Welcome to It's a Good Life with Brian Bafini, founder of America's largest business coaching company.

Here's a short, classic cut from one of our all-time favorite episodes.

Well, the top of the morning to you and welcome to It's a Good Life. Today, we have a very special guest for you, a man I've known for about 15 years, Mr. John Acuff. As we've launched this year, we've been talking about goals. John's newest book is called All It Takes as a Goal. And it's fantastic. It's a three-step plan to ditch regret and tap into your massive potential. John, we're delighted to have you.

Your book, all it takes is a goal centers around the idea of tapping into your potential. Let's start there, you know, for you, how do you define potential to start with? Sure, my definition is it's the gap between your vision and your reality. So the vision of how you thought life would be and the reality of how it is right now. And I love to take a positive spin on that because what often happens is people see this gap and they feel shame. They feel stuck. They don't know what to do. And I say, no, if the gap is massive, that just means you have massive potential. And there's ways you can work to close that gap, to overlap that. I think life, you say it's a good life. I think it's a good life when the vision of what you know you're capable of, of who you were meant to be, overlaps with how you're spending your Tuesday. Well, it's interesting. In 27 years and 2,500 seminars, I've asked every audience I've ever presented to, how many of you feel like you have some untapped potential. Every single hand goes up. And I always say, okay, and what are we

waiting on? Part of it is it's almost like, well, it's my choice. You've gone a little further and done some research on this subject. Why is it that so many people don't tap into their potential? Why do we often look in the wrong place for it in the first place? place. Well, I always tell people the only thing easier in the world than doing a goal is not doing a

goal. Um, you know, and goals are hard because Netflix is easy. We haven't really recognized that

our distraction technology is scaled faster than our ability to focus. So I always tell people up

front, hey, give yourself a little bit of grace. You're not recognizing that there's a whole industry that they're invested in you not tapping into your potential. DoorDash would rather you sit on your couch. There's a cultural hypnosis that's happened. And then the other thing is that sometimes people just don't know what they want. Brian, I guarantee you and I feel the same way about desire. That if you have, if you tap into desire, you'll run through a wall. If you don't have the desire, you won't do the smallest task. Nobody wakes up one day and goes, I'm going to be disciplined today. I'm going to have willpower. I'm going to be persistent. I'm going to have grit. Nobody wakes up that way. What they do is they find a sliver of something they want. They bump into it, often stumble

into it and they go, I want more of that. How do I get more of that? And then once you have that, you look at your time like logs and it's, you can't throw enough of those into the fire that's going. Like you start going, I want more hours. I always tell people, I want you to have a desire you love so much. It makes Netflix boring.

And people go, well, that can never happen. Oh, it happens. So I think that's part of it.

They don't know what they want and they don't feel connected to it. They miss that fuel. And what a miss it is. You know, my mentor, Jim Rohn used to say, if you have the desire, you'll find a way and if you don't have the desire you'll find an excuse. I also find it somewhat

intimidating when I come in contact with people because people have become so addicted to the comfort zone. The comfort zone is now stay at home, eat at home, Netflix at home, work from home, distractions are everywhere. And there's a fight. And like you said, there's an actual fight for your attention. There's a fight for your drive. There's a fight for your desire. And there's an enemy against you reaching your full potential. And it's more so than ever before. In your book, you point out that it's often easier to set meaningful goals by looking at your past than your future. This is how I believe, but I've often thought it was wrong. I've often thought I'm too preoccupied with the past. And when I read your book, I went, hallelujah. So tell me why you think that, because I've had doubts about that for myself. Yeah, you have doubts because we're taught the opposite. What we're taught is, if you want a big life, if you want a good life, you have to dream about what the next 20 years look like. And you have to vision cast, future cast, whatever. But in my experience, as I taught people about goals, as I spoke at companies about goals, when somebody would try to dream forward, they would hit what I call a vision wall, where they would go, I can't step forward until I know the perfect 10-year plan. And I think personally, it's a misinterpretation or a mutation of great books like Stephen Covey's Seven Habits that says begin with the

end in mind. What happened is people have interpreted that as I can't begin until I know the end perfectly. For me, the flip became where I said, okay, I can't dream forward. The question, what do I want to do with my life paralyzes me? So what if I looked back and just made a list. I started in an airport in Augusta, Georgia, and said best moments that I've experienced. And then I thought,

I write 10 things, 20 things down. I wrote 170 things down. And it taught me gratitude because it reminded me of things I've forgotten. Two, it taught me self-awareness. If you ask your head and your heart to Google things from your past, they start looking in your present too. And then the third thing, everyone I

taught this to, everyone had this moment where you automatically go, I want more of that. I want,

like some of it happened accidentally. I want it to intentionally happen. I want more. And it

becomes this flip from a review of your past into a plan for your future. And it becomes this

really helpful life plan. I think we just get a lot

of broken advice and we assume we're supposed to dream forward and then we get stuck. And so for me,

you know, we've put more than three million people in live seminars through the physical act of

goal writing. And we've seen the lights come on. We've coached the people then behind us. You've

gotten into a very nice rhythm that I see of

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