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💡 The Big Idea: How to Gain Clarity & Motivation from a Personal Retreat

Back when he was CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates used to do what he called “Think Weeks.” He’d go to a cabin in the woods to get away from the day-to-day and just think about the future of the business (this is actually where the idea for Internet Explorer came from).

And while you & I may not be the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation, we can still benefit from taking a regular break to think about the future.

When it comes to our personal and professional success, we often get in our own way.

Keith Cunningham puts it brilliantly in his book The Road Less Stupid:

So, I’ve adapted the Think Week concept for myself into what I call a Personal Retreat framework. Every 90 days, I get away for at least 24 hours to reflect on the last quarter and think about the direction in which my life (and my family) is headed.

Why every 90 days? Because I find a quarter is the perfect timeframe for planning. It’s long enough to make significant progress but not so long that you end up procrastinating on what you intend to do. It also gives you four time periods to learn from your mistakes and make adjustments as needed instead of one if you did traditional annual planning.

The trick is to disconnect from your inbox (and every other potential distraction) for a little while. It's hard to do, but it's always worth it.

Every single time I go away for a Personal Retreat, I come back with major motivation to consistently take action on the things that are important and the clarity I need to cut the things that aren’t.

It’s an investment to get away for an entire day every quarter, but the return is exponential. I can’t tell how many times I’ve been struggling with a major life decision, and a well-timed Personal Retreat gave me the perspective I needed to see clearly and make the right decision.

A Complete Walkthrough of My Personal Retreat Process

Here’s the exact process I follow:

• Review my LifeTheme and personal core values (30m) - These are the filters I use for every decision I make. If I’m considering something and I don’t see how it connects to either my LifeTheme or my core values, it’s an automatic “No.” But every 90 days, I revisit it to make sure it still resonates and give myself permission to edit and make changes if needed.
• Review my journal entries (60m) - I review my journal entries, my gratitude, entries, and my wins from the past 90 days, as well as the charts from the Daily Questions (I did a YouTube video about this here if you’re interested in learning more). This helps me recall some of the significant things that happened and helps me see general trends in my thinking. I add entries to my Daily Notes with tags, and I use custom queries to review them.
• Review my ideal future (30m) - I have a description of my ideal future that I revisit to make sure that the details are still exciting to me. I also have a eulogy note that I wrote about the type of legacy I want to leave. Looking at these notes during my Personal Retreat helps give me context for the decisions I’ll be making and helps me stay in alignment with my long-term vision.
• Fill out the Wheel of Life (60m) - The wheel of life is an exercise where you rate your current happiness in the different areas of your life on a scale from 1-10. When you view the results visually, it gives you a polar area chart that is always enlightening. To do this in Obsidian, I use the Obsidian Charts plugin and add a few bullets for each area for the score that I gave. Once I’m done, I always pick the lowest area to address in the next 90 days.
• Retrospective, Part 1 (60m) - The first part of the Retrospective is reflecting on the last quarter and identifying what went well, what I accomplished, and what could have gone better.
• Retrospective, Part 2 (120m) - After a break, I come back and spend a couple of hours thinking about three key questions: what should I start doing, what should I stop doing, and what should I keep doing? This is where the magic happens — IF you stay on these questions long enough.
• Setting my Intentions/Goals (60m) - I condense everything I’ve written so far into 1 or 2 intentions or goals for the next 90 days. Once I have these, I break them down into weekly habits that will move the needle for the outcomes I want to create and make success inevitable.
• Review/Revise My Perfect Week (60m) - I keep a rough time block plan for what my ideal looks like. My weekly plan never follows this perfectly, but the closer I can get to this, the happier I am.

I do the whole thing in Obsidian and link to it from my weekly planning template so I can review it easily when planning my week.

Ready to Host Your Own Personal Retreat?

I’m sharing this with you now because right before Q4 is the perfect time to do a Personal Retreat of your own. If you’re ready to make it happen, here are a couple of resources for you:

• I made a YouTube video about my Personal Retreat process a while back, which lets you see the whole thing in action.
• My template has evolved a little bit since that video, so here’s a link to my current Personal Retreat Obsidian template
• I also put together a video course called the Personal Retreat Handbook, which goes deeper into the specifics of a Personal Retreat. It sells for $47, but you can save $20 if you use the coupon code Q4CLARITY. (You'll also get free updates for life.)
• If you’re looking for a great place to host your Personal Retreat, I highly recommend Getaway House. If you’re curious about the experience, I made a YouTube video about it.

😎 Something Cool: Meta Bind Plugin​

I may be a little late to the party, but this plugin is incredible. It allows you to create input and view fields inside your notes that can be bound to properties, which allows you to edit and view your properties inside your notes.

Let me give you an example…

I’ve been writing a lot of instruction curricula for LifeHQ, my done-for-you Obsidian vault, which includes a lot of preconfigured workflows, plugins, and settings. But I want to make sure people know how to modify them if they want to make them their own, so I’ve written over 50,000 words, which are available as How-Tos and Deep Dives inside the reference vault. But with that much material to go through, it’s easy to get lost. So, I created a property that is either read or unread and added a button via Meta Bind to each note that changes the property and marks the note as read when you click on it.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Meta Bind can do, but this one application warrants a mention. If you work with properties a lot in Obsidian, you should check out Meta Bind.

📚 Book Notes: The Second Mountain by David Brooks

Speaking of gaining perspective, The Second Mountain by David Brooks is a great book about living for a cause that’s bigger than yourself. The basic premise is that we start off striving to crush our goals, then we get to the top of the mountain we’re climbing, we ask, “Is this it?”

At that moment, we see another mountain in the distance. It’s others-centered, not self-centered. And we realize that was the mountain we should have been climbing all along.

I really enjoyed this book and have recommended it many times. If you’re at all interested in purpose-driven productivity, this is a good one to pick up.

And if you want to download my mind map book notes for this book, click here.

— Mike

P.S. If you end up doing a Personal Retreat before next quarter, I'd love to hear about it! Just reply to this email and let me know how it went 🙂 I'm always looking for additional Personal Retreat-related inspiration!