Be More PRODUCTIVE, PRIORITIZE Your Time, and Get Things DONE!

Most people live by the law of accident. Don't let that be you. If you think of uncertainty as a muscle and you train it like a muscle, things start changing. You've got to find a way to be excited about what you're doing. Where you have assigned meaning to the experience fueling that work rather than letting the job description be your only definition of it. When they say, "Do I want to make an impact?" And the answer is yes and they own it. They realize they're going to have to develop. The thing that I love is that you're using the word build because that's exactly what we're going to be doing here. You're going to construct what you want your life to be. You're going to break it up into different hours and segments so you know when it's go time and then you're going to build rules into your life that mandate that you show up during those times. So I have a whole host of rules in my life. Uh they can be small, simple rules like I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. Uh they can be more profound and impactful goals or excuse me, rules. And I have a rule in my life where Monday through Friday, if I'm awake, I'm either working or working out. So if I were doing something like you in this situation, I would say, "Okay, these two day two hours or five hours, however much time it is that you want to allocate to the business, you're going to say, 'I am working on the business during these times.'" I'm going to tell myself, I'm going to tell other people. That way there's accountability. Then I'm going to score myself at the end of that session. Did I show up? Did I start when I said I was going to start? Did I go hard the whole time? And I'm just going to give myself a rating every day depending on where I'm going, how I did that day. Was I distracted? Did I have flow? Was it a great day, a bad day? And by doing that, I'm going to hold myself accountable so I can see over time that I show up when I said I was going to show up. What was the score that I gave myself for staying focused, staying on task, and getting things done? And then the third thing to really make this stick, you've got to find a way to be excited about what you're doing. And oftentimes when people come and they say that they're having trouble making a new habit stick, the reality is they just don't want it badly enough. And when you realize that that's not an indictment on you as a person, that's a simple statement about the fact that desire is a process. So, you don't There's very few things in your life that you just sort of automatically are excited about. Most of things, if you really want to kick ass at something, you've got to build a ton of energy into getting excited about that thing. Now, that comes in a couple different forms. Number one is your why. Why are you doing this? So, it might be, "Hey, my husband and I were really excited about this. This is going to be our path to freedom and building something with him. Like, this means everything to me, and I couldn't be more excited, more honored to be working side by side with my husband to build something, to show each other what we're capable of, to take care of each other, to, you know, give ourselves what we need to build a family." Whatever. You're going to make that why. You're going to say it. You're going to say it with enthusiasm. It's what I call embodying what you want to feel. So, if you want to be excited, when you're telling other people, when you're even talking to yourself, when you're talking to your husband, you're actually going to let yourself get hyped up. There's a mechanism in the brain that says, "Whoa. Hey, we're all hyped up about this. It must actually be worth being hyped up about." And it becomes a self-reinforcing loop. So, we've got our why. And then we want to make sure that we're putting the identity into it that we want to get out. So, if we want to be the kind of person that shows up and works hard, then we say, "I'm the type of person that shows up and works hard." And you're going to lean into that and the why that you have your husband, you guys are building something, you're excited about it, you're telling other people, you're embodying it, and now you've got the identity statement of I'm the type of person that does this. I see this through. And you repeat that cocktail over and over, over and over, and following it up with that score, and all of the sudden, over time, and it will take time cuz it is a process, but over time, you're going to stick to it because it means something to you and your husband. You've got the rule about showing up. You're rating yourself on how you did that day. You're feeling good on the days that you killed it, and you're reminding yourself to dig a little deeper on the days where you don't. And I promise, if you just work that process over and over and over, 2 weeks, a month into this, it's just going to be second nature. You're going to be showing up, you're going to be excited, you're going to see it through. And that's it. Just work the process. I