Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
This episode is all about busy and bored leaders, busy and bored entrepreneurs. And what do I mean? A lot of entrepreneurs and leaders aren’t very clear about their one thing and they tend to be always rushing about, always short on time and very busy. It’s the busyness trap that we will go into in greater length in future episodes. And the other side is the bored entrepreneur, that person who sometimes brings lots and lots of ideas and introduces chaos into their own business, if you really got honest, because they’re bored.
If either of those sounds like you, you’re going to love this episode with Shawn Blanc. Shawn is one of my friends. We’re in Masterminds together, and we ran into each other at Craft + Commerce in Boise. It’s a conference we both love, and we happen to have access to a podcast studio, so we sat down to talk about all things focus and productivity for entrepreneurs.
Shawn runs a course called The Focus Course. Hey, imagine us talking about that here. And he has a website called The Sweet Setup where he talks about all things productivity and productivity tools. I think you’ll love our conversation and get some great practical tips on how you can be a better, more focused leader and entrepreneur.
All right, Shawn, I’m super excited to get to chat with you today.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah, thanks, Jay.
Jay Papasan:
So, we were, like, comparing notes. And like a lot of our core clients, the people who show up at our doorstep are entrepreneurs, solopreneurs. A lot of times, it’s someone in a leadership position, like a manager, director above. And they are showing up and they are in some sort of distress, right? There’s something that’s not working or they wouldn’t be there.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
That’s your customer, too. What are you seeing? Why are they showing up?
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
What problems are you solving?
Shawn Blanc:
A lot of stuff we work with or we’ll work with the small business owners to help them just free up their schedule more, which is, I sometimes joke, I’m like, “Man, I kind of picked the wrong problem to solve because it means all of my ideal customers are too busy to work with me.”
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. I didn’t even think about it that way. Right.
Shawn Blanc:
But I love the transformations that we see. So, a lot of times when we first get started working with clients, we do a lot of group coaching stuff or some one-on-one. And a lot of the challenges are just the overwhelm. It’s the on the brink of burnout, I have to do everything myself. We’ve got five things that are due last week and 20 more that are due tomorrow, plus eight more that were due a year ago that I feel really guilty about. So, it’s just kind of just this sense of just being buried.
Jay Papasan:
And that’s probably just in their work life.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Because I don’t know about you but, like, I have teenagers, I have aged, like, sandwich years. Like, I know so many of our clients are in the same place because the timeline it takes to get a business to that growth level where they’re really getting overwhelmed in different places, like, maybe they’ve got teenage kids that are taking the car out without permission, and parents calling and saying, “How do I fix my laptop?” you know, from another state?
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Do you see the personal stuff pressing too?
Shawn Blanc:
A lot of times, yeah, because it all overlaps, right?
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Shawn Blanc:
I mean, the different areas of your life, it’s like, if you’re stressed at home, you’re gonna bring that into the office and vice versa. And so, if there’s pressure at work and there’s pressure at home, those are gonna compound, for sure. So, we see a lot of that. I don’t know if you see this as well, but another big thing.
So, there’s the overwhelm bucket is a big one. Another huge bucket I see of commonalities is folks that are realizing that they’re in the middle of transition somehow. So shifting, either they now realize something about their business or themselves that they’re ready to make a change of moving from one, a vision that they had for their life and they’re ready for the next one, but they don’t know what that is, they don’t know how to bridge that gap, whatever.
Or a lot of times I’ll have people that have been running a small business for 10 or 15 years kind of as a solo practitioner, and now their kids have left the house, and they’re like, “I want to ratchet this up. I want to give more hours to my work and see where I can take it.” And they don’t know how to scale or grow in that kind of a context. So, sometimes, it’s not the overwhelm of I’m drowning in too much stuff. It’s like, I’m ready for something new. I want to take this to that next stage, but I don’t know how to get there.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, I think the first client, I think of the metaphor is they’ve been knocked out of the boat in the rapids and they just feel like there’s no control.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Meeting to Zoom, that’s just like a boulder under the water that hit him in the shin, like that last Zoom meeting. How it shows up for us because in The ONE Thing, we talk about the most profitable businesses are the ones that are most productive. The most productive ones are the ones that have the clearest sense of priority. And then, for us, it’s a diagnostic. If you have a priority problem, well do you know what your purpose is?
