Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Hey there, ONE Thing family. Jay Papasan here. Today is the 31st of March. That means tomorrow is April 1st. It also happens to be the 12th anniversary of when we published The ONE Thing. Blows my mind, I cannot believe it’s been 12 years. We’re heading towards 3.75 million copies sold, I think 42 languages now, I just cannot believe how far this book has gone around the world.
And here you are listening to this podcast. This week, we’re gonna be sharing a live recording of a class I taught at our annual convention. And in it, I’m gonna be sharing part of a framework that we reserve for our private coaching clients, our group coaching called The First Domino. Our 7D method is designed for people to identify at least four hours that they can reclaim every single week. What would you do if you could get a half day back every single week to aim at whatever you want? We’re gonna explore that this week. It’s super practical, super applicable. It’s a way for you to reclaim your calendar.
Everybody here, especially all the new people, most of us have been taught to set goals backwards. The conventional ways we think about goal pursuit, from the experience we got and all the research we did, and then the 12 years since, I can tell you 99% of what’s written out there has got it completely backwards. We’re just approaching everything from the wrong direction.
So think about, who here has got small kids? All right, you go to the restaurant, they give you the little thing with three crayons in it that all break with your kids. There’s almost always a maze, right? Has anybody here done a mom or a dad trick? Do you know the trick to doing a maze really, really quickly? You got it. So most people in goal setting, if you work the maze in the direction it was intended to go, every single turn shows you a possible wrong turn.
You look up, if you wake up every week and say, “Man, I think life is great. What should I do this week?” and you make it a blank canvas every single week, I guarantee you, you will make more bad choices than the person who starts out with a little bit more narrow focus. It’s very freeing to look at every week that you get to live individually, but you’re not lining anything up. The forward way says every single week, every day that you wake up, you always got these choices, but there’s dead ends. There’s all those things. But when you start at the end, there’s only one path for you to follow.
And so, the trick we have to do is figure out, how do we work our life in reverse? It’s a big question. How do I work my life in reverse? Which means I don’t like spoilers. I don’t like spoilers in movies. I don’t like spoilers in books. But we want spoilers for our life. Have you heard Warren Buffett’s partner, Munger? He said, “Yeah, I really want to know how I die so I can never go to that place.” We want a spoiler on this thing because that allows us to know so much about where we’re going. And working backwards from the end is the trick.
So, I could take almost anybody in this room, I’ve done it a million times, and I can just ask, I’d be like, “Mariko, how did you end up in this room, a real estate professional?” But you might go back to, “Oh, I had an uncle that sold real estate.” You immediately go back to some milestone. Or maybe you had a professor who said, “You’re kind of an entrepreneurial kid. Maybe you should be in business with yourself.” There was someone in your past, a moment in time where you realized that was a milestone that got you to where you are. Most people, when you ask that question, how did you get here, they’ll name four or five events in their life between the time they were born and the time they got in the seat. Does that make sense?
When you look backwards, our life seems a lot clearer. We see the big mistakes, we see the big things we got right, we see the things that just kind of happened to us that may have turned out okay. But it’s very clear. How do we go in the future and do that for ourselves? It’s a process that we call Goal Setting to the Now. And the idea is that you would go out in the future around that top priority that you have. If I want to be the best business person I can possibly be, whatever that is, what do I want my someday to look like? What’s a goal? What’s that that I really want to achieve?
And I’ll tell you there’s two kinds of people. There are people who love to dream big and there are people that that question in itself just makes their blood run cold. I don’t know which one you are. I’ll tell you I’m in the second half. Some people will say, “Great, when you think about your business someday, how big do you want it to be?” Whatever. And they just start, “Man, I’m flying a helicopter to work. I’ve got my own hairstylist like Oprah. I’ve got…” Like they can dream big in a heartbeat. They can go right there.
