lit you up over the last five years, the last 10 years? What are the clues? Because most people go, don’t look backward. You’re not going that direction. And we leave all this real learning about who we really are and what really fires us up. So I wanted to redeem your past to provide clues to your present and build your future.

John Jantsch (04:15.997)

So the word regret in the title is a tough word for some people. mean, there’s certainly people look at it as a negative, but there’s a school of thought. think Dan Pink actually had a book recently that kind of talks about, no, you learn from that. There’s like good regret or there’s no regret. I don’t know which there is. So how do you help people distinguish between the, you you can learn from regret as opposed to just saying every mistake I made was regret.

Jon Acuff (04:20.312)

Yeah.

Jon Acuff (04:26.264)

Yeah, whole book on it.

Jon Acuff (04:42.616)

Yeah, I I guess for me, it always comes down to, well, so what did you do with it? What was the action that came out of that? And so I think a really simple test is bad regret is something that doesn’t lead to change. It just leads to more bad regret. Like you get stuck in that loop. Good regret, think by nature leads to change. You go, I regretted the way I said that. I’m not going to say that kind of thing again. Here’s what I’m going to practice to make sure I don’t say that kind of thing again. Here’s the, you know, I made this mistake.

And so, yeah, for me, that’s what I meant. I think a lot of times with regret, we go back to our past and hope there’s a single thing we can find that will change the rest of our lives. And we have this kind of misinterpreted version of counseling sometimes, like maybe there’s something that happened to you at six. And once you unlock that, you’ll be a completely different human going forward. And I think there is benefit to going, yeah, I had this challenge and I’ve, and I needed to process it, but

Sometimes where I see people get stuck with regret is it’s like if you visited the same beach town every summer for 20 summers in a row, you’d know that beach town so well. And they visit the same story 20 years in a row and they keep giving it more power, more power, more power, more power versus going, yeah, that was a thing that happened. I can’t change that. can change tomorrow. So I’m going to give more of my time, more of my energy to that. What does that look like? And so, yeah, I would say.

For me, it’s how fast can I turn it into action for my future versus rumination about the past.

John Jantsch (06:12.499)

Can you, and we can talk about the individual ones, can you just kind of quickly, what’s the three-step plan?

Jon Acuff (06:17.9)

Yeah. So the three steps are essentially you build what I would call as a goal ladder. Most people have a hard time with goals because they have a 12 foot tall ladder that only has two rungs. The top rung says final step and the bottom rung says first day. And the final step could be make a million dollars, lose 50 pounds. First day says, you know, get your LLC or buy sneakers. And there’s a huge gap between there you go, I can’t get to the top that way. And so the three steps are you build easy goals, you build middle goals and you build guaranteed goals.

essentially adding rungs to your entire ladder so that you have a rung every six inches so that it’s a really simple ladder to climb. So those are the three steps.

John Jantsch (06:55.729)

One thing I think we ought to address, and I don’t think a lot of gold setting books do, is that the fact of life is that there are people, I count myself as one, I had access to a lot of resources. I had privilege growing up and there are a lot of people that don’t, I mean, that want to take themselves out of the situation they have and don’t have some of the things that other people have. How do you talk about that person that’s like,

And again, I know people can use that as an excuse because we’ve all seen people that have risen from abject poverty, you know, to like, incredible, know, achieving incredible goals. But how do you address that just when you’re talking to the normal person out there that there are definitely differences in opportunities that people have.

Jon Acuff (07:42.936)

Yeah, I try to talk it to the individual person. I can’t talk to global people. I can talk to individual readers. So where I see people get stuck there is if I go, man, I think you’d feel great if you walked around your neighborhood today. And then they push back and go, well, not everybody has a safe neighborhood. Okay, well, let’s pull the thread on that. So are you saying until everybody has a safe neighborhood, you can’t walk in your neighborhood? How will you know? Will the government email you and say, hey, we did it.

John Jantsch (07:48.563)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:06.323)

Yeah.

Jon Acuff (08:10.316)

We did it. Everybody has the same exact safe neighborhood. Now you can go take a walk. I had a friend, Chip Dodd, he’s a PhD say, we suffer from global co-dependence. When you say not everybody had the same opportunity, you’re saying I’m dependent on them having the same opportunity before I changed my life. So in a situation like that, I’d say to somebody, hey, I think this could be beneficial. And if they said, well, I don’t have those same opportunities, I would say, well, which ones do you have? Let’s talk about you as an individual. If they said,

Hey, John, there’s a lot of people that can’t do that. I’d go, well, what are their names? And more than likely they go, well, I don’t really know any. just know that like the world and I’ll go, okay, well, like, is it a friend? Let’s talk about your, your friend doesn’t have that opportunity. Let’s help them fix their specific problem. I just think that, yeah, life is certainly like, life is certainly not equal. but I think it comes down to going, what can you do with what you have versus like, I don’t like.

