I struggled with anxiety and depression throughout my 20s.
My fear came from not knowing what to do with my life. Since I was a little boy, I felt I was here for some great purpose, to do work only I could do. But I couldn’t figure out what that work was, no matter how desperately I tried.
It took years of searching to find the key to solving my purpose problem that had eluded me all along: written goals.
TIWIKE #1: A written goal incites an adventure into the future to achieve it
“An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
While the root causes of anxiety and depression are complex, there are basic steps you can take that wipe out huge percentages of both.
The most fundamental of those steps is to write down some goals for your life. The reason is a simple, self-evident truth: an explicit goal incites an adventure into the future to achieve it. Without goals, life feels like the opposite of an adventure—a gray, empty existence with no meaning or purpose.
A purpose is an explicit goal.
Meaning is a byproduct of the pursuit of a purpose.
Without goals, there is no purpose, meaning, or positive emotion. Imagine you’re having dinner with a friend. You’re laughing and remembering while eating a hot meal and drinking good wine. In fact, you’d like some of that wine.
You reach for it, pick it up, lift it to your lips, and take a delicious sip.
Incredible. Positive emotion.
Rewind back the clock.
You’re laughing while eating food and drinking wine. In fact, you’d like some of that wine. You reach for it, pick it up, lift it to your lips, and your friend smacks the wine glass out of your hand, smashing it on the floor.
You are stunned.
Rage, fury, anger!
You see? Negative emotion comes from regressing away from a goal. Positive emotion comes from progressing toward a goal. This is one of those principles that are self-evidently true and therefore need no validation outside of themselves.
A written goal incites an adventure into the future to achieve it, which becomes your purpose, which generates meaning in your life as a byproduct.
The old proverb holds true here: a rolling stone gathers no moss.
Most anxiety and depression come from inactivity, just like moss grows on stationary stone.
If you want to get rid of anxiety and depression, then you need to get in motion toward a goal you care about achieving.
You need an adventure.
TIWIKE #2: Write down some goals
“The universe rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.”
-Tim Ferriss
When I was a junior in college, my marketing professor asked us to make a list of all the things we would like to be true in 10 years.
But he didn’t tell us that he arranged to mail these lists to us five years later. I received mine five years from that day. At that point, I was embroiled in building my first business, RV Heroes, so I didn’t think much about it. Just threw the list into my gun safe and moved on with my life.
Five years later, precisely 10 years from the day we wrote those lists, my future wife and I were moving into our first home.
I had completely forgotten about the list.
After a couple of days of moving furniture, I was putting the finishing touches on the basement late one night. The gun safe was heavy, so I emptied all the contents before moving it. As I relocated the papers and envelopes back into the safe, I saw it. There it was. The list.
On the envelope, Spring 2012.
It was Spring 2022.
I opened the envelope to unfold the list. Not long later, tears were rolling down my face. I couldn’t believe it. There I was, moving into my new home with my future bride, reviewing a list of goals I made for myself a full decade prior.
And I had accomplished almost every single goal.
How insane is that?
I literally made the list, then didn’t think about it ever again. I just got to work trying to find my place in the world. And the power of those written goals drew me toward them.
Goals are kind of like magnets in that way that we place off in the future to draw us toward the life we want.
If you are struggling with anxiety or depression, just try writing down some goals.
What do you have to lose? If you are still anxious and depressed after you write them down and work on them for a couple of weeks, then I give you permission to write me a scathing email. And don’t overcomplicate it.
Sit down with a notebook and a pen and physically write down a bullet-pointed list of all the things you’d like to do and have and be in the future.
Let your mind wander.
Don’t be scared to be outrageous and write down things you think are highly unlikely. It is easy to overestimate what you can do in a year but underestimate what you can do in ten. If the Lord wills it, life will be long, filled with trials and also opportunities.
Who knows what’s possible until we try?
TIWIKE #3: Review your list of goals to supercharge progress toward achieving them
When I made that list, I was an ignorant college student who had never even held a real job.
I thought I was just completing an assignment to pass a class. It would be five more years before I learned about the deep power of goal setting, which changed my life. I outlined that in a previous article called The Life-Altering Power of a Bad Plan.
Now I know how to harness the power of these purpose magnets we call goals.
They are like seeds.
We plant them in our unconscious mind by consciously writing them down. We water them by reviewing them, dreaming about what life would be like if they were accomplished, and devising strategies to reach them. If you plant particularly powerful seeds, they can germinate and come to bear fruit even without being watered.
That’s what happened for me with the list I made in college.
But if you water them, they will grow way faster. They might even grow large enough to create food and protection for you and your family forever.
I’m really excited to confess that I finished upgrading the Big Bad Plan Challenge curriculum into the Big Bad Plan Program, a self-paced life and business planning course designed to help aspiring entrepreneurs devise grand visions, break those visions down into goals, break those goals down into projects, and design business and action systems that enable the adventure.
In other words, it is a program for setting goals and figuring out how to achieve them.
My pal Cody Jones, a registered pharmacist and aspiring entrepreneur, had this to say after he completed the Big Bad Plan Challenge:
One of my big goals is to launch this program in the beginning of this coming February and get it into the hands of people who are tired of wandering in anxiety and depression and ready to undertake the adventure of their lives.
If you want to know when the presale goes live, sign up here: