YouTube Video — Transcript

Pause. Appreciate that. First thing I want to do is to compliment Transame for making this investment in your success. First off, let me make sure I'm in the right room. How many people here truly, sincerely want to have more success than you have right now? Okay, good. So, are you familiar with this book here? Anybody ever read or familiar with Think and Grow Rich? Then you know that it was written by this dude here, which is actually what he looked like when he met this dude here, Andrew Carnegie. And at the time that they met, Andrew had accomplished all his dreams and ambitions and was looking to leave a legacy. At the time, he was actually the wealthiest guy in the world by far.

His net worth is estimated in today's dollars to be worth about 400 billion.

So this whole Buffett at 50 billion, just a poultry 50 by comparison to his 400. And Napoleon weaseled his way into his conference room and just started grilling Andrew with every question he could possibly think of about how he created his success and how he motivated himself and how he motivated his employees and what he did first thing in the morning. And Andrew, after two hours, took a liking to this young man and said, "You know, if you'll take this ravenous appetite to figure out the keys to success, I'll open up my little black book and get you an appointment with people in this world that nobody else can get an appointment with, but they're friends of mine, and they'll take their appointment if you come with my calling card. And if you'll then take all the ideas that you collect, put it into a book, and make it available to the world, I'll fund the whole expedition."

Well, as you know, Napoleon Hill took Andrew Carnegie up on that, and as a result of it, Andrew opened up the door for Napoleon to sit knee to knee with the likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and both Roosevelt's, Wrigley, Firestone, Rockefeller. I mean, imagine sitting knee to knee with Rockefeller in his steely blue eyes and asking him the questions of what created his extraordinary success. And then he packaged it up into the book that became Think and Grow Rich. Later in his life, Napoleon Hill became the editor of Success magazine. Today, I sit in the very chair that was once occupied by Napoleon Hill. And the lineage of success, in fact, kind of goes back all the way to 1891 when it was started by Orison Swett Marden. And then you might be familiar with W. Clement Stone, another legendary figure in the personal development business. Once was publisher, he had Agmandino as an editor and Napoleon Hill. And then in 2007, we acquired Success Magazine. We put it back on newsstand in 2008. Y'all remember what 2008 was like, right? How about putting out a new print publication in March of 2008? That's what we did. And it was after Success had been the mockery of the publishing world because it had failed three times in a row. And so we had the largest first issue magazine release in the history of publishing. We sold a million copies of our first issue, which was bigger than Oprah, Martha Stewart, Kanye, la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la 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So this whole Buffett at 50 billion, just a just a poulry 50 by comparison to his 400. And Napoleon weasled his way into his conference room and just started grilling Andrew with every question he could possibly think of

about how he created his success and how he motivated himself and how he motivated his employees and what he did first thing in the morning. And Andrew after two hours took a liking to this young man and said, "You know, if you'll

take this ravenous appetite to figure out the the keys to success, I'll open up my little black book and get you an appointment with people in this world that nobody else can get an appointment with, but they're friends of mine, and

they'll take their uh appointment if uh you come with my calling card. And uh if you'll then take all the ideas that you collect, put it into a book, and make it available to the world, I'll fund the

whole expedition." Well, as you know, uh, Napoleon Hill took Andrew Carnegie up on that and as a result of it, Andrew opened up the door for Napoleon to sit knee to knee with the likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Alexander

Graanbell and both Rose Roosevelt's Wrigley Firestone Rockefeller. I mean, imagine sitting knee to knee with Rockefeller in his steely blue eyes and asking him the questions of what created his extraordinary success. And then he packaged it up into the book that became

Think and Grow Rich. Later in his life, Napoleon Hill became the editor of Success magazine. Today, I sit in the very chair that was uh was one once occupied by Napoleon Hill. And the lineage of success in fact kind of goes

back all the way to 1891 when it was started by Orson Sweat Martin. And then you might be familiar with W. Clement Stone, another legendary figure in the personal development business. Once was publisher, he had Agmandino as an editor

in Napoleon Hill. And then in 2007, we acquired Success Magazine. We put it back on news stand in 2008. Y'all remember what 2008 was like, right? How about putting out a new print publication uh in March of 2008? That's

what we did. And it was after success had been the mockery of the publishing world because it had failed three times in a row. And so we had the largest first issue magazine release in the history of publishing. We sold a million

copies of our first issue which was bigger than Oprah. Martha Stewart, Kanye la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la

launched Kanye and N la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la launched a publication at the same time called portfolio. It was dead in two years and and so what's happened is is

uh exactly a hundred years later from the time that Napoleon met Andrew Carnegie is the time that I became publisher of Success Magazine. And really the same calling card that Andrew gave Napoleon, Success Magazine has been for me. And so I've had a chance to get

in front of and meet with and study and interview the greatest business industrialists of our time. And so today, Transame didn't just hire me to come and talk to you about success and talk about productivity secrets of superachievers. Really on this stage

with me here today is the best ideas from Richard Branson and Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos and the like. And so in the short time we have together, I'm going to distill eight years of the most intensive success

study uh getting a chance to get in the minds and hearts and backstages of the most successful people that have lived during our time and digest it for you in short order. What we're going to talk about are what are the productivity

secrets of superachievers? How do these people who end up on the cover of Success Magazine end up doing 50, 100, and sometimes a thousand times more than any of us in this very room when we all live in the same 24/7 365 world? What

are they doing that the rest of us aren't doing to create their extraordinary results because they're sheer mortal flesh, bones, and blood like the rest of us in the same exact period of time? So, that's what I want

to try to distill for you in our our little bit of time together here. So, how many people right now already say, "Man, I I I already work hard." How many people would claim that you work hard?

You don't. You don't work hard right there. No, not working hard. Well, any of your guys got bosses here? Put that hand up, man. See, I I bet that the reason why you're not producing more is not because you're not working hard

enough or you're not working long enough. None of those are really the reasons why you're not producing more in the marketplace. It has nothing to do with how hard or how long that you're working.

You see, I was raised by a single university football coach father. And the only way you got any love and attention in my household was to work hard and to put in late nights and study through weekends and dribble with your

left hand with your right hand tied behind your back if you couldn't dribble with your left. I mean, working hard was never going to be my handicap in life.

And so, by the time I was 18 years old, I was earning a six-figure income. And when I was 20 years of age, I got into the real estate business. And by 24, I was earning a million dollars a year.

And 27, I had a $50 million business. And it was all because I just had this this work ethic of of working brutally hard. But I I reached a plateau where number one, I was killing myself. I had

no life. And I could not uh create any more success than this plateau, the ceiling of sorts through the just brute force uh uh method of trying to succeed.

When I met these three guys is when I finally discovered what it was that I was doing wrong. Because if the key to success was working hard, working long exhaustive hours, there's no question I'd be wealthier than Richard Branson,

Donald Trump, and Tony Hawk. But in reality, in a world of 247 365, these three guys were kicking my ass. And not only were they wealthier than I was, they actually, you know, I know that I was not frolicking on the beach as much

as Richard Branson was doing on his own private island. I know I wasn't playing as much golf as Donald Trump does in his own private golf resorts. And I'm certain that I didn't have as much time to spend with my hobbies or my friends

or my family as Tony Hawk was with his. And yet they were wealthier. They had more free time. They were a lot less stressed. And they were having a greater impact in the world. And so it really became this passionate obsession of mine

to try to figure out what was it that they were doing that I wasn't doing that was getting their results versus my results.

And so what I want to try to do is to outline for you the difference between being an overachiever, which I would imagine many of you in this room are just like I was working long exhaustive hours. Nobody is going to accuse you of

not working hard enough. But yet your results are still limited as mine were to transition into what I call a superachiever. Those people that you do see end up on the cover of success magazine. You see there are I call four

categories of people in the world. And if you look at this axis at the top are results and on the the horizontal axis is time and effort put. The first type of person is what I call the unengaged.

Okay, these are the people that the only thing that they're trying to learn is how to install a rear end in their recliner on the weekends, right? They're not here. They, you know, they might have been invited to this, but they

didn't decide to show up. We don't have to worry about the unengaged. They're not here to listen. The the next type of person is what I call the overachiever.