Take for me, for instance, I was never going to be in the NBA. I’m at my height at five seven. There’s five people in the history of the NBA that have played at my height. Like, so I can’t go like, man, it’s, it’s crazy that Steph Curry gets to play in the NBA and I don’t like, didn’t get the same opportunities. Like yeah, height wasn’t one of my opportunities. And in some ways it encouraged me to develop a sense of humor because I wasn’t going to be the tall, confident kid in the seventh grader because I was not tall and confident. So I thought.

And I’ve had to develop a little bit of survival skills in my middle school and maybe personality be one of them. So I always try to get it back to the individual because I think there are people, know, everybody gets a different set of opportunities and it depends on what you do with them.

John Jantsch (09:52.755)

So you started talking about the, one of the challenges people have is that they set these impossible goals for, or they think, you know, that’s not big enough. How do you kind of keep people keep a perspective on that tension? You know, that like what’s aspirational, what would put, mean, because a goal should push you a little bit probably, right? But also some people, you know, set something so big that they can’t take the first step.

Jon Acuff (10:13.282)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Acuff (10:21.346)

Yeah. So you do need both. like, you need the aspiration to get you started. You need the small goal to keep you going. So nobody gets excited. know, John, I know, and you know, if somebody wants to write a 50,000 word book, the first thing they have to do is write the first 100 words and the next 200 words. But that’s so boring. If you say to somebody, you’re going to get to write a hundred whole words, that doesn’t get anybody to the desk. You want to paint for them this big picture of like,

The book is on a shelf, you’re holding it in your hand. It’s been translated into Italian. You’re at a book signing. You need the aspiration to be inspired, but then you have to break it down at the daily steps. So it’s really a dance of both in that sense. And so for me, one of the fastest ways to do that is to deal in terms of time. Like I get to time so fast with people. Most people’s goal is divorce from their calendar and you never accomplish a goal if that’s how you’re living. And so one of the things I do, which is not

necessarily fun right out of the gate is if somebody’s serious about a goal, go, all right, let’s do a quick time gap analysis. Like let’s add up the hours that your new goal is going to take. And most people that read my types of books and listen to your podcast have more goals than they need. The average person I did a study had 22.8 goals. Your listeners feel overwhelmed because they should feel overwhelmed. They’re juggling 22 balls at a time. So I’ll go, let’s put an hour with it. And they’ll usually go, okay, it’s 22 hours of goals. And I go, okay, how many hours of free time do you have in your week?

John Jantsch (11:41.651)

Yes.

Jon Acuff (11:49.314)

this week and then go free time. What? I’m very busy. I have zero. Okay. You have a new goal system that costs 22 hours. You have a calendar that accepts zero hours. You’re just going to get into a fight constantly. So I’ll always try to get them to like make friends with reality. The problem is with goals is you dream and then you plan and dreaming is based on optimism and planning is based on realism. And a lot of people have a hard time making that transition. And so I try to help them ease that transition.

from I’ve got a big, crazy, amazing goal. I dreamed with unfettered limitations and now I want to actually bring it into the real world. How do I do that in a way that is still encouraging? But it also does stretch me. And so that’s always, it’s definitely a dance and it’s why most goals fail. 92 % of all new year’s resolutions according to the University of Scranton fail. Strava did a study of 800 million athletic activities. Biggest fitness tracking up in the world.

John Jantsch (12:26.611)

Okay.

Jon Acuff (12:46.604)

The biggest drop off day they saw was the second Friday in January. So let’s not, let’s not sugar coat that like, if you have a goal, it magically happens. It doesn’t, but man, is it worth it? Like, man, is it worth it?

John Jantsch (12:49.203)

you

John Jantsch (12:53.321)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (12:58.851)

You know, one of the things that I suspect most people, most listeners have, can think back in their life and have seen is that like, I know that if I make something a priority, it’s going to happen. If I wish that something happens, it’s probably not, I’ll fill up my calendar with other stuff. But when, you know, the one everybody always relates to is, know, on April 14th, if I haven’t filed my taxes, all of sudden I got time to figure that out. Right?

Jon Acuff (13:26.68)

Yeah, yeah, I’m motivated, I’m motivated, yeah.

John Jantsch (13:28.115)

Right. And, and I think that that’s true. Probably that, that idea of getting the right, like making something a real priority is the only way you’re going to make it happen.

