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Day Five: The Plan Welcome the fifth and final day. You’re just one training away from completing the program and becoming a card-carrying member of the

balance shifters. Not sold on that name. If you’ve got a better one, pass it along. So you’ve learned how to build a balance, with the right type of goal, strong incentives, and weak deterrents. You’re ready to rock.

Ah, but not so fast. The point of this program isn’t about action in general--it’s about the right actions, the right plan. Shifting the balance one time

isn’t what we’re after. We need a shift the remains in place over the life of your goal and that requires a particular plan, a plan with five particular qualities. For the last time, I’ll see you inside.

As much as you’ll want to leap into action—if you built the right type of balance—don’t. The point of all our work together isn’t action in general

but the right actions taken at the right time, the right way. That’s why the first and most important quality is to follow a proven plan as your guide.

Not all moves are good moves. If you do the wrong things, even with the best of intentions, the balance will start to slide toward inaction—you’ve just added deterrents by adding missteps to the mix. Mistakes, as we

know, are to be expected and can be helpful, but even the strongest among us will eventually give up if our actions don’t eventually produce results.

Copyright © 2017 FranklinMoxie. All Rights Reserve

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Day Five: The Plan The thing is, this happens constantly. People have the goal, incentives, and deterrents just where they wan them and dive into action. When it doesn’t

work as hoped, the balance is hit. Sometimes that’s all it takes, other times a few more hits will do the job. Incentives shrink, deterrents grow, and the goal is ditched.

I have a great example. I really liked Bach’s cello suites, so on a whim I bought a cello. My goal was to learn the intro to his Cello Suite No 1.

Turned out buying a cello online without any knowledge of the instrument is a really bad idea. It was cheap, and that was my first misstep. A knock to the balance.

Next, I launched into trying to play the song. I think you can guess what happened. With no lessons, no practice, not a clue how to actually play,

well, it didn’t sound great. Another hit to the balance. I was so excited about the idea of playing the song, but then I did everything wrong and the balance shifted toward inaction. The cello looks great in our living room,

but it’s never played a full song in its life. But it still looks good to have. The right actions, on the other hand, make for a much better story. When

you do something that works, you get progress. That progress is a reward that adds to the incentives and drives us even more to keep going.


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Day Five: The Plan Confidence is built, fear is reduced, and the shift is maintained. I might have failed miserably at cello, but guitar was a different story. This time

around, I did it right. Good, solid guitar, experienced teacher, and lots of practice. It wasn’t easy, but I did manage to improve, day after day, night after night, trying to follow along with Boston and Led Zeppelin and

Lynyrd Skynyrd. Every new chord learned, every new song mastered offered a new reward

and made me that much more excited to keep going. After twenty years, I’m not too shabby and I’ve had a great time playing. Goal achieved.

There are two ways to uncover those right actions: First, you could try to figure them out on your own. You could go at it through trial and error, hoping you figure things out before the balance shifts against you, all the

while wasting time, energy, and potentially money trying to figure out what someone else has already figured out, which brings us to option number two.

We talked about the fact that other people have already achieved your goals—this was a reason to have confidence and overcome fear. It’s also a

reason to avoid reinventing the wheel. Why start from scratch when you don’t have to? Why guess your way forward when someone else has


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Day Five: The Plan already found the way? It’s the fastest way to failure, so do me and yourself a huge favor and always—always—base your actions, your plan to reach

your goal, on a proven model that is guaranteed to deliver results. You’ll make the right moves, you’ll make progress, and you’ll make sure the balance stays tipped toward action.

Think about my chances of playing guitar if I had just plopped my fingers on any old strings and started strumming. If I had just guessed. It would

be the cello all over again. What chance would I have of figuring out the right way to play if I just relied on trial and error? Absolutely none. What’s true for learning guitar is true for all goals. You need to follow the right

steps and you need to base those steps on a model you already know works.

Where to find such models? They’re everywhere. We live at a time when people can and do record their every move and lesson learned on their way to success and share it with the world.

Through books, through articles, through videos and audios, through classes and courses, people have outlined, step by step, how to achieve any

result you can imagine: what to do, what not to do, what pitfalls to avoid, what shortcuts to take, and, my favorite, what incentives make the biggest


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Day Five: The Plan impact. These are all great tools, and I’ve used every one of them, but my favorite is the coach or mentor.