And so, a lot of the time, people say, “I read your book, and I realized, like, I’m really good at this thing, but I don’t actually feel like it’s in alignment with who I’m meant to be.” So, I see it as a pivot. Sometimes, it’s a pivot up but, more often, they either need to connect their mission to what they’re already doing or find the thing that is connected to their mission. There’s so much of… But I mean, there is burnout that comes from just being overworked, but a lot of times, also, they’ve lost the sense of mission and purpose that gave them that extra burst of fuel.
Shawn Blanc:
It’s the dissonance.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah, when there’s a dissonance between what matters to you and where all of your time and energy are going, like that sucks.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Shawn Blanc:
And when you’re the boss…
Jay Papasan:
Take a deep breath, because I’ve lived through those moments too, right? You just, like, totally like, “Oh yeah, I remember that feeling.”
Shawn Blanc:
Well, and I think it’s liberating to people when you’re like, you’re in charge. There doesn’t have to be dissonance here. It just takes the courage to say, this is what matters most, and here’s what we’re going to do about it. And a lot of times it’s hard to make that shift or to declare that. You know, a lot of business owners, they’re afraid to commit. So, that’s why they’ve got 75 things that they’re working on. And so just even…
Jay Papasan:
Well, I’m just gonna put a pin in that. I don’t know what that cartoon movie was where the obnoxious bad guy’s always putting a pin in it, but I just did that. Finish your thought, I wanna come back to this.
Shawn Blanc:
But just the courage to say, “This is what matters most, this is where we’re going,” and there is a fear of like, “Okay, well now maybe if I have a team, if I’m gonna get more clear on our vision, are they gonna quit on me?” or “If I get more clear on what our goals are, does that mean we’re gonna lose money? Is revenue gonna go down because we’re gonna do less? Are our customers not gonna like us? We’re not gonna get any more new customers.” Like there’s all this fear of, like, a lack that will come from clarity. But I mean, you know, you’re nodding your head, it’s the opposite that actually what happens in the end.
Jay Papasan:
What resonated to me, the 75 things, when someone starts talking to me, like, you know, we do some group coaching, a lot of it’s one-on-one, but if we’re in that teaching moment, they describe how busy their life is. My first question is, what are they hiding from? I think that busyness, we are as a culture, people will choose, there’s research that people will choose to be busy over being idle. I may have read it on your blog that if they have a choice in a study between having to do, walk around the building three times to do something, or just sit in the room, they feel more comfortable giving themselves work assignments that don’t matter than just being still. And so, this busyness is often hiding from the thing, “Well, I can’t do it because I’m doing all these things.” But you’re the one who decides to do all of them.
Shawn Blanc:
Right?
Jay Papasan:
So like, the thing that you’re afraid of often means that it’s really important to you. And it does take courage to say,” I’m just gonna put all my eggs in that basket. I know it’s right, and I know it could be painful.” And you’re right, you might lose people because they signed up for the 15th priority of what should be the 15th priority. But it’s a part of your business that they were attracted to.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah. I think too, like the challenge is when you lack the clarity, you lack a filter for what you’re gonna prioritize and what you’re gonna work on. And so, if your mission statement is something like, “Hey, we do everything for everyone, everywhere, all the time, no matter what,” you know, it’s like there was that movie, you know, everything all together at once or whatever, I can’t remember the movie.
Jay Papasan:
I loved it.
Shawn Blanc:
It was great.
Jay Papasan:
Yes, yes. Wonderfully weird.
Shawn Blanc:
But it’s like that can’t be your mission statement or your vision statement because it means any opportunity that comes across your way for the business, you’re gonna say yes. You have no filter to be able to say no. And as a business owner or as a leader, it’s like, I don’t know about you, Jay, but I have like 25 business ideas between getting ready for work and going to work. And if I brought all 25 of them to the workplace every single day, it’s like my team’s gonna just mutiny against me because they can’t keep up.
