How to make progress in life

Welcome back to the Noble Gents Playbook newsletter and if you’re new round here and it’s your first newsletter - great to have you here 🫡

As always the aim of this weekly newsletter is simple: to help you become a better man. 

Today we’ll be looking how you can make unstoppable progress every, single, day.

There’s a certain magic to sitting down with a pen, paper, and your thoughts.

To make progress in any area of my life, I've relied on this exact method: a pen, paper, and five critical tasks for the day.

Also known as the Power List, this method, which I owe to Andy Frisella (credit to him in EP16 of his podcast), has been a game changer.

It has taken me from struggling to complete daily tasks, including writing this newsletter sometimes, and feeling overwhelmed while running my businesses, to achieving my dreams within just six months.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about how you can use this method to generate progress in all areas of your life. Whether you’re starting a business, training for a marathon, or running an established business, this will help you.

Before you start writing out five critical tasks, you need to establish your goals and be crystal clear on where you want to be. This clarity allows you to reverse engineer the steps needed, breaking them down into monthly, weekly, and eventually daily tasks that will get you to your desired goal.

Let me introduce you to a resource I found in a Charlie Morgan video called the War Map. This allows you to visualize your entire year on one spreadsheet. Here’s what it looks like on a macro and micro scale with each month.

Here’s a couple of examples, putting this into practice.

Example 1: Achieving $25,000 Revenue Goal

Set a goal for Q4 of reaching $25,000 revenue for that quarter.

To achieve this, I need to send out 1,250 emails per month, which will allow me to book 125 appointments. With a close rate of 10%, I’ll be able to close 12-13 clients at $2,000 each for a service I’m offering.

$2,000 x 12.5 = $25,000 revenue generated in one month.

Knowing that my goal is $25,000 and that I book 10% of all emails sent and close 10% of all calls taken, I can now put steps in place before starting Q4, such as:

• Researching email campaign tools/software

• Scraping leads

• Setting up new email inboxes

• Developing scripts and testing angles

• Creating lead magnets, VSLs, and landing pages

These tasks will then be allocated weekly to be completed before launching the email campaign that will book appointments on autopilot. Of course, this process would look different if doing outreach manually and most of your critical tasks would be the mundane sitting down and doing outreach for 2-3 hours, if not more, per day, but that’s what gets results.

For example, it might take me a week to complete a VSL. This would involve:

• A day of research (a few hours)

• A day of scripting (a few hours)

• Creating slide presentations (a few hours)

• Two days of recording (4-hour sessions each)

• Two days of editing (2-hour sessions each)

These would become daily critical tasks on the Power List.

Example 2: Gaining 8kg of Muscle

Suppose I want to gain 8kg of muscle. I know that gaining 1kg of muscle per month will take 8 months. To achieve this, I need to gain 1kg per month, broken down into 0.25kg per week. Daily critical tasks might include:

• Strength training for 1 hour

• Consuming a high-protein diet with a caloric surplus

• Ensuring 7-8 hours of sleep

• Tracking protein intake to hit 1.6-2.2g per kg of body weight

As the weeks go by, if my muscle gain rate is below 0.25kg per week, I’ll need to increase my caloric intake while adjusting my training intensity, constantly monitoring my muscle mass.

Breaking down these goals into critical tasks ensures daily progress. This isn’t a to-do list with items like:

• Eat high-protein meals

• Strength train for 1 hour

• Sleep 7-8 hours

• Take out the rubbish

• Read a book

• Watch a YouTube video about muscle gain

• Buy protein supplements for next week

Instead, it's about setting a goal and breaking it down into essential tasks that bring you closer to achieving it. On a small scale, progress might seem minimal, but on a larger scale, it becomes significant.

Hopefully, this clarifies the concept. By combining these methods, you can become incredibly productive and make substantial progress within a year.

The war map helps you visualize your macro goals clearly while tracking them on a micro level each month. However, for micro-level tasks, I recommend using the Power List with pen and paper because it's far more effective in my opinion. Once completed, I transfer the Power List data into the war map every few days.

You can download YOUR blank War Map here.

That’s it for this week's Newsletter. As always, drop us a message if you have any topics you’d like to see covered. 

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See you next week 🤝