Jon Acuff (13:39.106)

Yeah, I mean, and you have to figure out what that means to you. Some people are people motivated. So some people are really helped when they have another person who’s holding their feet to the fire. Yeah. And you go, okay, great. Some people are, you know, visually motivated. They need to do that exercise where they cut out the pictures from the magazine and they can envision it. Some of them are, you know, audio motivated where they, they need the Eminem song kicking them off at the gym and they’re going to lose themselves.

So it’s really about figuring out what are the tools you need to get it done? Like what is your kind of set of tools? And for me, I throw thousands of tools at my goals. Like I really, you know, I’ve, now written 10 books. Like this year I will have run 650 miles and walked 450 miles. I read a hundred books a year and there’s people that’ll go, man, that’s a lot.

That feels like a lot. always think, yeah, I want a lot out of life. It is a lot. Like I want a whole, I want to make a lot of money and help a lot of people and, and run a lot of miles, but I just use a lot of tools that make that easy and fun. And I’m always figuring that out and I’m always dialing that in. And you’ve seen the same thing. Like if you spend time with successful people, they’re never accidental. Like nothing in life gets awesome accidentally. I’ve never met somebody who accidentally got in shape.

John Jantsch (14:51.378)

Yeah.

Jon Acuff (14:56.898)

who said, yeah, I was just binge watching Netflix. Next thing you knew, I was doing burpees in the living room. I don’t even remember getting off the couch. I’ve never met somebody who had an awesome marriage accidentally or had an awesome business accidentally. They’re always intentional and they’re very intentional about how they stay motivated to actually commit to the goal.

John Jantsch (15:16.467)

Yeah. And I think another thing is, you know, when you see that person, that you think, wow, look at the level of success, know, you should go back and listen to my first podcast, go back and listen to my first speech, go back and read my first article I wrote.

Jon Acuff (15:28.63)

yeah, dude. Yeah. Brutal. Brutal. My wife still like, so I’ve been public speaking for probably 15, 16 years now. My wife still doesn’t really enjoy to go to my events because she still has PTSD from my first couple of events. She would come and sit there and just watch me. Like it was a suffer fest for me and the audience. And that’s part of it. And so…

That’s the other thing is that we often don’t get to see that process. And I think that’s what people relate to with you is that you share, you share the process. Like entrepreneurs that share the process, are honest and vulnerable and go, yeah, this thing blew it. Like I wrote a book once and the, was, this was a literary magazine that reviewed it. And their last sentence was, you can essentially, you can tell John’s passionate, but ultimately this reads like a pamphlet that got stretched into a book.

That’s every writer’s nightmare that like somebody goes, this could have been a pamphlet. And, but at the same time, I’m like, what’s the trade-off that I wouldn’t have done that? Like, and I didn’t get a book out and then think about, think about, okay, if your first episode stinks, what’s the trade-off? You, you want the episodes to get worse? Of course not. You want to look back and go, wow, I’ve gotten better. Like that’s what you want. And so if you remember that you’re willing to do the work of being like, yeah, dude, that one was rough.

Or like, wow, the crowd didn’t connect on that. like, I wrote that book and it just did not, I’ve written books that didn’t sell and it’s a public failure. And that’s not, that’s not fun, but that’s part of writing a book that does sell.

John Jantsch (17:04.487)

Yes, absolutely. Well, I’ve read research on, and this isn’t everybody, but there’s certainly people out there that are actually afraid of success. It’s like, what’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to my family if I succeed? mean, how do you get people kind of past that barrier if it exists?

Jon Acuff (17:14.795)

yeah.

Jon Acuff (17:23.17)

What depends on what, you know, the cause of their, so it seems like when it comes to a fear of success, there’s like, there’s a couple versions of it. There’s, I can’t be more successful than what I grew up with is an acceptable amount of success. So I can’t make more money than my dad. I can’t make more money than the town I grew up in. there’s also, if I get successful, life will get harder and more complicated. So that is what I call Mo Money Mo Problem Syndrome. The idea that if I make more money, life’s going to get harder and more stressful.

John Jantsch (17:36.595)

Yeah, right, right, right, Yep.

Jon Acuff (17:52.664)

But I’ll tell you, I’ve had no money before and it didn’t make life easier. It didn’t make the problems simpler. or it’s, know, okay, if I get successful, people expect me to be successful every time. Some people like to surprise people. They’re afraid to have expectations. So they’d rather you have no expectations and they show up and then they exceed them. So it depends on which variety of that you have.

John Jantsch (17:57.075)

You’re right. Yep. Right.

