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The Power of Focus
1k Plays1 year ago
Today you’ll learn how to achieve more with less effort using the power of focus.
We’ll discuss three categories of focus, each which builds on the next. We’ll review multiple models that help us decide what to focus on, including a 1,000-year-old concept from Japan.
From how a rock star became a PhD to Oprah Winfrey’s success to a rising value-investor who now manages hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, we’ll uncover powerful tools used by the world’s most successful people to better focus to produce incredible results.
As we’ll soon discuss, we have only around 4,000 weeks to live. We can’t create more time, but we can make the most of the time we do have.
Listen to this episode to learn how.
Timestamps
(00:01:52) Four Thousand Weeks
(00:04:48) Rock star to PhD
(00:05:33) Two paths a great life
(00:10:41) Three categories of focus
(00:13:10) Forced actions into automatic habits
(00:19:43) Ikigai
(00:22:55) Be OK with “chaos”
(00:28:32) Micro Focus
(00:31:47) Rebuilding your attention muscle
(00:32:07) “Success leaves clues”
(00:34:51) Do the most important thing first (“Granny’s Rule”)
(00:36:15) Prioritize prioritizing
(00:37:40) Limit technology usage
(00:41:10) Maker vs. manager
(00:47:39) Present Focus
(00:52:39) Building a 3X Inc 500 company with the power of focus
Links
- Four Thousand Weeks
- Essentialism
- Free to Focus
- First Things First
- Success Principles
- The One Thing
- Focus by Daniel Goleman
- Deep Work
- Slow Productivity
- Your Brain at Work
- The Confident Mind
- The Gap and the Gain
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
- Freedom app
- Non-electronic headphones
- Silent Pocket phone sleeve
- iMac computer cover
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Music.
Podcast Format Change
00:00:15
Speaker
Hey, this is Matt Clark. Starting today, I'm changing up the format of this podcast. In the past, I was just trying to put out as many helpful tidbits as possible from my experience building businesses and helping people sell an estimated $10 billion online.
Research and Insights
00:00:31
Speaker
Starting today though, I'm going deep into what should be the first of many subjects that can transform our lives. I've spent the past month researching, reading, and synthesizing
00:00:44
Speaker
the best information I found on today's topic. Also, you can get the best strategies and tools to make your life better just by listening to and applying what's in this episode. Enjoy!
Solitude and Modern Science
00:01:01
Speaker
Mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal once said all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Now if we take this to mean that we should be able to sit alone in a room and do nothing, Pascal may be wrong. Because, as science writer Winifred Gallagher said, an idle mind is the devil's workshop. Shortly, we'll discuss why that's the case. However, if Pascal meant
00:01:27
Speaker
that we should be able to sit alone quietly in a room and work on what matters most to us in life, then what he said over 300 years ago lines up perfectly with what modern science tells us about how to achieve more with our lives.
Power of Focus
00:01:42
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Today we're going to talk about focus.
00:01:45
Speaker
Specifically, how to use this powerful tool to achieve more of what we want in life with less effort and in less time. Let's dive in. We have around 4,000 weeks to use in our entire lives, but most of us aren't zero years old. If you're 30, you have about 2,400 weeks.
00:02:02
Speaker
If you're 40, you have less than 2000. We don't have forever to do to accomplish and to experience everything that we want. The clock is ticking every day, whether we use our time well or not. Most of us, myself included, spend our time pursuing lots of different projects and goals all at the same time.
00:02:20
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We want to squeeze in everything we possibly can out of life, so we try to fit it in all today. Even when we sit down to work on a single thing, we're so anxious we're missing out on the other things that we want to do, we try to do those at the same time too.
Time Management
00:02:36
Speaker
30 years ago in 1994, the self-help author Stephen R. Covey released a book called First Things First. It includes the advice to make sure you're doing the right things, not just doing things right. However, what I found most interesting reviewing that book is the list of about 150 or so time management related books towards the back of Stephen Covey's book.
00:02:59
Speaker
There are research sources that he used for First Things First. Most of those time management books listed there were written in the 1980s and 1990s. That means for 40 plus years, a lot of people have been trying to figure out how to get more out of our finite time.
00:03:17
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Despite titles such as the 90 minute hour from 1990 and time, how to have more of it from 1983, we can't create more time. We can only do more with the time we have each day. To do this, we must learn to better focus our limited time and attention.
00:03:35
Speaker
This episode includes what I've learned after reviewing around 3,000 pages of advice and information on how to better focus, including 10 books written over the last three decades, so that we can achieve more and be more fulfilled with the time that we have.
Regret Minimization Framework
00:03:51
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Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has spoken about his regret minimization framework in making the decision to quit his high paying finance job and launch Amazon. The general idea is to imagine yourself at 80 years old, sitting on a rocking chair out in front of your house. At that stage, toward the end of your life,
00:04:10
Speaker
What will you regret having done or not done? Bezos believed that he would regret not trying to launch Amazon more than giving it a try even if it failed. So he packed up his bags and moved across the United States to Seattle where he launched what has become a trillion dollar company.
00:04:28
Speaker
What will you regret having not tried or not fully committed to? Will you regret not pursuing the career you dream about? Will you regret not launching a business? What about not taking a bigger risk in the business you already have now if you own one today? What about the vacation or trip of a lifetime you've been putting off until someday?
Career Focus Example: Dexter Holland
00:04:49
Speaker
In the 1990s, Dexter Holland was the lead singer of the iconic rock band The Offspring. Hits included Self Esteem and Pretty Fly for a White Guy. Today, he's Dr. Dexter Holland with a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Southern California. He works on HIV research.
00:05:07
Speaker
After graduating valedictorian of his high school class and completing his undergraduate and master's degrees, he had to make a decision between pursuing his PhD or his band. He wanted to do both at the same time, but his manager said, no way. This is the time. If you want to go for it, you gotta go for it. So for the next two decades, he focused on the offspring before returning to complete his PhD.
00:05:32
Speaker
I believe there are two paths to a great life. One path is pursuing the same calling our entire lives. Warren Buffett started investing at 11 years old and has been a full-time investor for the past 70 plus years since his early 20s. Tiger Woods first picked up a golf club at 18 months old and won 30 junior tournaments before becoming a teenager. He's 48 years old today and still competing in golf tournaments.
