Book SummaryThe 12 Week Year, by Brian P. Moran

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The 12 Week Year

You have two lives: the one you’re currently living and the one where you’ve fully engaged your unique skills and talents and accomplished amazing results in your personal and professional lives. This second life encompasses your wildest dreams for your future. You’re highly productive, and the results of your efforts have lifted you above the competition. So why aren’t you living this life now?

What holds you back from achieving your potential is a lack of a structured plan to accomplish your goals. When you implement the concepts of The 12 Week Year, you’ll strive to achieve one goal at a time for 12 weeks, and you’ll get more done in less time.

Change Your Perspective to Change Your Life

You’ve heard people say that knowledge is power, but this is not wholly accurate. Knowledge without action is just a bunch of ideas, and change doesn’t happen from ideas alone. The key to reaching your creative and productive potential is execution. When you consistently execute on your knowledge, you move from average achiever to top performer.

Annualization Versus Periodization

In your personal and professional lives, you tend to set goals based on an annual plan of attack. New Year’s resolutions begin in January and aim to create the desired change by the end of the year. Likewise, organizations set productive goals annually and tend to do annual reviews of their progress. This view is called “annualized thinking” and actually hinders your progress.

Annualized thinking creates a perspective on your workflow that there is all the time in the world to meet your year-end goals. This idea becomes your mantra until you reach October, when suddenly your deadline begins to loom.

Most organizations achieve 40% of their productivity in the last 60 days of the year because of the “end-of-the-year push.” Employees suddenly become focused on only those tasks that lead to the intended results, and a new sense of urgency motivates their productive output.

But why wait a whole year to feel this heightened level of productivity? Rather than redefining your workflow at the end of the year, redefine your timeline to shorter periods to encourage high productivity every day of the year. This idea is the definition of periodization and the backbone of the 12-week year.

Periodization means taking long-term goals and restructuring them into progressive steps to be taken during focused 12-week periods. When you focus for 12 weeks on maximizing one aspect of your annualized plan, your deadline is always in sight, which helps you push past your productive limits and motivates you to achieve more immediate results. Learning the 12-week plan of attack is easy, but implementing it is hard. Therefore, to successfully move through an optimized 12-week plan, you must form a significant connection with your goals.

The 12-week plan includes five disciplines for how to create and reach your goals and three principles to help you maintain the right mindset as you move through the process.

Discipline 1: Create a Compelling Vision

A compelling vision is your idea of your best life. Whatever you envision for your future, whether it’s a bigger status in business, a higher income, or more satisfaction in life, your vision should be significantly greater than your current life. When you imagine a world where you have everything you want, no matter how outlandish, you’re more emotionally invested in making that future come true. And emotional investment is needed to help push through the struggles encountered along your journey to bring your future to fruition.

An emotional connection with your long-term goal encourages you to do what is necessary to achieve it. You also activate the part of your brain responsible for cognitive reasoning, and it will begin forming new pathways based on your vision. Your heightened thoughts begin the process of strengthening your beliefs, which helps quiet the part of your brain that triggers fear of change and failure.

Your vision must be big enough to activate both parts of your brain because without the fear, you won’t be pushed to achieve your greatest potential. Your compelling vision will evolve through four stages of belief:

Impossible: Your vision won’t seem reachable when you first dream it because you won’t know how to make it happen. But you don’t need to know how yet. The question to ask first is, “What if everything I wanted came true?” This question starts your neurons firing and forming pathways of possibility.

Possible: The more you continue to imagine all the benefits of your new life, the stronger your neural pathways regarding that life become. As those pathways strengthen, your belief in your dream strengthens until you feel like you could actually attain it.

Probable: After you move into believing your future is probable, you start to focus on how you can achieve it. The steps you begin to develop to achieve your vision become your plan of attack. And with a good plan, you start to truly believe your dreams will come true.

Given: You now see exactly what to do to shape your life into what you want it to be. And you believe your dream is inevitable because you can see exactly how you will get there.

How to Create a Compelling Vision

To create your vision, set three levels of goals. Your long-term goal will include the improvements you want to make in your spiritual, personal, professional, financial, and relational arenas of life. Dream big about the life you want to truly trigger your brain to react.

Once you have your long-term vision, think about what you need to accomplish over the next three years to make that dream a reality. Which objectives need to be accomplished first, and what are the steps needed to achieve those objectives? Be as specific and detailed as possible.

Finally, **when you have your short-term objectives and necessary actions in place, you’re ready...

The 12 Week Year Summary Introduction

(Shortform note: The 12 Week Year is organized into two sections. The first provides the theoretical basis for the actionable steps to create your 12-week plan, and the second provides the actionable steps. For this summary, we’ve chosen to group the theoretical concepts and actionables under each topic for ease of understanding and implementation.)

What would you accomplish if you had your full potential at your disposal? How would your life change if you were functioning at your highest level? You most likely have skills and abilities far beyond what you currently use and desires you’ve yet to realize. These aspects are part of your “second life,” or the life in which your true talents are recognized and dreams achieved. In this second life, procrastination is a thing of the past, you’re not driven by fear, and you’re confident in your ability to achieve success. So if this life is already yours for the taking, why haven’t you started living it?