And if my filter is like, “Well, I had a good idea, I’m excited about it. And yeah, we can kind of shoehorn it, fit it into the mission statement or into the whatever goal, then great.” Or, the other thing is, sometimes, the goal is just like, “Well, we just want more.” And so, the clarity actually helps you to focus on what’s actually gonna move things forward.
Jay Papasan:
You shared this earlier, so I’ll give you full credit, but I think a lot of times, they’re bringing the great idea to the business because they’re a little bit bored, even with a really successful business. Because so much of it is just kind of showing up and doing that thing that you know you have to do, even when it can come in and out of feeling sexy until you really connect the results.
Shawn Blanc:
Right.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, just the shiny object, I need something new to make work interesting. Also, it’s holding you back.
Shawn Blanc:
100% and I think that’s part of why, you know, you mentioned people would rather walk around the building three times and sit calmly in a room like, “We need something to do.” There’s an anxiousness of the busyness. And I think partly too it’s, like, because for us as the business owners, like, because we grew the business just through brute force, there’s an entire shift in your brain of how you operate things when you begin to trust and delegate to other people and move away from, “I am not the center of the universe for my business or for my team. And my activity of working harder and showing up like first one in, last one out, doesn’t scale.” And there’s a point where you cannot work harder than everyone else in your business all the time and that is a very scary place to be.
Jay Papasan:
It’s not scalable and it’s not survivable on a long timeline.
Shawn Blanc:
And it doesn’t work.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
But the challenge is so much as someone who’s been an individual achiever, so much so that they’ve built a whole business around their skill set and their work ethic and their insights, the skill set of leading through others is a brand new muscle. They don’t… often, like I don’t care how many leadership books you read, like it takes a little bit of practice to get good at it. I mean, if you hired someone amazing the first time, you just got really lucky. I don’t care how much the process is.
I wanna go back just a little bit, and if we have to, we’ll catch up with this angle because I enjoy hearing how you talk about some of the problems we see too. When you talk about your compass, like how do I say yes and no to things? Like what business compass do you use? I can’t remember what word you use, I call it a compass. Like how do I… what’s my true north so I can say yes to that? Is it margin, is it profit, is it fulfilling the mission, is it a combination of all of those things?
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah. The tool we use, we call it a business mission map.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Shawn Blanc:
And so actually I work, when we’re working with business owners, we’ll actually start with a personal mission map first because they’re the boss, they’re at the head, and there should be… not that your personal core values should be the same as your business core values, there won’t be, but you need to be able to draw a line between what is important to you as an individual-
Jay Papasan:
You’re the founder. It makes total sense.
Shawn Blanc:
And then what you’re giving your life to in terms of your career. So, there’s gotta be an overlap there. So the core values of the business don’t necessarily have to be yours, but you need to have… there needs to be a direct connection between that. And for a lot of people then, like this is the enlightening moment where they’re like, “Oh, this is actually what matters to me. And now, I have this boundary line of what I wanna be able to say yes to and what I wanna prioritize.” And you talk about purpose, being that foundation. So, same idea, core values.
And so, the business mission map is, why does the business exist, what are its core values, and what’s the single most important goal right now? And I always joke, I’m like, “You should be able to go over to your employee’s house at three o’clock in the morning, sneak in, wake them up out of a dead sleep, and say, what’s the most important goal in the business right now?” And they should be able to answer you.
Don’t actually do that, of course, but it should be like, they should know it. And most of the time, as the business owners, and as leaders and managers, we don’t communicate what’s in our head. So, we think it all the time, it’s crystal clear for us, but it’s not crystal clear. And then, when we actually do try to articulate, we realize it’s not crystal clear after all.
So, take them through the process to articulate what matters the most, and that becomes the North Star right now, of like, this is the core values that we’re always gonna operate in. This is why we exist. And in light of that, this is the most important goal that we have right now. All of us are rolling in that direction.