00:05:59
Speaker
Oprah hosted the Oprah Winfrey Show for 25 seasons from 1986 to 2011. That was about half of her life hosting her show at the time she decided to end it. Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova concisely summed up the first path to greatness by saying, to follow without halt, one aim. There is the secret to success.
00:06:23
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Yet Oprah's story brings us to the second path to a great life. She could have kept running her show. However, as quoted in an interview with Vogue, she didn't want to make the same mistake as Michael Jackson. Part of the crazy success of his thriller album was due to being in the right time at the right place. Yet when his album Bad only sold 20 million copies, he couldn't let it go. He kept chasing his previous peak.
00:06:47
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Oprah saw this example and instead wanted to end her show on top and move on to a new chapter of her life. Most of us, myself included, haven't found and may never find that thing we want to do for our entire lives like Buffett or Tiger. If we do, that's fantastic.
00:07:04
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We're almost guaranteed to achieve huge success if we spend our entire lives on a single pursuit.
Success Through Focus
00:07:12
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Yet another approach is to go from success to success. We spend a period of our finite lives intensely focused on a single goal or pursuit, conclude that chapter of our lives, then move on to the next and most interesting thing. We may never achieve the best in the world status of focusing on the same thing for our entire lives as some other people.
00:07:33
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but will be rewarded with a good level of depth and mastery in what we pursue while also enjoying the taste of variety on our journey through life. I want you to make the most out of your life. Today, most of us spend our time on too many things, always feeling like there's more to do and that we're not accomplishing what we want. We feel like we need just a little more time to get what we want until there's no time left.
00:07:58
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Instead, you can knock off the big achievements in your life one by one. Think of your biggest, most ambitious goals. That's what you can accomplish. Then you can accomplish what matters most to you next after that. Each year, each month, each day, you can feel a sense of accomplishment and experience, forward progress because you've done what matters most.
00:08:19
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you focus on the vital few and set aside the trivial many as we'll discuss shortly.
Matt's Personal Journey
00:08:26
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Now, why am I sharing all this with you? And also, why should you listen to me at all? Those are good questions. First, I've spent the past month reading everything I could find on the topic of focus to prepare for this episode. That included 10 books and hundreds of pages from various articles and research studies.
00:08:42
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Second, for the past 19 years, I've been a guinea pig for self-development practices. I was dealt a good hand at birth. I was born with two loving, intelligent parents in the United States. Yet most of my troubles have been self-inflicted. Although I had big goals, I always felt like a bit of an outsider growing up and just wanted to fit in.
00:09:01
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So at 14 years old, I was already smoking weed out of a coke can on the side of my friend's house. By 16, I tried a lot of other drugs, stopped trying in school, and it even broke into someone's house. However, I knew I wanted something bigger and better for my life. It took a long time, but I finally started to distance myself from the kids I was hanging out with and began to align my life toward a better future.
00:09:24
Speaker
In my sophomore year of college, I read my first self-development book Success Principles by Jack Canfield. I couldn't read more than two pages without having a huge epiphany about my life. I'd think, oh, that's how you actually accomplish something that's in your head in the real world.
00:09:42
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From there, I went on to start a lot of businesses, failing and learning along the way. Eventually, I built a $30 million a year business, helping a lot of people improve their financial lives by learning from me and my partners on how to start e-commerce businesses. I was able to interview Richard Branson on stage at our event with 2,500 of our customers live with us in Las Vegas. I became a millionaire. Life was good, but that's when my real learning began.
00:10:10
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Years ago, after studying super successful people such as Michael Jordan, I realized that much of success comes down to two things. Focus and persistence. If we pick something, focus on it almost at the exclusion of everything else, then keep at it for years and years
Macro Focus
00:10:26
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and years. We get pretty good at it. It's not a complicated formula.
00:10:29
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Yet, I wondered, why is it so hard to stay focused on something even when we know that's the way to get good at it and likely, ultimately, improve our lives as a result? From what I've learned about focus, we can tackle it in three categories. The names of those categories that make the most sense to me and hopefully are helpful to you are macro, micro, and present focus.
00:10:53
Speaker
So the first category, macro focus, refers to the overall projects, goals, or areas of your life that you want to improve. Right now, what are you focused on? What areas of your life do you want to improve? What goals do you want to accomplish? Or what do you want to most get out of your life today? Those big, high-level areas of your life are what I consider our macro focus areas.
00:11:17
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Often, we try to make huge improvements in far too many areas or pursuits at once. We end up accomplishing almost nothing as a result. There are a few reasons for this. First, we only have so much available time. Last year, I did a lot of research on the science of goal setting. One principle became clear. Only hard goals move the needle. Easy, or as they call them in the research, do your best goals, don't change our performance, and are therefore useless to set.
00:11:45
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Yet the reality of hard goals is that they almost always require significant time or energy. We can only pursue one or two hard goals at a time. Therefore, we can only aim to improve one or two areas of our lives at the same time.
Attention Residue
00:12:01
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Second, there's a concept called attention residue which refers to the lingering attention we pay to unresolved tasks after we've stopped deliberately working on them. If our main goal right now is to learn computer programming and after putting in three hours learning and writing code, we switch back to our job as an administrative assistant, we can't help but to have lingering thoughts of writing code while responding to company emails for our job.
00:12:25
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This residue of attention is likely going to cause us to perform worse at our job, making it difficult to try to make significant progress on both areas simultaneously. Lastly, and related to the effects of attention residue, is all the in-between time we think we're not working on our goal, but are either subconsciously or consciously working through unresolved challenges towards that goal.
00:12:49
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If you have too many goals you're pursuing simultaneously, then for example when you go for a walk, does your mind process goal A, goal B, or goal C? It could be any and that's likely causing sub-optimal results on each of them as opposed to having a single goal which is available for processing in all of your downtime outside of your deliberate work.
00:13:10
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Part of the reason to focus on one or maybe two maximum areas of improvement or goals at a time is that we're often trying to turn forced actions into automatic habits. If you want to lose weight or get more fit and you currently hate going to the gym, you're going to try to make going to the gym an automatic habit of your daily routine.
00:13:29
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The same applies to your eating habits. You want to make choosing the healthy option at a restaurant the automatic habit, not choosing the pizza by default. I worked with a business coach Buddy Fichera for 4 years. He had taken to company public in his 20s, made a bunch of money, then had some family crises, and later became a practicing Buddhist.
