- Welcome to Firm Learning. I hope you all had a
great Christmas holiday. I for sure spent some
great time with my family. We are now outside taking
a little Christmas walk. Hope indeed you also
find some time to relax and to recharge your batteries
in these difficult times. So today I have a very
special video idea for you. I will talk about how to set
goals and objectives for 2021. And I use a system that
also large companies use to set their goals for
the whole corporate level. And this is a system that is called OKRs, objectives and key results. You might have already heard about it. It's a pretty common,
pretty well-known system. And today I'm going to show you how you can adapt the system,
simplify it a little bit, but make it work for your
personal life as well. So welcome to another video here with me with Firm Learning. My name is Heinrich. I'm a former McKinsey consultant. And on my channel, I try to
help you to become successful in the first years of your career. But now without further
ado, let's jump into it, so see you in a moment. So welcome back home, and let's start by talking
about how to set this up in the right way. From an Instagram survey, I know that many of you are not used yet into this whole process of structured goal
setting for the next year. And if this is you, if you do not have clear
goals for the next year yet, or maybe you have some things in mind, but not really a structured process of how to put this on paper, I would just encourage you to try it out. Try it out this year and test for yourself whether this makes a difference for you. And of course, I hope
that with this video, I can provide you a framework that can work well for you as well. The next question that
then always comes is, "Okay how do I do it?
How do I write it down?" And of course here there
isn't the one correct thing that you need to follow. You can do it on pen and paper. You can do it in a note program
like OneNote or Evernote. Personally, I just like to do it in Excel because it's a tool I often work in. So I will now show you how I
write down my goals in Excel. So if you do that, if you
do write it down in Excel, or maybe you also use some
other technologies like this, what I would encourage you is to not just make a new document that then you save somewhere and then very likely
will just forget about it and never look at it again, but rather include it in a document, include it as a tab in a spreadsheet that you naturally open
up on a regular basis. So maybe you already have
a spreadsheet that you use for some other things
related to personal growth. And by this, you make sure
that you naturally will open up this document several times
over the upcoming year. And this then always is an opportunity to look back into the step, to look back into what you wrote down now at the end of the year to remind you of what
you wanted to achieve. So what is the methodology
for goal-setting that I can very much recommend
and really use for myself? This methodology is called
objectives and key results, OKRs. And maybe you've already heard about it. It got quite popular in the last years in the corporate world. To my knowledge, it was
first described by Andy Grove in his book "High Output Management." Andy Grove was the former Intel CEO. He wrote this book,
very worthwhile reading. He talks about lots of
other topics as well. It is included in the link
in the video description where I talk about my
book recommendations. So pick this up, very, very
big recommendation from me. But there is a chapter in here about MBO, management by objectives, which is a bit of an old
management methodology that was quite popular several years ago. And out of these ideas, the system of OKRs has
been developed over time. Today, OKRs are used by many startups, but also larger corporations
like Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Intel, and the like. Now, one could make a full
course about what OKRs are and how to implement them,
but the basic idea is that you break down your
goals into objectives. So this is the O of OKRs. But then you just
aggregate every objective into some key results,
some clear, measurable, key results that you want to achieve, then together will lead
you towards this objective that you set for yourself as a goal. Now, we will soon look
into a couple of examples how I did this for myself. But just one other idea I
want you to understand is that the idea is that the key results that you set for yourself,
they should be stretch goals. They should be very ambitious. And the idea is that you should be okay if you achieve 60 to
70% of that key result. So be bold, set some ambitious targets which might be achievable, but maybe where you would also be okay if you're maybe only achieve
60 to 70% of them after all. So now let's look into a couple of OKRs that I set for myself for the next year. As some of my OKRs are quite personal, please understand that
I took out some of them, but still I believe that this will give
you a very good insight into this whole system works. Let's jump into it. I will now look at my
screen to look into the OKRs that I set for myself. So first of all, I would
like to encourage you to think about what might be
groups that work for yourself, how you can cluster and
aggregate your goals. Personally, I have three main areas that I wanna focus on next year. First are some professional goals. Second, some health and sports goals. And third, some other additional
personal growth goals. These might be categories that
work well for you as well, or maybe you also might need to adapt them a little bit to your needs. So let's go into the professional goals. And here I just wanna make it clear that these are now only my
goals related to Firm Learning. I have some professional goals regarding my full-time job as well, but due to confidentiality reasons, I don't wanna disclose
them here in the video. So first of all, I have goals
for my three main channels that I wanna focus on next year, and this is YouTube,