think even one step before that is is opening yourself up to new role models and new experiences. See, we live in echo chambers. We're just surrounded by the same thinking. How often do you bump into a monk? You know, it just doesn't happen. You don't have No one has a dinner party and goes, "Oh yeah, we just invited the monk, you know, from town, like the local monk." Like no one ever does that. And so, we meet people who are just like us most of the time. And we talk about this in business all the time. If you want to be a billionaire, spend time with billionaires. If you want to be a millionaire, spend time with millionaires. If you want to be a tech startup, spend time with, you know, that's that's the common rhetoric that we hear all the time. But what if you want to find purpose and master the mind? There's no one better than a monk who's mastered the mind. So, so for me, the first step is just opening yourself up to new experiences and new role models. Because most of us can't see ourselves in people, so then we try and fit ourselves into the boxes that we do see. And and I mean, there's this beautiful quote that I I've been saying it everywhere, and I wish I wrote it, but I didn't. So, it's by a philosopher and writer named Cooley. And he said that today I'm not what I think I am. I'm not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am. Right? And just let that blow your mind for a moment. It's uh it's so powerful. I'm not what I think I am. I'm not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am. So, we live in this perception of a perception of ourselves. Hence, my identity is made by what my parents think I should be. My identity is made up by what my college or university thinks I should achieve. While you're living in that bubble in that echo chamber, getting to what you really want to do is impossible. Because maybe that just doesn't fit. And I think so many people feel that way today. That they don't fit into the current education system. They don't fit with the three or four or five careers that you're taught exist. So, that process of self-excavation and actualization first requires being exposed. You can't be what you can't see. If I never saw a monk, I would never have wanted to be a monk. If I never meet a billionaire, I wouldn't want to be one. Because I wouldn't know what that feels like. I don't know what it looks like. I don't know what it takes. And and I think that's the biggest challenge of our society, that we're not exposed. So, that's the first step. Being exposed to unique experiences and role models. Second step is finding that experience or role model that you're passionate about. And exactly like you said, taking it seriously. Shadow them. Network with them. Spend time with them. Observe them. Even from afar. It takes that observation, being addicted to observing that person's lifestyle. And then the third step is going yes or no. Does that work for me? Not everyone who's going to go off and become a monk is going to feel like the way I did. And that's cool. But not everyone is going to go and follow and shadow a billionaire and go, "That's exactly the lifestyle I want." They may want the result, but do they want the hard work that goes with it? And so for me, that's the third step. It's observing, focusing, shadowing, getting as close to the process of that individual, and then going yes or no. Do I want that process? Not do I want the result? Everyone wants to be that monk who's fully enlightened, you know, can walk through, has an incredible aura that people just gravitate towards. But when you realize he has to wake up at 2:00 a.m. every day and sleeps about 4 to 6 hours, you're like, "Ah, you know, I don't want to do that." Sometimes, instead of pushing back against the way that we are, we can lean into it. So, finding a way to structure your life such that you have a job that actually lets you do that. So, if you know, "Hey, I need to be moving around. I need to have a high degree of physicality in my job." All of that, find a job that lets you do that. You've already said that all of your past jobs sound like they were more suited to what you're doing now. So, that begs the question, what does the ideal job look like for you? I'm guessing you've taken other jobs in your life because you were wanting to move up, right? So, you want to make more money, you want a better title, whatever the case may be. And so, recognizing that where you are right now may not be fully suited to where you want to be. So, what are the things that need to change? And I think it is very instructive for people to ask the question, "Who's living my ideal life?" And that doesn't mean who's making the most money. It means what person's life do you want to live? The real day-to-day grind of it. And when you identify what your dream job is, now we need to go about figuring out how we get that job. And so, very quickly, a question about managing our ADHD and figuring out how to stay focused actually becomes a question of how do we get good at finding the right job. And so, if you think about