00:13:47
Speaker
Much of our conversations had less to do with business and more to do with general life fulfillment. He once shared a matrix with me of like and dislike on one side and skillful and unskillful on the other. He explained that there are things that you do that you like and are skillful, meaning good for you and others. There are also things that you do that you like and are unskillful, meaning bad for you and others.
00:14:10
Speaker
The interesting part is, is that you can change your likes. We often think our likes are fixed. We either like working out because you're a weirdo like me or you don't. But that's just not true. As Pavlov proved with his dogs, we can develop a different response to a certain stimulus over time.
00:14:27
Speaker
If you go to the gym and feel good afterwards, then have that experience a bunch of times, you'll eventually associate going to the gym with feeling good, even though you haven't even worked out yet. That's how we change our likes. That's the power of focus. We can continually repeat an action until it becomes habitual, either out of routine or because we literally change how much we like it. Then we don't have to focus on it anymore.
00:14:50
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Changing habits is hard, but less hard if we focus on changing only one habit at a time until it no longer requires the same level of effort.
Benefits of Single Focus
00:15:00
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Focusing on one major project goal or area of your life also simplifies things.
00:15:05
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If you only have one major thing you're working on, each day when you wake up, you get to work. There's no decisions required. For the past 60 plus years, almost every day, Warren Buffett has woken up and known exactly what he would focus on, making his company Berkshire Hathaway better.
00:15:23
Speaker
However, for me, and likely you can relate, there have been times when I've woken up and wondered do I do this or that or something else. For example, at times, I've been actively pursuing a goal for a sport such as jujitsu while also working towards a professional goal such as growing sales for one of my businesses and working on a personal finance goal all at the same time. At night, while my wife takes her bath, I'll often have a half hour to an hour free between doing normal work for the day
00:15:49
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and spending time with her before we go to bed. In that time, I've had to decide do I watch a jiu-jitsu instructional to learn new techniques, do I watch a YouTube video on investing, or to review some of our marketing campaigns to see if there's a way to further grow sales. In one day, that 30 minutes to an hour doesn't matter that much, but over the course of a year, that's 26 to 52 hours, or more likely 100 plus hours because there's other similar times during the week, we have to decide how to fill those extra time gaps.
00:16:19
Speaker
That can mean the difference between barely budging on a bunch of goals or making massive progress on a single goal. So now that we've laid out the case for why it's best to focus on just one or two areas of improvement at once, which one do we
Choosing Focus Areas
00:16:32
Speaker
choose? This doesn't have to be the often fruitless exercise in trying to figure out your life purpose. If you already know what you want right now, go for that. If you want to increase your income, focus there. If you want to lose weight, focus on that.
00:16:44
Speaker
If you want to find a romantic partner, focus there. However, if you're not satisfied with where your life is today and you know you want to move your life forward but don't quite know where to focus, there's a few tools I've discovered that can help give us direction on what to focus on. In the book The One Thing by Gary Keller, the author encourages us to narrow our focus list and to-do list down to just the single most important item likely to make the biggest impact.
00:17:09
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In summary, the whole book is about prioritizing, so we do what is most important. The question structure he uses is this, what's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary.
Simplifying Tasks with One Thing Question
00:17:23
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This is pretty similar to the focusing mantra given at the end of the book 4000 weeks, which is to do the next and most necessary thing.
00:17:32
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If you already have a goal in mind, you can use the one thing question to decide what to do next. For example, if you want to get out of debt, you can ask yourself what's the one thing I can do to get out of debt such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary.
00:17:47
Speaker
Prior to that question, you might be thinking you need to eat ramen noodles every day or cut your daily Starbucks trip. However, after asking the question, you realize those changes may only save you 200 bucks a month. While moving into a cheaper apartment with a friend might save you a thousand dollars a month, so you focus on the latter. You can also use the one thing question to decide on a broader scale what to focus on.
00:18:08
Speaker
Keller recommends a process called goal setting to the now. You start with a someday goal, possibly with no definitive timeline in mind. Then you ask, in the next five years, what's the one thing I could do that would make everything else easier or unnecessary towards that someday goal?
00:18:25
Speaker
You repeat this process for one year, one month, one week, one day, and right now. That's why it's called goal setting to the now. You're breaking your someday aspiration into an action you can take right now.
Actionable Goals
00:18:37
Speaker
So you can ask yourself, what's my someday goal? What would I like to accomplish someday in the future that would make my life great and meaningful? Once you have an idea of a future outcome that you'd like, you can begin to break your goal down into shorter term increments so that you're more clear what to focus on in this stage of your life.
00:18:55
Speaker
An alternative approach to deciding where to focus your life has been touched on in different forms by a lot of different writers and thought leaders for decades. In the book Essentialism, the author Greg McKeown asks you to look at the intersection of what you're inspired by, what you're talented at,
00:19:12
Speaker
and what the world needs to find a focus for your life. Similarly, in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman, the author suggests you look at the intersection of what you're excellent at, what engages you, and what you believe matters in the world to find your chief aim in life. Lastly, the author Michael Hyatt in his book Free to Focus tells us to look for the intersection of what we're passionate about and what we're proficient at.
00:19:38
Speaker
For Hyatt, proficiency means what you're skillful at and what others measure and reward you for. Really after reviewing all these writers' advice on finding an area to focus on that's likely to give us success and fulfillment, to me they all point back to the same thousand year old Japanese concept of Ikigai.
00:19:55
Speaker
A common interpretation for this term is a reason for living. To find such a reason, you look for the intersection. Imagine a Venn diagram with the three circles. You look for the intersection of what you like, what you're good at, and what the world needs.
00:20:11
Speaker
Once we find that, there's almost no better way to spend our time than in that area. One nuance to this approach though that's been clarifying and useful for me was given by author Michael Hyatt who I mentioned said to find the intersection of passion and proficiency. He has a matrix that lists passion on the left and proficiency on the bottom.
00:20:30
Speaker
What I find most interesting is that, sort of as he explains, there are some activities in which we're highly proficient at, meaning we're good at them and the world is rewarding us for them, but maybe we're not passionate about them. Maybe we once were, but we aren't anymore. Hyatt says that often these areas become traps because we're getting rewarded for doing them, but we may spend years or decades unfulfilled doing so.
00:20:53
Speaker
For me, I really think at this point doing marketing is such an area. I've spent so many hours using these same psychological tools to create marketing campaigns that I'm no longer that interested in marketing. While working on marketing campaigns I often feel like the guy in Groundhog Day waking up to repeat the same thing again and again and again.