These are the people who read all the personal development books, right? They go to all the seminars, they sign up for all the they read all the blogs, they they they go to all the webinars and they apply none of it. and yet they get

no results as a result of it, right? But they're reading it all and they're motivated. They're dreamboarding and they're meditating and you know they're doing all the all the stuff but they're not applying any of it and that's why

they don't get any results. Spending a lot of time, energy and effort on those endeavors by the way but still getting very little result. The next is where I lived most of my life. the over motivated, overwhelmed, overachiever, spending just

brute force amount of time and energy. Yes, getting more results than the average bear, but nowhere near the kind of results that I could have. What I want to do is try to help you become what I call the stunningly successful

superachiever, where you see spending very little time, energy, and effort, you can end up getting extraordinary results. So, no matter where it is that you might find yourself on this matrix here, what I want to do is try to help

you get over into the far left corner and help you become a what I call superachiever. So, what is it that stops the superachiever? What is in essence your kryptonite? There's one destructive force out there in the world that is

causing all of us with great capabilities, great potential. Because here's what I promise you. Those of you that are sitting here, your current results are nowhere near what you're truly capable of. If if your creator were to look down on you and and take a

look at where you currently are in life, while they would see you as a loving, wonderful, you know, creation of of God, they would simply say, "Of all that I bestowed, the gifts, the capabilities, the potential that I placed in you, and

this is all you've done with it." they would be disappointed. So, we can achieve a lot more than we're achieving.

What's stopping us? What's our kryptonite? Well, I want to try to outline for you, particularly in this day and age, what is the number one threat to your productive future, your ability to achieve your goals, realize your dreams, and fulfill your purpose.

What do you think the number one threat, the number one stopping point for all of us with great capabilities and great potential?

Imagine this. Imagine somebody came into your office and they went to the the reception desk where you keep a little petty cash drawer and they just started taking out $100 bills and lighting them on fire and just doing that right in

front of you. Just one right after the other. Just $100 bills one right after the other. Lighting them on fire. How long would it take for you to either call the cops or tackle them and throw them out the front door? But see, this

is what's happening all day, every day inside your office. This is exactly what's happening where people are just burning money. Well, what is it that is uh who is it and what is it that's happening that is robbing you and

robbing the people inside your office? When it comes right down to it, it is distractions.

Distractions is your kryptonite to your superproductive capabilities. In fact, it is to everybody uh in our current society. And studies shows that organizations lose $10,000 per employee just due to distractions a year. So that means that if you have a hundred people

in your organization, you're losing a million dollars a year net. Not we're not talking about topline revenue. We're talking about net productivity, a million dollars a year if you have just 100 employees.

As a nation, we're losing at least $650 billion a year. And that's a couple years old because the distraction rate is proliferating at an epic volume.

So the number one threat to your productive future, your ability to achieve your goals, is being able to control distractions. I say that the number one skill, and I get asked this all the time because we obviously I'm in

the business of curating and publishing ideas and on success, the number one skill you need in the 21st century, the most imperative skill of all is learning to control your attention, learning to control your focus in today's epically

distracting world. Because this is the epic battle of our times. This it we're constantly being swirled within a a digital world. We used to have to it was it was either a ring of of a phone or a knock at the

door for you to get distracted. But now we've got all these devices. All these are like open windows that we have brought into our environment whether it be a laptop, a computer, a tablet, a mobile phone where you are just at at

any of any time can be immediately distracted and we are being distracted every minute on the minute as a result of these open doors and open vessels into our lives. And so this has become the great conundrum of our ability to

stay on track, stay in focus, stay into what I call REM productivity. If this was the skill line in the 20th century of a achiever, if you grew your skills of time management, leadership, success, at this rate, you'd ended up at the top

of your organization. You need to be number one in the marketplace if you put this sort of dedication into growing your skills. But here's the problem.

Because of technology, the proliferation of technology, you see, technology has advanced far faster than our human capability to manage ourselves with it.

That technology progress and change in our society has hit an exponential rate. And this is the progress line of what's taking place because of technology. And you could see that about 2010 started there to be a gap between human

capability of skill development and technology proliferation in our society. You get to 2015 where we're at now, 2020, it's going to leave a lot of people behind. There are plenty of people in the 20th century who were successful

who are going to not be successful in the 21st century because they are not scaling their skills at the same rate that we are scaling change and progress in our society.

This is what it looks like to most people when you enter your office each morning. I mean, just try to focus on one of those boxes.

And you can see that number one, it's difficult because all the other boxes around it are competing for your attention. And if you try really hard, what you end up doing is getting a headache and blureyed. That's exactly

what's happening inside your office every single day. All these competing priorities and agendas and solicitations of your attention and time is drawing you and that's the reason why you're overwhelmed stressed anxious and underproducing.

In this day and age, you don't just need to focus. We've always needed to focus.

You needed to focus in the 18th century, the 19th century, the 20th century. In the 21st century, you need insane focus. your skill set of keeping your attention and keeping your focus has to be at an insane level. So, what I want to try to help

you do today, okay, in the short time we've got is to take this conundrum that you're faced with every single day you walk into your office, and I want to help you do three things. Number one, I want to gray out all those solicitations

on your time and attention. That's number one. And then I want to point out the three boxes on that grid that actually matter.

And then the third thing I want to do is to help you master those three. Right there. I just gave you the formula between you and Richard Branson, between you and Warren Buffett, between you and the late Steve Jobs was the

formula I just gave you. how to remove the other needless solicitations on your time, energy, and creative capacity, show you the few that matter, and then deepen your skills on those few. And that will dramatically separate you from any of your contemporaries, any

of the competitors in your marketplace, any of the other people in your office. Let's do that.

What I want to show you to do is to scale your skills at the same rate that we're scaling change and progress within our society. I'm actually excited that these are very difficult times for people to keep up because I know that I

will scale my skills at an aggressive rate and many people who won't will get left behind. It will be easier to be a superachiever in today's world than it was in the past because it will be more difficult for most people who don't

focus on scaling their skills at the same rate that change in progress is taking place around us.

So this is what I call the productivity secrets of superachievers. So the question I'm asked all the time is all right these people who end up in the cover of success because see there's seven billion people on the planet. We

only get to pick 12 12 people out of 7 billion to put on the cover of Success Magazine. What did these people do that the rest of us not do that separated them from everybody else? So, let me

give you the answer. The answer is it had nothing to do with what they do.

What Richard Branson does and what Warren Buffett does is not anything different than what you're doing.

It's not what they do that actually separates them from you and everybody else. In fact, it's what they don't do.

What they don't do has more to do with their success than what it is that they do. You're already doing what everybody you see on the cover of Success Magazine is. The problem is all the other crap you're doing is watering that down and

diminishing your results. You see, yes is easy. When you say yes, a knock at the door, do you have a minute? Yes, I have a minute. Will you be on this conference call? Yes, I'll be on the conference call. Will you join us

for lunch? Yeah, I'll join you for lunch. Will you want to go out with this couple who you don't even like and go out to dinner? Yes, I'll go out with a couple I don't want to go out with and

spend my time doing that because there's no there's no argument or resistance in yes. But here's the thing that I want to impose upon you today. The master skill of success is no.

The master skill of success is your ability to say no. Now, if you don't want to believe me, believe Warren Buffett. When I asked Warren, I said, "What is in your being the Oracle of Omaha, maybe one of

the the the wisest financial prudent people in the history of humanity? What is the number one key to your great success? If it came down to one thing, what would that one thing be?" Now, this is the reason for his $50 billion net

worth. This is it right here. Like one answer, here it comes. This is the answer he gave. For every 100 great opportunities that are brought to me, I say no 99 times. The Oracle of Omaha, of all the

wise things he could have said, he says that his success is saying no 99 out of 100 times. A matter of fact, he goes on to say, "The difference between successful people and very successful people are very successful people say no

to almost everything. So they have that time to do the thing that actually matters." So the late Steve Jobs getting a chance to talk with him and I said, "Of all the things that you and Apple have built, what is the thing

you're most proud of?" because I wanted to know if it was like the revolutionary iPod when he came out with it or whether it was some small project that never really got commercialized but he loved it. Right? Well, this was his answer.

I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do. There's this reoccurring theme that seems to show up with all these people who end up becoming these uber achievers. He went on to say that

deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. It's true for companies and it's true for people.

He says people think focus means saying yes to the thing you have to focus on.

You see that that's what all of us are doing. It's like what do I got to work on? What do I got? What do I have to focus on? And he says no no no. That's not what it means at all. It means

saying no to the hundred other good ideas there are. You have to pick carefully. Success is saying no to a thousand things.

So this is Mark Parker. We have the audio live, right? When he first took over the chair for uh CEO of Nike, he was having a conversation with Steve Jobs. They were working on the Nike Plus collaboration and asked whether Steve

had any advice for him becoming the new CEO of Nike. And so this is uh Mark talking about that dialogue real quick.

Last night when we were having dinner that when you first got the the job as CEO, you got a call Jobs and he offered you some advice. Well, he didn't call to offer me advice, but uh we had worked

together on a Nike Apple collaboration called Nike Plus. So, we took what Apple knows, what Nike knows, and you know, brought a new technology to the market.