orchestrating your life, and most people live by the law of accident. I want to repeat that. Most people live by the law of accident. Don't let that be you, right? You bump into somebody, they know there's a job offering, or it's closer to where you live, or it's, you know, easier for you with the kids, whatever. And so, you bump into these things, it's like, "Oh, yeah, cool. Oh, I'll make that little thing." And instead of designing your life, you end up just responding to sort of little bumps along the road that end up leading you down a path that was never a conscious choice. The concept of building in, the concept of and and I love this, you can't imagine how much I agree with you on this, uh that it's not just about doing what comes naturally. Yeah. So, what is it about? Yeah. Oh my gosh, I'm glad you relate with me cuz I'm getting a lot of flak on that. So, uh the big huge finding that really scratches the surface of a lot of like cultural assumptions, uh especially in high performance, is this big cultural conversation we have about strengths. And you know, find your strengths, follow your strengths, the strengths are everything, and uh you know, take the strengths finder, figure out your top five strengths, follow those, don't do anything else, or, you know, at least know what they are and really aim your career to that. Or aim your behavior towards that, or, you know, use that as a guide for recognizing pattern. And by the way, I'm all for it. That's all great. I I'm that guy who says, "You know what? Any self-reflection you do, I'm cheering you on." Like any assessment, any tool that makes you look at what's inside, I'm like, all for it. It's just that strengths are not highly correlated with long-term success. Right? There's not a lot of data, and there is not a lot of research that has shown it leads to long-term success with the positive outcomes uh associated with what we care about in psychology, which is we care about happiness, we care about health, and we care about your positive relationships. And this myth that uh we just follow our strengths to, you know, to the promised land is just not true when you actually talk with high performers. Cuz my favorite question in if it was down this just go up to anyone who's good and say, "Were you always good at that?" And they'll be like, "No." They'll be like, "Not at all." They're like, "Well, did you always have an inclination to do every element of do what you're doing really well?" "No." Like me, man, I sucked on stage. This year I've talked to 60,000 people live. This is really important because this idea that we're just our strengths are going to give us everything just it's just not true. I sucked speaking on stage. Uh matter of fact, I was terrified of it. Terrified. But, one reason I love your show is because I had that intention of I want to make an impact. And when someone actually asks and and kind of owns that, like when they say, "Do I want to make an impact?" And the answer is yes and they own it. They realize they're going to have to develop. They can no longer leave their growth to me you know, to to to randomness. Because if they do, they'll always be mediocre. And they realize I got to become something entirely above both of those. That's what most people don't see. They're like, it's we've made this binary false conversation, right? It's a it's it's not a true sort of choice here. It's a false dichotomy we call it, right? It's not strengths or weaknesses. Many of you, if you have a big dream, a huge goal, you got to become something entirely above and beyond any strengths you even know about, feel, or own, and go way beyond any weaknesses you've ever even addressed or even you know about cuz you're going to discover so many new strengths and so many new weaknesses on the path that it's almost irrelevant what they are now. It's what's the goal and build into that. You know, I did not know how to write. Um I get a lot of critics who are like literary guys about my books because every book is different, right? Six books, all of them different. And the reason they all read differently is I am challenging myself as a writer to develop, to get better. Every book I write I'm going I'm going to write this like nothing I've ever written before. And I go to work at building a new skill set to be able to write. Like Manifesto, I researched for 2 and 1/2 years just how to write it. Wow. Not what to write, how. How do I get that pentameter? How do I What was the rhythm in which revolutionist rhetoric was spoken in or written in? Just to understand that took me 2 and 1/2 years. So, I had no conceptual understanding of it. It wasn't a strength. I didn't even It wasn't even It wasn't on my radar. Part of the reason that people don't take the leap is cuz you're stepping outside of your zone of certainty. But, no one ever got No one ever made their dreams come true in their field of certainty. Dude, you have the best memory. Remarkable. Dude, I was really into to the book and just everything. So, that makes it easy to remember that stuff. But, like how How