Nothing compares to learning directly from someone who has already done what you want to do. Nothing. The feedback, the support, the

insights, the detailed advice on what to do and how to do it—they will do more to help you achieve your goal than anything else. Like we talked about yesterday, you can find these people through community groups or

services, national organizations, social media, online courses and workshops, or by simply hiring a coach online: search for your goal, visits the sites of experts offering help, and sign up with the best of the bunch.

When I started shooting videos for my online brand, I did it all on my own, all trial and error, and it took forever. The camera, the lighting, the editing

and uploading…I spent so many hours online searching for answers, or at least clues to answers. I finally did figure it out, but it cost a lot of money and wasted a ton of time.

When starting the podcast for FranklinMoxie, my company, I decided to follow a proven model, a step-by-step guide offered by an expert coach.

Took me twenty minutes and the quality is equal to the videos that took me months to figure out.


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Day Five: The Plan It’s not always within our means to hire a coach or work with a mentor, and that’s okay; there are plenty of sources to learn from. What’s not

optional is following a proven plan. Resist the urge to figure it out all by yourself and instead copy what already works.

The second quality I want your plans to have is a schedule. Good would be to give the overall goal a deadline. Great would be to give important benchmarks deadlines along with an overall completion date. As always,

the more specific, the better. Humans naturally want to put things off because, as you know, the brain

likes comfortable, safe routines. Goals throw that comfort out of whack, so if there is no deadline to your work, it’s one more loophole for procrastination to take advantage of. If you have forever to do it, why

rush? A short delay can easily turn into never, so we have to do what we can to

counteract it, and timelines are another tool to do that—along with your main incentives. Yes, they bring even more focus to the goal, making it even more concrete, and they give you a great measure of whether or not

you’re staying on track, but what I love the most is how they add a reward and a cost to the incentive side of every balance.


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Day Five: The Plan Stick with the timeline and you get that burst of reward; it always feels great to meet a deadline. At the same time, you have a cost—don’t do the

work and you miss the deadline, something no one likes. Simple, but effective.

One more bit of advice. Yes, humans like to procrastinate, but they also like to fill every minute of the time allotted to get something done. I just heard a great example to demonstrate this: Give five kids two hours to

rake a lawn and they’ll take five hours to do it. Give two kids an hour to rake that same lawn and they’ll get it done. We take the time we’re given—even when that timeline is artificial—and then mold our actions around it,

filling every last minute, so don’t give yourself too much time. Because if you do, you’ll take it.

Third, I want you to track the progress of your plans. Listen, I know it’s not the most exciting of things we’ve covered, but if you’re serious about your goal, it’s a must. What gets measured, as they say, gets improved. Or,

as they also say, what gets measured gets done because tracking your progress keeps you on track, keeps you focused, and it keeps the balance shifted.

What exactly do I mean by tracking your progress? That depends on your


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Day Five: The Plan goal. In general, there are two types: goals that are built around numbers and goals that are built around benchmarks. For instance, saving money is

a numbers-based goal, just like losing weight or selling widgets—the goal is to hit a certain number. In that case, tracking involves keeping tabs on your numbers each day or week, either in your journal or in a spreadsheet.

Other goals, though, aren’t so clear. Wanting to travel the world is harder to reduce to numbers—although I bet you could do it with a little

creativity. In these cases, track the benchmarks you need to reach to make it happen. For example, take that goal to travel—there are a list of things that need to happen in order for you to make the trip: planning the route,

choosing sites to see, getting a Visa, making contacts, and the like. Tracking this goal could involve making a laundry list of tasks and checking them off as you go.

Of course you can use whatever approach works for you, as long as you use something to track your progress. But why? Why does it matter? As with

everything we’ve covered, it’s all about the balance. It’s easy to miss the progress we’re making from the 10,000-foot view

most of us take with our goals. We think about how close we are to the finish line and the distance turns us off. The big picture hides the truth.