If you’re in the class of people like me, maybe a little perfectionistic, likes to get things right, the idea of that big, crazy goal, like I immediately start going, “But how, how, how, how?” I can’t answer the question how that far out. And all I will tell you is it’s by design, no one should be able to answer the question how about your big dreams. That’s why they’re big dreams. So allow yourself to go big and imagine the biggest life you can imagine for yourself.
We have an exercise. We call it the Someday Letter. Jordan worked with Zuber, one of our amazing coaches. He’s actually just published a book called The Ten Year Letter, they’re kissing cousins. The whole thing is a process where we can take you into the future and get you to imagine the life that you most want to lead. And when we do that exercise, a lot of times people are in tears, right? They have finally allowed themselves to imagine what they actually want the end to look like for them. And it’s really not the end, it’s really the beginning.
And a lot of people think that someday, you know, they talk about someday aisle, right, like it’s a place that you’ll someday get to. It’s actually so much closer than most people imagine. But if we go into the future and imagine that, now we get to play this game of working backwards. Based on my someday goal, what’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary. So what would have to happen in five years? And here’s the honest truth. Like, who the heck knows what’s possible in five years? With technology and everything else that’s happening, it feels like the world is moving so fast, how could we possibly imagine that with any accuracy.
The truth is, with a little practice, you can get really good at picking stretch targets five years out that you can actually hit pretty well. But the beauty is now, you’ve set a target in five years that you believe will get you towards your someday goal. And then, we take it one more step back. Based on my kind of maybe guesswork five-year goal, what’s the one thing I would have to accomplish this year to feel like I was on track for my five year? And do you see what I’m doing? I’m not continuing to anchor to the someday. I’m bringing it a little closer every time.
My one-year goal is anchored to my five-year. My five-year is anchored to my someday. And then we just keep doing that game. Based on my annual goal, what would I have to achieve if you were a 12 week year or someone who likes to work on a 90 day plan, maybe this quarter or this month. And then based on my month, what do I have to do this week? Based on my week, what do I have to do today? Do you see how that works?
Most of you will be amazingly accurate at getting it correct. You know why? Because you’ve started in the right direction. Going back to that little conundrum, when you don’t have a North Star you’re steering towards, all the roads look good to you. And the problem with that is a lot of our Januaries look a lot like the last January. Anybody experience that? A little bit of like a groundhog day, but it’s more of a groundhog year.
The years start to kind of blur. “Wait, didn’t I say I was going to lose weight last year and the year before? Didn’t I say I was going to start going to the gym three years ago?” You have these things that you know that you want to do, maybe even you should. You should do. But we don’t have a system for staying on track. And it’s really because we’re not working backwards. And if we can just pick that one thing and start there, the beautiful part is that when you conquer one area of your life working backwards, things start to happen kind of, we call it the halo effect, all around it.
There was research done around people that implemented a positive habit in their life. And it could have been anything. And the weird thing was that we talked to the researchers, they were in Australia, and they said they’re talking to these people who had spent, we called it a 66-day challenge, kind of figuring out how to get themselves to do something automatically. And they were like, “You know what, I stopped smoking as much, I’m not drinking as much alcohol. My sleep pattern is better.” Like, even down to like less dirty dishes for a college student. And we always think that we have to do all the things. But sometimes just when we focus on one thing, a lot of the other things kind of start happening automatically.
So, this is where The ONE Thing comes in. Can we pick to the best of our ability that thing that we believe, that priority that is most important to us, and make us stand around that, knowing if we’re really trying to do our best to live in honor, honoring our number one value, our number one priority, the after stuff doesn’t actually matter as much. There will be the necessities. We have to return the calls. We have to pay the bills, right? We have to earn the money to pay the bills if those are not on that short list. But we’ll know that we’re honoring the thing that’s most important to us.