00:21:12
Speaker
You grab attention, talk about a problem, rub the problem in, give a solution, share credibility, make an offer, add scarcity, add social proof, add a guarantee, then ask people to buy something. Some people find that infinitely interesting, I don't. And that's okay. And it's okay for you too if there's something that you're really good at, but you're not that interested in anymore.
00:21:31
Speaker
A second interesting point of Hyatt's matrix is the high passion, low proficiency quadrant. Often this includes areas we're very excited about, but are terrible at either objectively or in comparison to others. For me, this is maybe jujitsu. I put in a lot of time there, but I'm 37 years old, I didn't really start until my early 30s, and I'm never going to be the best in the world at it.
00:21:53
Speaker
Therefore, it would be crazy for me to make jujitsu my entire life, though I've tried in short bursts in the past. However, some activities in this quadrant, which he calls the distraction zone, with enough practice become ones in which we're highly passionate and highly proficient at, which he places in the desire zone.
Hyatt's Matrix for Fulfillment
00:22:13
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If there's nothing you can think of right now that you're both passionate about and proficient with, then maybe there's something you're passionate about, but just not that good at yet.
00:22:22
Speaker
If you honestly believe that if you spend enough time in that area, you could become great, then go for it. That could be the ticket to a lifetime of fulfillment. For me, this podcast and more specifically, helping people improve their lives by sharing self-development practices is in that area.
00:22:39
Speaker
I make zero money from this podcast, but I've spent easily over 50 hours preparing for this episode. So maybe someday it'll pay off not just in financial terms, but in real value provided and received by the world that I also love working on. So one last tip to make focusing on one area of your life easier is to learn to be okay with, as Gary Keller calls it, chaos.
00:23:02
Speaker
A big reason why we often don't focus in one area of our lives long enough is that we feel guilty for not doing everything else we can in every other area of our lives, especially when other people depend on us. So let's say you're a business owner and want to focus on developing a new product, but you have 10 employees constantly sending you Slack messages and emails with all the stuff that they need.
00:23:23
Speaker
Or, the same thing really applies to pursuing any personal goal while you have family members, colleagues, and bosses vying for your attention. You could focus on developing the product you want, or you could focus on being available 24-7 for everyone else. While you've hired people for a reason and those people need attention and training, they don't need all of your focus.
00:23:43
Speaker
You may have to be okay with the feeling of a little chaos while pursuing what matters most to you. Maybe an email doesn't get responded to within a few hours. Maybe someone has to solve a problem on their own. Maybe even a ball gets dropped. That's okay as long as you're doing what you believe matters most to you. The same thing applies to pursuing any other goal.
00:24:04
Speaker
If you're a hundred pounds overweight and losing weight is the most important thing because if you don't, you could die, then you may miss out on the next pay raise at your job because you're spending time improving your health. That's okay. You've got to be willing to tolerate a little chaos. Alternatively, maybe on the other hand, you work out too much and you want to make more money. Maybe you can't work out two and a half hours a day. You might have to settle for a single workout each day, which is likely enough to maintain good health, but not to win any fitness competitions. That's okay also.
00:24:33
Speaker
The metaphor often given, which I still find helpful, is a juggler with multiple balls in the air, yet some are rubber and some are glass. A rubber ball we keep in the air is likely our short-term finances. If we lose a job, a business fails, or make a bad investment, we should be able to recover over time.
00:24:49
Speaker
However, if we do irreparable harm to an important relationship, a glass ball we juggle with other things, we can do permanent damage. Therefore, while focusing on our one or two pursuits, we must keep in mind what in life are rubber balls versus glass balls. Some areas of our lives, such as health and important relationships, need some regular attention
00:25:10
Speaker
They're these glass balls, but they don't necessarily need our full attention. They're kind of like brushing our teeth. Four minutes a day is good. Eight hours a day of brushing your teeth has reached far beyond the point of diminishing returns.
00:25:22
Speaker
Now with the risk of overcomplicating the metaphor, most areas of our lives, I believe, are more like glass balls surrounded with rubber. We can lose a little money in the short term and still recover, but we can't necessarily lose all our money or go into bankruptcy and expect there to be some chance we may never be able to fully recover.
00:25:41
Speaker
Major area of our life requires at least some level of maintenance while we pursue our main goal, but not necessarily a ton. So in pursuit of our main goal right now, we need to be able to tolerate a little chaos in the other areas of our lives. Some less important stuff is not gonna get done, emails won't get checked immediately, the house won't be as clean as it could be, and we won't be able to go to every outing we get invited to. In exchange, we get to make huge progress on what matters most to us.
00:26:08
Speaker
Now, sometimes putting almost all of our focus into a new goal can be just what we need to reignite our interest in an area we've gotten stuck in. In 2016, I wasn't satisfied with the size of our business that we grew from zero to about $32 million a year in four years. I wanted to build a billion dollar company. Our main product was a $5,000 eight week training program that included videos, coaching, software, and a community to help people build e-commerce businesses.
00:26:35
Speaker
I thought there were only so many people who could pay $5,000 for such a program and looked for other models. The website, Linda, which sold online training, sold for a billion dollars to LinkedIn. I thought that was it. So I changed our model to a $39 a month all you can watch membership. And I figured we'd get so many more people to join that we'd make up for the lower price and volume.
00:27:00
Speaker
I was so confident I told our team to stop selling our main product, bringing in all the money to sell this new product. Now, we never got more than 6,000 members of the new product. That's a little less than $3 million a year. That was one tenth of our revenue at the time. So our revenue that year dropped 72%.
00:27:18
Speaker
We were burning half a million dollars a month, and we came within one week of running out of cash. So I had to fire half of the company. We eventually refocused on selling our main program and brought the company back to life. But by 2017, I was burnt out. I learned over the years that throwing myself into something physical, whether that was jujitsu, krav maga, shooting classes, survival training, driving classes, or anything like that, was the best way for me to recharge for work.
00:27:45
Speaker
So while doing those activities, I can't really think or focus on anything else. So with the most burnt out I'd ever been in business, I decided to pursue a long-term dream, which was to learn to fly a helicopter. My wife and I packed up, moved to Hawaii for a month where there's a great helicopter training school called Mauna Loa Helicopters. I spent 12 hours a day for five weeks learning to fly a helicopter. I didn't have the time or really desire to focus on anything else. Now I still worked out, I still nurtured my relationship with my wife, but I really did nothing else.