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Day Five: The Plan We miss the daily advances, the line on our charts that is steadily heading up. We miss the small successes that could serve as weights added to the

balance, rewards that have the potential to consistently drive you. We also miss the chance to increase our confidence and decrease our fear; success, of any size, proves we can do it while wiping away the fear that we can’t.

We miss it all when we don’t keep tabs on how we’re doing. A good friend wrote a fiction book a few years ago. On his way, he kept

focusing on whether or not the book was done and it always took the wind out of his sails; it seemed like such a massive undertaking. He sent me a few samples of the writing and I realized he was getting thousands of

words written each week. I told him so and it shifted his perspective. He realized that, in fact, he was getting a lot of words down of paper and every week brought him closer to completion.

Tracking your progress shifts your focus from how far you are from the end to how much closer you’re getting each day. That makes a difference.

But wait, there’s more! Tracking your progress also reveals problems before they have a chance to become disasters, undoing the balance you’ve

worked so hard to shift. It’s like wanting to lose weight but not tracking the pounds lost—how would you know if your plan is working?


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Day Five: The Plan I remember working as a marketing manager out of college and scratching my head at the lack of tracking our marketing. We’d spend money on ads

and then hope it worked. Did it? No idea. But we kept spending like it did. When I finally got tracking codes into our coupons and inserts, we found out, for the first time, that certain spots worked great while others were

duds. It told us, clearly, what worked and what didn’t. Only possible through tracking.

If we kept pouring money into ads that didn’t work, we’d have been dealing with a much bigger problem, which is what happens with the balance. A small problem that could easily be fixed goes unnoticed and

eventually snowballs into a negative too heavy to overcome. But when you know what’s actually going on, day by day, you’ll catch problems early, make the necessary changes, and save the shifts.

Fourth, I want your plans to be flexible. I imagine someone who has held onto a dream for more years than they can remember, never doing but

only dreaming. Then, one day, they decide to go for it. They stick their head up and, without notice, they get smacked down. They instantly jerk back, retreating to safety and vowing never to try that again.

That’s what I want to save you from. I’ve seen it, my readers and clients


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Day Five: The Plan have experienced it, and I’ve even done it. You finally get the courage to take a shot and when things go wrong, you scurry back to the comfort of

routine and chastise yourself for being silly enough to try. This is what happens when you don’t expect things to go wrong. This is

what happens when you can’t accept it for what it is. This is what happens when you’re unable to learn from your mistakes.

I know this is a rehash of yesterday’s chat about the fear of failure, but it’s among the most common reasons people quit, if not the single biggest cause, so I want to send you off with armor on, ready for the reality of

progress. It’s not always a smooth road. It has bumps and detours. But if you stick with it, you’ll get to wherever you’re going.

So I’m going to echo what my friend told me before my wedding: expect things to go wrong. Expect it. If you're doing something new and challenging, it will happen. It has to. Know that it’s all part of the game, all

part of achieving goals, all part of becoming more than you are now. Expect that not everything will go as planned or hoped. Because when you expect it, it can’t throw you. It can’t catch you off guard and ruin your

plans.


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Day Five: The Plan Then, accept it. It happened and no amount of wishing it away will change that fact. I also want you to accept that mistakes happened, not because

you don’t have what it takes but simply because the wrong steps were followed—it’s simple cause and effect and not a sign of your inability.

Step outside yourself and accept it rationally as a mere miscalculation. The quicker you accept the facts, the quicker you can regain your footing and benefit from your mistake, which is the third bit of advice: learn from your

mistakes. Doing the wrong thing once is understandable, but doing it twice is just lazy. What happened, why, and how can you avoid it in the future or use it to make you better?

When our daughter was learning to sit up and then to crawl, she made a ton of mistakes. She’d tip over when she lifted her feet or an arm would get

stuck under her when she’d crawl and she’d topple forward. We didn’t rush her to the pediatrician thinking that she didn’t work. We knew it was all part of the process. We all know this. When it comes to babies, it’s

obvious. But we’re no different. Our goals are just like sitting up and crawling. It’s a process that

occasionally falls over and drools. As long as the overall arc is heading in the right direction, that’s what matters. You’ll get there and you won’t be


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Day Five: The Plan thrown off by mistakes. Today she’s a crawling machine…oh how I miss those days when she’d be in the same place where we left her.