And there’s a confidence that comes from being true to yourself. Who do we disappoint the most? We say no to ourself all the time. What you’ve done is you’ve said this really wonderful yes to yourself, and then that starts to echo around, and then you realize it wasn’t selfish at all. When you take care of yourself, when you get clear about what you want, it gives you all kinds of gifts that you can then pass on to other people.
Yesterday, it just came out of our conversation. The biggest gifts you can get yourself is to get clarity around what success looks like for you in your life. And it’s a question a lot of us are uncomfortable with because we’re afraid that if we’re clear about what we actually want, and then we don’t get it, what does that say? Is it better to wander around not knowing than to know and know there’s a chance we might not get it?
The problem is, if you never answer the question, do you ever actually get it? No. You’re just living someone else’s life. You’re living a shadow life of what yours could be. So at some point, a lot of people call this a midlife crisis, people realize they’ve been avoiding the question. And they get really serious about it. And your opportunity is just to avoid that altogether and say, “You know what? I’m going to go out, I’m going to pick my priority, and I’m going to work it backwards.”
The beautiful thing for everyone in this room is like you might be thinking, but I thought, “I wanted to be a teacher, or I thought I wanted to do this, but I chose this life, or this life happened by default,” I would tell you a lot of my research has shown that you’re here for a reason. And the thing that you haven’t articulated has been living inside of you and guiding you.
We call it the phenomenon of the rider and the elephant. And there was a rider, I’m trying to think of his name now, he wrote a book called The Happiness Hypothesis and he said that if you can imagine an elephant walking through the jungle with a small child guiding it on top, if you can imagine that in your head, right? You see the giant four-ton elephant, little 40-pound kid, maybe it’s the kid from the Jungle Book if you just watched that movie, got a little bamboo stick, tapping it on the ears, guiding it through the jungle, right? Now, is there anything that kid can actually do to make the elephant go where the elephant doesn’t want to go?
The writer of the book, his point was, I think it’s Jonathan Haidt, he said, the elephant is your heart, the rider is your head. The rider always thinks they’re in charge, but the elephant is always in charge. The elephant doesn’t go where it doesn’t want to go. And there’s nothing the rider could have done to put you on the path that you’re on today without the elephant saying, “That feels good to me.”
I remember the first time I heard that, because I was a clueless 42-year-old who didn’t have a long-term plan, had lots of little things, I wasn’t courageous enough to go out and work backwards. That made me feel good. So, I was like, “Oh, okay. So, I’m not a complete fraud to be up here teaching this book. Like everybody else, I’m not completely clear, but chances are I’m already on the path.” The people who know us best can often see it better than we do.
You know why you’re a realtor? If you’re not clear, there’s probably two, maybe three people that know you better than you, and they can help you get clear about where you are and maybe where you should be going. So, that would be, if there was one thing so far I would take away from it is get clear about that someday. What’s that thing that I really think should be non-negotiable at the end of my life? For me, I want to look up and say I was a great husband and I was a great father. Those are very close together for me. And when I do those right, I think everything else kind of falls in line.
There we go. This is the 20-minute miracle. The boring way to talk about it is called the 411. That’s how I learned about it. The 411 is taking the last three steps of Goal Setting to the Now. How many people here, and it’s okay to be completely honest, how many people here do a 411 every week? Okay. That’s awesome. Maybe 10% of the room, which just tells me there’s a real opportunity. The beauty of this is if once a year maybe you go on a retreat. We do it in our organization. We call it a goal-setting retreat. Me and Wendy have been doing it for 19 years. We get out of our house. We allow ourselves to dream for a while. Where is it that we’re going together? What is this journey going to look like along the way? What’s important to us? And we set some five-year goals.
You look up, and then on one piece of paper, the 411 stands for four weeks, one month, one year, right? And who is old enough, like, I guess you can still do it. You dial 411 and what do you get? Information. So, that was Gary’s clever way of naming it. At the beginning of the year, and we’re close enough for most of you, if you haven’t done it, you can start it off, what are your annual goals at the top? What are the big things that hopefully line up with that someday goal that you want to accomplish? So you probably have your business goals on there.