Anyway, long story short, uh he said, "Hey, congratulations. It's great. You're going to do a great job." Uh I said, "Well, do you have any advice?" And he said, "No, no, you're you're great." And then there was a pause and

he goes, "Well, I do have some advice." He goes, "Nike makes some of the best product in the world." I mean, product that you lust after. Absolutely beautiful, stunning product, but you also make a lot of crap. She said, "Just

get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff." And then I expected a little pause and a laugh. But there was there was a pause with no laugh at the end. Yeah. And he was absolutely right.

And in fact, that's one of been one of my major uh focal points in terms of my priorities as a as a CEO and and even as a designer when I was growing up at the company is to edit. I mean, we have so

many ideas. Nike is an idea factory to edit. So, I ask you the question, what crappy stuff do you need to stop doing so that you can focus on the good stuff? Now, I I hope that you're that

you're hearing me here because this this really is the separating factor. The ability to say no to very tempting, very shiny, very alluring commitments on your time that make you feel good, make you look like a hero, make you be the white

knight, you know, all these things that, you know, make you look busy and and and needed and valued and feel significant and so forth. Your ability to abstain and to say no is truly the big separating factor.

I think Kenneth Cole kind of puts it in the one sentence that sums up this of where we're at so far. Success has less to do with what we can get ourselves to do. See, that's what I always thought. I

need to do I need I need to I need to be more successful. What else do I need to do? What else do I need to do? He says, "No, no, no. Success has less to do with what we can get ourselves to do and more

to do with keeping ourselves from doing what we shouldn't." Peter Ducker put it uh this way. Okay, says there's nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which we should not be doing at all. And most of us spend most

of our days trying to be better at doing things that we shouldn't be doing at all.

So consider this. If you looked at your calendar last week, okay, so that we can just sort of bring this into your world, make sure that it's applicable. We looked at your calendar last week. Ask yourself this, what should you have said

no to that you spent a lot of time and energy on? You know, one of the things that'll be interesting, if you look at your calendar last week, how many how much of your calendar there were no appointments scheduled? Like, in other

words, you can't even account for what the hell you did, but you ran around like a crazy person when you went home and your spouse said, "Well, how was your day?" I'm like, "It's so busy." But you can't even account for what it is

that you're busy doing. Right now, we start to look forward. If you look at your calendar next week, now you start asking yourself, "What should I say no to?" Look at your idea list, your project list, your commitment list, and

your communication list, and start wiping it clean. What can I start saying no to? By the way, if you want I see a lot of you writing feverishly. I'm going to go through these quickly. We'll go through them a lot. If you want a a

copy, the whole slide deck, I promised Tomu, beautiful person who invited me to come and be with you, find people today, that I would give you the whole slide deck so that you would have it as a reference point. The other thing that I

will do is I'll give you an audio recording of this entire talk. So if you want to hear it again or you want to go back to your team and share it with them, you are welcome to do so. The only

thing that I ask is that you do not post it publicly on YouTube or anywhere else.

Okay, we got a deal. So all you do is just text your name and email address to that phone number. It'll send you the link to the site where you can download the slide deck. There's a lot of

worksheets that will help you think through a lot of these things. There's the audio recording of it as well, but do it in 48 hours because I have another uh commitment and it will go to that other conference. Okay?

So, if you didn't get the number, it's over on the lefth hand side as we carry forth. So, then you might be saying, okay, well, if all you're telling me to do is to stop doing everything, obviously that's not going to ultimately

take you to the land of success. There's got to be some things that we have to do. So, what do we do then?

Well, success is not going to be by you doing many things things, spinning many plates, juggling multiple balls.

Instead, it's going to be a factor of doing fewer things and then doing those fewer things at a level of mastery. See, super achievers learn to focus on what I call the vital few. And this is going to

end up being your execution framework, the vital few. It's better to be world class at a few things than mediocre at many. You see what happens is we all we all try to be good at a lot of things

and we end up mediocre at everything. We never get world class at anything and the world forgets us because we never became world class at anything. When you look at the faces that appear on the screen here, these are people who will

be for forever remembered in history. These are the people who pushed human progress forward, did something significant. They're known to be world class. But the thing that's interesting that you need to know is they're they're known to be world class at probably one

thing. And if you read their biographies, they were rather mediocre, if not even a little bit terrible in much of the rest of their lives. But they were world class. And history will remember their contribution because they were world class at one thing. So what

are you going to be world class at? If there's one thing that you could become world class at, what is that one thing? whether it's a skill, whether it's a contribution, what is it that you'll be world class

at? So, I uh I coach uh CEOs of a variety of companies all over the countries, all over the world. In fact, uh Doug Trailer, who's here, is in one of my elite groups. And with this elite group, we we we go to these great

fantastic resorts all over the world. And this was at the Grand Delmare in in um Delmare, California. And a few of the guys wanted to come in early and play golf. And I'm like, "Guys, I you know, they invited me to play." And I'm like,

I don't really play a lot of golf. I'm not really that good at, you know, he's like like, "No, no, we just want to be with you. Just just doesn't matter how you play. Just come out and do that."

I'm like, "Ah, you're you're going to be sorry you invited me." They're like, "No, just come out." So, uh, I agree to it. And we get out in the first tea box.

And I said, "All right, gentlemen. I'm going to give you a workshop here today." And they're like, "Oh, that's pretty cocky talk for a guy who says he doesn't play much golf." I says, "Yeah, just trust me on this." And so, I said,

"I'll tee off first. I go up there and I put the ball down and I take my club and, you know, I'm an athlete. I play some sports. So, so I kind of take this and I just reach back. You know that

kind of that back swing where you're you're scratching your shin, you know, on the backstroke. And I just put this hercuan swing on it and just crush this drive. Okay? And it goes like this in the trees. And I dropped the club and I

said, "Gentlemen, workshop over." They're like, "Uh, no, dude. Your ball's in out of bounds. You got to hit it again." I said, 'I just proved to you why super achievers suck at golf and most every other thing because this game

takes too much damn time. If I were good at golf, you wouldn't have flown into Delmare to be part of my elite CEO group. So what happens here is is that to become world class at one thing, you have to relegate lots of

other things to mediocrity, if not even to being really really bad at. And so I'm going to suggest that you make a give up list because see that's a lot of people's problem is we're trying to be good at a lot of things. We end up

mediocre at everything and never really great at anything. And so to to become world class, to become great at one thing, you've got to reallocate time. So this is my give up list. Now I'm just sharing you mine. You don't have to take

mine. I'm just giving you an example so that you can create a framework for your own. So I gave up television. I don't watch TV. I have no idea what television programs are popular. I've never seen a housewives of this or a a voice of that

or American of this or nothing. I I have no idea what goes on in television. The average American what eight hours plus a day. Imagine what what you could do with eight hours of refocused time, right? I mean, even if it's two to four hours, an

enormous amount of time. I give up news. I don't watch any news. I don't listen to any news. I don't read any news whatsoever. I know some of you will disagree with that, but I have this sort of divide and conquer sort of mentality,

which is like, you know, okay, you got you you you've got cancer, you got the whales, you you've got Afghanistan, you you know, you've got global warming.

I've got success. Like, you can sleep at night knowing that I'm going to go and champion success. And I'll sleep at night knowing that you've got military ships handling our business over yonder, and I don't have to pay attention to

that, and you don't have to pay attention to this. Right? So, I just if it doesn't affect my goals, my family, and the dreams and ambitions that I'm after, what I'm trying to be world class in, I'm just going to assume you all got

that and I got this, right? So, I don't listen, watch, or read any news. And I know some people that spend hours all day, every day trying to just absorb the world's worst because that's all news is the worst things that are

happening in the world paraded morning, noon, and night. and you're just soaking all that in and then you're trying to go out there and be inspired and be productive. Not Not helpful. Now, again, I don't expect you to adopt my list, but

I I'll watch it. It's interesting, but I don't follow any sports. I always figure like if people just took the amount of time that they spend following other people's career and reinvested in their own career, their statistics would go up

dramatically, right? So, I don't follow any sports. Uh, music. Uh, my iTunes library is empty except for all the success CDs that get imported in every time I put it in my computer. Um, again, I'm not saying you need to to to take on

this list. This is just all the time I would have been trying to get the cover albums to match my iTunes library, I put into my one thing, bodybuilding. I used to live here in South Beach uh once

before. I live here halftime now. Uh, and when I did, I I sold uh company and I was just going to retire for a while.

That was a great mistake. And all I did was work out for two or three hours a day. And I was like 220 with 20 pounds heavier than I am right now, all muscle.

