Accountability in the context of achieving goals, as that is what this website is all about, is where someone else holds you accountable for reaching your goal. There is no clear answer whether sharing your goal is a good thing or not and it should definitely done in a strategic way.

Imagine the following situation; you want to loose weight but your partner is usually buys and prepares the food. Without telling your partner, you decreased your chances of success significantly. In this situation it might be beneficial to tell your partner, however it is not always beneficial to tell someone else.

Affirmations are short powerful statements, which allow you to consciously control your own thoughts. When you say them aloud, or think of them consciously, they can become the thoughts that shape your reality. ‘To affirm’, is to declare or proclaim something (positive). Therefore, an affirmation is firmly declaring a positive thought and assertively stating it as the truth.

What is Daily Gratitude?​

Daily Gratitude is the practice of taking a moment to think about what you are grateful for. With enough practice, this exercise will shift your mind to more positive thoughts rather than the negative thoughts. Also, it will shift your awareness to what you have rather than what you want.

Why write a letter to your future self?​

First of all, it is fun to receive a message from your past self. You will realise time is passing fast and life is finite. Maybe your past self has some lesson to remember or a wish your future would be like.

What to write?​

Of course this is up to you but here are ideas for inspiration.

What your life looks like​

Describe in precise detail what your day looks like. You wake up in the morning, at what time? Who is lying next to you in bed? Do you go to work? If yes, what transport do you use to go to work? Go into as much detail as you can and you'll be amazed when you read your letter back in the future, how much of it became true.

What goals you have achieved​

We overestimate what we can do in the short-term and underestimate what we can do in the long-term. It's likely that you will have achieved more than you write down.

What your life currently looks like​

Imagine receiving a letter from 10 years ago with the struggles you were dealing with, or decision you took and are curious how they worked out.

Advice​

What advice would you give to your future self? Some mistakes you've made which you should remember to avoid. History has taughts us valuable lessons and we should not forget about them.

You know you want it, but getting started is not that easy… The further away the reward is, the less motivation we feel. Nevertheless, there are ways to trick your mind and experience more motivation and drive to start your journey towards that goal.

Everything journey towards achieving a goal involves learning new habits; No matter whether that is getting rid of bad habits, or obtaining good habits.

Success is a product of daily habits - not once-in-a-lifetime transformations

James Clear

Obtaining good habits and fighting of bad habits is an uphill battle. Humans want to conserve energy and thus prefer not to do a workout. Humans want to obtain food and thus choose to keep eating. Humans want to find love and reproduce, and thus watch porn. Humans want to connect and bond with others and thus use doom scroll on Instagram.

So we need to use our frontal cortex, the part of the brain that can override impulsive behavior, and build good habits instead. This blog describes some practical tips what you can do, to improve your control over your habits which then also increases your chance of reaching your long term goals.

The average human attention span is getting shorter. In 2000 the average human had an attention span of around 12 seconds and in 2015 this was 8.25 seconds. Hope is not lost because the ability to concentrate is one that can be practices and improved.

Each kind of journal has its strength and weaknesses. You're not limited to either one of them so you could combine their powers in some cases! Create a system that suitss your needs. In this blog, we go over the advantages and disadvantages of each, and in the end there are examples of how you could potentially combine their strengths.

Paper Journal​

Advantages​

• It's very easy to open your journal and start writing
• You can create your own journaling system.
• The slowless of handwriting comes with the advantages of having a better recall of what you wrote.

Disadvantages​

• You might not always have it with you.
• There is a risk of losing or damaging your journal and therefore losing all its information.
• Anyone could open your journal and read it, or syou have to store it in a locker.

Digital Journal​

Advantages​

• Easy to share your goals and to chat about them
• It's always with you on your phone
• With Strive Journal, you will be guided in how to do proper goal setting, without having the invent your own system
• It's very compact, despite the ability to add unlimited photos, videos or audio.
• Send automated reminders for messages to future self / affirmations / daily gratitude / focus questions / milestone deadlines

Disadvantages​

• A journal is personal and putting this information online doesn't feel good [^1]
• It's easy to get distracted

Combine their powers​

There is no need to choose one or the other. In some cases you might prefer a paper journal over a digital journal, or the other way around. I, for instance, use a paper journal for daily gratitude. Let me go over some scenarios where and how to combine their powers.

Goal Setting​

For very basic goal setting, only writing your goals down on paper is enough. But if you want to enable any of the strengths of a digital journal, then you have to write it down digitally too.

Visualize​

Takes photos or find pictures of how you envision the end result, stick them together and you've created a Vision Board. Creating a vision board, can be done both digitally and analogue. But it's very strong to have a vision board placed in a place where you see it regularly. If you prefer this vision board to be on Paper, then you can take a photo and add it as an image to your goal on Strive Journal too.

Roadmap​

Ticking off from a paper roadmap is a lot more satisfying. For the roadmap, I would recommend to choose either a digital or a paper one. Doing both and keeping them in sync is just too much work.

If you choose a roadmap on paper, then you could post a picture of it regularly in the Story, or update the image of your goal with a photo of this Roadmap.

Focus Boost​

Regularly sitting down to think why you're doing all the effort to reach your goals and how you're going to continue is something you don't need to write or type down necessarily. You're free to choose whatever you prefer, but it is recommend to think about these questions regularly to stimulate instrinsic motivation.

Affirmations​

Choose one or the other for each affirmation. The fun thing about a post-it with an affirmation is that you can hang it anywhere you should see it. For example write "You're beautiful" or "Smiling is Contagious" on your mirror. It helps to give a positive boost to start your day.

For the more personal ones, which you don't want to bother others with, you can add them to Affirmations in Strive Journal so only you see them on your phone.

Daily gratitude​

Use Daily Gratitude in Strive Journal to receive a daily reminder to write in your Paper Gratitude Journal. And use the digital journal as a back-up in case your paper journal is not with you.

Dear Future Self​

1. Write the letter on Paper, then copy it to Dear Future Self in Strive Journal to make sure you will never lose it.
2. Store the letter somewhere save and write in your digital letter where to find it.
3. Set the date when you want to receive it and send the message.

Thank you for reading! Hopefully you can find the best working system that fits your needs. Contact us if you have any feedback or create a pull request on GitHub with suggested changes.

[^1] This is how I felt and therefore exercises in Strive Journal are encrypted so nobody except you can read it. Encrypted goals will be an option in the future.

If we have particular goals that are important to us, we have to be careful to not get distracted by other goals. We shouldn't get distracted by other goals. Therefore we need to set priorities so we can work on the goals that are important to us, and not get distracted by the ones that aren't.

Andrew Huberman is a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at the Stanford School of Medicine and he also has an interesting podcast show called the Huberman Lab podcast. In his episode "The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals" he describes setting goals, assessing progress and the execution towards this goal in the context of neuroscience. In this blog post I provide some key take aways from this episode. If this is interesting to you, I encourage you to listen to the whole episode.