About the Episode:
Everyone talks about milestones. By this age you should be married. By this age you should own a house. By this point you should be making a certain amount of money. On the surface, that sounds responsible. It sounds motivated. But there’s a downside to putting your life on a timeline, and it’s one that quietly creates stress, anxiety, and resistance without you even realizing it.
When you attach big goals to a fixed time, you start living under pressure instead of momentum. Every day that passes becomes a reminder of how close you are—or how far behind you feel. Sometimes it pushes you. Other times it gives you an excuse to wait because you told yourself there’s still “time.” That’s where things slow down. Not because you’re lazy, not because you’re incapable, but because time-bound thinking removes urgency from what actually matters today.
Big outcomes don’t need deadlines. They need priority. When something truly matters, the only questions worth asking are: What is most important to me right now? And what can I do today to move it forward? That’s it. Not five years from now. Not eighteen months from now. Today. Action without pressure creates speed. Action without resistance creates momentum.
Checklists don’t create movement. Energy does. Focus does. When you overload your day with too many “top priorities,” none of them get the attention they deserve. Three real priorities is the limit. Everything else is secondary. And distractions—social media, streaming, constant noise—only steal energy from the things that actually change your life.
What you focus on grows. What you delay weakens. Time doesn’t create success—consistent action does. When you stop trying to schedule your future and start showing up fully today, things begin to materialize faster than you ever expected.
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Episode Topics:
- It challenges the way you think about goals and deadlines.
- It simplifies success into two clear daily questions.
- It removes pressure without killing ambition.
- It exposes how time quietly creates resistance.
- It helps you build momentum starting today.
What shakin’? Hey, we’re back. I’m Rick Jordan, and today we’re going all in. We’re going to talk about achieving things by a certain time point in your life today. You know, everybody needs milestones. Everybody needs a time period to give yourself at the same time it’s there’s a negative side of this too, and I want to talk to you about that today. This was inspired off of an Instagram reel that a good friend of mine, David Meltzer, put out a little bit ago, and it just got me thinking, I’m actually sharing the stage with him and Michael Chandler, the MMA star, in just about a week and a half or so at an event. And I’m pumped to talk about this, you know, because I thought of a little more after this. Because what his point was is, like, you know, when you set things, it’s like, by the time I’m 30, I’m gonna be this, you know, by the time I’m I’m 25 I’m gonna be married. By the time I’m 30, I’m going to have a house by the time I’m 35 I’m going to make my first million by the time I’m 40, I’m going to have a rental property, you know, or something in that or it’s like, by the time I, you know, one year from now, I’m going to be in a new and better relationship, or five years from now, I’m going to have kids, you know, whatever these life goals are, or, you know, what I’m going to be at this point in my career, 18 months from now? That’s my target, right there.
And you know what? While these things have very, very good intentions, while they have extremely good intentions, they actually create resistance, and they can create a little bit of anxiety around it. Because what the negative force of this is when you put something that’s time bound in these things is that you end up creating this stress in your life, because every minute, every day, every week, every month that goes by, you start seeing yourself inch closer and closer and closer. And while that’s good to actually push you into some things and be like, Okay, I got to this, it’s also bad because you actually think, oh, maybe I have some time, and you start to procrastinate a little bit. But the procrastination is not really procrastination. It’s not even perfection in trying to figure this stuff out. It’s just when these things come about and they’re big things in your life, when they’re huge things in your life, big decisions, big accomplishments, big things to go after huge outcomes that affect a lot of things that you think may alter the course of your life forever. Those are things that you can put so much stress on yourself when you’re saying it’s by this time that I’m going to have this done, because it actually starts to slow you down in accomplishing that. And then when you get there, like, I guess I didn’t do it, it’s not for me.