And I said, "Forget it. It's too much time. I'm just going to stay healthy." And I took the two extra hours that I was spending doing that, reallocated it towards my one thing. I live on two coasts, San Diego and here in South

Beach, and I don't surf. Now, I envy people who surf and they find their like spiritual bliss out there. I just took that time and reallocated it to my one thing. Mechanics. Now, this one I'm a little embarrassed by, but um besides a

pen and a fork in my hand, and I'm totally Like this one time um in San Diego, I I use the bathroom down the hall from from my office instead of our master bathroom. And my wife was catching me walking down the hall going

to the powder room. She's like, "Why don't you use your own bathroom?" I'm like, "Ah, the toilet broke." She said, "Well, you've been doing this for like a month now." I'm like, "Yeah, it broke a long time ago." She says, "Well, why

don't you fix it?" I'm like, "I don't know how to fix it." She said, 'Well, come in here. She She goes into my bathroom and she takes off the the top of the uh the tank. I'm like, "Oh,

that's how you get that thing off, right?" And so, she takes the chain, puts it back on the lever, and flushes the toilet. She says, "It's fixed." Now, again, I'm not proud about how I am as a mechanic, but uh I took all

the time and energy that I would have spent doing that on Saturday. You know, a wife usually has the honeydew list. I go and say, "Honey, who can I hire to do what you need to get done?" Right? So,

that's my life and much much more. And so, all these all these things where I'm or or mediocre in my life, all those things, the time and energy and life force and capacity I would have spent there, I reallocated to my one

thing. And my one thing is what we're doing here right now. Okay? So you'll have to come up with your own give up list of sorts where you just relegate it like take the pride and the ego you've

got about having to be you know proficient at something and just give it up and then take the time and energy and put it towards your one thing. So I ask you, what are you going to give up so

that you can get what you really want? Because most of the things that you're spending a lot of time, energy putting uh effort towards, you don't really care actually to be great at, but yet it's still taking life force from you. So let

me just sum up where we're at so far. Okay, number one is this. Stop doing most of the things that you're doing.

Literally, we took 99% of all the things you're spending your time on each and every day. Most of it is not productive.

Then focus on the few things that are and that matter and then master them.

Then go about drilling deep on the mastery of those few skills. And I'm telling you, the difference between what could be your success a year from now versus where you're at right now if you just did that formula right here would

be dramatic. I'm talking about a multiplied outcome of where you're at right now. If you just did that three-point formula right there. So, let me show you the vital few. Understanding your vital signs of strategic productivity. Okay.

So, this if you get in a car wreck and you know your legs sticking out of your your leg meat and you know and your your bleeding out your ear and so forth and you rushed to the emergency room, what's

the first thing they're going to do? Right? They're not going to worry about your bones sticking out of your leg or the blood coming out of your ear.

They're going to check your vital signs because they could be working on your leg and not realize that your heart rate is dropping precipitously and you could be dead before they bandage up your leg.

So, the first thing they do is figure out where your vital signs are. Same thing when it comes to your productivity. There are things that are vital metrics that are vital to your productivity. While you're going and chasing the extremities, the fires that

are happening over here, the the loud voices, the the solicitations, the sirens call, you could actually be killing your productivity and not even knowing it. So, let's talk about what are those vital signs. There are vital few functions, vital few priorities,

vital few metrics, and vital few improvements. If all you do is focus on the few in each of these categories, I'm telling you where you could be a year from now is extraordinary. I'll we'll walk through these real quick. Vital few

functions. These are the few functions that matter the most. The reason why you're paid what you're paid. These are the functions that make you the rain maker of your particular job position.

When I uh spent time with this guy here, I love this guy. Memed, an extraordinary human being. I mean, when I met him, he had his Emmy award-winning TV show already. He was still doing 200 open heart surgeries a year and he has a

whole line of bestselling books, two nonprofit organizations. The guy was just prolific and I'm spending time with him and he's the most relaxed, calm, nonstressed, not looking at any smartphone, none of the rest of that guy. And I said, "Minute, how are you

doing this? How are you pulling all this off? Because man, I'm doing a tenth of what you're doing and I'm running around like a crazy person." He said, 'You know, I learned a long time ago that there are only a vital few functions

that are important in any endeavor. He says, for instance, take heart surgery. He says, there's a thousand little procedures that are done in the midst of a heart procedure. He says, but I don't I don't clean the room or the

instruments or or even open up the body cavity. He says, I have staff that do that and then they get it to a point and now it's time for those vital few functions. Those are the things that I

do. So I walk in cleaned up and then I perform those vital few functions. Now these are vital because if they're done well, patient survives. They're done wrong, patient dies. And so I've got to be ready to be excellent at those vital

few. I do those vital few and then I leave the room to and have the staff take care of the rest. It's the same thing when it comes to a TV show. He said, I don't edit the commercials and

put the staging light around. He says, "There's a vital few functions that they're expecting me to be excellent at, to be ready, prepared, and on point." And so, I work on those vital few functions. I show up, I deliver those

vital functions. I leave the rest to a capable team. Same thing with running a nonprofit. Same thing with writing up a line of bestselling books. And so, what he said is, you have to identify your vital few functions. What are the vital

few functions that only you can do? And it's the reason why you're the rain maker.

and then leave the rest to a capable team and get excellent at those vital few.

Now, there not 5,000 functions that are important for you to do to be successful at what you do. That's the mistake most people make. In fact, it always comes down to less than a half a dozen.

Give me for instance, when I was in real estate, there are 5,000 functions you could mistake that are needed to do to be productive in real estate. If any of you are familiar with this, I'll just read off a few. Get the permit report

from the city. Meet with the selling agent. Check on the septic tank history. Review the utility bills. Send thank you gifts. Prospects. Show property. Go on broker tour. Get buyer pre-qualified.

5,000 things. You can run around like your head cut off and be productive. Right. I learned real quickly there are only three things that matter. When I do them, and only I can do these three things. You can't delegate. You can't

have a staff do these three things. Only I can do. And when I do them, we get paid. The cash register rings. Those things were pitching a listing, negotiating a contract, and prospecting.

And when I did these things, we made money. And when I was doing the other things, we weren't. And so, I became so fanatical about focusing my time on these three things that I actually bought a stopwatch and wore it around my

neck. And every time I was doing one of those three things, I turned it on. Soon as I stopped doing one of those things, I turned it off. So, for instance, I'm prospecting, going door to door, knock, door opens, turn it on. Talk,

talk, talk. Door closes. Turn it off. Down the driveway, up the driveway. Knock knock. Door opens on. Door closes, off. Go home. Ring, ring, ring. Phone answers. On, phone down, off. So, the first day that I did this, I just wanted

to set the bar really high just to just crush it, right? So, every day thereafter, I'd have to try to match that number. I was a little crazy back yonder, right? So, I put in this 16-hour day. I mean, it's 10:30 at night. I'm

exhausted. and I wouldn't let myself look at it all day. And now it's time for the big reveal as I turn it over. So that first day putting in 16 hours, guess how much time I was able to log,

two hours, three hours, 19 minutes and 54 seconds. Now I put in a 16- hour day. I mean, just worked like a If you asked any of my office mates, was he was he productive or was he screwing up? No.

No. That guy's crazy. He won't even talk to us in the hallway. But the amount of time I was actually doing anything that mattered was only 19 minutes and 54 seconds. When I saw that, that is when I became a

crazy person. Getting it from 20 minutes to 40 minutes was a was unbelievable. The first time I got it up over an hour, I threw an officewide party. In my four years in real estate, I think I got it

up to four hours, maybe a dozen times, which means what? In four years, I worked a half day a dozen times.

When you figure out what your vital few functions are, like the few of the things that you could only you can do because that's why you get paid the big bucks. Like you don't get paid the big bucks to drive around papers and all the

things that you know files and all all the other conversations that you're having. But the few things that that make it rain and only you can do when you figure out what those few things are and if all you take from from what our

time here is identify your vital few functions that only you can do and time them. the amount of time that you're spending on them. First of all, the first time you do that, you have a shocking reality about how little

time you're actually spending doing anything that matters. And then if all you do over the next year, 90 days, 30 days, is try to increase that number every single day, you'll multiply your productivity, you'll multiply your results, you'll multiply anything you

can accomplish in life. Simple as that. How do you do the only the vital few?

That's the big question. just like, well, I got all these other things that I've got to get done. How do you do the vital few? First thing you have to understand is how valuable you are.

