The 4 Disciplines of Execution Review and How To Apply It To Your Personal Life

The 4 Disciplines of Execution is a great leadership book to help businesses achieve goals but I actually found this extremely useful in my personal life. In this book review I discuss the key ideas in the book and how you can apply them to your life

The 4 Disciplines of Execution (on Amazon)

0:00 – Introduction
1:25 – The 4 Key Concepts in the Book
2:19 – #1: Wildly Important Goals
3:10 – The Whirlwind in your life
3:54 – #2: Lead Measures (Things You Do)
6:02 – #3: Create an engaging scoreboard
8:29 – #4: Keep Accountable
9:10 – Summary of the 4 Disciplines of Execution

Transcription:

I recently read the book the four disciplines of execution which is ideally a business leadership book to help people who run businesses and run teams to get the company and the teams to implement strategies to achieve goals but I actually found this book extremely useful in my own life of my small one-man operation in terms of my business as well as applying to my own personal finances as well so in this episode I want to do a review of the four disciplines of execution talk about the key concepts in the book and more specifically talk about how you can apply them to your everyday life and your own personal goals this book was extremely valuable and came at the exact right time when I needed it in my business as you may know I have been in debt lately I’m currently paying that off and I’m working towards growing my passive income quite significantly ideally over the next couple of years but staying focused on that when I do work that doesn’t have a payoff for 6 or 12 months is very important and this book really provided a framework for doing that a framework for staying on track and a framework for getting motivated so let’s have a look at the key concepts in this book and then I’ll suggest some ways that you may be able to apply them to your own life and your own personal finances in order to move towards financial freedom so the book really has just four key concepts so the four disciplines of execution and they are the first one is to create wildly important goals so just having one or two goals per year that you’re focusing on not even per year just one or two goals then you’re focusing on which ultimately have a deadline so I’ll break all of these down in more detail but first I’ll just summarize them so set one or two wildly important goals create lead measures so have things that you do that result in lag measures or that result in results that are in line with your goals the next thing is to have an engaging scoreboard to track your results and then lastly keep yourself accountable or have weekly meetings if you’re running a team so there the four disciplines while the important goals lead measures engaging school board and keeping accountable so let’s go through them in more detail the first section talks about wildly important goals so these are the most important goals in your life or in your business that you are focusing on these are the things that are going to move the dial that are going to change the business or the company or change your personal finances so for me for business it is about growing the level of my passive income in the business and so there’s two different aspects of that so I have two different goals or wildly important goals that I want to achieve this year that go across two different online businesses that I have so they might do while the important goals in my personal life my wildly important goal is to pay off all my debt ideally by the end of 2019 so by the end of this year pay off all my debt so I’ve got my wildly important business goals and my wildly important personal goals the book talks about the thing called the whirlwind which is basically there’s activities in your life and in your business that you need to do just to keep things operating so there’s emails you need to respond to reports that need to go out things that you have to do you know when you can spend the day and you did a lot of work where you didn’t really feel like you were productive and moving towards the goal that’s what they call the whirlwind so I really like the name for that that business as usual or life as usual is the whirlwind and that’s kind of what’s happening to you that’s what’s driving you and these wildly important goals kind of step outside of the whirlwind so you’re living in the whirlwind but then you have these wildly important goals that you’re aiming for and then that leads to the second point which is creating lead measures now I don’t like the name lead measures because it’s quite confusing if you haven’t read the book because it talks about lead measures and lag measures but basically lag measures are the results that you want to achieve so for me the goal of one of my businesses is to double the income this year and now that is a smaller website so well that sounds intense I think that’s quite achievable so I want to double the website income for that and how to do that is to double the page view so the amount of people going to that website and I’m doing that through creating content so the lag measure is the results that you’re getting so the growth in income and the growth in the page views to the website that’s the lag measure because it’s a lag you do stuff and then you get that as a lag the lead measure is the things that you do so for me that’s writing articles that’s updating old articles that’s creating videos and things like that so they’re the lead measures so the things that you do so what this book talks about is the second discipline of execution is rather than focusing on the lag measures or focusing on the results that we want we need to identify that those results that we want but then decide what we think the activities are going to be that are going to cause that result and that’s our lead measure so the things to do and what it does is it suggests that you set targets for your things to do or for your lead measure so for me for this website it is how many words do I need to write per week in order to achieve my goal so I broke it down from how many articles do I need to write to how many words do I need to write per day which equates to per week and that is my