If you're in Week 1 and these three words are starting to blur together, here's the way I finally got it to click.
They're three points on one line: where you are, where you're headed, and how you get moving.
**𝗕𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 — 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗻𝗼𝘄.**
The honest snapshot. Your sleep, your energy, the state of the things you've been avoiding. Not a judgment, just your coordinates. Without it you can't tell later if anything actually moved.
**𝗡𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿 — 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿-𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺 𝗮𝘀𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.**
This is the horizon, not the six weeks. Your future self, a few years out. It's the "why" that has to survive the week 3 day when everything feels heavy and the old voice pipes up. Important bit: your North Star does **not** change inside a six-week cycle. Its whole job is to keep pointing.
**𝗕𝗶𝗴 𝗥𝗼𝗰𝗸𝘀 — 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝘅-𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸 𝘃𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲.**
This is where the short-term work lives. You pick a maximum of two life domains that carry you toward the North Star over these weeks, and each gets one concrete, measurable indicator. The Big Rock is the direction. The number is the compass reading that makes the daily decision almost automatic.
So the chain is simple:
🔹 **Baseline** tells you where you are
🔹 **North Star** tells you where you're ultimately going
🔹 **Big Rocks** are the two things you actually move over six weeks to close a bit of that gap
The North Star stays fixed. The Big Rocks are what you renegotiate each cycle.
A question that helped me: does my commitment letter clearly separate the horizon from the six-week move? Or have the two quietly blurred into one? That's usually where the clarity leaks. 💛