What's your time is worth? Now, you all have seen this before. I I will tell you, you're violating it every day, but but you got to remind yourself of the math. You got to remind yourself of the value. So, if you take your income goal,

divide it by 2,000, that's your your hourly rate. That's what you're worth on an hourly basis. So, for instance, you make $100,000 a year, your time's worth 50 bucks an hour. make $250,000 a year, you're times with $125 an hour, you make

a million dollar a year, your times worth $500 an hour. Now, that means if you want to make $250,000 a year, okay, every hour upon the hour, you've got to be doing something that's worth $125 an hour, like you would pay somebody else $125 an

hour to do what you're doing because it's that valuable. So, it's like this. Imagine January 1, you woke up, you went into your bank account, and you're like, "Somebody deposits $250,000 in my account. Oh my god. And all you got to

do is keep it. But every hour on the hour throughout that year that you don't do something that's worth $125 an hour, the difference gets taken out of your account. And that's what happens. People at on December 31st, they go to their

account, they go and they look it up, $82,000. What happened to the quarter of a million I had here? Well, what happened was that little cat video that you got on YouTube that ran into another video ran into another video and it was 20 20

minutes. 20 minutes can go like that, right? Well, what happens is you in 20 minutes, what you have to do is take out take out your wallet, take out a $20 bill, take out another $20 bill, hold them up, and light them on fire

because you just cost yourself 40 bucks. 20 minutes. See, a lot of people think that YouTube is free. Oh no.

Facebook, Twitter, those are free. Those are so expensive on your time because they're costing you so much time.

You want to invoke the rule of three. Figure out what your three functions are, those vital functions we talked about, and try to spend 90% of your time on those. What do you do best? What can only you do? And then delegate or

discontinue the rest. delegate or discontinue the rest. Build a support team. In this day and age, the ability to get virtual assistants, I don't even care if you're an employee. Your ability to hire virtual assistants to do low

volume, low pay work so that you could stay focused on your vital few is essential. Absolutely essential. Always ask yourself, would I pay somebody else 125 bucks to do what I'm doing right now? Would I pay somebody 125 bucks to

make comments on my blog to respond to somebody's Facebook notification? If the answer is no, stop doing it. You can't afford you doing it. See, people for some reason violate and abuse their own time.

And that's all you've got in life. Soon as you're born, there's a fuse that's lit. And that fuse is burning every minute on the minute. And it's getting shorter and shorter. All you have is time. Don't mistreat time. So, what's

better than a few? If you get your world identified down to a few vital functions, what's even better than a few? Yeah. One. Exactly.

Learned it from this guy here, Joel Ostein. Now, a lot of people see him as a Christian televangelist and so forth.

I don't. I see him as a CEO of a several hundred million dollar organization, which is in fact what he is. And so, I said to Joel, "Man, you reaching 40 million people uh a week. You got this

large organization. we're basically in the same business trying to inspire hope and abundance in people's lives. You're killing it and I'm not. How you doing all this? And he says, you know, when I first took over the church from my

father, he says, I was trying to do it all. He says, I was doing weddings and baptisms and funerals. And he says, I was even, you know, adjusting the lights, you know, for the stage before we we went on air. And he said, our

organization stalled. It couldn't grow any further than my calendar could stretch. I realized that I was the main constraint. Number one, I was killing myself. And secondly, we were stalled.

So he said, I had to figure out how to stop doing as many things as possible.

So I asked myself the question, what's the one thing that I do that has the greatest contribution to our overall success? And he said, I realized it was the 22 minutes on Sunday. If those 22 minutes are inspiring and hopeful and

funny and engaging, it drives the rest of the engine. He said, so I stopped doing everything but those 22 minutes.

So literally his schedule to this day, Wednesday, he just thinks, reads, and and drafts ideas about what he might want to talk about on Sunday. The whole day does nothing but sort of enriches himself so he can think about what he

wants to do on Sunday. Thursday, he writes out his sermon word for word. The whole day, he can't reach him. Family can't reach him. Staff can't reach him.

Friday, he spends the whole day just memorizing it. You ever seen him on Sunday? Like the guy, no notes, magic, right? Saturday, he delivers it twice to a closed group inside his church.

Sunday, lights, action, camera. Bam. I mean, I basically I could say he's one of the best keynote speakers of our day.

He has to do 22 brand new keynotes every single year. Most speakers have one stump speech and that's it. That's how they spend their career. He's got to do 22 new ones a year. How can he do that?

Because it's all he does all week throughout the whole week just for 22 minutes. and it now he reaches 40 million people instead of the small church that he started with in Houston.

And so I ask you to ask yourself, what is your one highest activity? The one thing you do when you do it, you're not getting paid 125 bucks an hour. You're getting paid thousands of dollars an hour because that activity is so

valuable to driving the economic engine of your business. You figure out what that is and then arrange your life to try to do nothing but or as much as possible more percentage more percentage more percentage of just doing that one

thing your world will change. So here's your goal. You want to do fewer functions more often and get better at them.

Now let's talk about the vital few priorities. Okay. A lot of people don't understand the difference between a function and a priority. function is what is that job description thing that you do that that makes it rain. A

priority is what are the tasks that have to be done in underneath that function in order to create an outcome. Like for instance, one of my vital functions is um well it's three things. curating and creating content, speaking for organizations like this to

enroll people into the success community and any public-f facing spokesperson PR media type work. Now, I'm the publisher editor of the magazine. You think, well, isn't it editing meetings and advertising meetings and and you know, content and editorial meetings? No,

those those aren't the three greatest contributions that I provide to the organization. And so, let's just take um let's just take speaking to organizations like this. A vital priority might be preparing a new presentation for an upcoming talk.

That's a vital priority underneath a vital function of mine. So these are vital few priorities. The problem is is that we have we suffer from what's called the lion syndrome. The lion syndrome is this. How can an 800 pound

killing machine, the greatest machine devised by God to kill prey is the king of the jungle, the lion. How can a a a a a 100 pound human being stay off a killing machine with a simple bar stool and a little whip when the

lion could take one swipe of his paw and remove the head from the shoulders of that human being? The reason is is that lion when he sees the bar stool doesn't see one bar stool. It sees the four legs

and it's four threats coming at it simultaneously. And in the overwhelm of all that threat, it submits. it goes docile. Same thing happen happens when you walk into your office and you're hit with all these priorities and all these

solicitations on your attention and and in the overwhelm of all of that you think I'll just check email.

I'll just go on Facebook. Oh yes, I have a minute and you submit. You go docile. That's what happens in the what's called the the lion syndrome in the face of too many priorities. It creates paralysis.

I really learned this from this guy here, Richard Branson. So, we had him on the cover of Success Magazine and a client company wanted to hire him to come speak at their conference and they would ask they asked us if we would

contact him and because we had a relationship now and we don't like to use our relationships like this, but uh this company actually was responsible for 60,000 subscriptions to Success Magazine. So, we were kind of between a rock and a hard spot. So, we called them

up and we said, "This company wants to hire uh you to speak at your conference.

Um they're willing to pay you $100,000." which was kind of a a you know a stick in my side because they hire me to speak and they don't pay me 100 grand but he's Richard Branson and uh would you please

speak for their organization? He flatly declined. Call him back says no they they he said no. He says well offer him $250,000. We really want him to speak at our conference. Call him back. They want to offer you $250,000.

Flatly declines. Call him back says he said no. He says, "Well, we've already started telling people that we might have Richard Branson at our conference. So, uh, I'll tell you what. We'll send our private plane.

We'll pick him up as soon as his foot hits the the cement at the conference.

We'll have him back on the plane in less than an hour. Pay him a half a million dollars for an hour." Comback said, "Half a million dollars." Flatly declines. And then they're now really, it's becoming kind of an ego issue for

them. So, they're like, "Just tell him to name his price. Blank check. Whatever he needs to get paid, we'll pay him for an hour. Call him back. Name your price.

Richard Branson staff says, "Right now, Richard is focused on three strategic priorities, and he will only allow us to allocate his calendar to something that significantly contributes to the accomplishment of one of those three strategic priorities. And speaking for a

fee is not one of them." That's what's called focus. I remember telling a friend of mine, "Oh yeah, Richard Branch just turned a half million dollars to speak for company for an hour." And he's like, "Oh yeah, of

course he's Richard Branson. you know, I could never turn down a half million dollars to speak for an hour. And I said, well, that's why you're not Richard Branson because he didn't just start having this focus.

The reason why he's gotten to where he is is because he's had this focus all along the way. The difference between you and Richard Branson is this as well.

You figure out what your three strategic priorities are. And with with no shiny no desirous or temptious offer will you be distracted and what you could accomplish would become awesome.

Remember what I said the most important skill of the 21st century is learning to control your attention and keep your focus. That's what he's mastered.

I have a friend of mine who finally got his arms around this because he has the disease every entrepreneur salesperson has which is you know it's like a mosquito in a nudist colony. It's like you know we don't lack for opportunity

we just lack for you know priority right so now when anybody comes into his office with a new idea he always says what the focus pal we have our three strategic priorities just stay focused Jim Collins says if you have more than

three priorities you don't have any Warren Buffett let me give you his method for prioritizing this is worth the cost of admission to be here okay this is how he keeps himself prioritized Number one is he writes down all the

priorities he has on a yellow legal pad of paper. As many pages as it takes, all the priorities going on in his world at any one time. We've all heard that before. Number two, he then narrows it down to his top three.

