Welcome to the first lesson of The Clarity Challenge inside The Purposeful Performer.

Goals and resolutions fail because they rely solely on willpower. Systems succeed because they set you up for consistent, purposeful progress. Instead of just “trying harder” or “setting your sights higher,” build a simple system that aligns with who you are and where you want to go.

Today’s focus?

Develop a one-word (or single-phrase) theme for the year and personify it with a meaningful persona—something or someone you can channel in those critical moments of decision and doubt.

With The Clarity Challenge, we’re laying the foundation for a high-performance operating rhythm—a system that guides your decisions toward a clear Vision (rather than making hopeful goals that fade in a few months or chasing unattainable targets that leave you frustrated at the end of the year).

Systems ensure continuous improvement by shaping your daily thoughts, words, actions, habits, and ultimately your trajectory.

As a seasoned tech seller, you’re not just chasing short-term quotas but designing a career that accelerates financial freedom and personal autonomy.

Goals and resolutions often boil down to wishful “I should’s,” but a system gives you a strong why—fueling bigger opportunities, sustainable success, and, eventually, 100% calendar ownership. This is a valuable exercise to complete at clean intervals—a new calendar or fiscal year, starting a new role or program (like this one), or simply to get a clean reset in your life.

→ Thought exercise: Imagine if your calendar were only filled with projects and people that brought you joy. Wishing it to be true won’t make it happen, but connecting deeply to a personal system you trust will.

This is the first small step.

Example as the Zen Athlete: ”Before every call, I will do four rounds of box breathing to calm my parasympathetic nervous system so that I can deliver my message with calmness and I can clearly communicate with my prospect.”

Other examples: The theme of “Be Visible” and persona of “A Media Maverick” could include committing to sending a personal video message to one strategic contact each morning, or, for the theme of “More Strategic” and persona of “The Deep Thinker,” could be blocking an hour each day for deep work before checking email.

These purposeful habits, accumulated over the year, will compound in your favor.

I did this exercise with an Inner Circle Member last year. He’s highly organized and prepared, setting himself up well for Stage 3 opportunities.

He was at a relatively unknown company despite having a highly strategic account list. At that stage of his career, he needed to be comfortable being a bit more “scrappy” and “entrepreneurial” in certain parts of his day or week to build a stronger TOFU (top-of-the-funnel) pipeline.

He’s a car enthusiast, so we settled on “Let It Rip” as his theme and the persona of a “Mustang” to support it.

The Mustang (the car) embodies the muscle, freedom, and power of the Mustang (the horse). Fittingly, this member grew up watching “Black Beauty” (and owns a vintage Mustang), so this persona has a double impact. Anytime he’s in a pinch, he can think of the black Mustang horse galloping “home” or listen to The Black Beauty theme to refocus his attention on what’s truly important.

He’s pretty familiar with the power of somatics, so hearing this theme or seeing the black Mustang in his mind’s eye gives him the physical sensations to disrupt any negative patterns or thought loops consuming him and direct his focus on more purposeful actions.

I settle on my theme by asking, "What moves me closer to what I truly want in life?"

By way of example, below are my themes and personas from the past several years since implementing this strategy:

By developing a theme and a supporting persona, I've found more peace, creativity, and less obsession with fixed outcomes.

This has allowed me to be more fluid about what is outside my control while being more specific about micro-actions within my control.

Goals can be emotionally charged, whereas actions (when tracked daily or across a week) can remain binary—you either do them or don't.

For example, a common seller goal: "I want to earn x this year."

I tripled my earning potential when I ditched fixed goals to adopt this system.

For instance, I wanted to earn $500K heading into 2019, but by sticking to my theme of slowing down to speed up, I earned $1.5M that year.

That’s because I wasn’t fixated on a specific target, which would have required me to devote the entire year to that goal. Parkinson’s Law explains why: work expands to fill the time you give it. Instead of letting a one-year container invite unnecessary activity, I focused on my principles and operating system (which we’ll deconstruct in future lessons) to support, uphold, and embody my theme.

The result? I transformed from a fixed mindset to an abundance mindset, far surpassing what I thought I could achieve.