Jon Acuff (18:17.868)

But for me, it’s, go, you’re going to have to raise your level of what’s an acceptable amount of success. And one of the ways you do that is in community. So you and I, where we connected was a community of very successful authors. And I can’t speak for your level of success. I was not the most successful person that room by a long shot. And, but being around them, I go, wow. This person, that’s how they did it. They seem like they really love their family. They seem like their life is really fun and they have a level of success.

that I thought came with a lot of complications or maybe like I have this broken soundtrack that says, if you get that successful, you never see your kids and you end up, you don’t really even know your wife. And this guy seems to love his wife and he seems to love his kids. And wow, that breaks my framework. And so now just being around those people challenges me to go, I’m going to raise my own personal definition of what’s an okay amount of success, you know, and see what that looks like. But the other thing for me with that is I’m really deliberate about

John Jantsch (19:01.512)

Yeah.

Jon Acuff (19:14.782)

studying and working with people who have sustainable long-term success. So I’m no longer impressed by the person that has a YouTube channel that’s hot for a year or one book that did well. I’m curious about the guy who’s 40 years into his career, the woman who’s 30 years into her career, who has a family that loves her, has a spouse that loves them, has a business that’s healthy, they’re in moderate health shape. And I go, how did they do that?

John Jantsch (19:24.955)

Yes.

Jon Acuff (19:40.492)

Like how have they not blown it up? How have they not? Cause there’s plenty of examples of leaders who have. And so I treat it pretty serious about how do you, how do you enjoy success and how do you make success not change you?

John Jantsch (19:52.979)

All right. Final question. I’m guessing I could be wrong. There’d be hard to write a book like this, or at least shape the ideas of a book with this like this that you hadn’t experienced a significant goal that you failed to achieve.

Jon Acuff (20:09.428)

yeah, yeah, so I mean…

John Jantsch (20:10.349)

So do share maybe how some of that shaped this book.

Jon Acuff (20:15.02)

Yeah. mean, you could say, I mean, think about this. Like I spent three years working with Dave Ramsey and that was a really amazing experience. And then I ended up starting my own company, which was not successful for a period of time. So there were a lot of people, friends who would say, wow, what you blew it. You were on the radio with 10 million radio listeners. And then the next day you had zero radio listeners. My wife said to me, she said, Hey,

I think it’s going to be hard for you to handle that your next book won’t sell like your last book because you don’t have 10 million radio listeners to talk to about it. And that was a reality. for me, you know, that was a big, that was a big, a big moment to go, wow, I have to start over. Like I started at the bottom of a lot of ladders, in that moment where, you know, so that was definitely one that I would say, okay.

John Jantsch (20:49.363)

Thanks.

Jon Acuff (21:09.162)

I had to start over in that moment, starting my own business in that moment. It’s going to speak to 80 people in a Ramada in January in Effingham, Illinois, when I had been on stage to 10,000 people three months before. I don’t know anybody in the world that would go, this is working. I’m doing it. This is the trajectory. That’s definitely one of them. Then there’s been too many books. There’s books I’ve written that just…

didn’t find the sales market. Like one of my books, Do Over, which is about career transition, it just had the wrong title. And I came up with the title. That’s no, like I don’t, I’m not pointing a single finger that I came up with that title. Seth Godin said it was the greatest career book ever written. That was his endorsement. It’s the best endorsement I’ve ever received and it didn’t sell well. And the reason why, in my opinion, is the phrase do over was so negative to so many people. I saw it as positive.

John Jantsch (21:46.939)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Acuff (22:07.328)

I saw it as a phoenix rising from the ashes, but nobody wanted to give anyone that book. Cause you would never say to a husband, Hey, it’s a book about failures. It’s called do-overs made me think of you. Here you go. But like, no one would give that book and dude, we changed the subtitle from the hardcover to the paperback. Like we did everything and it just didn’t work. And, and I worked as hard as I could on that. I wrote the best book I could. got, you know,

John Jantsch (22:07.419)

Mm-hmm. Right, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (22:15.922)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:24.509)

Huh. Wow.

Jon Acuff (22:34.616)

great feedback from other writers like Seth Godin, but the titling, the way I positioned it, and again, it was me. Like I would love to blame somebody else. It was a guy named Jon Acuff that did that. And so yeah, that was definitely a humbling one.

John Jantsch (22:43.869)

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, John, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you, find out more about your work and your books?

Jon Acuff (22:58.894)

Sure. If you like podcasts, I have a podcast called All It Takes is a Goal, where I interview folks about the goals they’re working on. And then I read all my audio books. So if you’re a listener to audio, I add a ton of bonus content. If you ever write your own book and get to record the audio, add a bunch of bonus content because it’s really fun. So you can check out my two most recent All It Takes is a Goal and Soundtracks, which is about mindset. And then I’m just Jon Acuff everywhere online.

John Jantsch (23:25.189)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road, John.

Jon Acuff (23:31.384)

Yeah, thanks. Great seeing you again, John.

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