00:28:13
Speaker
Now had I tried to split my time between work, friends, and fitness goals while pursuing my helicopter pilot's license, I don't think I could have ever done it. That single focus for five weeks is what allowed me to accomplish something I'll remember for the rest of my life. That was just what I needed to come back fully recharged to drive our business forward again.
Micro-Focus Execution
00:28:33
Speaker
Once you know what you want to focus on, next it's time to learn how to better focus. I call this next level of focus micro-focus. It's how we actually sit down to do the work toward what we want to improve. A study was done that showed most knowledge workers, meaning most of us who use computers to do our work, only focus for an average of 40 seconds before switching our attention to something else. Yet to make meaningful progress on what matters most to us, we need to devote significant chunks of time in what author Cal Newport calls deep work.
00:29:03
Speaker
for much more than 40 seconds. Most of us spend our time working, quote unquote, with Slack open, email open, 10 browser windows up, our cell phones dinging with notifications on our desk, and oh yeah, the real thing we're actually trying to work on, such as a marketing campaign, presentation report, or financials to review.
00:29:20
Speaker
We work much of our eight hours a day like this, then wonder why at the end of the day, it feels like we got nothing done. We often feel like what Chris Bailey said in hyper focus, I've never been so busy while accomplishing so little. We blame it on our devices, we blame it on social media, and we blame it on the hype focused alarmist news media. All those things are culprits, but we're not hopeless in our ability to focus today, despite all the available distractions and technologies grabbing for our attention.
Impact of Distractions
00:29:49
Speaker
We've always sought novel distractions to avoid the mental effort of doing harder work. 30 years ago, when First Things First by Stephen Covey was written, before social media and before ubiquitous use of the internet, we were distracted by things such as meetings, phone calls, paperwork, appointments, faxes,
00:30:08
Speaker
Voice messages and knocks at the door. Hardly anyone important calls us anymore. We have little paperwork. Our appointments are down. We don't get faxes anymore. We barely get voice messages and nobody knocks at our door. We've just replaced those distractions and interruptions with new ones. What really is happening is that we seek distractions because hard and important work is hard.
00:30:31
Speaker
As Oliver Berkman wrote in The Guardian, each activity becomes a way of avoiding every other activity. So when a task feels difficult or scary, as tasks that matter do, you can just bounce off to another one instead. Our brains are wired to seek novelty. Paying attention to potential threats and opportunities was more important to our survival in the past than working on a presentation for 90 minutes straight.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yet, like our desire to get a milkshake every day with just two clicks on the DoorDash app on our phone, rather than resist the urge to do so, which is just a random example, nothing to do with what happened last night by the way, just because something has been programmed into our psyche over a long time that we have to intentionally fight with,
00:31:11
Speaker
doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't resist those urges. Our ability to concentrate is like a muscle. We can build it over time with effort and practice, and eventually, concentration requires less effort and energy. We've all likely experienced this to some extent. When we're so focused on digital technologies that allow us to switch apps, search on Google, switch browser tabs, open email, and chat with people on Slack, all in seconds and seemingly, simultaneously, it feels very uncomfortable to sit down and read
00:31:41
Speaker
a paperback book with zero distractions. Our attention muscle has atrophied. Yet to get the most out of life, we must rebuild our attention muscle. That's the path to greater success and peace of mind. So first, what do you actually work on once you know the broader goal or area of your life that you want to improve?
00:32:02
Speaker
Let's say you want to build a sizable savings so you can retire early, where do you start? Self-help expert Tony Robbins has said for years, success leaves clues. Much of his advice and teaching has followed the same pattern. Find someone who's already accomplished what you want, then do what they did. If you want to grow your savings, find people who've already done it in the time you want to do it, then see how they did it. That's a great place to start.
00:32:25
Speaker
30 years ago, value investor Monish Pabrai was a technology entrepreneur from India who dabbled investing. He stumbled on a book about Warren Buffett and discovered Buffett's path to investment success, then he did what most people don't do. He cloned Buffett, as he calls it. Pabrai aimed to model his investment strategy, fund structure, and work habits as closely as possible to Buffett.
00:32:49
Speaker
Today, Pabrai is one of the most successful, most well-known value investors with a growing hedge fund with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. Pabrai became friends with the legendary Charlie Munger before he passed away, has had lunch with Bill Gates, and regularly speaks with the most elite business schools on investing.
00:33:07
Speaker
all of that because he's happily a quote unquote shameless cloner which is his favorite phrase for his really his trick to faster success by modeling what's worked for other people. We can combine this concept of success modeling with
00:33:22
Speaker
goal setting to the now that we talked about before to determine what to focus on to make progress towards our goal. Once we know our someday goal, we can break that goal down into shorter objectives by asking ourselves, what's the one thing I can do in whatever time period to make achieving the next step towards my ultimate goal easier or unnecessary?
00:33:42
Speaker
For example, let's say you have the goal to have complete financial freedom, then you say to have complete financial freedom, I wanna have a personal savings invested in the best long-term assets of $2 million in the next five years. Then you ask yourself, what's the one thing I can do in the next one year so that I have a savings of $2 million in five years? And let's say you do the math and come to the realization that your current job has no way of getting you to that goal. You either need to get a higher paying job or start your own business.
00:34:11
Speaker
At some point, you're likely going to have to put in work learning new skills, either to earn your higher paying job or gain the necessary skills to start a business. You might spend time learning to code for a new job, becoming the most knowledgeable person in an inch, learning online marketing, learning social media marketing, or studying people who've already done what you want to do so that you can figure out how they did it.
00:34:32
Speaker
This process from high level goal to getting down to doing the focused work necessary to move toward that goal brings us to our current stage of micro focus. Once you determine what you want to accomplish, you need to sit down and actually do the work, despite all the distractions we've talked about so far. Here's how.
Doing Important Tasks First
00:34:52
Speaker
Charlie Munger spoke about a business consultant who made his money running around telling executives one simple thing. Basically just do the most important thing first in your day. Munger called this Granny's Rule. Or eat your carrots before your dessert. If you did nothing else to improve your ability to focus on what matters most in pursuit of your goal, this is it.
00:35:11
Speaker
determine the thing that most needs to be done, then do it first every day. Here's why this works. First, your energy and willpower are generally highest at the beginning of the day. If you've ever been stressed and ordered a cheeseburger later in the day rather than the salad, then you know the effect we're talking about here.