And if you see the two columns, I don’t know that you can read them in the back, we have personal and professional. I would encourage you not just to make this a business goal worksheet, but also put your personal goals. And then each month, you’re going to ask the question, based on what I want to accomplish this year, what do I think I need to accomplish this month to be on track for that goal? And there will be one-offs in there, right?
If you’re the parent that’s in charge of registering the kids for the summer camps, it’s probably already on there. I don’t know exactly when that heats up, but it’s like a free-for-all in Austin, Texas to get those summer camps. There’s probably a month, March, April, where you’re just planning on losing sleep and going and sitting in different places. And that’s connected to your role of being a parent, but it’s not part of the breakdown. So just realize it’s not set in stone that every monthly goal has to be connected to some specific annual goal. But you just ask, what do I have to accomplish this month to be on track for my annual goals? And you do that for your personal side.
Now the longest time I spend working on this is the very first one of the year, because I have to actually have annual goals. That makes sense, right? It’s a little bit more thinking. Each month it might take me 30 or 40 minutes because I usually look at the whole month. I’ll look, is there a big birthday coming up? Is there an anniversary? Is there a Family Reunion? Is there a Megacamp, right? Are there things I have to plan around? And then, I kind of create my monthly goals.
But 20 minutes, that amazing investment, it’s all about staying on track. That 20 minutes that you spend, the second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth week of the month, when all you’re doing is checking in, I had a monthly goal, I was going to list this many houses, I was going to build this many widgets, I was going to write this many pages of the great American novel, how did I do last week, and based on that, what do I need to do this week? It is such a simple process, but it creates amazing alignment with your goals because now, that 20 minutes a week, you’re visiting and dating your goals.
I did a whole episode recently on our ONE THing podcast. If you’re not listening to it, we’ve invested a lot of energy in reviving it. We’re almost to 500 episodes. I did a whole one on how to have a relationship with your goals. And that’s what we’re talking about. Most people have a goal at the beginning of the year. They have a business plan that they share with their team. And then, they look up in March and it’s still stuck to the whiteboard or whatever and they haven’t thought about it in two months.
That’s what we talk about the Groundhog Year syndrome. You start with this really, really big intention, but you don’t have a framework for staying connected to where you want to go. What we’re just trying to do is lay down some beacons every Sunday, every Friday, whenever you decide to make it the ritual, Saturday morning, sometime before the week begins is what I advise, can I find 20 minutes? Can I sit down and work my annual goals backwards, which is really working them the right way. And I ask, how am I doing on that annual goal? Based on that, what should I be doing this month? Based on that, what should I be doing this week? And when you’re clear about what you have to do this week, most of you will get it done. In fact, a lot of you will get it done by Wednesday, because you’re doers.
I was talking with a gentleman on the front row. He’s already been through the burnout cycle because doers don’t have a trouble doing, they have a trouble dreaming. And I can think this exercise is part of your dreaming. Can we stop and dream a little bit about what we need to do, because doing is not our problem. Right? And so, Keith Cunningham calls it thinking time. He talks about if we just had the thinking time, an hour a week is all he asked for. I’m asking for 20 minutes. He just said, it’s not that we need to do more smart things, we need to do less stupid stuff.
And I love that statement because if you know what you’ve actually said yes to this week, you’ll do less stupid stuff. Meaning you won’t say yes to everything that comes across your desk, your email, your text, and you’ll actually remember that you had another commitment that was more important. And you’ll say, I can’t do it this week, but maybe next week. Because we always have more time next week, don’t we?
There’s actually got to be like some psychological fallacy about how next week is always easier than this week. And then we just punt everything into the future. And that’s fine for me, because if you can live this week right, and then just live one week right at a time, and actually it’s just one day at a time. But this little 20-minute investment, this is how you keep an oar in the water. You can keep steering the ship and not drift too far off course.
