Sharing a story about how he wasted away his college years and then spent much of his early career jumping from job to job not knowing what he wanted to do, Jon Acuff wants more people to take advantage of their time to do the things that fulfill them the most. He has written nine books on self-improvement and goal-setting. His latest, “All It Takes Is A Goal,” provides a clear blueprint for people to achieve small, measurable steps toward the things that are the most rewarding to them. Acuff has amassed a large community over the years; he has tested out his ideas with his Facebook group of about 20,000 people. He also conducted a survey with the help of a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, in which 3,000 participants were asked about reaching their potential.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.American Essence: What are the greatest obstacles keeping people from heading toward their goals?
Mr. Jon Acuff: Fear, perfectionism, lack of time, busyness—those are the most common obstacles, if you will. The one I mentioned in the book—they think they have to know exactly what they’re going to do—so that’s what I call the vision wall of, “I have to know exactly my plan.” And they think, “I can’t just go along.” And the example I was used as entrepreneurs. Every entrepreneur right now is taught, you have to know your niche. You have to know your niche, your perfect audience. But that would be like saying to somebody who’s never eaten food, what’s your favorite meal? If they’ve been taught that they have to know exactly where they’re going before they start, they never start.
AE: So how do you break it down for them?
Mr. Acuff: Often what happens is, we try to talk ourselves out of the comfort zone without something better. And what I found is that, if we have a goal, if we have a reward, if we have a vision of what we want to do, then life change happens. The way my ideas work is, I try it in my own life and see if it’s helpful to me. And then if it is, I try it with a small group of people. And then if it’s helpful to them, I try it with a bigger group of people. And then a bigger group of people. And that’s kind of how this book happened. I thought, I felt stuck in my potential. I wonder if other people feel stuck too? And then I did the survey and realized, wow, a lot of people do too.
Because of my background—I was in corporate advertising and used to write advertising for Home Depot and Bose and Staples—it really taught me how to write an idea in a way that’s sticky and helpful. We have enough ideas in the world—we have more than enough. There’s so much content. What we don’t have is handles on the ideas, meaning, we don’t have any way to pick them up and take them into our lives. So I consider my job as, I’m a handle maker. I put handles on ideas so you can pick them up and bring them into your life. So sometimes it’s in a book, sometimes it’s in a tweet or my podcast, and sometimes it’s in a speech. So for me, saying, okay, there’s a chaos zone, comfort zone, and potential zone. That’s me putting a handle on this big messy thing of, “I don’t know what I want to do.”
AE: Right, you’ve classified the three zones of action and how high performers tend to bounce between the three. But to keep reaching goals, it’s critical to get people in the potential zone. Is it difficult for people to make that step?
Mr. Acuff: The challenge is we want the progress to happen faster than it is. I always tell people, “I know how long it’s going to take for your dream and your goal to happen: longer than you want.” Sometimes we only get frustrated when we have an expectation of faster results. I‘ll give you an example of that. I met so many parents during COVID that would tell me, “John, I’m terrible at homeschooling my kids.” And I would always say to them, “yeah, you should be. You should be terrible at that. Because you’ve never done it.” We have this expectation that we’ll be great at things we’ve never done. One of the soundtracks I’d say is, be brave enough to be bad at something new. You’re not going to be amazing at it. And that’s okay. Progress often happens a lot faster than you think. But not if your idea is that it’s going to be amazing right away. It just takes a little bit of time.
The other thing is, you’ve got to make your goals small enough that you can actually see the progress. So I love to tell people, have a lot of finish lines, not just one. I worked on a new book today. I wrote about 2,000 words of a new book today. Imagine if my only finish line was, the whole book is done. Every day, I’d feel like a failure. For a year. Every day.
AE: In as few steps as possible, how can people get their goal going?
Mr. Acuff: The first thing I'd say is, just pick one game you want to play. So the five games I write about in the book are financial, relationship, career, fun, health. So just pick one. Don’t pick 10 goals. Don’t pick 20 goals.
Then, find a small way to do it. So if you say, “you know what, John, my finances are out of control.” Okay, this week, I’m gonna write down the things I spent money on that were kind of frivolous. I’m just curious. I’m not judging them, not going to change them all this week. I’m just gonna pay attention this week. Awesome.
Then, I would encourage people to take notes about the results. Pay attention to your results. How did you feel during it? What did you notice? Having some self awareness will end up being encouraging, because you’ll go, “wow, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was. Or, wowo, I got a little inspired.” Whenever you get something that starts to work, your natural inclination is to say, “I want more of that.” That’s such a good feeling.
AE: What’s an encouraging story of success you can share from your online community?
Mr. Acuff: Coleen Berry’s story is amazing. She lost her job. She was in film, lost her job, had to get three or four jobs to survive. And one of them was being a receptionist at a real estate office. And she decided to have a great attitude about it, to work hard on it. And she’s now the CEO of that office. The thing she told me that I really liked: she said she went to the library and got a library card MBA. She couldn’t go back to school, but she just started reading and reading and reading and she thought about it like [getting] a library card MBA. And I thought that’s amazing.
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