We've all heard that before as well. Now, what separates the rest of us from Warren Buffett is point number three.

Now, he takes the entire list, but those three and throws it away. So none of it has the ability to leap any capacity or any bandwidth or any life force while he's focused on those top three priorities. And once those top

three priorities are fully executed, then he goes and just makes a new list. And he says, it's funny, when I make the new list, a lot of the things I thought were so important on the first list don't even reappear on the list again.

And so that's a little tip from Buffett. So what's better than a few? If you isolate your focus down to a few priorities, what's even better than the few? Of course, one. Now, the master of the one priority was certainly Steve

Jobs. He learned this in the wilderness years as well as when he took over Pixar. And Pixar is a movie studio who only produces one movie a year. Now, if you're familiar with Hollywood, if you're a movie studio, you produce 20,

30 movies. You hope one or two are successful to pay for all the losers.

That's how you mitigate your risk. They only do one, which means that they it's sink or swim every single year of their existence. But what Steve realized is when you can get a creative group of people to focus on only one thing with

no other option, one thing, he says that's how you create revolutionary breakthroughs. So when he took back over Apple, he applied that strategy where they only focused on the iPod. The only new product they delivered was the iPod.

And it wasn't for seven years later that they came out with the next new product, which is the iPhone. Now, you got to remember Samsung, Sony, the rest of them, they're putting out dozens and dozens of products in between these

iterations. And then it was the iPad, and then it was a focus on retail. And through this one focus priority, they became the most valuable brand in the world over the Samsungs and the Sony's and the rest of that. One big thing at a

time. Steve would actually spend now you gota remember he's running two publicly held companies you know what the demands of the CEO are for running a publicly held company and the multi-billions right the shareholder meetings the investors the legal li all that stuff he

would spend three hours every day focused on whatever was the number one priority for Apple at any one time whatever the number one priority was for Apple that day three hours of his calendar was focused on just that.

Imagine if you took your number one priority and you spent three hours on it every single day. What you could accomplish would stagger your competition. No doubt. So the great challenge of our times though we talked about is this constant solicitation on

your attention dragging you in a multitude of different directions. This is the great weapons of mass distraction that we have to deal with. And we love this distraction. By the way, we're addicted to it. We love it. We We love this

distraction. The reason why it's so profound and prolific is we actually love it. You see, what happens is it offers you some form of relief. If you're prospecting or you're planning or you're working on some marketing copy and it you you know when it gets

difficult and somebody knocks at the door or you get a little a text or you get a a a ring of the phone internally, you might not say it out loud. Will you go?

I can finally have some justifiable excuse to stop doing what it is that I'm doing and focus on this emergency.

We have this insatiable thirst for novelty. What's new? What's new? What's new? What's new? What's new? And then lastly, we want to be wanted. This is the biggest disease of uh what happens out there in today's world. I mean, even

even Facebook, the button is called what? Like I mean we're like we're like kids on a school yard. We would post something on Facebook and we sit there and refresh refresh.

Five people like it. Five people like me. I mean it's it it's absolut if you just back up from this for a second. See what's happened was it's the boiled frog syndrome. You know the boiled frog syndrome. You put a frog in a room

temperature water and it boil simmer ever so slightly because it doesn't notice it will be boiled to death.

What's happening with what's going on in our culture is it's happening around us ever so slightly and we're our productivity our focus our sanity is being boiled to death with what's going on. And it's just we want to be wanted.

I mean you get a text on your phone it's like dopamine right? It's like a drug. Oh, somebody likes me. Somebody need email.

Somebody needs me. You go to your email and refresh and there's no new email.

You're like, you feel so unwanted, right? It's crazy what's going on. The consequence is we're overwhelmed, over over stimulated, over scheduled, over spent, and unproductive. On an average, we are distracted every three minutes.

Every three minutes. Now, here's the problem. It takes 11 minutes to regain concentration. Anybody see any problem with that math? This is the reason why most of us have not actually entered a state of creative focus or of

concentration in the last many years called creative atrophy. It's like REM sleep. Okay? So, you know that it's not the amount of time that you spend in bed that determines the quality of your rest. It's the amount of

time you spend in REM. Young mothers would be able to tell you, right? If you get woken up five, six times in the middle of the night, even if your total log time in bed is 10 hours, you will

wake up exhausted. If there's a branch that knocks at the side of your house or a dog barks and it pulls you out of REM repeatedly, it doesn't matter how much time you spend in bed, you'll still wake

up exhausted. Same thing when it comes to you at the office. Doesn't matter how much time you spend at the office. Only matters the amount of time you spend in productive REM. You actually could spend a third of the amount of time at the

office if that a third was allocated to productive REM. For instance, you want to go from reacting to creating. What happens is in your office, you're spending most of your day reacting. Do you realize that when you get an email or a text or an RSS feed or

a blog comment, all those things are solicitations of somebody else's agenda that you're reacting to. And most of us are spending 90 95 99% of our time reacting rather than creating. Rather than going what are the priorities and

goals that I've got with no distraction from anybody else and anybody else's agenda, I'm going to focus on these things that matter to me and my family.

Another 28% of productive focus is wasted on multitasking. There's no such thing as multitasking. You can walk and chew gum, but you cannot process two things cognitively at the same time. You cannot listen to a conference call and

check email at the same time cognitively. That is absolutely impossible. But what it is is switching. See, you're listening to a conference call and you're hearing what's being said and you're comprehending it or you're reading email. But when you're reading

email, you are not consciously actually absorbing what's being said in the conference call. And you're listening to the conference call, you really can't intelligently read email. What you're doing is you're switching back and forth cognitively.

And when you switch, it makes you dumber than if you were stoned. CNN says that when you switch, your IQ drops by 10 points. When you are baked out of your head, it only drops by five. So most of

us are walking around all day as absolute potheads, stoners in terms of our cognitive capability to be productive.

And like a muscle that goes unused, we have created attention atrophy. we've actually lost the ability to focus and to stay focused and stay into creative realm. We're losing our ability to stay concentrated. So, just just to take a

poll here of all the forms of distraction, now all all of us are subject to all of these, but what would you say is your number one like the one the the biggest piece of kryptonite in your life in terms of distracting you

from your focus? Of those options right there, how many people would say email? Okay. Yeah, it's a big one for me. Uh, phone calls or texts. Okay. News updates. We have any politicos in here?

Okay. Office dropins. You in a chaotic environment where people come and drop. Okay. Um, self-induced multitasking. You know what's funny is is that's always the most popular. Thank you for being honest, by the way. But that's the one

you're doing to yourself. Like the rest of these, you're subject to the having to sort of thwart the outside world, but that one we're actually doing to ourselves. So, now that you know that it makes you dumber than if you were

stoned, maybe you'll work on that one. What we what we don't want to do is we don't want to mistake movement for achievement. Just because you're running around with your head cut off all day, doesn't mean you're actually achieving

anything. Or activity for productivity or rushing around for results. We've all had the experience where you go home and your spouse says, "Well, how was your day?" Like, "Oh my god, I was so busy." Well, what did you do?

Well, you said that you wanted to get all these goals done. What did you do today?

But you're stressed, you're you're overwhelmed, and you were crazy busy all day. And that's the mistake is we think that that that activity, that rushing around, that movement is actually productive, and it's not. You want to measure results by scale, not volume. I

have a friend of mine who's a billionaire, and all he does is he gets up and he does only one thing all day.

One thing. Every day it's different. one thing. He will not allow himself to do anything more than one thing.

Now, his one thing is a really freaking big thing. And if it's done by 8 or 10 o'clock in the morning, he's done for the day. If it takes until 9 at night, but it's only one thing. He won't allow anything else

on his calendar but one thing. And because he's had that uh practice for 30 years now, he made himself a billionaire by doing one thing a day. Amazing. So scale, not volume. Give you some strategies how to apply what we've just

talked about. Strategies of high performance. Here's something that will triple your productivity immediately. Your triple the productivity of the average Fortune 500 CEO. So the average CEO logs about how much of genuine productivity each day? We're talking about the highest achievers in our

society at the corporate level, right? Have all the staff and ways to delegate. How much time do you think the average CEO spends on focused productivity?

Any guesses? 1 hour, three hours. Forcing came back and said 90 minutes. And then Jack Welch saw that report and said absolute BS. I don't buy it. and called them out in the Wall Street Journal and said, "I I I do not believe

that the average Fortune 500 CEO spends 90 minutes on anything productive." And so they he after calling him out the Wall Street Journal, they redid the study uh two years later and it came back as 28 minutes.