00:35:28
Speaker
As you work throughout the day, unanticipated problems and annoying interactions can happen. Each of those drains us a little more throughout the day, leaving us with little remaining energy or willpower to work on what matters most. By doing the most important thing first every day, we chip away at our most important goal, little by little, despite what happens the rest of the day. Second, like learning to work out, we train ourselves to somewhat enjoy hard work.
00:35:55
Speaker
If we make ourselves do the hard thing first, then give ourselves a little reward, such as by doing easy work or work that we enjoy. Once the hard work is done, we begin to associate doing the hard thing with the reward at the end. Eventually, this trains us to anticipate that reward when we begin working on the hard thing, which makes doing the uncomfortable work easier. One of the most important activities we can do first thing in the morning is prioritizing.
00:36:22
Speaker
Dr. David Rock in his book, Your Brain at Work, says to prioritize prioritizing. It takes a lot of mental energy to think through what's most important to us, sort through potential actions and priorities, and create a list of what needs to be done first. So do that type of work first thing in the day as needed. Dr. Rock also says that just 10 minutes of emailing can use up the power needed for prioritizing. So don't check email first thing in the morning.
00:36:48
Speaker
Authors of many of the books I've reviewed citing various sources recommended starting each day with a list of three priorities and no more. By forcing yourself to limit your list of three priorities, you're required to decide what matters most. The problem with most to-do lists is there isn't really any indication of what's most important or least important, so we tend to just get the stuff done that's easiest and feel like we've accomplished something at the end of the day but really haven't worked on what's most important.
00:37:16
Speaker
Unless we write some to-do list items ten times the size of others, we aren't immediately clear which items matter most on a list of ten priorities. Instead, if we force ourselves to limit our daily list of important actions to just one to three items only, by design we focus on that which matters most. So whether you choose one priority two or three, limiting to three maximum seems to be the most recommended practice.
00:37:41
Speaker
While you work, I recommend removing every piece of technology possible. It's still amazing to me that Buffett and Munger built a company Berkshire Hathaway, now valued at almost a trillion dollars from nothing, both without using computers and with almost zero use of smartphones. I now better understand why that may be a smarter, though kind of difficult today, way to go.
00:38:04
Speaker
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and more recently Slow Productivity, advises us not to necessarily abandon all technology for the sake of focus. Instead, he advises us to look at each piece of technology as a tool that has both positives and negatives. The first step is determine what do we want to accomplish in life.
00:38:21
Speaker
Then we work backward to determine if each piece of technology has more positives towards that goal than negatives holding us back achieving that goal. For Buffett, he can read company filings in paper form, read investing books on paperback or hardcover, read earnings call transcripts printed out, and meet with his investment team in person and network in person as needed.
00:38:41
Speaker
All that is the most important work for him. All of it requires zero use of a computer or smartphone, especially when his assistant can print what he needs and arrange meetings for him. Getting on Twitter, reading online news, or sending Instagram DMs all are more likely to drain his valuable time than help him achieve his goals.
00:39:00
Speaker
As I started reading and rereading the material on focus for this podcast episode, I limited my technology usage to the bare minimum. The internet in general is a huge distraction. I don't have a big problem with social media these days. However, with easy access to the internet, I'll Google random things I want to look up, open up Slack to see if anyone needs anything from me, check Wall Street Journal online or Yahoo Finance online to see how my investments are doing, or repeatedly check for new sales coming in for the software company we're building right now.
00:39:29
Speaker
To prepare for this episode, however, what I really needed to do was deeply read 10 books and a lot of articles, process that information, and think about how to simplify it and make it as useful as possible for myself and for others. So here's what I did. First, I put a cover on my computer at the end of each day with a mouse and keyboard tucked in the back of the computer so that it wasn't more compelling to use. This is a simple thing you can buy on Amazon, I bought mine on there for my iMac.
00:39:56
Speaker
Second, I put my iPhone in what's the brand is called Silent Pocket. I think it's an RFID sleeve that I bought years ago. Basically, no signals can get in or out once you put it in this thing. To me, it's just kind of like I get a little stress reduction every time I put my phone in that thing because I'm like, ah, now this thing, nobody can be bugging me with this. So I put my phone in this Silent Pocket RFID sleeve at the end of each day. It's tucked away deep in my bookshelf cabinet.
00:40:20
Speaker
And then third, I put the next book to go through and my notepad on my desk with almost everything else cleared away. Each day, I'd wake up and read the current book. If there was something I needed to do on the internet, I wrote it down in a notebook to do later. Once I finished a book, I took out a blank piece of printer paper and took two pages of notes kind of front and back on that book to later scan and upload to my Google Drive. This is a very low technology way of going through these books. I even bought a cheap pair of construction headphones with no electronics or Bluetooth from Home Depot.
00:40:49
Speaker
so that I could focus as much as possible despite noises happening around me while reading without having to pull out my phone or fire at my computer to connect to my Bose Bluetooth headphones. So I bought these non-electronic headphones that still work really well so I didn't have to use any technology whatsoever to do the work that I needed to do.
00:41:09
Speaker
I followed a great piece of advice while doing all this, and still am today, from Gary Keller, author of The One Thing, to be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon. He in this book was referencing an article from Paul Graham, who is the founder of Y Combinator, which is a startup accelerator that funded some of the biggest technology companies of today.
00:41:28
Speaker
Graham wrote years ago about the differences between the ideal schedule of a manager and that of a maker. A manager chunks his or her time into one hour blocks usually, each which can be taken up with a different meeting or purpose. However, a maker, such as a computer programmer, writer, or really anybody who has to intensely focus to accomplish a new goal needs large chunks, potentially up to four hours of uninterrupted time to really go do deep work.
00:41:56
Speaker
Keller found it useful to break his day into two simple chunks, be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon. So for me, I'd spend the mornings completely disconnected from the internet and the afternoons plugged in on Slack, checking sales stats, coordinating with my assistant, reading online news, and having meetings. Most days, I wouldn't take out my phone from the RFID sleeve or off airplane mode until 11 a.m. or later. That's how I was able to power through 10 books in about three weeks for this episode.
00:42:25
Speaker
The more you can separate yourself from your digital devices, the better for your ability to focus. The ideal solution is to be able to work as much as possible without your cell phone or computer. The temptations and distractions available in our devices are often just too much to resist, at least for me. It's best to avoid the devices altogether when we don't absolutely need them. If possible, we want to design our environment or find one in which we feel like we're in what one writer called a creative cocoon.