So, there’s two big things that this 20-minute little meeting a week, and I have them in a podcast I talked about, so I’m just gonna hit them a little bit. But we talk about you get to avoid goal drift, and you get to avoid unconscious quitting.
Goal drift, what is goal drift, Jay? There’s this thing called the one in 60 rule. And the one in 60 rule says, for every degree you’re off course, one degree out of 360, if you travel 60 miles, you’ll be off course by a mile. One degree every 60 miles means you’re a mile off course. So, a small deviation over a long period of time will put you way off course. It’s called the one in 60 rule.
And so how you would navigate, back in the day they called it dead reckoning. You had to know exactly where you started. I am leaving the port of Houston to go to wherever this place is. And if I know what direction I’m going and how fast I’m going, because I knew where I started, I can plot out where I am. That’s called dead reckoning. And for centuries and centuries, that’s how pilots and sailors got around the world.
Well in the 19, I’m going to say the 1980s, I don’t remember the date, there was a Korean airline that took off from Anchorage, Alaska. And back then, they didn’t have GPS, it was not for commercial use, they used radio beacons. And how you knew for dead reckoning is they had to know where they started and then they had to hit these beacons. They would come in contact with the radio beacon that told them where they were again. And then, based on their speed and their altitude, all those things. The plane is crazy. They have to look at the drift of the earth, right? The earth is rotating under them while they’re flying. So it’s a bigger computer. They had computers to do it even back then.
Well, the problem was this Korean airline was leaving from Anchorage to go to Seoul and they started not one degree off but five degrees off. They missed a beacon and they thought the wrong beacon was the right beacon. And so, they’re about halfway to Seoul, Korea, and they look up and they’re hundreds of miles off course and they’re actually flying over Soviet airspace. They were mistaken for an American spy plane and shot down, all 269 passengers killed.
So, that’s the grim story of the goal drift. To get your attention, you’re all going to crash. But the happy side of that story, after that happened, if you were around in the Reagan years, Ronald Reagan, because that happened, authorized what was then military technology, GPS satellites, to be made for commercial use. So, that bad thing made millions of safe flights possible thereafter. But that’s gold drift.
And every week we need a beacon, your 411 meeting, a little beacon so that you know that you’re not drifting off course. And if you drift long enough, again, I’ll come right back to that groundhog year, you can just do it in little circles. And I think a lot of us look up and we’ve been running so fast without looking up, you know, these doers, right? We’re just doing, doing, doing, and we get our identity from being able to do things well and doing them fast, and yes, I can do that, and yes, I can do that too, we look up and we’re just kind of running in circles.
And that’s the ultimate goal drift, is we’re right back where we started. And that’s just frustrating, and it can make us feel like we can never get anywhere, but it’s really easy to break out of. All you have to do is start laying down these little beacons, these milestones.
One of the coolest things I learned from The ONE Thing is we got to the end, like what is this all about? And for Gary, ultimately, a life of no regrets. At the end of my life, can I be proud of what I did? And we asked this question around happiness. The most fulfillment we experience on an ongoing basis is not actually when we achieve our goals. It’s when we recognize progress towards them. Fulfillment happens along the way.
And so the crazy thing that can happen if you take this on is every little week can be a minor celebration. It allows us if we choose to get into the game, not the gap. If you want to go there, a lot of us do, but don’t. Yeah, I made progress. And I promise you, the weeks that you still showed up, even if it sucked and you just didn’t get the results you wanted, those are sometimes your most important weeks. Because you told yourself and you showed yourself that you could do it even when the results weren’t there. And that allows you to do it again and do it again when other people give up.
All right, so goal drift. The other one is unconscious quitting. The Strata Research, the Strata Company. Anybody here a cyclist or a runner? They have a Strata watch, Strata app? Yeah, I know you, Dan. Mr. Iron Man on the front row, love it. People are addicted to it and they’ve done research. They’ve collected hundreds and thousands of data points. And it’s funny, everybody talks about Quitter’s Day, and the day keeps moving around. And I realized finally that every year they update the research.
So, it moves around from January 15th to January 19th. But what they will tell you is when most people set out their year and they input their fitness goals for the year, most people will quit between January 15th and January 19th. And they call it Quitter’s Day, just to confuse all of us. I think I’ve put three different dates in my newsletter. And like 80% of people will quit by the second week of February. So, the vast majority of people start their year going big, thinking big, having a clear goal, but right now in this room, you do not have to announce if you’re in that group, they’ve already given up on the goal.
The beauty, if that is you or not, is that you could start today and do it in a better way. And I believe it’s to go a little smaller and just come up with that weekly target. Like the other beautiful part of that process is when you look at the annual goal and let’s say, like, Dan, how many sales will your team do this year? In the 300s? For most people they hear 300, 350, 330. That feels so big as to make me want to shut down.
But we start breaking it down. Like how many cells do you have to have in any given month to feel like you’re already in a place where that feels approachable, the gap is five sales or 10 sales, right? Most of the time when we break it down, the activities get small and doable. Even when they’re really big goals, it’s all relative to where we are at that time.
So, the last piece I’m going to tell you is, you get to avoid goal drift, you get to avoid unconscious quitting, because you’re staying in contact with your goals. You’re dating them, you’re having a relationship with them. Every single week, you get to go on a date, remind yourself of where it is you wanted to go, get excited about it again, and you get to revise those goals along the way. It is a living document. About half the time by April, there’s at least one or two annual goals that I cross out. The thing that I thought I wanted in January doesn’t make sense anymore, and I realized I was just kind of having a brain fart. And you can give your permission, give yourself grace to kind of realign along the way and that’s how winners stay on track and actually accomplish more of the goals, not usually all of them, but more goals than people who just abandon them along the way.
All right. So we’re going to do three Ds. We have a model called the seven Ds and people pay over $1,000 to get access to this in our First Domino course. And when we sold the course, we told people, if you did the work, you went through these 7Ds, and one of them is just downloading all the stuff you have to do, right? If you did this and you did not identify four hours that you could earn back every single week, that we would give you your money back.
And so, in our last cohort we had 96 people pay us. How many people do you think asked for a refund? I wish it was zero, but I actually kind of like that one person asked for a refund. And we’re like, “Okay, the terms say that you do the homework.” They hadn’t, and then they did the homework. How many hours did this individual buy back? Seven and a half hours. But they wanted their money back anyway. We said, “No questions asked, that’s what we’re going to do.”
So, the person who had the worst experience got seven and a half hours back. If I could give you four hours a week back, what would that be worth to you? Would that be valuable? I mean, just think about how how rushed we feel most of the time. So, I’ll tell you, this exercise came, me and my coach Jordan Freed, who’s also our head coach, built it, but this past summer I had one of the most challenging seasons in my life. Everything I could imagine that could go wrong went wrong at the same time. And I was drowning. I mean, I was drowning. And we walked through this exercise and I suddenly was able to get out of the fight or flight mode and actually start making conscious decisions and I started to be able to check some things off and make progress. So, I can tell you that it works on a very personal level and I want that for you.
So, the first step we’re going to do is called the download. So, you can use your phone. What I want you to do is think of all the stuff, and this could give you hives in the moment, what are all the things that you know you kind of have to do? I like to put it in the framework of an average week. An average week, what are all the jobs that fall to you? You have to lead the team, you have to prepare for the team meeting, you have to lead the team meeting, you have to do your own lead generation, you have to do 411s maybe with your team, create your own. Like this is the thing that is that kind of exhausted list. What I find shows up on the list is not the stuff that you’re doing well and is not a problem.
Most people only are writing down the things that are kind of problematic, the things that are painful for them in one way or the other. And that’s okay if you’re looking. It’s not exhaustive. You don’t have to write down, brush my teeth seven times, right? It’s the stuff that are your core responsibilities that are probably you’re not doing well, you’re not doing enough, or you’re just like, “Man, I wish I didn’t have to do that.” So you download all the things.
And then, the first kind of actionable D is going to be delegate. And these are four questions. It’s not the whole exercise. But there are four questions that you can ask. And what am I holding on to that I should be letting go of? I don’t know about you, but when my coach asked me that question, I immediately thought of at least a couple of things. But if you don’t ask the question, you don’t get the answer. What am I not asking for help for that I should be?
Here’s the thing. I don’t know why, the people that are the most accomplished that I know are the worst at asking for help. That sound like anybody in this room? And all I can guess, and I don’t have the answer, all I can guess is if you’ve built your identity around achievement, being the person that people can trust to get things done, maybe it’s kind of in violation of that identity, having to raise our hands and ask for help.
But the reality is, nobody’s going to succeed alone. No one’s going to do it alone. And everybody eventually has to learn to ask for help. And the faster that we learn that skill for ourselves, the better we’ll be. And asking for help does not mean you’re a mooch, right? It does not mean you’re selfish. There’s all of that self-talk that we attach to it, right? So, there’s two help questions. There’s the what am I not asking for help, and then there’s the who. You see that? That’s how pronounced this is for achievers. Who am I not asking for help that I should be?
Now, this is a whole thing that you may have to talk to your therapist about. I can’t go down that road. Like, why are you not comfortable asking that person, who often is the logical person, not just to help you, but maybe to be doing it in the first place. So, what we’re trying to get here is clarity with just a handful of questions about the things that we’re holding onto that we really don’t have to, right?
And then I can’t, I don’t have a monitor so I have to read this over here, how would I get this done if it were illegal real legal for me to do. Now, there’s some laughter in the room. This actually comes from a real story. So, one of our coaching clients, I believe the guy’s name is Jeff Connelly, was working with Jordan Freed, our head coach, and he was trying to start a new business and he was choosing between two. And one was going to be a hair salon and the other was going to be a sandwich shop. And he had been a serial entrepreneur, he was experienced, and he knew that the thing that would cause him to be most likely to be unsuccessful would be if he didn’t get help to do all the things.
And so, he asked the question, like, if it was illegal for me, how would I get it done? And he immediately eliminated the sandwich shop because you don’t have to have a license to make sandwiches in his state, but you do have to have a license to cut someone’s hair. So, no matter how bad it got, he could never be the person to say, “Just sit down in the chair, I’ve gotcha.” It was literally gonna be illegal for him to do the work. And what we found is that’s just kind of a powerful thought question.
So, what are the things that you’re holding on to, but if tomorrow someone passed a law and it was illegal, you’d have to figure it out? Is everybody kind of thinking of, like, maybe more than one thing now? There’s stuff that you can hand off. And it may not be if you don’t have a team, someone on your team. It may be someone in your market center that could work with you. Maybe you could find a contractor to do that. There’s so many ways today to delegate that work. Maybe you should not be drafting your listing descriptions and ChatGPT should. Maybe we’re not even talking about a human being here. What are the things that you are doing and holding on to that you can give up? Immediately, this should buy you back a bunch of times.
Now, the challenge here, how many people here are, I would say, a solo business? You may have admin help, but you’re the only license. Okay, so it’s about 10% if everybody raised their hands. So, if you don’t have someone on your team to delegate stuff to, you still have stuff that you can delegate. Gary kind of is a smartass. He’s like, “Did you make the car that you drove here in?” Of course, I didn’t, but then you have leverage. We have leverage. You didn’t make your own house, most likely. All the things that we do.
