🌻Use The Five-Year Rule to Permanently Reinvent Your LifeIt goes by faster than you think, so start

I’m in my bedroom folding laundry and watching a video…

My girlfriend is pregnant, and I’m dead broke, but I have this little hobby that seems promising. I’ve been practicing for a while, constantly looking for inspiration.

The man in the video says:

“Five years from now you will arrive, the question is, where?”

Your two options are:

Continue living the same way … aimless and drifting
Give yourself five years and you can transform your entire life
For some reason, that video from the late great Jim Rohn just….hit me…

I silently nodded in my head “5 years? Ok. I’ll do it.”

Read also: Seven life shortcuts that actually works

In that time span…

I wrote blog posts barely anyone read
I launched products that got zero sales
I put in massive amounts of effort that seemingly yielded no results
But, I was also learning and growing. I got better. I started getting some wins. I picked up steam.

4 and a half years later, I made more money in one year than I had in every previous year of my working life…combined.

5 years, that’s the number.

Here’s how to commit to the process.

Start with a 90-day sprint

Spend your first 90 days working on your new skill or path with reckless abandon. You’ll get a sense of what success looks like as you make progress, but more importantly, you’ll figure out whether or not you actually enjoy the thing you’re doing. If it turns out not to be a great fit, you can quit after 90 days without having wasted much time.

An alternative is to use the Rule of 100: Do something 100 times to get good at it. Write 100 blog posts. Shoot 100 videos, record 100 podcasts, pitch 100 potential new clients. Don’t focus on making each one perfect; just focus on doing your thing, over and over. In the beginning, it’s a volume game.

Push through the suck

In the beginning, you won’t be very good at the new skill you’re trying to learn or the path you’re trying to forge. You might just be trying to survive. Most people quit in this phase. Don’t be one of them. Why? Because one day, you won’t just get a little better and become a little more successful — you’ll be much better and experience a lot more success.

Check in with your progress every 18 months

This is a piece of advice I learned from reading Peter Drucker, author of Managing Oneself: Use 18-month benchmarks to track your overall progress. This length of time is long enough to give you enough data, but not so long that you create unrealistic goals.

If you lose your way, remember The One Thing

The One Thing by entrepreneur Gary Keller teaches a simple rule to help you stay focused and productive: Ask yourself the question, “What’s the one thing you can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

You can use this system to reverse engineer long-term goals into actionable goals and key performance indicators to work on in the short to intermediate term. Choose your one thing for 18 months, then for the quarter, then for each month, then for each week, then for each day.

Read also: Don’t compete for money create it

Final Thoughts

I use this five-year framework for every new goal or important decision. If I’m not willing to dedicate five years to it, I won’t do it. But when I do commit, I’m all the way in.

When you break things down to the present moment and focus on the immediate future, you’ll look up five years later to see that you’ve achieved a level of progress even you didn’t think possible. Your skills compound, like an investment account. But first, you have to start.

Contributed by Ayodeji Awosika

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