do you train to do that? Like, how do you get better at that? So, something that I've learned from And you know, over the course of the journey, there's the people who I spoke to for the book, but there's also people I got incredible advice from along the way. And one was Drew Houston, the founder and CEO of Dropbox. I think I was like 20 years old and you know, it's a pretty cool brunch to be having. I'm sitting there with him and I'm asking him similar questions. And he told me something that was amazing. He said, "The problem people have with dealing with uncertainty, which is uncertainty is entrepreneurship. That's the difference between being an employee and being an entrepreneur is the entrepreneur takes on the uncertainty, right? Drew said the key that people misunderstand about uncertainty is that you're not born with it. It's a muscle. And people just assume that because they don't have it, it's not for them. He said, "If you think of uncertainty as a muscle, and you train it like a muscle, things start changing. Let's say you haven't worked out your biceps. You don't go to the gym and just start lifting the 60-lb dumbbell. No, you start with two, and then you go five, and you go 10, and then you take, you know, a couple days off. You have to, you know, have rest days. If you think of it the way you train a muscle, all of a sudden uncertainty becomes this manageable thing. Where you start small, and you work your way up. And something that Drew said that I love, he said, "When you feel the pain, that means you're working up a weight class." That's cool. And then he said, "When you pull a muscle, like psychologically, if you've taken on so much uncertainty that you're having a panic attack, you're way too high in your weight class. Tone it down a little. It doesn't mean it's not for you, but, you know, if you're I've done it, you know, you're lifting weights, and you, you know, pull something, all right, you're going to go down maybe 10 or 20 lbs the next time you go into the gym. And then you work your weight slowly back up." Emotion should never stop you from achieving your goals. So, if you feel stuck, overwhelmed, low on confidence, you're beating yourself up, or you feel like you're not deserving of the things you want in life, I have something to tell you. Emotions are not facts, and you should never let them hold you back. And yet, I find that people do this all the time. They mistake that feeling for objective truth, and it sends them in this downward spiral. Reaching greater levels of success in life means knowing how to use your brain. And if you're in a rut right now, or if you've been struggling for a while to achieve your goals, then I've pulled a class from Impact Theory University to help you get back on track. It's called Six Steps to Getting Unstuck, and it's for anyone who wants to know the exact steps to achieving big goals when life puts challenges in your way. If you want to check it out, go to unstuck.impacttheory.com to get access. It's a free preview. All right, guys. I'll see you on the inside. Now, let's get back to today's episode. You have this concept of protect your confidence. I've never heard anybody say it like that before. Why is that so important? Uh because I think I mean, in all the big decisions you've had to make along your way. Have you ever made a good decision when your confidence was down? No. Once, like can you say I walked in, my head was down, your your physiology's changed, you're like a little nervous. Like you just don't make good decisions when your confidence is down. And And I don't think it's like we're either confident or not confident. I think it's like if if confidence is 100%, if our confidence is 95%, we play smaller. I know with me, like big opportunities come. If I'm not in that like space, I'm like, you know what, guys? Let's just let's hold, let's not. Like I won't make smart decisions. So, I think I think we have to do everything in our power to protect our confidence. So, that that theory of protecting your confidence has been has been a a major thing in my head always. In fact, I have a you know, we all have our own morning routines. Not maybe not everybody, but I have a morning routine that I have to do to get me to play it The way I look at it is play offense for the day, not play defense with lower confidence. What does that look like? Um I've tried a lot of variations. And for me, it's if I immediately when I wake up, I can't check my phone. In fact, I put it on airplane mode and I move it. I got that from Arianna Huffington, who's amazing. And she's like, "Is your phone still by your bed?" She goes, "Airplane mode on the other side of the room, you know?" Um So, that and then I just know so many people roll over and grab their phone. And to me, that's like Russian roulette. You put a bullet in the gun and you spin it. It's like, "What if the email says the deal didn't happen, numbers are down, life's not working out?" Like And immediately for me it's like you open up and and this little box is going to dictate the first couple hours or maybe