Miarazzo can be a profound tool to help you to mold yourself into the person you’ve always dreamed of being. It doesn’t matter how far you have to go to achieve that. What is important is that you make a change to the right direction and start the journey. The following are steps that will help you use Miarazzo in it’s most effective way.

Step 1.) Establish Goals: You wouldn’t go on a road trip without a map, why would you begin each day’s journey without one? No telling where you will end up, and most likely not a place you’d like to be! Common wisdom these days says that good goals are “SMART” which is an acronym for:

• Specific – Document in the goal precisely what you want to accomplish. You wouldn’t ask your Uber driver to “take you to New York”. No telling where they would drop you off. You would give them a specific address so there is no wasted time or money, and you would reach your desired destination. The same goes for your goals. Rather than set a goal to “get in shape”, set a goal of “be able to run a 5k without stopping in 30 minutes”. Document in the goal the specific steps you will take to attain it. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail after all. Another important thing to do is to choose an image to associate with your goal. As they say, a picture is worth 1000 words, this is true in helping you to visualize the goal you plan to reach.
• Measurable – be sure your goals have measurable outcomes so that you can stay on track and celebrate the wins. You will make excuses and fool yourself into thinking you are doing ok if you do not have measurable outcomes. These should also have target dates so that you don’t slack off and be too easy on yourself. Rather than say your goal is to “lose weight”, say that you will lose 1 lb per week for the next 4 weeks.
• Attainable – it is good to be hard on yourself, but don’t be unrealistic or you will get disappointed in yourself and even depressed. The goal should require some change in your life, or it would have already been achieved. Jim Rohn said “Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.” To be successful, one needs to keep their targets realistic and sustainable. Don’t set yourself up for failure by making an impossible goal like becoming a billionaire or losing 100 lbs by the end of the month.
• Relevant – One of the most important parts of setting a goal is establishing a “why” you want to achieve the goal. Freidrich Nietzsche has a quote that says “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” If you make a goal without having good reasons why you want to achieve them, you will find any “excuse” rather than any “how” and never get them done. Document in your goal why it is important, even if it is self evident. It will more firmly embed in your mind the goals importance. You will most likely even come up with a few reasons why that you’d not thought of before. If you cannot come up with a why, then do not create the goal!
• Timebound – This is tied with the “measurable” part of the SMART acronym. Your goal should not only have a pre-defined value, but also a deadline to keep you motivated and keep the goal from slipping through your fingers. So schedule a date, and a celebration!

Step 2.) Link Motivational Quotes: to keep you inspired and moving in the right direction. If you do not find a quote you like in Miarazzo’s quotes, search the internet and find one that does. You can add quotes you find to Miarazzo, and then link them to your goals. Be sure the quote is meaningful to you and related to the goal. You will be surprised how motivating quotes are. Like with the goals on Miarazzo, images can be added to quotes you create. Be sure to add an image that is meaningful to you and related to the quotes you add. If you don’t like the images we have on our quotes, just copy our quote and create a new quote of your own with an image of your choosing. Visualizations help!

Step 3.) Link Habits to your goals to sow your destiny. These are the things you need to do on a regular basis to achieve your goal. Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.“ And you thought you were just setting goals here? This is where you build a destiny! With Miarazzo you can track your habits on a daily basis. For the first 60 days, set your habit frequency to daily, if not always so that it will show up every day in your home page feed at Miarazzo. It takes most people 60 days to establish a habit.

Step 4.) Link Metrics to your goals so that they are measurable and you know your numbers.

Step 5.) Seriously review your goals at least daily. When you create your goal, be sure to set it’s review frequency to daily or always so that it shows up in your Miarazzo home page feed. No skimming. Seriously ponder the goal itself, the quotes you assigned to it, and enter your metrics/habits. Create an icon on your mobile phone home page to take you directly to Miarazzo, and visit the site every day to keep yourself on track. Click on the goal title in your feed to take you to the “goal view” page where you will also see the quotes and be able to mark it as “reviewed”.

One of my favorite quotes is from the book “Dune” by Frank Herbert which says “The test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.“. If you internalize this, it becomes something like “I will test myself by what I actually do, not by all the things I keep telling myself I’ll do someday”. Meditate on this thought/quote every morning and make a plan to actually do something each day that gets you closer to where you want to be.