The concepts provided in The 12 Week Year will help you...

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 1: Success Begins in the Mind

Society tells us that changing our actions leads to better results. This advice is not completely wrong, but the focus is. A shift in actions without a shift in mindset only leads to marginal improvements. To truly reach your full potential and achieve your goals, you must change your perspective about the nature of work.

Annualization Versus Periodization

Real progress cannot be made when you base your execution plan on attaining yearly results. However, most businesses set annual goals and create 12-month plans for increasing profits and productivity. You also do this in your own life. You set New Year’s resolutions on January 1 and commit to changing your life by December 31. But this type of thinking hinders your success and wastes valuable time during the year.

Annualized thinking is when you set a goal for the end of the year and believe you have all the time in the world to achieve it. December is beyond comprehension at the start of a new year, so you have no sense of urgency in working toward your goal. You dole out the required steps to achieve your goal over several months, and if you get behind in your plan, you reason you still have months ahead to...

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 2: Discipline 1—Vision

One of the most important requirements of increasing your execution is a clear and compelling vision for what you want your future to be. This vision is necessary because the process of executing at a higher level is simple but not easy. What stops so many people from doing it is the hardship of going through the steps of change. Changing your behavior is uncomfortable because you're pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. When this happens, your brain activates your fight-or-flight response. Unfortunately, flight is the easier choice than pushing through the discomfort to fight.

Although you’ll work within the confines of 12 weeks to achieve higher productivity, the cumulative outcome must be life-changing in the long term to keep you motivated. If you don’t have a compelling vision of your future, you won’t see the benefit of reducing your comfort level as you work toward it.

What Is a Compelling Vision?

Your compelling vision should be of a life significantly better than your current life. Otherwise, why put in all the work if you just want to stay in the same place. Imagine a future where you have everything you want. Think about your life goals. When you...

Shortform Exercise: Imagine Great Things for Your Life

We all have dreams, but sometimes the fear of not knowing how to make them happen causes us to diminish our goals.

What does your perfect future look like? Be specific regarding job, income, and social life.

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 3: Discipline 2—Plan Your Execution

Many people believe that simply having a compelling vision is enough. They sit back and wait for the universe to provide what they need to succeed. But the universe only responds to what you do, not what you dream about. You must act to achieve your full potential.

A compelling vision requires a compelling plan of action. You can’t navigate a new life if you don’t know which path to take to get there. Planning has three advantages that help you stay on track to reach your short- and long-term goals. You can work out all the mishaps you might face along the way when you take the time to plan on paper before you start to act. And as you reduce your mistakes, you save precious energy and time because you won’t waste either backtracking to fix errors made during a typical trial and error period. If you start to plan and end up somewhere you don’t want to be, you can readjust your plan without risking wasted capital.

A 12-Week Plan Versus a 12-Month Plan

You sharpen your planning skills when you focus your plan on 12-week production cycles. A 12-week plan has several advantages over a year-long plan:

1. You Increase Predictability

You can’t possibly predict...

Shortform Exercise: Create Your Roadmap for Success

Often, the hardest part of making significant changes in your life is knowing where to start.

State your vision for your future and three things that need to happen in the next three years to make it a reality.

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 4: Discipline 3—Control Your Process

Your actions are what create your future, so if you want an idea of what your future looks like, examine your current actions. You can’t completely predict how your future will turn out, but you can determine how successful you’ll be while working toward it.

At the beginning of each week, review the progress made the week before and your plan for building on that progress in the coming week. Also, make a weekly plan, and check it daily to ensure you’re clear on what duties must be accomplished that day. Once you determine what those duties are, don’t stop your day’s work until they’re done.

You’ll also check in throughout the day to make sure you’re still focused on the right task and the timeline of your week still makes sense. If it does, keep moving forward. If not, review the plan to restructure the activities necessary to achieve the week’s goals.

The Critical Aspects of Process Control

To ensure you don’t lose faith or momentum during your execution, you need progress measures to support your efforts. These supports are important because striving for a higher level of achievement means performing actions that are new and challenging. You can generate enough...

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 5: Discipline 4—Measure Your Progress

You gain valuable information about how to execute more effectively when you keep track of your execution progress over the week. Use a weekly scorecard to track your stats for how well you’re performing. With these data, you can make informed decisions about how to adjust your plan or process to attain better results. Without an objective measure of execution, you can’t know whether you’re doing what is necessary to meet your 12-week goal and future vision.

Some believe that keeping score is demoralizing because you’re forced to recognize failure. But the opposite is actually true. You can focus on what you’re doing right, rather than wrong, to boost your confidence and willpower. Statistical data are devoid of emotion. All you see is the raw facts of your outcomes.

How to Track Performance

To effectively track your execution progress, use two different measures: lag indicators and lead indicators. Lag indicators measure results, such as dollars earned, pounds shed, sales made, and pages written. Lead indicators measure the steps taken to achieve those results, such as marketing tactics, exercise routine, number of sales calls, and hours spent writing. You need...