the whole day by what you see. So, I've just I just won't look at my phone when I first wake up. Um so, but when I first open my eyes, this is all and I like doing things quick for me cuz I want to get to the gym cuz it's the only time of day I'll go. If I try to wait till the afternoon, it doesn't work for me. So, as soon as I wake up, I immediately try to think of something I'm grateful for, which everybody knows that and thinks about it. But, I've I play this game myself on how far I can lower the bar. Meaning, I I tried to do a gratitude journal about 3 years ago. And after about 5 weeks, I ran out of stuff to say. I'm like, I already wrote my kids and this and life. Like, what do I put in here? Like, I I I don't And then I was like, wow, 150,000 people die every single day. You can Google it. That's the number. It's like, some days I wake up and I'm just like, I'm here. Awesome. And I let I feel that silly little thing like I'm here. Or I'll be like, "Oh my god, the sheets feel softer than they've ever felt." And I'll literally think to myself, "These sheets are really good." Like, what? A third of the world sleeps on the on a dirt floor? And I have sheets and an amazing bed and look at the view I have. And that's enough. Just because the way I do it is I'm just just tweaking my brain enough to be in a grateful place. It doesn't have to be this For me, and you guys might have better practices. I'm not talking about a half-hour gratitude meditation. I just need one little thing. Or I pick up a book if I'm reading one of the books that you have on the shelf, I'll pick and I'll just pick three sentences and read something empowering. And I'll get that state of mind for my brain. And then, I think about one win I had the day before. Because I know as entrepreneurs, as somebody searching for success, we never give ourselves credit. We never treat a friend the way we treat ourselves. It's like, I know I've had days I've gone till 10:00 at night and go, "Man, I got nothing done today." It's the biggest lie. Like, we beat ourselves up. We just we're we're like these racehorses. We wouldn't even treat a racehorse that we owned as bad as we treat ourselves, right? So, I wake up and I'll I'll do a quick little gratitude and I'll say, "What was one win yesterday that I accomplished?" And I'm like, "Wow, you did do that yesterday." And then I'll think of one win I want to do that day. Like, what I'm going to do a million things done today, but what's a must today that would be a great win? And then for me, then I immediately go downstairs in my house and I drink I feel like I fed my my mind and then I want to feed my body. So, for me I've been doing the same drink forever. I do apple cider vinegar, lemon, MCT oil, a scoop of green powder and uh mix that up and I down that and then I immediately got to go to the gym. Millennials these days kind of rub their hands, "Oh, we're digital natives." It's like, yes, this year. But in 10 years from now, you're going to be a newbie like everybody else and have to relearn everything and unlearn what you already knew. And so there is a sense in which constant lifelong learning is the main node that you have to be in. Um and that uh part of learning that that people who study it understand is that a lot of it is is unlearning what you already knew, kind of forgetting or trying to overcome ingrained patterns of thought previously. So, you have to sort of like you have to think differently about things. And by the way, that's one of the reasons why I travel a lot because I find that there's almost nothing that forces me to unlearn and think in a different pattern than traveling in a real sense of kind of being on the ground and and confronting things that I don't understand that everybody else understands. You talked about the the shifting um peaks and unlearning, but you've also talked about, okay, in a world where all this stuff is moving, um the thing you have to get good at is learning to learn and that really learning a specific skill may not be as useful as it once was. So, what can people that are in the thick of the job market now that are going to get slapped around by robotics and AI? Like, how should they be thinking? So, so, um you know, a very common question related that a lot of parents ask me is, "Oh, yeah, I hear all this stuff is coming, AI and the VR, what should my kid be studying in school?" And I think really there's no language that's going to survive very long. There's very few even skills that aren't going to be obsolete by the time you graduate. So, most of the jobs that you will have, I'm talking to somebody maybe who's in the high school right now, are probably jobs that don't exist right now. And so, then this idea of, well, the only really skill you want to learn in, say, school is the meta skill of how to learn. And what's really interesting to me is that um that's almost taught nowhere. And um it turns out that um almost nobody, including me, really knows how we learn ourselves. So, it's not just how to learn how to learn, but how you learn best how to