We’ve talked a lot about people. Yesterday we covered how they can help reduce your fears and today we saw how a coach or mentor can make all

the difference in your plans. And that’s how it is in life overall, isn’t it? People make all the difference.

We don’t live in a bubble, and we wouldn’t survive if we did. For most of us our fondest memories are about people, our biggest moments are about people, our largest leaps forward involve other people. So it only seems

fitting that we wrap the qualities of a great plan with people. Either with one other person or a group of people, make your goals a team

effort. Bring other people into the mix, either as a partner in crime, chasing the same goals or as an accountability partner who is there to help keep you focused and moving forward.

Everything is better with the right people by your side. Mistakes are easier to laugh off, setbacks are easier to overcome, doubts are easier to ignore,

fears are easier to quiet, challenges are easier to face. And every positive is made better: new ideas are more exciting, progress is more rewarding, and


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Day Five: The Plan victory is never sweeter, not to mention the joy you get from helping someone else achieve one of their goals. The right people diminish the

negatives and amplify the positives. My wife is my biggest partner, so I get to see the perks of people up close

and personal. Every time I have a new idea to run by her, she gets as excited as me, which only spurs me on even more. When something doesn’t work, she’s there to remind me that we’ve been here before and

found a way. When I doubt myself, she wants to knock me on the head but instead reminds me of everything I’ve been able to do. I wouldn’t be where I am without her, no question about it. People make all the difference.

Along with making everything easier or better, they also bring fresh ideas and viewpoints and experiences and solutions and advice. Not to mention

accountability; it’s too easy to let things slide when you’re accountable to no one but yourself.

They double your resources, even more so when you’re working in a group. They can help you uncover incentives that you never before considered just as they can knock deterrents right off the balance with a perspective

you lack because you’re too close to the goal. It’s so easy to talk ourselves out of doing something when no one hears the conversation. The moment


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Day Five: The Plan you voice your doubts or fears, they can be questioned, challenged. Sometimes that’s all it takes to snap out it and start taking action.

Sometimes all it takes to achieve your goal is sharing it with someone else. It all comes down to this: five days, five ideas, all designed to help you take

that first of many steps. Everything we’ve done has led to this moment, the moment of truth, when learning and thinking and planning come to an end and you have to actually do something. Nevertheless, with all we’ve

done, people still hesitate. Taking that first step is the hardest part because that’s when fear is at its

strongest, when everything is an unknown. With this in mind, there’s one final piece of advice I want to leave you and that’s to kick things off with a laughably simple task. Make it micro.

Just like we talked about yesterday with overcoming the fear of following through by reducing the ask, if you’re hesitating at the moment of action,

make it micro. If starting is the hardest part, it only makes sense to make that start as simple, as easy, as small and as unthreatening as possible. And then letting momentum take it from there. It’s all about reducing

those deterrents so that the incentives easily win.


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Day Five: The Plan That’s been my goal this entire time: Help you form a crystal clear goal, overwhelm it with incentives, reduce the fears, and kick things off with a

simple task. It’s how we stack the deck in your favor, lining up an avalanche of positives to motivate a teeny tiny action so you can’t lose. And after you take that action, and get that pop of reward in your brain,

you’ll want to continue, your incentives will build, your fears will quiet, and you’ll keep going.

Keep it simple. Start with a phone call, with a conversation, with lacing up the shoes, with turning on the stove, with saying no, with saying yes, with checking out a book, with watching a video, with an invitation, with one

person. The easier you make that first step, the more likely you’ll be to take it.

Another reason this is so effective is that counteracts the snowball effect. It’s so easy to build up our goals into these complex monstrosities. We get

ahead of ourselves and let our imaginations run wild, but not in a good way. Our neighbor is a brilliant guy, especially when it comes to business and accounting. He’s in the process of helping his parents get control of

their money to set up a comfortable retirement. And he’s making a real difference because most people at that stage aren’t sure where to start or


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Day Five: The Plan how to take advantage of the technology we take for granted.

