Your days are busy, aren’t they?
When you wake up and look forward into your day, how much clarity do you see?
Is it always obvious what you “should” be focused on? How do you even define “should?”
Because a lot of your days can be consumed “just” doing what’s in your calendar and “needs” to be done, can’t they?
But is this your highest value?
Highest value
In my book Do What You Want I use the phrase Highest Value Actions.
It’s a common phrase I use with clients and it’s baked into all our winning methods like Rocket To The Top Like Musk And Bezos.
But, what does this even mean to be focused on your highest value actions?
Highest value relative to what?
And when, btw.
When?
Last couple weeks I’ve been talking a lot about eating frogs.
A client who was a college athlete said he’d given his son advice to walk into his high school football team locker room and get the team fired up by biting off the head of a frog. Fortunately his son thought better of this!
And it wasn’t the type of frog eating I was talking about either. I was talking about the time management device of eating frogs which means to wake up and get done your most resistance-inducing task first thing in the day.
So instead of thinking to yourself “I’ll get that done later….” and then later never coming or days or weeks stretching out like doing your taxes see it like if you had to eat a frog every day.
Would you wait till end of the day thinking about it over and over, or just wake up, eat that frog, and get on with your day?
Engineering your day
A buddy who runs a real estate development company says everything is engineering.
His brain is built this way and he’s religiously engineering his mind and actions all day.
When I shared with him the notion of eating frogs first thing he re-engineered how he sequences his day.
Because now he could see those things he kept putting off thinking he’d get to later in the day were just like scaffolding a building.
They weren’t always the highest value actions but by getting these things done first he was building his “accomplishment cycle” engineering winning his day.
Winning your day
“What is winning your day?” I asked a new client.
Now this guy is the type of entrepreneur who has opportunities coming to him all the time and like someone who collects cards he collects projects he wants to move forward with incredible people.
An issue he had was even with all his expertise engineering his best days, was he moving forward the right things? Because he felt like he got to the end of the day and week and month and even year after year and had been productive but “achieved” too little.
“How do you know?” I asked him. Do you see where I’m going here? You can be getting all these things done feeling like you’re being productive and making progress but do you know what best drives your winning?
Are you certain what winning means to you? Are you winning your day? Achieving what truly matters?
Chief aim
This one phrase has stuck with me for decades from the best-selling self-help book in history Napoleon Hill’s, Think and Grow Rich.
Because there’s lots of highly valuable ideas in this book yet Hill’s notion of your chief aim is what rules the day.
See, you know this. You can have tons of goals in life. Lots of things matter to you.
And then, you can have this one thing, this chief aim that’s most dominant.
What is this for you? Are you certain what this is? And why?
Keep your eye on this!
Your brain target fixates which is why riding motorcycles you’re taught to keep your eyes where you are headed instead of heading towards that pothole or cliff your eyes might be looking over!
For the same reason the four-letter word “Mars” dominates SpaceX and as one of Elon Musk’s chief engineers put it, every engineering decision at SpaceX is made on whether it moves forward or back by even one day a colony on Mars.
The target is certain. The company is built for achieving it. Every day is engineered for best achieving this target.
How about for you? How clear are you on your chief aim? How much is your chief aim engineered into your day? In what ways is it not?
Keep your eye on this! Because you can spend your days being busy and miss your chief aim in life.