lead measure when it comes to paying off my debt paying off my debt is my lag measure and then my lead measures because I run my own business are actually the writing the words and doing that sort of work but it’s also lead measures for that could be things around budgeting things aren’t paying myself first etc so that the end result is paying off the debt but what are the things that I need to do in order to pay off the debt the third thing is to create an engaging scoreboard and I found this one of the most valuable steps so once you identify the things that you need to do or your lead measures you then need to create an engaging scoreboard now what I’ve done is created score boards for myself just in Google Docs in Excel spreadsheets so for my business I have trackers for my leap measures for how many words I write per day that also summarizes per week and per month and it’s got its color coded and everything so if I haven’t hit my goal it’s red if I’m moving towards my goal so yellow and then if I’ve achieved my goal or gone above it it turns green so I can really see at a snapshot exactly how I’m going it tracks both my leap measures as well as my lag measures in that school board so in business that just really motivates me last week for example so my weight goes from Monday to Sunday I got a set amount I want to achieve each week in terms of writing I’d only written 30 percent of my target because the whirlwind had gotten in the way and so knowing that I can see that on my scoreboard 30 percent I spent the day I worked till like 11 o’clock at night in order to get that result over 100 percent so I knew that I did the work I needed to do that week to move that lag measure or to get those results that I wanted so that scoreboard really motivated me and can really motivate you when it comes to paying off debt I’ve got my cash flow calendar as my scoreboard so I know when I need to pay certain items and that’s scheduled for each particular month and shows that and my school board on my school board I have a column or I have a row that puts extra money in there so if I start building up my buffer fund if I have extra money then that goes in that column and I can see that at my score but how much money have I got compared to how much debt I need to pay in the next month and it’s so exciting to see that that figure is higher than how much money I actually need to pay next month so I’m already earning money each month but I’ve got enough money that even if I had nothing this month I’d be able to pay the debts that I want to pay in the next month so ultimately I’m building up that buffer more and more and pushing that timeline further and further back so that’s Gord both keeps me on track and is very exciting and very motivating and then the last thing is keeping accountable so for teams they advise that you have a team meeting I am by my lonesome here working in my office aka the garage at my dad’s house I run my own business by myself with the help of one virtual assistant and so I don’t have weekly team meetings two key me accountable though I do have people that I work with and chat to about how I’m going but really I keep myself accountable through my school board so my school board has daily results but it also has a weekly summary and so that weekly summary is how I keep myself accountable as to whether or not I’ve achieved what I’ve set out to achieve so they’re the four disciplines of execution creating wildly important goals one or two they recommend not having too many because otherwise you can’t do it you need to have these needs to be wildly important goals that you need to focus on and that if you achieve this this would be the most important thing for you to achieve so for me and I could have so many financial goals in my life personally by the wildly important goal is to wipe myself clear of debt completely and if I achieve that then that’s gonna have a bigger impact than everything else so well I guess in personal life I actually have two goals because business is all about growing my passive income personal is all about paying off debt they work hand in hand so the more passive income I get the faster I can pay off debt but then also once the debts paid off then I’m going to be in a better financial position so kind of have to wildly important goals they’re so crazy wildly important goals see your lead measures so things that you need to do in order to get the results that you want so rather than just tracking your results and how you’re going work out what you need to do and create a way to track that and to make sure that you do the work then get motivated by creating a scoreboard for yourself and tracking how you’re going on that scoreboard so tracking both your lead measures or the things that you’re doing so making sure that you’re doing the work and then seeing that go from red to orange to green is so rewarding and seeing that I’ve got multiple weeks in a row now where my lead measures are the things that I do agree and then the lead measures ultimately affect the lag measure so you track both of those so have that engaging scoreboard and then keep yourself accountable as well we’ll stay accountable to your partners or whoever it may be in your life so the four disciplines of execution was an amazing book if you run a business or a team that I highly recommend it but it can also apply to your own personal life and your own personal finances so it’s a bit of a stretch out there away from your traditional personal finance books like Rich Dad Poor Dad the barefoot investor and things like that but this book was amazingly helpful to me and I highly recommend it for anyone out there interested in it I will link up to it in the description down below or you can go to onproperty.com.au/mortgage 4dx for the four disciplines of execution so on property condo you for forward slash 4dx if you want to purchase that book that’s my affiliate link thanks so much for tuning in today I hope that this has been interesting with you that you can set your wildly important goals you can start creating things that you do to get the results that you want and you can track it on a scoreboard and keep yourself accountable we should either absolute best of luck and until next time stay positive