
You're probably thinking about goals at this time of year. The ones you set, the ones you hit and yes, the ones you missed too.
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Distribut if you didn't hit your goals this year, it's not because you suck. Nothing's wrong with you. It's because you're setting goals in a way that almost guarantees that you're gonna fail. And the crazy part is, it's actually easy to fix. Most advice out there is just a bunch of hype, a bunch of motivation, a bunch of you gotta want it more. What a bunch of nonsense. Today I'm gonna teach you the real reason you haven't hit your goals and how to fix it in a way that actually works in in your real life. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. The first reason why you haven't hit your goals is simple. You are not setting goals, you're setting wishes. Like you have some sort of lamp and a genie is going to pop out and grant you your wishes. And often this sounds like, I want to make more money, I want to get in shape, I want to, I want to grow my business. These are wishes, they're not outcomes. A real goal includes inputs, the things you actually can control every single day, every single week. And a real business goal looks a lot like this. 10 hours a week of deep work. Publish one piece of long form content, one sales action every day, review progress every Sunday night. Those are goals. They create results. If you can't measure the actions you take, you can't achieve the outcome. It's that simple. I'm going to say it again. If you can't measure the actions, you can't achieve the outcome. The second silent killer of goals is that people try to overhaul their whole life overnight. This does not work. I'm the first to say that I don't recognize the person I was 10 years ago. But it didn't happen from one day to the next. It just happened because I made small changes every single day that compounded. And then 10 years later, later I'm like, wow, my life is totally different. I'm a different person. If you try to set goals for your finances, your business, your health, your relationships, your routines, your hobbies, all at the same time, you are asking for failure. No one can do that. You need to focus on just a couple at a time. I'm giving you the truth that not you, not me, not the most disciplined person in the world can pull that off. Momentum comes from focus and consistent focus. Focus comes from doing less, actually. And one good way to do this is to have one major goal per quarter. Everything else is supporting habits. Now listen, you're going to get better at this year after year and you're going to be able to do more than one goal a quarter. But at the start, just do one and see it through so that you can get a win under your belt and see this actually works, see the fruits of your labor. And I'm saying this knowing I'm speaking to people with jobs, with responsibilities, with businesses they're trying to run, family life, all kinds of stuff. So I want to share with you things that actually create change. And that is just focusing on one thing at a time. And 1/4, 3 months is a good amount of time for you to make meaningful change. The third reason why you haven't hit your goals is that you have no real system. And a lot of people think they're not hitting their goals because they lack motivation. But really what you need is structure. And a lack of structure is a recipe for disaster. You don't have endless willpower, and structure allows you to stay on course. Listen, if you're relying on emotion that is unreliable, emotion is unreliable. You can't count on feeling like doing things all the time. The beauty of systems is that they work even when you don't feel like it. Systems don't care if you're tired. Systems don't care about your mood. You don't hit goals by being inspired. This is what I've learned. You hit goals by building a life where it's harder to fail than to succeed. You see what I'm saying here? You got to build a structure that makes it easy for you to not fail. That's the difference between building a business and thinking about building a business is that you're actually building the system that allows the business to thrive. Reason number four, you never review any. Anything. This is the simplest fix and the one that almost no one does. A lot of people, they have no scorecard. They have no scoreboard to see if they're winning. They don't track progress. They don't review their week. They don't analyze anything if it's working or not. So every week feels the same and your results stay the same because you are not actually checking if you're making progress. A 15 minute weekly review changes everything for you. You could do it at the end of the week or the start of the week, but do it. Here are some questions you need to ask yourself. It's just four questions. Question number one, what did I actually do last week? What did I actually get done? Where did I slip? That's question number two. Where did I slip up? Where do I make mistakes? Where did I kind of fall behind? Question number three, what needs adjusting in next week's plan? And then lastly, what's next week's? Plan. What am I going to do the same? What am I going to do different? It's very simple. And you may want to rewind that just so that you can write it down. But you don't need to overcomplicate this. Those four questions will help you stay on track and give you the structure you need to make progress to hold yourself accountable. Reason number five, you're not hitting your goal is your life is not designed for your goal. This one is brutal but honest. You're trying to hit a goal with a lifestyle designed for the opposite outcome. If you set big goals while living a life that can't support them, you are asking for failure. If you're exhausted after work, if you have no dedicated work block, times to work on your side, hustle, or work on your business. If you sleep badly, if your environment distracts you, your physical and your mental environment distracts you, if your calendar is full of obligations for everyone else except yourself, you are asking for trouble. Your lifestyle is producing exactly the results it's designed to produce. So whatever results you're getting right now, it's because of the lifestyle you have. So if you want different results, you need to change the way you're living your life. It's just that simple. And until that changes, nothing will change. Everyone's deploying AI agents now. They're automating tasks, they're handling workflows and making decisions. But sometimes they mess up and then you're stuck trying to fix it for hours. Unless you're using Rubrik Agent Cloud. As you know, AI agents are pretty powerful. But that also means that they can now create 10 times the damage in 1/10 of the time. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern, and rewind AI agent actions. One platform to help you unleash more agents faster without the risk it's running in the background the whole time, watching what's happening, making sure that things stay on track. You get full visibility, and you can set guardrails so agents don't go rogue. And if something breaks, you just roll it back. It's the only way to get real control without slowing down innovation. If your business relies on AI agents, you need the ability to monitor, govern, and rewind their actions. Right now, my listeners get exclusive early access to Rubrik Agent cloud. Head to rubrik.com that's R U B R I K dot com. You know how busy life gets. But what I love about masterclass is that learning from the world's best just fits right into your day you can explore thousands of bite sized lessons across 13 categories from cooking to writing to business to entrepreneurship, all taught by people who truly mastered their craft. And I find that it's so easy to work it into your routine. You can turn your commute or even your workout into a learning session with their audio mode. Or you can download classes like I do so you can learn anywhere offline, even if you're on a flight. Memberships start at just $10 a month and come with a 30 day money back guarantee. And the results are real. 83% of members have applied something that they've learned and most say it's had a positive impact on their lives. Masterclass lets you learn anytime, anywhere from the best in the world. One class I keep coming back to is James Clears class on developing good repeatable habits. His framework is simple, but it's really incredibly powerful. I've applied a bunch of them in my own business and life. I'm also excited to get into Michael Lewis's class on storytelling. I need to use some of those storytelling principles he teaches with her own content. These classes just make you better personally and professionally. It's such great value. Masterclass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to masterclass.com mba100 for the current offer. That's up to 50% off at masterclass.com mba100masterclass.com mba100 when I was teaching full time, I was a teacher. That was my job for over 10 years before I was a full time entrepreneur. I was building my first business on the side and I missed my goals year after year after year and I was really frustrated. I was really down on myself and I was really beating myself up honestly. And I wasn't hitting my goals, not because I wasn't putting any effort. I was putting time after work and the weekends and even my summer breaks. I was working constantly actually. But my effort had no structure. I I didn't have dedicated hours. I just kind of did it whenever I could instead of when I told myself I had to. I had to realize that I needed deep work blocks where I do deep work. I didn't have a weekly review. I didn't have a simple plan. I didn't ask myself those questions and hold myself accountable. I had ambition, I wanted it. But I had no foundation or system. So what I'm sharing with you today is out of experience. I've been through the frustration you're going through and probably a bit more too. So I'm sharing, sharing with you what has worked for me in hopes that you can apply it and see how it works out for you. Because the moment I built a system, I had fixed weekly work sessions, minimal distractions, I had a scorecard. Everything changed, like literally within months. The business took off. My side hustle started to make more and more money. And I was actually shocked. I was like, oh, I was just kind of doing this haphazardly thinking that I was going to get a result. It's only because I leveled myself. And I said, hey, I got to figure out a better way to do this because I can't compete with people that are doing business full time. I'm in a full time job doing this halftime, you know, doing this part time as a side hustle. How am I going to compete with them if I have no structure? I'm actually shooting myself in the foot and making it more difficult than it needs to be. And the biggest takeaway of all this is that I started to do better. Not because I suddenly became more disciplined. It's because I finally built a life that supported the person I was trying to become. Here's a trap that keeps people stuck. They think they need more discipline, they need more motivation, they need more willpower. They don't. You don't. You need clarity. You need structure. You need boundaries around your time. You need your environment to match the goals. Most people fail because they expect their lives to stay the same while the results magically change. It doesn't work like that. Think about it for a moment. Think about when you went to a conference or some sort of event where they had a structured day and they had sessions and lunch and networking, working, right? Why did all of a sudden you started to feel more creative and you had all these ideas and you felt inspired and you felt good about business is because you put yourself in the environment to feel that way. The structure was there for that to manifest. Heck, last time you went on holiday, why did you feel so energetic and adventurous and a sense of wonderment? Because you created a structure for that. You have a hotel and you have breakfast and you set out an itinerary and you have, you know, excursions and you're learning and you're going to museums and you're feel uncultured. The structure of the environment creates who you are. Like they say, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. If your system is random, your results will be random at best. Now, if your systems are Structured. Your results will be structured. Consistency isn't a personality trait. Is designed through the environment you create. So I want to put you on action. I want to give you a four step goal system