Jay Papasan:
We usually ask them to rank the top three values. Is that, for you to say yes, it has to score a nine out of 10 on all three values. And it’s like, if you got a number one, for me it’s impact. It’s like, if it’s not a nine out of 10, why are we even talking about it? And that’s usually, it takes 30 seconds to apply that against the opportunity. Because I know that I am always gonna generate 10, 50 times more ideas than I should be bringing into my business. I wanna keep that muscle strong, because you do need to ideate, you need to innovate. But it’s gotta be around that core mission. So I love, like just, how do I… I have to quantify it. So, give me a score. It doesn’t have to be a spreadsheet, but you kind of know the answer.
Shawn Blanc:
What I love about it too is like when you’re using core values as a decision making framework for your business, then over time, you end up building an organization that you love.
Jay Papasan:
And you attract people who like those core values.
Shawn Blanc:
Exactly, yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. And so the alignment happens not just in the business and the products and the services, but with the people who work there.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah, exactly.
Jay Papasan:
All right. So, when you were talking about, you’re working with the founder about that lack of alignment around the mission, and one of the tests I like to throw out is your senior director over there, what are the top three things that she has to do or she loses her job? Can you name them in order? And like, see, I was like, blah, blah, blah. And I said, awesome, I love that clarity. You’re like, you’re really clear why she’s there, what her job is, how she brings value. If you stay right where you are and I take your phone and I go ask her, do you think she would give me those same three answers?
And that’s like part of the skill. You talked about it. I think a lot of entrepreneurs and leaders, their ability to get crystal clear can be really quick and they overestimate how well they’re communicating it. And that’s just a system.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Right?
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
We have a weekly system where we’re always getting back an alignment. But like, they don’t know. And it’s like, and guess what? You’re judging her. You’re thinking, man, she’s neglecting her job, but she thinks she’s actually doing it, right? And it’s just like, those little gaps that a coach or a great trainer can help someone see, like, I mean, I get chill bumps, because I’ve been there so many times, you’re just like, and it’s also happened to me.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah. Right, exactly
Jay Papasan:
My coach is like, “Jay, do you really think?” You know, it’s like, “Oh, man.”
Shawn Blanc:
It’s just normal, I mean, it’s just normal to drift. And just coming back to the center, and so that’s why, when you’ve got it codified somewhere and then you can revisit it regularly. And we think it’s… I don’t know, at least for me, I often feel like it’s weakness to re-communicate something. Like I didn’t communicate it well enough or it’s, oh, I’m like treating my team as if they’re dumb because I’m saying this again. I said it last week, I’m gonna say it again this week. It’s like, no, it’s not. It’s actually kind to like remind us that this is it and all the other stuff that just swells up or comes, you know, whatever, it’s like none of that matters. Let’s just stay on these few things.
Jay Papasan:
It’s so easy for people to think that it did shift if you don’t always come back to it. So like, what are the conversations we should be having on a weekly, monthly basis, and manufacturing as leaders so that people understand that that is the rules of the road around here.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah. It’s just the importance of clarity and reemphasizing clarity to your team. What matters most, what are we doing about it?
Jay Papasan:
So, we have the same customer. They are overwhelmed with time. How do you either give them confidence that they’ll find the time or help them find the time, so that they can kind of get a foothold and start believing they can actually get out of this place. And if that’s secret sauce, we can stop there.
Shawn Blanc:
Oh no, I got no secret sauce. The secret sauce is in just getting people to go through and do the work, not in communicating information. There’s two things. So, one of them is, a lot of the training I do, we do it in groups. So, we do four programs a year with other business owners. So, when you have a small group of business owners together, and they’re all like wiggling, and it’s like you get someone to share, okay, what are you making different, or what are you changing about your priorities, your goals, your schedule?
As we go through the work, and someone says, okay, well I’m doing this, and it feels so stupid, and everyone goes, oh, that’s amazing. I didn’t do that. And someone’s like, “Oh.” Like you begin to realize you’re not alone as an overwhelmed, busy business owner, or as someone who’s trying to figure out the next stage of growth for their business. You’re like, oh, actually we’re all kind of just folks guessing at how to grow our businesses. It’s like, well, welcome to the world.
