I often recommend books I’m reading. This one isn’t getting my recommendation — except for one habit worth stealing from it: writing down your goals every single day.
The book is Be Obsessed or Be Average by Grant Cardone. If you don’t know him, Cardone is a sales trainer, speaker, and real estate mogul whose firm manages over $4.3 billion in assets. The man is worth more than half a billion dollars. He is also, by his own admission, someone people either love or hate.
I don’t hate him. I just don’t buy most of what he’s selling.
Cardone’s whole premise is that you’ll never achieve anything meaningful unless you go all in and obsess over your goals, twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week. That’s not a typo. That’s basically his math. And look, I agree that greatness doesn’t come from coasting. But somewhere between 25/8 and “never have dinner alone with your spouse because you might miss a sales opportunity,” Cardone and I parted ways.
That’s not an exaggeration, by the way. He actually writes that he and his wife don’t do dinners as just the two of them, because why waste an evening you could spend closing a deal over appetizers.
I’m no relationship expert, but I’ve been married almost 25 years, and I can tell you that a marriage doesn’t run on leftover time. My wife and I still love a quiet dinner together, just the two of us. Half the time I’m the one begging her to slow down, because she rolls straight out of teacher mode and can inhale a meal in 9 minutes flat. But that’s a different newsletter.
Cardone also brags about skipping vacations and mocks the doctors who tell him his pace isn’t sustainable. When people suggest he’s made enough money and should enjoy it, his answer is that he’ll never have enough.
And hey, it’s hard to argue with the results. The man has about $4.3 billion more than I do. But for every Grant Cardone who wins at that pace, there are 9,999 people quietly running themselves into the ground trying to copy him. That’s not a formula for a full life. That’s a formula for a great Q4…and a great obituary.
The One Habit Worth Stealing: Writing Down Your Goals
Here’s the part of the book that actually resonated with me. Cardone writes down his goals every single morning and every single night. Not his to-do list. Not his tasks. His goals — all of them, no matter how big or unrealistic they sound.
He doesn’t let himself think about how he’ll get there. He just writes them down. Over the years those goals have grown right along with him. There was a point when $100 million in real estate felt like a stretch. Now he manages billions. The number changed, but the discipline of putting pen to paper never did.
I actually think that kind of focus is healthy. Not the 25/8 version — the daily-reminder version. When your goals are sitting in front of you every morning, it gets a lot easier to catch yourself before you burn another evening on a show you don’t even really like. You start asking a simple question: does this get me closer to what I said I wanted, or further away?
So I started doing it. I’ve got roughly 30 goals written down across my businesses, my family, and myself. Honestly, just writing this article, five more came to mind that I need to add to the list. Some I can knock out in the next year. Others might take a decade. I’m not writing action plans underneath them. I’m not overthinking the “how.” I’m just keeping them in front of me, on repeat, every day.
I’m even starting a second notebook — one where I log every goal I complete, so I’ve got a running record of what actually got done. Something tells me that once I start filling that one up, it’s going to fuel the next round of goals even more.
Here’s my challenge for you. Grab a notebook. Write your goals down today. Don’t edit them. Don’t fact-check them. Don’t give yourself a reality check before the ink is even dry. Just write. Do it again tomorrow, and the day after that. Watch what starts happening to your focus.
You don’t need to work yourself into the ground to build a life you’re proud of. You just need to know what you’re building toward — and be willing to write it down.
Dream big. Plan smart. Live fully.