You’ll officially establish your goal — your “big win” — in Stage 1, but you’re probably already thinking about what you want it to be.

Some goals are better suited to this method than others, and we’ll go over that in this lesson. I’ll also offer a long list of big win ideas, because there's a huge variety of types of goals available to anyone who can make a good-sized stack of Blocks.

Three things your goal needs

A suitable goal for OBW checks three boxes:

• It will create meaningful rewards in your life

• It has a clear finish line

• Its achievement depends on your effort (and not on external factors)

1. Meaningful rewards

The whole idea of OBW is to build something in your life that makes it better. You’re going to make X number of Blocks in order to “buy” something great with your effort, which will then improve your life in a lasting way. Taking 40 Blocks to implement a new workflow system could drastically improve your experience at work, lower your stress levels, and earn you a raise. Deep-cleaning every dirty thing in your house (32 Blocks, perhaps) could brighten your mood every time you enter a room for a long time to come.

Think about your prospective goal as though you’ve just completed it — what is life like now? How does it feel? What does it allow you to do?

Does the thought of this new status quo feel great? It should -- choose a goal that would be a real “win” for you.

2. Clear finish line

You need to be able to finish your goal, and know when you’re finished. “Read the classics” isn’t clear or finishable, while “Read the complete works of Shakespeare” is.

Usually you can take an ill-defined goal and give it a clear finish line. If you want to learn culinary skills that can impress others (no clear finish line) you could schedule a dinner party eight weeks out, plan a menu, learn the skills to cook those dishes in the meantime (clear finish line).

You’ll spend the beginning of Stage 1 getting clear on what your goal entails. For now, just keep in mind that you’re going to need to define a finish line at some point.

3. Depends on your effort

The Block Method is a tool for focusing your efforts and getting a lot done. It cannot make other people do things, it cannot make favorable external events occur, and it cannot transcend the laws of physics. It’s simply a tool for maximizing your own output, and so your big win needs to depend on your output.

Some goals aren’t well suited to the Block Method because they involve help from outside factors. You can’t “Block” your way to an Oscar nomination, but you can Block your way to a finished screenplay. You can use Blocks to reach out to acquaintances and old friends, but you can’t make them get back to you.

Some goals also have natural bottlenecks on their progress. No matter how many Blocks you put in, you cannot train hard enough in eight weeks to go from completely untrained to bench-pressing three hundred pounds. You can assemble large parts of your family tree by putting lots of Blocks in, but you can’t make the Vital Statistics Agency deliver your requested birth records any faster.

Often you can shape your goal such that it is Block-suitable, by focusing on the part that does depend on you.

An (Optional) 4th Criterion: Fun

Your goal by no means needs to be fun. In fact, many people will want to use their Blocks to tackle something rather not-fun, such as scrubbing beneath appliances or optimizing tax strategy, simply because it would be very rewarding to have those things done.

However, OBW is an opportunity to finally do something that is fun, like reading great books, making art, cooking, or learning new skills.

Choosing a fun-to-work-on goal is totally legitimate and will only add to your motivation. Not everything worthwhile can be fun, but it should be rewarding either way.

Ideas for Big Wins

At any given time, you’re only 20 to 100 Blocks away from a huge variety of life-changing achievements. Here’s a list of possibilities.

• Get a major project at work done

• Finish your university thesis, or a piece of it

• Declutter the entire household

• Begin your novel and get the first two chapters done

• Learn to play the guitar solo in Stairway to Heaven

• Install You Need a Budget (or a similar app) and get yourself using it

• Write a novella

• Read a long classic, or several of them. (e.g. The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace, Jane Austen’s big three, In Search of Lost Time, Don Quixote, Ulysses.)