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 6: Discipline 5—Manage Your Time Effectively

You must invest your time wisely to accomplish your tasks successfully. You, like everyone else on the planet, are used to feeling like you just don’t have enough time to do everything you want to do. But the truth is, this belief is usually a defense mechanism against facing the truth—you don’t manage your time well. Effective time management is often the difference between average achievers and high achievers.

People who have accomplished amazing feats in business, sports, or other arenas do not have more time than you do. They merely made better choices about how they spent their time, which is the foundation of good time management. Your choices from one minute to the next dictate how well you use your time.

Studies show that most people waste more valuable work time in a day than they realize. This time is wasted dealing with the various distractions people and technology throw your way while you’re trying to work. One study found it took 15 minutes for workers to get back to their tasks when they stopped to check emails or text messages. Another found that 28% of the average employee’s day is spent managing interruptions in workflow and time taken to refocus. In a...

Shortform Exercise: Use Your Time Effectively

It’s not possible to remove distractions, but knowing which distractions to look out for can help you manage them.

What are the two ways you currently distract yourself from work?

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 7: Principle 1—Accountability Breeds Success

Now that you know the five disciplines to reach your goals, let’s look at three principles to help you stay focused.

You will experience more success and pride in your work if you hold yourself accountable for following your plan. The nature of accountability is often misunderstood. You’ve heard managers say that they need to hold their employees accountable. You’ve heard lawyers say that criminals must be held accountable for their crimes. You’ve said that you're more productive when someone holds you accountable. These phrases convey accountability as some form of punishment or mandate applied to one person by another, but this is not accurate.

Accountability is a personal action. You hold yourself accountable when you make the choice to do what is needed. Accountability is the recognition of freedom of choice, not actions performed under duress. When you do something because you have to do it, the task feels like a burden, and you likely only put forth enough effort required to complete the task. But when you do something because you choose to do it, you're more empowered to perform the task to the best of your ability.

To truly be accountable, you must release...

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 8: Principle 2—Commitment Is Key

You have accepted personal accountability and decided to make positive choices to achieve your vision of your life. Now, you have to follow through because intent without action is worthless. The most important aspect of positive execution is a commitment to execute. A commitment is a promise to follow through on your accountability, or a promise to perform future actions. When you commit to your work in business and follow through, you foster trust, respect, and greater productivity. When you commit to your actions in your personal life and follow through, you foster discipline, confidence, and self-respect.

The simple act of committing to your plans is life-changing. Your sense of self and success grows the more you continue to show up and do the work. But it’s too easy to break our promises when situations become difficult. If you only do what you say you'll do when things are easy, you’re not truly committing to your work or life.

The following components are required to develop a strong sense of commitment:

• You must have a strong desire to compel you to act. This is similar to the need to create a compelling vision of your future. If you’re not...

Shortform Exercise: Strengthen Your Commitment

You have good intentions when you commit to certain actions, and when you feel emotionally attached to those actions, you’re more likely to follow through.

Think about the different arenas in your life, such as family, community, spirituality, financial status, and health. What would a breakthrough in these arenas look like? Choose two and be specific.

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 9: Principle 3—Greatness Is a Journey, Not a Destination

You can be great if you can be present in the moment. But you often have so many responsibilities, it’s hard to know where to put your energy and how to get the mental downtime you need to thrive. You multitask to make sure you engage with everything you need to get done, but by engaging with everything, you aren’t truly engaging with anything.

When you spread your attention too thin over multiple directions, you aren’t fully applying yourself to any task. You’re overworked, overconcerned, and overtired. Burnout is a likely result, and in the end, you haven’t mastered anything, just become mediocre at several things. To be truly great, you need to allow your body to catch up with your mind. When you're mentally in the same place as you are physically, you're living in the moment. And your true potential lies within this moment.

You can’t change the past or live in the future, but that doesn’t stop you from defining your worth by some end result you believe will signify success. Greatness isn’t achieved when you reach your final destination. Greatness represents the efforts made along the journey to get there. You become great the moment you decide to do the work to...

The 12 Week Year Summary Chapter 10: Starting Your First 12 Weeks

Your first 12-week year is the most important one you’ll have. You should not only consider it your first opportunity to grow in your life and career but also as a learning experience to set up your next 12-week year and all those that follow. The disciplines and principles you’ve learned are all that are required for you to get started with your first 12 weeks of goal achievement. But before you can have a successful first 12 weeks, you should get clear on the barriers that will try to thwart your progress. When you know what barriers to look out for, you'll more successfully maneuver around them and increase your chance for success.

Barriers to Success

1. Resistance.

Change is hard, and you’re hardwired to resist it. Resistance to change and the effort required is akin to the monster hiding under your bed as a child. When you ignore it because you’re too afraid to confront it, the power of that monster grows. But when you turn on the lights and expose the underside of your bed, you see that the monster is not as big as you thought or not there at all. **Learn to face your fears in the light of day so they don’t grow to exponential proportions and paralyze...

Shortform Exercise: Your First 12 Weeks to Success

The guidance provided in The 12 Week Year lays out everything you need to start achieving more today.

How interested are you in incorporating the 12-week plan into your life? Explain your answer.