We chatted a while ago about doing this for people other than his parents, and he loved it. It would be meaningful work, work that made a difference, and he knew his stuff; it would be a valuable service. But then the cascade

began. When I mentioned testing out his idea, the wheels of doubt began to

turn—how would he handle all the clients, where would he get an office, who would set up the website, what if the rules for insurance were to change? He was building out a massive undertaking before he even got

started and, naturally, more and more deterrents climbed onto the balance.

He was excited at the start—when it was focused and simple—but overwhelmed at the end, all because he took his eye off that first, simple step. I told him that a lot of things are going to come up down the road and

he’ll figure it out, just like he always has, but right now it’s all about taking one micro step forward—talk with one person who’s nearing retirement about their needs. That’s it. Ignore everything else.

Ignore what could happen down the road. For now, today, think only of


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Day Five: The Plan that one person and that one conversation over coffee. You could see the weight fall from his shoulders. He let out a sign of relief. And he was ready

to go. I’m sure you’ve seen this happen yourself. It happens all the time, more

often than not actually, so to guard against this snowball effect we make it micro. Push aside the future for just a moment and focus on the very first step in front of you. You’ll have a worthwhile goal and you’ll have what it

takes to make it happen. Yes, you’ll have to figure out a lot of details down the road—and you will—but at the birth of a new idea, keep it simple.

You made it! You reached the end of Day 5 and are now a card-carrying member of the balance shifters. Seriously, congratulations on seeing this through to the end and on learning what I truly believe to be the most

important skill you will ever learn. When you can shift the balance, you can do anything.

To quickly sum up this final day, remember that action by itself is not the point—you need to take the right actions, more often than not, to make progress, to increase your incentives, and to decrease your deterrents. As

always, it’s about protecting those initial shifts. We do that by copying what works. There’s no need to guess your way forward and risk undoing


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Day Five: The Plan all your work. Instead, you can model your plan after what others have already done.

When that plan is in place, put it on a schedule and keep track of how things are going. Both of those will further boost the incentives and

weaken the deterrents. And be ready for things to go wrong. Don’t expect a perfect plan—it doesn’t exist. Expect mistakes, mishaps, and failures. That way, they can’t catch you off guard or throw you off course. You’ll know

they’re coming and you’ll be ready. Finally, don’t do all of this alone. Life is a team sport. Bring others into the mix and you’ll find that negatives are easier to overcome and positives are more exciting to pursue.

Last but not least, what this whole program has been about, make that first step of your plan as easy to take as possible. Then make it easier.

For the last time, get your journal out, and write down what that first micro step is for your GPG. What’s the smallest step necessary to kick

things off? Then, by the end of today—yes, today—take it. With all of the things you want to accomplish after today, you’ll be able to use every step of the balance-shifting process that we covered.

But that doesn't mean you’re off the hook with your practice goal. If you’ve


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Day Five: The Plan done the assignments up to this point, you’ve still chosen a specific, personal, and powerful goal, you’ve pinpointed your strongest incentives,

and you’ve reduced your fears to words on paper. That’s enough to motivate a massive step forward, let alone a micro one. So prove to yourself that this isn’t going to be another letdown, prove that you do have

what it takes, that you’re not like everyone else, that your life is going to be something more, mean something more, and take that first step. Then don't stop.

You did it. You completed the program and you now have a skill that will serve you for the rest of your life. No matter what you want in the future,

just run it through the program, shift the balance, and make it happen. And remember, when you do, tell me about it. Send your story to [email protected] and I’ll be forever grateful. Your success is my

motivation, my strongest incentive. As we wrap our time together, I have one last piece of advice. I know how

exciting a new idea can be and I know how much of that excitement can turn into fear and doubt overnight. You have time to think, worry has time to snowball, and a balance ready to shift the day before wakes up firmly

tipped toward inaction. Happens all the time. It’s only natural. Our minds seek out safety and comfort, but our goals are worth the risk.


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Day Five: The Plan So when you feel that fear rising up, when you start to doubt that great idea, I want you to lean on your strongest incentives--remember why you

set this goal in the first place--and I want you to keep it simple. Think only about that first step, that simple act to get things rolling.

More details will need to be figured out down the line, and you’ll figure them out, but right now, at the beginning, remember that reason and take that step.

That’s all folks. My very best to you and yours.


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