This is the Fortune 500 CEO uh running our major corporations do less than a half hour of anything that actually matters throughout a 10, 12, 14, 16 hour day that they're at the office. See, focus is a skill every bit of foundation

to success as reading or writing. When you control your attention, you finally control your life.

And to build the muscle of concentration and creative focus, it develops like a muscle. What goes unused, you lose. And if you want to build it, it's a matter of putting incredible stress and strain on a muscle over and over. Incredible

stress and strain in short burst period of time. And then in rest and recovery, it grows back bigger than it was before and it could do more than it could before.

So I want to show you the productivity intervals of elite achievers. Those people that go on to become Olympic athletes that go end up doing extraordinary things in the marketplace.

These are what are called the productivity intervals of elite athletes. This was called sprint and recover intense intensity and then recover. So let me show it to you. Let's first talk about sprint. What I do is called 90-minute jam sessions for 90

minutes. You know you can't actually be productive in a concentrated state more than 90 minutes. I don't care if you're violin v virtuoso piano virtuoso you practice in tennis baseball n after 90 minutes your product your productive rate starts to diminish but for 90

minutes you can stay in a deep state of concentrated creative focus so I do what are called 90-minute jam sessions to set up a 90-minute jam session you got to create a bubble of silence around you because if anything breaks you out of

that creative rim it'll take 11 minutes to get back into it and you probably won't so you have to create a bubble Bubble of silence. Turn off your phone.

Turn off your Put a sign in the door to not be disturbed until I'll reemerge at this period of time. Whatever. Bubble of silence. Second thing is a countdown clock so you actually see where it is that you're at. I get this on Amazon

like 14 bucks. I have it on my desk my desk in both places that I live wherever I go. And I started on a minute-minute jam session. And that's all I'm going to do is work on this one thing for 90

minutes. You do this. I'm telling you, the first time you do it, you'll be working on this one thing. I've been wanting to get to this marketing campaign for the longest time. You'd be working on, you work on it, you hit it,

you hit a mental wall, you're like, I must be almost done. You look up at the club, you're like, "Oh my god, 78 minutes left." And you'll go and you work on it again, work on it again, you go like, "I got to

be almost done by now." And you look up, you're like, "61 minutes." You'll realize how difficult it is for you to only work on one thing. You'll you'll you'll see how atrophied your concentration muscle really is. Now, you

do it two, three, four times. The other thing to realize is how much incredible outcome you can create in a 90-minute period of time. I mean, incredible productivity in a concentrated, focused effort period of 90 minutes. You'll become addicted to your jam sessions

because look, you're you're you're flying through 90 minutes all the time and getting nothing done, nothing to show for it. You do these focus 90 minutes, you'll have these big consequential outcomes to produce.

And then next is recover. You got to recover. This is look you getting you to do the 90-minute jam session is going to be easier than me getting you to actually take the time to recover properly because you're you're an

addicted achiever. That's the reason why you're here. That's the reason why you're the top of your your business because you're you're an achiever. And the one thing you have a hard time doing is justifying actually resting which means that you're in this state of overt

tired, overworked uh period of time and you're low productivity. So you have to take the time to recover. The problem is the absence of discipline and intermittent recovery. Chronic stress without recovery depletes energy reserves, leads to burnout, breakdown,

and ultimately undermines performance. If you're going to train an Olympic athlete, the thing you're going to have to focus on with that athlete is not their exercise program and their training regimen. The reason why they got to that level is because they train

like a beast. The thing you have to focus on is locking them in the room and forcing the recovery. Because when the gun goes off and you got a 100 yards, the difference between who wins and who comes in third, that split second is

going to be who's got the most in the tank at the time that it matters. Same thing with you at the office as well. I mean, it's true that most workers are overt tired and underutilized in terms of their creative

capacity and that's what's stifling their ultimate outcome. And it's because they lack the rest, recovery, and revitalization. gamechanging mindset shift I want to give you is to understand that you get paid to rest. If I am a sponsor of an Olympic athlete and

I know that his or her outcome is going to be on how rest, recovered and vitalized they are before the competition, I am paying them to rest and recover because their performance is going to hang in the balance. Same thing

with you. When you are resting and recovery, you're getting paid because in order for you to be productive on Monday, to be at your highest level of productivity, you have to be revitalized and recovered.

Go down to the vital few metrics. Let me boil it down to you in a real simple formula. I call it my massive transformation formula. Number one is you want to take your life and just boil it down to three goals. I don't care if

you got a hundred goals, thousand places you want to see before you die, a bucket list of 50 things. Three goals. the three goals that if you accomplish this year would make 2015 the best year of your life. I know a lot of you have had

some great years. But what would it take for 2015 to be the best the best ever?

Well, if I accomplish this at this level then but if I accomplish this and that wow now that but if I accomplish this that and this at the same time definitely no question about it best year of my life. Great. If those are the

three, throw all the rest away because if this is what it takes to make it the best year of your life, all the rest of them will only distract and take life force away from accomplishing those three. Figure out what your big three

are. Number one. Number two, what are the two to three key behaviors most important for you to accomplishing each one of those big three. That's it. And then track it. Let me show you. You want to cash out every day. Are you on track

or are you off track? This is what I call my weekly rhythm register. It's in the goal achieving program I've used for 20 years. And what you do is you take your big three goals, you boil it down

to your two or three behaviors. So let's say your big goals are increase yourselves by 30%, lose 15 pounds, increase the intimacy in your marriage.

Okay? If you did those three things, best year, fantastic. What are the two or three behaviors most important for each of those goals? Let well in increasing your sales, maybe it's number of hours you spent prospecting, number of sales appointments where you're

belly-to- belly with a qualified uh client. Lose 15 pounds. number of days you do 60 minutes of exercise.

Drink 10 glasses of water if that's your constraint. Increase the intimacy in your marriage. Maybe you find out the love language of your spouse is expressions of appreciation. And then magic moments. Those things you do something romantic for no damn reason at

all. Right? Come home with flowers for no good reason, right? A little note left in their briefcase, little sticky on their dashboard. You're so amazing.

Whatever. Little magic moments. So if that that's your game plan, that's it. That's all you got to figure out. Big three goals, two three behaviors. Now, all you have to do is each day figure it out. Did you Did you do it on Sunday?

You say, "Okay, I'm going to do this one six times, four times, five, six, 10, three." Takes you less than three minutes to plan out your day. And then at the end of every day, you just go check, check, uhoh, check. Uh-oh. And at

the end of the week, are you on track or are you off track? I don't care whether you got 300 companies like Richard Branson or you're running your business as you are. You can roll it all up to a

single page dashboard and this is it. Those are your big three goals that make this the best year of your life. The two or three key behaviors most important to accomplishing those goals. And all you got to do is chart the amount of times

you need to do it and then just check in every day. Did it or not? It's as simple as this. I don't care how sophisticated, complicated your business is. It's all as simple as this. Not doing this, not

tracking this, not identifying the three and the key behaviors and measuring on a day-to-day basis. That's what causes complicated failures. Vital improvements. Last piece. Where is it that you need to improve your skills the most in order to accomplish the goals

that you've got? You see, you are at the center of your universe. The world is responding and reacting to you. Every conversation you enter, you change the conversation. You're you're like lightning in a bottle for every engagement that you step into.

And when you change, everything around you changes. You truly are 100% responsible for all the situations that happen around you by your engagement. I kind of call it what what's called a personal development set point. It's like a thermostat, right? Doesn't matter

how what's happening outside, it'll keep the room temperature the same on the inside. So, if you set it at 70 degrees, all of a sudden it gets really hot.

It'll kick up the air conditioner, bring the temperature back down to 70. All of a sudden it gets really cold, it'll kick up the heat, bring it back to 70. So, it doesn't matter what's happening on the outside, the inside stays exactly the

same. Well, all of us have a personal development set point. And the reason why you're not able to accomplish more is because that achievement might be above your set point. It works like this. See, a lot of times people will

run into a bunch of money and um we see all the time with lottery winners, right? Somebody's making $30,000 a year.

They get paid $20 million. In three to five years, what's inevitably the situation? How is that possible? How does somebody make $30,000 a year, get 20 million in their hands, and then in three to five years be broke? because the money was

far above their set point and unconsciously they did everything they possibly could to get rid of it until it went back down to their personal development set point. A lot of people go on diets, lose a bunch of weight,

what happens inevitably gain it all back. Why? Because that weight was not commiserate to their personal development set point. See, you could wave a magic wand and put 40 pounds on me by magic and in six to nine

months, what's probably going to be the case? I'm going to lose it off, right?

because that weight is not commiserate to my personal development set point. You could take somebody who's 50 pounds overweight, ma magic wand, take it all off in six to nine months, what's inevitably going to be the case. They're

going to gain it all back, right? Because that's going to be equal to their personal development set point.