00:42:52
Speaker
We have little distractions and interruptions, at least for part of our day. I first discovered the power of this kind of environment during my junior year of college. I had the busiest semester with 18 hours of classes, a part-time internship, applying for jobs to get after college, and participating in the business plan team for an entrepreneurship program. Yet despite all that workload, I had my best semester academically.
00:43:13
Speaker
The secret was the eighth floor of the library. I discovered there was a little used eighth floor that had tiny little cubicle desks and a policy of zero noise or talking. I'd go up to the eighth floor each night with my headphones, set a timer for 50 minutes, work on my schoolwork, then take a 10 minute break walking around and listening to music. I'd repeat this process three or four times each night. That was the secret of my success that semester and for the rest of college. I discovered my own creative cocoon.
00:43:40
Speaker
So aim to find your own environment in which you can work uninterrupted and undistracted for at least part of your day.
Focus-Friendly Environment
00:43:47
Speaker
I guarantee you'll produce better work. Remember, if Buffet and Munger were able to build a near trillion dollar company without using computers or iPhones, maybe we don't need to spend 12 hours a day checking messages, doing social media updates, checking live stats for our businesses, or sending a bunch of emails for our jobs.
00:44:04
Speaker
So while I avoided technology for the first few weeks of preparing for this episode, eventually I needed to start outlining and writing the content. That required me to switch to using the computer. So I decided to try out a computer app recommended by Cal Newport called Freedom. With this app, you can block websites and computer apps while you work in dedicated chunks of time.
00:44:23
Speaker
So while working on this outline, I've been using the Pages document app for Mac, which runs without using the internet, while blocking all websites using Freedom and blocking apps on my computer such as Slack so I can't get distracted. I literally, while using the app, can't use any of those until the time runs out or I restart my computer. So far, this app has been pretty useful for me when I have to do computer-related work.
00:44:44
Speaker
If possible, I encourage you to give the maker in the morning manager in the afternoon schedule a try, but depending on your job, you may not be able to. If you're an administrative assistant, 90% of your job may require being plugged in and available to respond to requests. However, regardless of your job requirements,
00:45:01
Speaker
Nearly every time management resource I've read, from billionaires to self-development authors, settles on one critical tool of using our time well, time blocking. Most of us will try to work on something important while simultaneously checking email or Slack, searching for stuff on the internet, or fielding text messages from our friends. That's a recipe for slow, if at all, progress and days that end with the feeling of, what did I actually get done today?
00:45:25
Speaker
Instead, it's ideal to chunk activities into specific blocks of time throughout the day. I like the simplicity of the maker in the morning manager in the afternoon schedule. Other people seem to be okay with scheduling most of their days into chunks literally having their calendar look like a rainbow. I just can't stand that much stuff on my calendar, but it seems to work well for others.
00:45:44
Speaker
So either way, I recommend doing your hardest work first in the morning. Call this your focused work block. If you have kids, maybe do this before anyone wakes up or immediately after your kids are off to school. This is likely to be the best time for almost everyone, whether you have kids or not. However,
00:45:59
Speaker
As much as it's hard for me to relate to because I'm such a morning person, you may find scheduling a block at the very end of the day to work best for you. Paul Graham, founder of the Y Combinator and author of the Maker Manager post I mentioned, wrote computer code for his startup late into the night and early into the morning, waking up at 11am to do as he called business stuff, the meetings and that sort of thing.
00:46:21
Speaker
that had to be done outside of his focused work, so that schedule may work better for you if you're very much a night owl. Other blocks likely to be helpful include checking communication tools such as email, Slack, and really any other platform where you get messages. Additionally, you might have a block to chunk meetings into, so you avoid having one meeting followed by a 20 minute break followed by another meeting and so forth, which can eat up your entire day. If you group all those into one, that's likely to be better for your schedule and freedom.
00:46:45
Speaker
Recharge blocks on which you put your phone away and computer to focus on non-work activities, such as spending time with your family or working on a hobby, whether explicitly scheduled or not, are highly valuable for all of us. When we're in Colorado, for example, I walk our dog in the morning
00:47:00
Speaker
in the woods. I've tried using this time to listen to podcasts or audiobooks, but I found that somewhat stressful because every tug of the leash by Rex is a distraction from my learning. Instead, I found it more peaceful and recharging to leave my phone at home and do nothing other than be present during the walks.
00:47:16
Speaker
I usually in the morning will work for an hour, then go walk him and kind of use that as a process to reset and recharge and then keep working after once we get back. For me, this works as kind of a mini recharge in the day. And in general, there's a lot of research that seems to support walking in nature is good for our minds anyways, especially our ability to concentrate.
00:47:37
Speaker
If we use the tools we've discussed so far, we're likely to make huge progress towards our goals.
Maximizing Potential
00:47:42
Speaker
If we get clear on what we wanna improve, break that down into what we wanna work on right now, then get rid of all the distractions to work in dedicated focus chunks of time, we're gonna get a lot done. We'll get more done, in my opinion, than 99% of everyone else that we work with.
00:47:56
Speaker
However, will we reach our full potential and what we're after? Likely not. Here's why. One of the biggest sources of distraction and one of the biggest barriers to improve our lives is our own thinking. We sit down to focus on what matters most, only to have our minds wander, ruminate on all the things that could go wrong or have already gone wrong,
00:48:17
Speaker
or overly focused on our failures, ignoring our successes. All that unproductive focus holds us back from getting both better results and greater happiness while pursuing our goals. So this third and final level of focus that I'm calling present focus
00:48:33
Speaker
became clear to me as I reviewed the material for this episode on focus and saw the parallels to advice given to elite athletes by sports psychologists. I had recently discovered in a book called The Confident Mind by Dr. Nate Zinser, who is the director of West Point's Performance Psychology Program.
00:48:51
Speaker
Dr. Zinser has coached West Point students, preparing for military service, Super Bowl champions, Olympic athletes, and collegiate All-Americans. In the confident mind, he shares practices he's learned and taught to help people perform at their best. One practice that I adopted for Jiu-Jitsu that's made training a hell of a lot more fun is to focus on what went well after each session, rather than letting my mind naturally dwell on my mistakes.