that's going to help you achieve what you want in 2020. Me give you a system I personally use and what I teach inside of our program. The $100 MBA. Step 1 Choose one 90 day goal. One target, one outcome. Everything else becomes secondary. Step 2 Pick the three non negotiables. Three weekly behaviors that guarantee movement and progress. For a business school, for example, this might be 10 hours of deep work publishing one long form piece of content like a long video or a podcast episode. Or maybe it's three smaller pieces of content. One sales action per day. These are clear things you can do to achieve the business goals you want. Align the action to the goal that you have picked for that 90 day goal. If it's a health goal, three workouts a week, 10k steps a day, a protein target. These are things you are in your control that you can do that will lead you to the results you're looking for. Notice I'm giving you actions as examples. Your actions are the goals because they're going to lead you to the outcomes you want, whether you like it or not. That's the point. The actions will lead you to what you want. Step 3 Put them in your calendar. Don't say I will do this. Hopefully I'll get around to it when I find time. No, schedule it and protect it. These things are sacred to you because it's what's going to lead to what you want out of life. It's going to change your life. So give it the respect it deserves. STEP 4 Weekly review. Take 15 minutes every Sunday night or Monday morning, whatever works for you. And ask yourself those questions I gave you and adjust, refine, reset. This is how adults actually hit goals is that they look at what they've done and they evaluate. Should I do more of that, less of that? Do I do something different so that I can continue to grow? What did I do right? What did I do wrong? Course correct? One of the things I learned from playing basketball for years. I've been playing basketball for over what, 35, 40 years. One of the things you learn about basketball is about how to refine, how to adjust. Every time I shoot a shot in basketball, what do I think about? Well, the first thing I think about is too long, too short, too right, too left. That's it. That's all basketball is. When you're shooting a shot so I mentally quickly adjust. Next time I take a shot, I need to go a little bit higher. Or next time I take a shot, I need to make sure that my elbow's tucked in so it's straight and lined up with the rim. It's not going left to right. I'm telling you, in life, in business, it's that simple. If you do those things, you'll be golden. And you'll not only hit your goals, you will build the muscle of knowing how to achieve things. It's an empowering feeling. You're like, wow, I can actually pull things off because I'm building a system around the things I want. So what else can I do? What else can I accomplish? What else can I get out of life? It's pretty exciting. If you found this episode helpful in any way, go ahead and share it with somebody that you know, somebody you think that would benefit from this episode. Send them a message or tell them in person when you see them next. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You're not behind, you're not broken, and you're not unmotivated. You just haven't built the structure that you need that is required to achieve your goals. But here's the key. In order for you to reach the goals that you want, the things you want to get out of life, out of your business, it's going to require you to change. Now, change means changing what you do, and what you do every day makes you a different person, which is a great thing. Which means you're growing. That means you're becoming something that is worthy of the things that you want out of life, the things that you want to achieve. Those things are waiting for you, but they require you to become somebody new to get there. And you can do that with that structure, with the practices I shared with you today. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast, hit subscribe, or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or ever, you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. And it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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Hear that? That's me in Tokyo, learning to make sushi from a master. How did I get here? I invested wisely. Now the only thing I worry about is using too much wasabi. Get where you're going with spy, the world's most traded etf. Getting there starts here with State Street Investment Management.
C
Before investing, consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. Visit statestreet.com im for prospectus containing this and other information. Read it carefully. SPY is subject to risks similar to those of stocks. All ETFs are subject to risk, including possible loss of principal. Alps Distributors Inc. Distributor.
Podcast Summary: The $100 MBA Show – MBA2719 "Why You Haven't Hit Your Goals"
Episode Overview In this practical and candid episode, Omar Zenhom explores the real reasons why people consistently miss their goals, both in business and in life. Drawing from personal experience, he dismisses "just try harder" motivational fluff, instead breaking down the structural, psychological, and practical shifts that can get you from wishful thinking to hitting your objectives. The episode is filled with actionable advice, memorable analogies, and a no-nonsense four-step system anyone can apply.
Step 1: Choose One 90-Day Goal
Step 2: Pick Three Non-negotiables
Step 3: Schedule and Protect Your Actions
Step 4: Weekly Review
Basketball Analogy (18:40–19:00)
Summary Omar’s straight-talking episode exposes the flawed ways most of us set goals and why success comes not from wishful thinking or raw motivation, but from practical systems, tightly defined actions, and honest structures that support your ambitions. His four-step goal-setting framework offers a repeatable system for making meaningful progress in business and life — and proof that with focus and structure, big change is possible for anyone.
Recommended Action Adopt the four-step system for your next goal, focus on actions you can directly control, and establish a weekly review ritual to course-correct in real time. Remember, the path to achievement is built, not wished into being.