Business, you can all of a sudden have a runaway freight train make a your business starts to grow, but if it's not equal to the personal development set point, it'll fall back right to where it was. So, what do you do about this? If

you're stuck at a personal development set point, how can you possibly ever achieve what you don't haven't achieved before? Here's what you do. Stop working on your money, your health, your business, and your relationships.

Instead, work on you. And when you grow, when you raise your personal development set point, then all of a sudden, everything in your life grows along with you. My mentor Jim put it this way. For things to change, you have to change.

For things to get better, you have to get better. things to improve, you have to improve. And when you improve, everything in your life improves along with you. What you have to do is to raise your personal development set

point. In whatever area you're focused on trying to achieve, underneath that is a skill set point. When you raise the skill set point, then all of a sudden everything around you rises to its level. And I think we actually need to

learn less and study more. See, information is not the obstacle to any of our achievements. With a Google search, every piece of information in the world is available to you.

Information is not the problem. As a matter of fact, information is the problem because it's overwhelming you and in the paralysis of too much information, you're doing nothing. And so I say you need to learn less and study more. Find a few things in which

you are allocating your attention to and go deep in the study of a couple of few things. Period.

So my personal development plan, I'll give it to you real quickly. My personal development plan is really simple. I call it the 115 31303 35 10 plan.

Yeah, it's it's it's more simple than anything it thinks. Number one is what is my number one goal of my big three.

What's the number one most important goal? Then what's the number one skill necessary to achieve that goal? That's the one one part. Then I take the new skill and every quarter I attack a new skill every quarter. That's all. One

skill a quarter. That's it. And I buy the top five books focused on that skill, the top three CD DVD programs.

and I go to one seminar focused on improving that skill and you go like wow geez you know uh that seems like a a lot of time no it's not right so all I do with the time is that's the 3030 part

every morning I get up and I read for 30 minutes one of those five books and in about four weeks you're through all five books really by just reading 30 minutes every morning five days a week you don't

want to do it on the weekends why I want to get that person involved right and then while I drive around I listen to one of those CD programs or walk or travel for 30 minutes. While my hands

are busy and my mind is free. You You spend 300 hours in your car on average every single year. You get a PhD in any skill that you want in the time that you just drive around. It's called net time.

No extra time. And I treat it like a race. I mean, I if I'm traveling, if I'm walking through the airport, if I'm walking the dogs, if I'm in the gym, I'm feeding my mind. I'm feeding my mind. I

I every every hour that goes by, I feel like I'm getting steps ahead of my contemporaries.

Now you go, well that's a lot of money to spend on your personal development.

Now it's as simple as this. Brian Tracy taught me the 1010 investment when I was 18 years old. So you want to take 10 cents of every dollar you make and carve it off to help other people, right?

Tithing. You've heard of that. And you want to take the other 10%, carve it off to help yourself. 10 cents out of every dollar you earn needs to be reinvested in your own personal development. He says, "For every dollar you invest in

your personal development, it adds $30 to your bottom line." I've had that philosophy since I was 18 years old. And I can tell you the return the rate of return is far greater than 30 to1. Now where else can you go get a 30 to1

return on your financial investments anywhere and I'm talking to a room of financial advisors. The best place is your own personal development. Jim Ran put it this way. He says you want to take the goals that you've got and your

goals need to equal the investment you make in the achievement of them. So, you want to make $250,000 a year, you should be spending $25,000 on your personal development. That 10% equal to the goal that you've got. You

have to grow into your goals. He says, "You can't achieve something you haven't achieved before because you're not something you need to be." And so, the only way to achieve your goals is to grow into them. The aim of life is to

see all that you could become with all you've got. So, I just want to encourage you to pick one. What what one skill? If if you just walk away from the vital improvement, say, "I'm just going to pick one skill and attack it with all

you've got. Go buy top five books, top three CD programs, sign up for one seminar, and attack that one skill over the next quarter." The skill most important to accomplishing your biggest goal. It'll make an immeasurable difference for you. I want to give you

one last strategy to walk away with, apply to your business that I think can make a profound difference because it did for mine. When I first got into real estate, I was 20 years of age. had no business being in the real estate

business, right? Person's most valuable investment, 20-year-old. And I went to a seminar and I took the seminar leader out to lunch and I asked him, I said, "What is if you were to give me advice, the most important thing that I could do

to be successful in real estate, what would that one thing be?" He said, "Um, go fail." And I said, "I thought the whole idea of success was to avoid failure." He says, "No, no, no.

It's exactly the opposite." He says, "I want you to go fail. Go fail rapidly. Go fail big. go fail as fast as possible.

And he could see that I had this perplexed look on my face and he gave me this quote from Thomas Watson who said, "The key to success is massive failure." Think about that for a second. The key to success is massive failure. Instead

of hearing that as a motivational quip, what if that were true? The key to success is massive failure. Now, based on the look on your face, same look I had, he wrote with this little analogy.

Says, "Look, life is like a pendulum. On one side of the pendulum is pain, rejection, sadness, and failure. On the other side of the pendulum is joy, love, happiness, and success. He said, 'You can't push the pendulum on the side of

joy, love, happiness, and success, but you can on the side of pain, rejection, sadness, and defeat. Your job is to go push the pendulum as far and as wide as possible on the pain, rejection, sadness, and failure side. He says, most

people find this little comfort zone, and they're never willing to experience a certain level of pain, rejection, and sadness. So, they never experience a certain level of success, happiness, and joy. and that ends up becoming the confined reality of their life, the

comfort zone. He says, "Your job is to push that pendulum as high and wide on the on the side of failure and rejection." So, in real estate, there's a few places you can go get a lot of rejection really fast, right? Expired

listings, for sale by owners, the scourge of the earth, right? Door knocking, cold calling. And I just took his advice straight forward and I just went and just subjected myself to massive amounts of rejection, defeat, failure, sadness, and bludgeoning. I

pushed the pendulum high and wide. I was in an office of 44 agents, veteran agents, and in 90 days, I was out selling the entire office combined with number of new listings, a number of new escros. He it did exactly as he promised. It's

swung in equilibrium on the other side. And even to this day, this becomes a new confined comfort zone. If I get to the end of the month and I have not had some sort of defeat, failure, or rejection of

some epic proportion, I am mad at myself. Why? Because I want more success than I have right now. And the key to success is what?

Massive failure. You ask Richard Branson, the the king of failure, uh he's had more failures than anybody in this room. Times 100. Epic failures. I mean, remember Virgin Brides, Virgin Cosmetics, Virgin Cinemas, Virgin Cars, all of them. Epic

failures. He's failed his way to $4 billion of net worth, right? You want to pursue failure with a passion. When you can turn fear into fun, when you turn the pursuit instead of success, when you turn it to the pursuit of failure, of

rejection, of defeat, all of a sudden fear and failure loses its energy. And the only thing that I did in the real estate business over my contemporaries is I just outfailed them.

And because I was able to endure more failure, more rejection, more defeat, I also accumulated more success and more victory and more. So instead of having a contest in your in your organization about the number of new transactions,

number of new successes, have a who could get to a hundred nos the fastest, the number of hundred rejections, and then you and then celebrate that person.

and then have a movie prize that whoever has the most heart-wrenching, gutkicking defeat uh story, carry them around on your shoulders and celebrate them because when you turn fear into fun, I'm telling you, it loses all of its its uh

weight and empowers your productivity like no end. As Elanor Roosevelt said, do something every day that scares you.

So, to sum up what we've talked about here today together is this. The productivity secrets of superachievers comes down to these halfozen fundamentals. Stop doing most of the things that you're doing right now.

Master the vital few vital few functions priorities metrics and improvements. Outfocus everybody around you. This is going to be the dividing line of competition in the 21st century. Who can outfocus their competition?

Outlast everybody around you through consistency. Don't just start this new regimen, this new diploma, this new resolution and then drift. Don't suffer the common achiever dilemma of drift.

The tortoise will always win. No matter how talented or how ambitious or how skilled the hair is, the tortoise will always win. Outlast and outgrow. Scale your skill, particularly the skill of focus and productivity in the 21st century. And then lastly, outfail

everybody around you. And if you're willing to to not only see failure as part of the process, an acceptable part of the path, but actually the pursuit to accumulate as many failures and rejections as possible, I'm telling you,

success will be a path to your door. And you'll have more to sip out of the chalice of victory, uh, more than you possibly could drink. and do all of that and then maybe one day maybe one day one

of you in this audience will get knee to knee with me because we will be presenting your story on the cover of success magazine. Thank you all very much. It's been a joy to be with you.

Pleasure mine. Thank you guys. [music] [music]