learn. That's a high bar. And to do that is not going to be something you're just trying to learn. You need to be You need to have teachers. You need to be tested. You need to be scored. You need to practice. There are lots of different ways to learn, so each variety you have to test yourself and become better in that. And so, so, to actually learn how to learn would require a would require years of discipline improvement. And we don't have that. So, that means that neither I nor you really have have learned how to optimize our own learning. But, that should be the general common thing that you're going to be taught in school and that when you graduate you have a meta skill of knowing how you learn and whatever kind of problem comes up, you at least know your best method for learning that. Then the whole notion of Dharma to me hit home really hard in that story in the book and you talk about one of the people in particular who was changing like the photographs out for people so that they had something new to see and somebody asked her like, is that part of your job? And what was her response? I thought this This summed up Dharma for me in a really visceral way. Yeah, it was it's not part of my job, it's how I see my job, right? It's how I perceive what I do and the term is job crafting. Where you have assigned meaning to the task, you've assigned meaning to the experience that you're now fueling that work rather than letting the job description be your only definition of it. Yeah, when she was stepping into that and saying like, okay, I knowing who I am and knowing how I feel and what it means to me to take care of this person and to look at a small detail like that and to imbue this thing which somebody else might think of as, you know, sort of a gross job or whatever, but to bring the beauty that I want to bring to it, um it it's me recognizing She didn't use the word Dharma, but it's me recognizing my purpose. It's me like not asking, what's the definition of the job, but instead, how do I bring my truest purpose, the unique way that I would do this job and bring that to this situation. Now, this is where your book got really interesting for me is this interesting interplay between there's a uh a sense of your essence, who you are and then there is bringing that into the things that you do. And so, you could take something you talk about like cleaning the um the monastery, like in the tiny tiny little ways, but how what you would do is you would think about cleaning this I imagine myself cleaning my my own heart. And so now it becomes not actually polishing a monastery, it becomes like this spiritual pursuit of recognizing one that even as you get to the end of cleaning it's dirty again and so it it's this continual thing. But that was that that being able to begin to tease those things out that some things will seem really boring and dull, but you can imbue them with meaning. And then there's this thing inside of you that when you align to the things that you like and that you enjoy is like the the sort of raw responses there, but you can also create a response. Yeah. And how do you help people like bring those together? You talked a little bit about it with job crafting, but how do you get people out of a woe is me mentality into, you know, finding ways to to make their life beautiful? I really believe that you have to seek the love and the beauty that you want in what you have now. Because that way you're training yourself to extract meaning right now, which means in the short term if you can like those hospital workers were doing, if you can fill that role with meaning and your true passion and what's coming from you, then that's going to lead you to discovering the power of it. And I saw that in my own life when I came back from being a monk and I worked in the corporate world, I was teaching meditation and mindfulness and the things that I talked today in the corporate world. And I remember in 2014 I was invited by one of our executives to teach mindfulness to a thousand of my peers at Twickenham Rugby Stadium. And I was speaking in between the CEO and Will Greenwood who won the Rugby World Cup with England. And and I'm sitting in the audience as a complete nobody and completely around people who are my same age, we all make the same money, no one knows who I am. And there I'm sitting there going, how am I going to share mindfulness? But after doing that experience, I realized that even though my job was digital strategy and social media innovation, and I was a consultant, I was bringing my passion to the workplace, which actually gave me confidence that I could do this outside of the workplace. And that's how the two ideas connect, that when you find how you can apply it to your your small world, you then get the confidence and the courage to take it out and make something real of it. Whereas I think a lot of us are waiting for that break to get into doing it in reality, but we actually haven't even tested it or experimented on it in in a small space where we can develop our our own confidence and courage around it.