• Organize all your photos

• Start a Dungeons & Dragons campaign

• Get 40 hours of meditation under your belt

• Educate yourself on [Topic X] so that you’re able to discuss [Topic X] confidently

• Get a certification, for work or for fun

• Learn the basics of mobile app design, audio engineering, CSS, or any other technical skillset

• Learn to code

• Read the essential “canon” in some topic area (top 5 personal finance books, top 3 books about A.I., etc)

• Deep dive into a person you admire, consuming their work and a biography or two

• Learn to assemble your family tree on ancestry.com, or elsewhere

• Prepare your will

• Launch a YouTube channel and make your first three videos

• Read the Bible, or study some of its books deeply

• Learn everything you need to know in order to hike the Pacific Northwest Trail next year

• Knock off a long list of small, long-ignored tasks

• Make a quilt

• Go through everything in the attic or garage

• Write three short stories

• Record an album

• Get all your inboxes to zero

• Learn to use ChatGPT, Midjourney, or another A.I. tool skillfully

• Deep clean: list everything that’s really dirty – under the stove, the back foyer walls, etc, and get all of it sparkling

• Write down all your burning questions about a particular topic (e.g. personal finance, computing, politics) and look up the answers

• Go through all your filing cabinets so that you know where every document is

• Cull all your online feeds, bookmarks, and to-read lists: Substack, Twitter, Instagram, etc, or unfollow everyone and start from scratch

• Learn how to properly service your vehicle, and establish a clear maintenance schedule

• Start an online business

• Come up with a principled, well-researched position on a tricky political or moral issue

• Learn some yoga, qi gong, or tai chi routines by heart, so that you can do them anywhere and any time

• Learn to draw, using a book like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

• Learn to use a sewing machine and do a few projects

• Learn to cook three or four go-to dishes well enough that they would impress most people

• Assemble and print a family cookbook

• Start a zine and distribute the first issue

• Make a list of people you want to reconnect with, and reach out to them

• Learn the BBC’s 25 skills every cook should know

• Deal with your storage locker: clean it out, quit paying every month, and sell everything you don’t want

• Build a patio, shed, or fence

• KonMari (i.e. declutter item-by-item) the entire household

• Write the screenplay you’ve had in your mind for years

• Design and publish an online course

• Do the CBT workbook your therapist gave you but which you stuck in a drawer

• Implement David Allen’s GTD system, or some other workflow system

• Look up a list of things you feel like you should know but just don’t (What are the three branches of government? What are you supposed to do when you encounter a bear?)

• Learn Adobe Photoshop or some other software

• Start a podcast

• Figure out how to back up your computer regularly and stop worrying about losing everything

• List everything broken in your home and fix it, replace it, or get rid of it

• Learn the basics of photography

• Learn a list of minor skills you admire, such as: wrap a present neatly, pour a beer perfectly, jump rope without constantly stopping, jump start a car, shuffle cards, parallel park, do magic tricks, etc.

If there’s a goal that really appeals to you, don’t worry if you don’t yet know how you might achieve it in eight weeks. We’ll get to that.

For now, just imagine the different possibilities. What would your life be like if you could pull that off? In less than two months, that could be your life.

Invent your own

The list above is only to inspire you. What a big win is for you depends on the particulars of your life. Your big win might be very idiosyncratic and hard to explain to others. Perhaps you want to finally “do something” with your boxes of Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering cards up in the attic, which you know are worth quite a bit, including getting some nearly-forgotten ones back from your uncle’s attic if possible.

This might sound like a straightforward problem, but you haven’t acted on it all these years because it really isn’t straightforward. You have to figure out what’s there, first of all. How do you appraise and sell them? Do you have to find a buyer for each one? How do you even use ebay? Or is that what people use these days? And are you just going to call Uncle Kevin for the first time in three years?

Doing even ordinary things can be quite complex! Something like this will never get done without a plan and a concerted effort. Because it's not a simple or sexy task, it never seems like the right time. Yet it could net you thousands of dollars over the next eight weeks, and take a load off your mind.

If it would be a big win for you, and it meets the three criteria above, it’s a candidate.

Meet George and Pam

Throughout the course, in order to help you see the process at work with different goals, I’ll be referring to two fictional characters, George and Pam, who will be doing the course alongside you.

Following George and Pam's progress (appended to the end of some lessons) isn't strictly necessary to complete the course, but they may give you ideas about how to manage your project.

Right now, George has a couple of project ideas. He likes the thought of mapping out his family tree, but has no idea what that entails. If it turns out to be too much for eight weeks, he might instead write a screenplay based on some old family letters he found.

Pam wants to set up a website to publish essays about her favorite films. She knows people who have set up sites in even less time, so she thinks she can pull it off.