That’s how long an average worker is productive each day…
That’s a yield of 36%.
Imagine a production line that was operating at 36% yield.
Where 64% of the inputs were wasted.
That’s the average workday.
The average life.
It’s not just routine jobs either.
In fact, someone sitting answering phones all day is certainly far more productive than most professionals.
Perhaps nothing is more important…
Yet harder to find.
That’s why I created this Masterclass on Focus Tools.
It’s focused, short and devastatingly sweet.
Just a couple hours and three 5 minute tools that make ADHD and meditation look like child’s play.
Here’s the intro track:
The best way to win is through brute force.
Everyone knows that hustle is the secret to winning, and that demands that you never have a minute you’re not ferreting away.
Most people are far too lazy for this approach.
Some people are just too stupid to run themselves ragged chasing success, but those who are truly ambitious know exactly how to win.
As soon as you wake up you must get yourself fired up.
And we all know that the absolute best way to motivate yourself is with fear.
Immediately, as soon as you wake up, you want to start thinking about EVERYTHING that you need to get done today.
The best “hack” for getting your anxiety started is to keep your phone by your bed so that within 30 seconds of waking you can check your email.
Of course if you’re serious about winning, you never want to let that anxiety get away from you while lazy people are sleeping, so keep your phone dinging all night.
The most insightful question we should all ask ourselves is, “What keeps you awake at night?”
And then every night before going to bed you want to fill your mind with those things so your brain will keep waking you up to hustle.
It might seem small but just waking up a few times through the night to check your email can make a massive difference. People will know how much you hustle, you’ll feel like you’re all over it, and with just a few thousand sleepless nights you’ll be crushing it.
Now you’ve got your nights sorted and are waking up with the right terror, you want to drive your day the same way.
If you’re serious about success, after you check your email, you want to start filling your mind with all the ways that you might fail, and especially, all the things that might go wrong today.
Instead of paying attention to your spouse, kids, pets, or others you love, you want to be fully in your head thinking about all those things that are happening elsewhere.
A great way to keep building up your fear and overwhelm is to tune into the news, and of course start scrolling through social media, paying careful attention to all the bad things that are going on that have zero impact on you, and you have zero control.
By far Twitter is the best.
It’s only soundbites, so you can easily scroll through thousands of brain farts and overwhelm yourself with noise in just a few minutes.
Once again, if you’re truly ambitious, you’ve been doing this throughout the night, but for those of you who aren’t as committed, there’s still plenty of time to build enough overwhelm to start your day.
Continuing on our theme for the year of getting done what matters to you, I want to hit the most basic and fundamental idea.
All the time people ask me what is the trick to getting yourself doing those things you’ve been avoiding, and this is, quite literally, what matters most—
You must be skillful at getting yourself moving and building momentum.
That’s it.
It’s very simple, but, of course, as with all things that we talk about here, this doesn’t make it easy to do.
As I wrote about last week there are many things that can get in the way of making progress on our goals.
Some times we’re resisting. Other times avoiding. Inner conflicts. Lack of commitment. There are lots of reasons we get stalled.
Yet, no matter what the reason, we get held back for more or less the same cause…
We are creatures of habit. And anything new that we “try” to get ourselves to do is, by definition, in conflict with our “muscle memory,” our habits, our old ways of being.
So, while just getting ourselves to take new actions can be hard in its own right, it’s also the elastic pull, or gravity, of our old habits that we must escape.
Think of someone with a goal to change their job. Just imagining all the things they must do to hunt and claim that new job might be resistance-inducing enough, but first reaching escape velocity from their old job can be even harder.
They might be fired up about making a job change, but waking up every day and heading to that old job tends to have a way of starving that new job of oxygen.
To make progress you must be able to get beyond those old ways of being, get yourself moving in a new direction, and build momentum in your goals and days.
Progress begets progress. We of course know this. A rolling stone gathers no moss and all that…
But when it comes to our goals, crucially, progress also acts as a “convincer” that we’re on the right track.
Results validate our belief and effort, which begets more belief and effort. And this shot in the arm is often all we need to keep taking action.
In most goals this happens naturally with progress, but we also want to engineer our goals in such a way that we can build momentum with small victories.
Any small victory will do. One more day in a row you ate right. Or went to the gym. Or didn’t drink. Just a couple of great meetings might be all it takes to feel like you’re building momentum in a job search.
You also want to find ways to remind yourself of your momentum. You might do this in your Daily Exercises. A calendar on the wall that you mark with progress. An app that does the same thing.
However you do it keep finding ways to prove to yourself that you’re building momentum, and you’ll find it easier to get yourself focused and taking action.
In the last few weeks one article on my website keeps getting hit over and over again.
The headline, How to Focus on What Really Matters and Stop Wasting Time, tells you exactly what many of us are searching for.
If we had to label in one word what’s driving this search, we might choose “regret.”