00:49:15
Speaker
Zincer admits that it's useful to acknowledge and work on your weaknesses. However, for most of us, we don't have a problem doing that. We often beat ourselves up too much rather than too little. Instead, it's more productive for us to get in the habit of looking at what's gone well each day or
Focusing on Wins
00:49:31
Speaker
each year. Which brings us to the first point of present focus, which is to focus on your wins.
00:49:37
Speaker
The goal of present focused is to direct our mind on a moment to moment basis so we're more likely to achieve what we want and enjoy the process working towards that outcome. We spend the large majority of our time working toward the goal rather than on the actual accomplishment of it so we might as well enjoy the journey.
00:49:55
Speaker
Zenzer has three categories for reflection. Effort, success, and progress. At the end of each jujitsu practice, I write down one reflection for what I put in good effort at, one success I had that day, and one thing that I made progress on. This process takes about a minute or two, but has made my experience training much more positive and productive.
00:50:17
Speaker
Similarly, author Benjamin Hardy, who's worked closely with business coach Dan Sullivan, who's been around forever on multiple books, shares the principle of focusing on how far we've come, not just how far we have to go. They call this in one of the books, The Gap and the Game. Most of us, especially myself, spend far too much time stressing out about how far we are away from our goals instead of how far we've come towards them.
00:50:42
Speaker
it's better to spend some time thinking about how far we've come from that starting point. Training yourself to recognize and feel proud about your progress makes persisting over the long term a bit easier because you take time to reward yourself with positive reflections for all the hard work you've put in. Then, in the future, when it's time to put more hard work in, your brain recognizes that it's gonna be rewarded afterwards with these positive reflections and there's likely gonna be some less mental resistance pushing forward.
00:51:12
Speaker
The reason we must deliberately control our thoughts and direct our focus is that when we let our minds wander by themselves, unfortunately, we tend to ruminate. We think of the mistakes we've made, the problems we've had, and what could go wrong in the future. This is useful if every day is a fight for your literal survival, but not so good if you live in comfortable circumstances in the modern world. This rumination tendency makes us feel unhappy, which makes it less likely we're going to put in great effort going forward and have great energy to go after our goals.
00:51:42
Speaker
In the book Essentialism, the author shares a story about Larry Gelwix, a high school rugby coach that's achieved huge success. One of the secrets of the coach's success is getting his players, as often as possible, to focus on what matters most. He does this by training them to use the acronym WIN, which stands for What's Important Now.
00:52:03
Speaker
At any moment, whether we're playing a sport or working on a marketing campaign or reading a book, we can choose what to focus on. By remembering the acronym WIN, W-I-N, and asking ourselves what's important now, we're more likely to direct our attention to the most productive next action, or as it's called in 4000 weeks, the next and most necessary thing.
00:52:25
Speaker
Einstein reportedly said it's not that I'm so smart. It's just that I stay with problems longer. By directing our moment to moment thoughts towards productive aims, we're more likely to persist until we get what we're after.
Focus and Success
00:52:39
Speaker
So to wrap up, I'd like to share how I use the power of focus to help build an entirely new, far more successful business after the near failure of our e-commerce training company. Because I think the lesson learned is going to help you achieve more of what you want starting today. So after I got back from my five weeks off learning to fly helicopters, I got back to working on our training company.
00:53:00
Speaker
However, I soon realized that the opportunity to teach people how to sell on Amazon was fading. There were too many people creating similar educational and coaching products, and Amazon itself was getting way more crowded for new sellers. So I was looking for something new while I let the team run that business.
00:53:16
Speaker
I read an article by biohacker and blogger Dave Asprey about the potential harmful effects of drinking conventional low quality coffee. So I started looking for single origin organic coffee to buy myself for personal consumption. Then I discovered that a friend of mine had launched a healthy coffee business just a few years ago, but had run into some supplier issues. Yet he still had about $200,000 a year in sales, almost entirely driven by fanatic customers who kept repurchasing because they love the product so much.
00:53:46
Speaker
So I looked into what was going on inside of his business and saw huge potential. We decided to set the ambitious goal of turning that coffee business into a $100 million company. We created an equity deal that would give me 40% of the business if it grew fast. Then for the next 12 months, I did nothing else but focus on that business called Life Boost Coffee. That was the macro focus for me during that time period.
00:54:09
Speaker
My micro focus was to spend my time only growing sales, not running the company, not managing employees, or anything else. All that was the responsibility of my business partner. Within the activity of growing sales, I focused exclusively on one traffic source, which is Facebook, one sales channel, which is our Shopify store, and one sales page.
00:54:30
Speaker
I worked on only this every morning while we scaled the business in the first year. That intensive focus paid off because a year later we grew our sales to 33 times from where we had started and soon we received our first Inc 500 award for being in the top 300 of the fastest growing companies in America.
00:54:50
Speaker
And over the next few years, we won three of those awards in total and eventually landed at the number 29 spot on the entire list, making our company the fastest growing coffee company in America that year. So with all this, I've experienced the devastating consequences of having the wrong focus,
00:55:08
Speaker
having too many things to focus on and having no focus at all. I've also experienced the great power of purposeful, directed focus toward what matters most at that time in my life. Now, I want you to experience that same power. If you're like me, you've spent a lot of time not really clear on what you're after or trying to do too many things at once and feeling like you're getting nowhere. There is a better way.
00:55:30
Speaker
Once you get clear on what you want right now, whether that's a pressing problem to solve, opportunity to seize, or that which lies really at the intersection of interest, talent, and what the world needs, you've taken the first critical step. Next,
00:55:46
Speaker
break that broad goal down into what you can focus on right now to make progress towards it. If necessary, study those who've already done what you want to do. There's no need to discover everything else on your own the hard way. Each day, start with the hardest or most important thing on your list that will get you closer to your goal. Aim to work in significant, dedicated chunks of time while doing your best to avoid distractions. And if necessary, and if possible, take time away from the internet itself to do what matters most.
00:56:16
Speaker
Lastly, remember to acknowledge your wins each day. Just by trying to improve your life, you're already winning in my opinion. Unfortunately though, most people coast through life, settling for an unfulfilling, distracted existence that wastes their potential as human beings. We can do better. Reflect on what went well each day and how far you've come so you wake up renewed with energy tomorrow to keep moving forward.
00:56:41
Speaker
The famous basketball coach John Wooden once said, When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. When you improve conditioning a little each day, eventually you have a big improvement in conditioning. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens. And when it happens, it lasts.
00:57:08
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Matt Clark Show. I'll see you next time.