Jay Papasan:
And I love that you do it in a group setting because I know when someone’s on a hot seat, that’s what we call it. If somebody like to volunteer, we’ll work through this together. And then, we get their ahas, but then it’s when everybody else shares their ahas, they see, “Oh, we have the same problem.”
Shawn Blanc:
Oh, for sure. I get more from someone else’s hot seat than I do from my own.
Jay Papasan:
I know, every time. But you also, you’re not attached to it. There’s no I was wrong. You’re like, well, why can’t they see that? And it becomes obvious and then the mirror turns around and you’re like, oh, we’re all doing the same stupid stuff.
Shawn Blanc:
That’s a huge one. It’s just going through it together with other people, it’s liberating for you. You told me earlier, you can’t read the label from the inside of the box.
Jay Papasan:
I’ve had two different coaches that have reminded me of that mantra, because I want to beat myself up. Like, why didn’t I see this is my internal monologue. And that’s like, dude, you’re too close to it. You have no perspective. I’m on the outside. I don’t have to walk in your shoes every day so I can help you see those things.
Shawn Blanc:
So that’s one. The other big thing we do for helping them when they’re trying to get a foothold with their schedule is we go through a process, call it divergence and convergence, which is, I didn’t invent this, it’s been used for whatever. It’s common. And it’s the idea of going very wide and getting a big picture, and then editing down and simplifying and subtracting. And so, we go wide with, what are all the things that really matter to you? And like, just get it out there, let’s just be honest, what do you wanna do, what are you actually doing? So, you put it all on the table, and then it’s like, now you have to begin to whittle away at this.
And so, we’re gonna use the core values, that business mission map, we’re gonna use these as tools to now begin to make some decisions about what you’re gonna stop doing and then also how much time you’re gonna give to what’s left. And so we subtract down and we get down to this core focus of this is the one thing that I’m gonna do and this is why I’m gonna do it and this is what I’m gonna do about it. And it’s like when you have that-
Jay Papasan:
It’s clarity.
Shawn Blanc:
It’s clarity, right? And then suddenly you realize, I mean, you talk about this with the TwentyPercenter, it’s like when you know, actually there’s only one thing that matters most for you to do in your business, I’m not even punning, but it’s-
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, it’s hard not to say it.
Shawn Blanc:
It’s hard not to say it, but it’s like, there’s just, for you as a business owner, and for each person in your company, they should know there’s one singular activity that is the highest leverage use of my time that will get us towards accomplishing the single most important goal.
So, when you have those two points of clarity, it’s really hard work to get there. But once you’ve made the decisions, and you’ve done it in context of other business owners, so you’ve got the courage from your peers, like we’re all going this way together, we’re all crying about this stuff that we’re putting back into the locker, you know, that we’re saying goodbye to right now, like, you know, we’re Marie Kondo-ing our business stuff, we get to that point of clarity and you realize there’s one thing I need to do. And for most of them, they’re like, I can do this in like two hours a week, which is-
Jay Papasan:
It’s a huge source of relief.
Shawn Blanc:
It’s crazy. It’s like 95% of my job is two hours a week, and suddenly they’re like, what am I going to do with the rest of my time? Because they realize how high leverage those two hours are, and then suddenly everything else is now in context, because before everything felt urgent all the time. It was all misaligned and the priorities were upside down. And you suddenly realize one thing stands above everything else and all these other things are secondary. Suddenly the stress, the anxiety, it just melts away.
Jay Papasan:
I love someone metaphorically preaching our gospel but in their own. I love it. No, we live this stuff. And I know that you were sharing with me that y’all work in shorter cycles, like six to eight weeks. In my head, I’ve seen that but my language is, like, so you have to choose. They come down to two or three. But these are all really important. But I was like, but you have, just imagine this world, you have to choose one. And they finally make the choice.