Looking back on those things that we didn’t get done last year, we’re seeking strategies to get them done this year.
Correctly, we identify that our problem might come back to focus.
Incorrectly, we often think the solution is getting better at time management…
Some of the most “successful” people I’ve known are hardly experts at time management, nor are they even efficient.
In fact, many of them are downright inefficient.
They aren’t particularly clear on what matters most to success, nor are they particularly exceptional at getting focused on those things…
But for what they lack in focus, they make up for in brute force by throwing a lot of hours at their goals.
Unlike a surgeon whose every cut could be the difference between life and death, in many arenas of success, precise focus can be less relevant than simply working at it.
My old world of investment banking is a perfect example—
You don’t need to be the best banker on the planet if you’re willing to work 100 hours a week for the rest of your life.
You decide.
See, it’s not about solving questions like, “How do I stop wasting time and focus on what matters?” It’s about committing to what matters!
Whether you want to get the house painted, your mind right, or step back and get focused on landing the job you truly want, it’s your decision that gets you moving.
A decision is simple. It says, This matters. And I’m going to do whatever it takes to make it happen.
If I said that reading this would save you hours this week you might not believe me.
But even if you don’t, you’d likely believe that the way many of us engage with email is costing us hours a week, right?
Hours a week flushed down the gurgler.
Hours a week that you could put into valuable tasks that lead to more of what you want.
Hours a week that you could be doing something fun.
Hours a week that you could be much more enjoying your time than eyes pasted on a screen.
I know we all identify with these goals, which only leaves two questions.
First, what are you going to do with all that extra time?
Now here’s the thing that I’m not going to do here…
I’m not going to give you some “productivity hacks” or tips that may or may not be right for you.
I’m not going to try and get you to “just look at email less” or “shut down your email during the day.”
Instead, I’m going to share with you an important principle and suggest that, if you want to rescue a couple hours a week from your email, you use these ideas to commit yourself to a new email routine.
In some ways this should be the easiest change in the world, but we all know it’s not so easy.
Many of us struggle to effectively manage our time. With an inundation of emails, phone calls, and meeting requests, we must keep finding ways to protect our time for what matters most.
That often requires becoming better at saying “No.”
This can be hard to do. We all have a fear of missing out, of saying no to an opportunity that might just change our lives. Maybe this lunch is where we hear the idea that comes to define our career. Maybe this connection will be a lifelong friend.
If you let that thinking rule your actions, you are bound for failure.
Do you want to be happier? Better?
More engaged? More focused? More alive?
Do you want to get done the things that matter to you?
In Podcast 2.0: THE HOUSE OF FLOW, I share with you powerful ideas on becoming fully absorbed in what you are doing, and I take you deep inside my HOUSE OF FLOW.
Step inside. Get absorbed. Come more alive!!
P.S. This is an old podcast, and my later and greater version of the House of Flow you can listen to here.
The hardest thing I have done is write my first book.
I’ve done some hard things in my day but it all seems easy relative to writing The Guide.
Of course it would have been easier if I could actually write! But even then writing is notoriously hard.
There are many quotes from writers, such as Dorothy Parker’s, “I hate writing, I love having written.”
And in perhaps the best book on this subject, The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield writes:
“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”
Over time it got fun for me as I learned to stop thinking too much.
So rather than sitting down to write, and thinking about writing, and thinking about what I just wrote, and analyzing words, and sentences, and paragraphs, instead you learn to get in the flow and keep moving.
Writer of the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming, said, “Never look back, if you look back you are sunk, just keep writing, the story is everything.”
Like a fat kid on skis, once you have momentum it is easy to keep going.
And if you keep going, you will keep making progress.
And if you keep making progress, you will inevitably finish.
Whether it be improving your career, changing your job, transforming your life, or any other project, sitting down and getting started is the most important and often the hardest part.
Like writing a book and thinking about the thousands of pages of mess in front of you, you can become over-whelmed and fail to take any steps.
Yet a book comes together by working at it consistently day by day and getting what you want happens the same way.
Just f’n get going!
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg’s hacker motto is, “Move fast and break things.”
LinkedIn CEO, Reid Hoffman says, “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.”
My friend, a highly sought after coach says, “Take massive imperfect action and improve as you move.”
Having created some far less-than-perfect products, and just launched the ninth version of wallstreetteach.com, I firmly grasp the power of getting moving.
If you are doing something new, just get started, get moving, take action.
It is inevitable you will make mistakes, but you will avoid the most fatal mistake.
The number one reason most people fail to get what they want is they never get started.
Endlessly thinking about the things that they want to do, they fail to just do it.
Like Nike has proven, there is enormous power in just doing it.
When you just do it, you get moving.
And when you get moving, you build momentum.
And when you build momentum, you feel empowered.
And when you feel empowered, you keep taking action.
And when you keep taking action, it is inevitable that you are moving closer to what you want.