Instagram, and LinkedIn. What you see here is that I first of all have the goal on top, and then I have some key results that I wanna achieve that are supposed to back up this objective
that I write on top. So for YouTube, it is to
become the leading career and consulting creator on YouTube. YouTube still is my main channel. I'm still incredibly
grateful about the growth that I experienced this year, and of course I hope that I'll be able to sustain this over
the next months as well. The key activity of course
that I wanna continue to do is to release a quality video
every single week for you guys. And by this, I hope that I will be able to increase my subscriber
account over the next months. What you see here now, what I also have for many
of my other key results is that I try to attach time stamps to them. So here now, each quarter, I always feel like it's
much more straightforward to disaggregate the goal into the quarter so that then each quarter you can review where you stand against the goal. This will also enable
you to, if necessary, maybe revise or update the
goal throughout the year instead of realizing that
after one or two quarters, you pretty much are completely
off track of the goal and have no way anymore how to achieve it. Now, for me to come up with
these specific subscriber goals, I looked into my Social Blade, looked into what they
projected for my channel. Of course, for me, the perspective of reaching 300,000 subscribers at the end of next year
would be just crazy. It would just be completely insane to me. Just the perspective of
reaching 100,000 subscribers next year would be an
immense achievement for me and much more than I
would ever have hoped for. So please do not misunderstand this. I will by no means be disappointed if I do not reach these
300,000 in the end. But again, I do wanna set
a stretch goal for myself, and this is based on my
Social Blade analytics. Similar to that is Instagram. Here, my main objective really
is to become more consistent in the next year by creating one regular post
every week on Instagram. I have not been very
consistent on Instagram over the last months,
but I do wanna change and improve this now in the next year. So if you're not following
me on Instagram yet, my handle is firmlearning. I have lots of great
content lined up for you on Instagram for the next month. So check out my Instagram
channel and follow it if you're interested in these things. Besides Instagram, another
channel that is really important for me for the next year is LinkedIn. I wanna create two regular posts per week on LinkedIn next year and also create one
long-form article per month. I do see LinkedIn as an important platform for the focus of my Firm
Learning activities. I do wanna put the effort
in it that it's worth and then indeed have the
hope that I will be able to achieve these follower targets that I'm setting for myself. The next one is a new topic, though if you're already
following me on my Instagram, you will already have heard about it because in the next year I will release a major new educational
offering for all of you. The working title of this
is "The Analyst Bootcamp," though I still might change
the title, and the idea is that I wanna create a
full comprehensive course of how to be successful in the
first years of your career. So based on the setting of
being a young consultant who joins a team, I will teach
you key communication skills, key Access skills, key PowerPoint skills, skills about how to behave in meetings, how you interact with your leadership, with your other colleagues, how you navigate politics
and organizations, many more topics like this. This would be a topic that
will go significantly beyond what you might have already seen from me on the Udemy course. I will probably not host this on Udemy, but on a new platform that I will create. To be transparent, it will be
sold at a higher price point of the courses that you
already know from me, but this is something where I trust that I will be able to deliver great value for everybody who's interested in it. So I'm so excited about releasing
this sometime next year. The exact release date is not defined yet, but of course I will keep
you posted here on YouTube. If you wanna have the
latest information on that, please, again, also follow
me on the Instagram. So for this course, I hope
to complete the base version at the end of the first quarter. Of course, I have some objectives in mind of how many of you will sign up and then join me in this new offering. Next area of goals is my
health and sports-related goal. So my first objective here is to get back into marathon shape. So I ran my first marathon in 2018 and then my second one in 2019. Initially, I wanted to do one every year, and I was already signed
up for a marathon in 2020, but then of course it got canceled due to the current situation. So if the situation allows, I would love to do a new marathon in 2021. And the main rationale for
me is just that I realized that I just need such a goal. I just need such an event
to really keep me motivated to keep me training. If I do not have such
an objective in mind, such a reason why I should train, then it's really hard to motivate myself to really go out every
week and do the kilometers. This is just why it's so important for me to have such an event to look forward to and then to train for. So in this first, I set myself as a goal
to run a baseline mileage of 100 kilometers per month. So this is of course not enough to get into a good marathon shape, but this is kind of the minimum
that I wanna do every month. Then in the first quarter, I
wanna set up a training plan and start following it for the marathon. And then hopefully
around the third quarter, I will be able to
participate in the marathon. So far in my first two marathons, I was able to always run sub four hours, and I hope to again be able to do that. So honestly, I'm not in the
perfect form at the moment, which is why I'm a bit hesitant to now set myself an