What if it was for you? And you could have actually accomplished those things faster than what you actually thought? Because without the resistance of setting that time, you can, and this is the important part, because this is going to hit home with a lot of people today, because when you do everything you can do every single day without the pressure of that time, you will start to accomplish things faster. You will see things in your life start to materialize at a quicker pace than the resistance that you just gave yourself. Because when you’re looking at all these things and you start to, like, make a checklist of all this stuff that you have to get done while it’s good to be organized, that’s a different story. Being organized in what you’re going at, what you’re trying to achieve or figure things out, is much different than actually generating action itself. A checklist. Having things to do will not get you going on what you need to do. A checklist is great because you can stick it up on the wall. How many of you have ever made if you’re a woman, how many of you have made a husband? I need you to do this list, or a man? If you’re like, in a play, it’s like, I need you to do this. But what happens? Because you’re like, hey, I need you to do these things today, but then it just sits there and it’s untouched.
Why is that the case? Because you put time on it. That’s why, because you put that time, put resistance on it, because you might have a different perspective on things than other people. Other people might have a different perspective on when things should be done than you. Nobody can decide except you, when these things should be done. And you know what? Even to that fact, sometimes you shouldn’t even decide when those things should be done. You should just take the steps that you need today. The resistance is something that has to go away. That resistance of placing something time bound on it has to go away for these big outcomes. If you start saying, oh, I need to have this done in two years. Maybe you could have a re evaluation point in two years and see where you’re at in this process, rather than I need to accomplish this by that point in time. Maybe it’s two weeks, maybe it’s two months, whatever that is that you’ve placed a time on right now. Now it is working against you, because one you figure that, oh, I’ve got this amount of time, so I don’t need to act on this today. You tracking with me there. That’s powerful. I have this amount of time that I gave to myself, so I don’t need to act upon this today. What that does is it takes the priority off of these important things, and you start to put energy and focus on things that do not matter, things that are just distractions, things that will create no impact, no influence in your life.
When you put that time on it, you start to be able to de prioritize the things that will make the difference, rather than just taking those things that you want to accomplish and saying what is most important to me in my life. And then the second question is, what can I do today to help move that forward, to create forward motion, those are the only two questions you need to ask. Not when do I need to have this done by what part of my life? What phase of my life should I have this in? You know, what? What does my life look like next year? You know, that’s great for envisioning but not for getting the shit done. There’s only two questions to ask, because to create movement is to prioritize number one and saying, What is top priority for me? And the second question is, what can I do today to move that forward? That’s it. It becomes super simple, and you do these things, you will start to create more momentum and achieve things at a faster pace. When you take an honest look at those things, time de prioritizes what is important, time bound things will lessen your activities that you need to do to create forward movements today.
This is something that you should do overall in your priorities, and then get it all the way down to this time today. When you look at the things you’re like, What can I do today? Then you start to list out those things that you can do. These are the checklists everybody. It’s like, I know I can get these done today. Now, what’s the priority? Because if there’s more than three things, more than three things on your list for today that are super top priority, important to make forward motion, to create some kind of persistence or consistency in what you’re doing.
If there’s more than three things, the whole list is going to suffer. You can have a bunch of tasks that are like 2025, things that whatever that you can start to bang out, but that’s only after you accomplish these important things that are a priority to you. And overall, when you say, I want this, I need this. Everything else is secondary. Everything else. Because what you focus on grows, what you put energy into grows, if it’s procrastination, if it’s watching Netflix, if it’s thumbing through social media, looking at reels every goddamn minute of your fucking life. Come on now, that’s a bunch of shit. It’s sucking up your time. Do you turn on screen time? I’m not saying things like, you know, at the end of the night, your day’s done. You got those priority things done, and you want to look through these things. But if you find yourself getting distracted to these with, even with my social media presence, I’m on this maybe, maybe like 25 minutes a day, this is a distraction from what you need to get done today. If you take a look back, I bet you that, if you’re honest with yourself, you can start to see because you place time bound things in your life that they were de prioritized by distractions. Ask yourself today, what is a priority in my life? And number two, what can I do today to move that forward? Go all in you.