They wanna know what’s happening to their other children that you have to lock away. And you’re like, no, they’re going to be there. It’s not like you’re starving them, but you’re going to give your first energy and attention because this is the clear priority. And now that you know that’s only really two hours of work a day. Like, yeah, you could tend to them, but now you know that they’re clearly, you have to earn the right to get there because you did the thing. You did that change. Now you can kind of be building for the next thing. But you’ve got to do them in the right order. Sequence matters a lot.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So Divergent, you made me think of our Goal Setting to the Now, we go really long and then work backwards.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah, I love that process. We do a very similar process with our group.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. And I imagine it’s the same psychological principles because you’re kind of disassociating, diverging, from having to… like, it’s so big that people aren’t judging it, right. It’s out there, you’re just putting it all out there, and then you have to ask the question, now how do I take a step backwards? And each step narrows, narrows, just kind of naturally.
Shawn Blanc:
Yeah. Well, and I love it, it’s like the idea of if my goal is to have a $5 million coaching business down the road, and I’ve worked things down, and it goes, oh, well, ultimately, the milestone for this is more clients, the milestone for that is more leads, the milestone for that is a book, the milestone for that is to write the book. Actually, the most important thing I can do right now for a $5 million coaching business is to spend 15 minutes a day writing. And it’s like when you…
Jay Papasan:
Connect the dots.
Shawn Blanc:
When you connect the dots, you’re like, oh, this makes perfect sense, but when the dots aren’t connected, you’re like, I don’t know how to build a $5 million coaching business. So when you are able to work backwards like that, it’s liberating.
Jay Papasan:
And people, they can’t do the math. It’s like compounding and like our brains think too linearly. So this idea of it’s just 15 minutes, like I’ll skip it today. Like it’s so easy to step over that versus building the momentum and starting to get the pages. Like 15 minutes a day for even one month, you know you probably got two chapters drafted now. Right, that’s actually so much in the grand scheme, because you’re writing a book you know how neurotic and hard it is to do these things. So, yeah, I love that. All right, I’m gonna wrap this up. If people want to seek you out, where should they go?
Shawn Blanc:
For all the business owner stuff, best spot is, our website is the Focus Course, and then if they do forward slash boss, there’s a-
Jay Papasan:
That’s just focus like a boss.
Shawn Blanc:
Yes, focus like a boss. And that’s the secrets page for all the business owner stuff.
Jay Papasan:
You’ve clearly been focused on focus and how to get it and do more with it for a very long time. And I’m just like, game sees game, man. Keep it up. You’re changing lives.
Shawn Blanc:
Thanks, Jay. That’s awesome. That means a lot. Thank you.
Jay Papasan:
I hope you enjoyed this episode with my friend, Shawn. When I think about the three big parts of the interview, where we go from who we’re serving to what he calls a business mission map, which has a strong parallel in The ONE Thing around how we teach purpose and core values. When he talks about the value of working through group coaching and how we get to learn so much by watching other people on the hot seat. Watching someone else be coached allows us to learn from their lessons as well. We do that as well in the one thing with our group training, like the first domino.
And finally, we kind of hit on to this idea of divergence and convergence, which is his version of Goal Setting to the Now. How do we go really wide to see all the things that might matter and then narrow it down to the handful that really do? And I love this example of the entrepreneur that looks up and realize 95% of their job could be done in just two hours a week.
All things don’t matter equally. And that brings me actually to our challenge for the week. My challenge to you, our listeners, is for you to look at your week and ask, if I only had two hours in my business, if I only had two hours in my job, what is the two hours that matters? What is that meeting with myself or with others that actually makes all other ones easier or necessary? That’s your challenge for the week. Go identify that 5%, that first domino in your role in your business that drives everything else. That clarity will serve you well.
Next week, I hope you’ll join us again. I’m doing another solo episode. We introduced the idea a little bit here. It’s the busyness trap. It’s how we can do all the things in the name of productivity, but we’re actually doing just the opposite. Activity and productivity are not the same thing. We go deep into the business trap. We go deep into the business trap. Next week, please join us.