even more ambitious goal. So let's try just to get back in form, do a marathon sub four hours, and then this would be fine for me. Another goal from me this
year for sure is also to spend more time outside. I also realized over the last day, so I had a bit more time to
spend outside with my family, how great this is, how important this is, and it's so easy just
to spend the whole day in front of your desk, in
front of your computer. But this is just a topic
that is really something that I aspire to for the
upcoming year as well. And in this context, my wife,
who you see here behind me, actually also made a YouTube
channel here recently. It is called Health & Growth, and she is talking about topics
like how to stay healthy, how to grow in your life, also at work. So if you find this
interesting, I will leave a link to her channel below in
the video description. And actually you already saw
her a couple of months ago where we made a video about
how you can stay healthy on your job by working
in a high-paced career. Then the next point is
now to try a new sport. So I would like to find
a new sport that I can do in parallel to the running,
just to mix it up a little bit and just try to do
something completely else. I already tried out a couple
of things over the last years, but I didn't really find
something that sticks, so now I have a couple of
new ideas for next year. Which one exactly I
will pick for next year also depends a bit on
my life circumstances. There are a couple of things
happening currently in my life where I do not know yet how exactly this will play out next year. Once this is more clear, I will of course inform you on that. But depending on how this goes, I might pick the one or the other sports. And then once this is clear, I hope to be able to come into a routine where I then attend this
practice once per week. So the third area on my
personal growth-related goals, and here I have two ones, and the first is to
complete my PhD program. So not sure if all of you know, but I'm still working on my PhD that I started a couple of years ago. So I started it during the leave while I still was in consulting, but then I went back to
work and then just hoped that I was able to finish
it in parallel to work. This for sure proved a bit
more challenging (laughs) than I might initially have thought. So I'm still in the
process of completing it, but I do hope that next
year I can finish it. So I have some goals related to that. And trust me, if I only finish this, if I complete my PhD next year, this for me personally, it
would be such a great success because I've worked on
it already for so long that this alone would make
my next year a great success. So thumbs press, guys. Please cheer for me a little
bit that this works out fine. And then last but not least, I always set for myself a net worth target that then I break down by quarter. So if you've already watched some of my other personal finance
related videos, for instance, how I achieved the 50% savings rate or my general strategy on investments, you already know that this is a topic that is very important to me. And since I started to systematically track my net
worth a couple of years ago, I feel like this alone has
helped me to really increase it, to really just focus on it, and making sure that this
number goes up over time. So if you've never heard about this, what the net worth means is
pretty much just the difference of the value of your assets, so for instance, your stock portfolio, some other investments
that you might have, or anything else of
significant value that you own, subtracted by all the liabilities that you have on your name. So if you still have student
loans or some other debt or maybe a mortgage on your
house, you would deduct that from the value of your assets
to end up with your net worth. So I have a more complex spreadsheet that I use to track my own net worth. So if you're interested to
see how this looks like, write me a comment below
in the comment section, and then I might make a
whole video just to show you how exactly I track my net worth. But independent of that, I
believe this is just really one of the base things that you should do. In my opinion, everybody should do this. It gives you clarity and
focus and also just helps you to make sure that all
the money that you earn, you do not just spend it and consume it, but that you invest it
and that you do make sure that it goes towards
increasing your net worth. So I hope you found these tips helpful. As always, if you have
any question at all, leave me a comment below
in the comment section, and I will make sure to
answer every single comment that you write. And of course, as you know,
if you write a comment, this also helps me with
the YouTube systems, so every comment is very much appreciated. If you took any value
out of this video at all, please hit the like button
for the YouTube algorithm, and also subscribe to my channel to stay up to date on all my content. I release one video every single Saturday. Now, what I would like to hear from you is what are your goals for 2021? Let me know below in the comments as well. I'd love to hear about your aspirations, what you desire to do
and you desire to achieve in the next year. If you want to see even more from me, also follow me on my Instagram. My handle is firmlearning. Also have a mailing list. There's a signup link to that below in the video description. And also feel free to follow
and reach out on LinkedIn. Again, you can find a link
below in the video description. Now I wanna say thank you to all the members of Firm Learning. You are helping the cause of
this channel tremendously. If you wanna know how to
become a member as well, just hit the Join button
next to the Subscribe button to learn what it's all about. And yes, there are some member-only perks that you will get as a member. So if you're watching until
now, thank you so much. Next video will release next Saturday. See you again soon. Goodbye, this is Heinrich
from Firm Learning.