At home and at work, a lot of people see work and they’re like, I don’t want to have a lot of help. But they can get help at home. And that was one of the first breakthroughs that my wife, Wendy, had. She looked up, she’s trying to build a business, she hadn’t earned the right to have other agents on the team, we didn’t have the right yet, we didn’t have enough income to pay full-time admin on the team, but what we did look up and say is, “I can get help at home.” And some of the first work she delegated to was me, but we both started delegating to each other appropriately.
I had more bandwidth, she was the stay-at-home parent, she needed to have more time to get out, we traded some jobs, we also hired some jobs out. But there’s probably time every single week that you’re meal prepping, that you’re doing the yard, that you’re cleaning the house. You know that you can even hire someone to come and clean your aquarium? There are people who do that. But someone can do your pool, someone can do whatever it is. There is someone out there that you can hire to come do it. And then you just have to say, “Well, how much time did I just get back and how am I going to use it?”
And Ben Kinney, I haven’t seen him here, but he taught me to distinguish between leverage and luxury. Do you all know the difference? If you’re paying, I got one hand back there, so you’ve heard this, I love this. It stuck with me. It’s leverage if you’re paying someone to do something so that you can do a more dollar productive activity. If paying someone to clean your house allows you to then sell an extra house a month or something, then that’s absolutely leverage. If you’re just doing that so that you can catch up on Shrinking on Apple TV, that’s luxury.
And you’re entitled to both, okay? Because one of the things, we, burnout happens in our industry at a high rate, very high rate. You need to also sometimes take things off your plate so that you do make space to just chill and relax. But you have two different areas that you can delegate. The efficiency trap is something that we call, it’s this trap about why we don’t give things up.
And Rory Vaden, he’ll be speaking here a little later this week, he taught me the 30X rule, which I also like, but it’s this idea that nobody can do it as well as you. And I’m just going to go ahead and pop that bubble right now. Everybody here in their work life is absolutely replaceable. And there’s probably someone that’ll do it for less money than it takes you to do it, that’ll do it faster and at a higher quality. That’s the humbling truth. There are things that you do that nobody else can do. And it might be things that are just weird meta things. But just don’t ever fall for this idea that nobody can do it better than me. That is that devil on your shoulder keeping you locked into a job that you’ve earned the right to graduate from. All right? It’s this idea a lot of people will tell you, it’ll take them longer to do it.
And the truth is, this is kind of a, not a law, but it’s a hypothesis I believe to be true. It’ll take you about 30 hours to train someone to do something that you do in an hour as well as you do it. Thirty hours. And the problem is, every week we look up and that one hour that we have to do whatever it is, update the database, or I’m going to make some reels for YouTube, or whatever that is, I’m going to edit them, which is even worse. We look up and we go, I don’t have 30 hours to give. And we think that it all has to happen at once or in one block. And the truth is, the longer we play that game of not investing 30 hours to get the hour back, every year we’re just burning through, you know, you could have gotten 20 plus hours back the first year.
The tradeoff is investing time up front to get time back forever. And the really cool thing is when you train someone to do something, your job is not to document it, it’s their job. You don’t have to build your own training manual, but that investment in time buys you back 20 hours the first year and then 50 hours the next year and goes on and on. And the people who learn how to play this game are the ones who have time. And people who have time make better decisions, they make less stupid decisions, which means they have less time doing things over and repeating the same mistakes. Time is your friend and you want more of it.
So, here’s the last key before we wrap things up. Think of all the meetings, just look on your calendar, all the meetings that you have, how do we decrease the number, the frequency, or the amount of time in them? Are there meetings that you could just take off your calendar altogether? Do you serve on a board where you go to that board and you’re just hoping that nobody calls on you, but you’re too nice to say, “I really don’t belong on this thing.” Might be at your church, might be at some other thing. There’s a thing where you raised your hand and said yes a long time ago and you’ve been regretting it for a long time. So, there are things that you can just say no to and say, “Hey, I hope it’s not a problem, but I really need to step back. I’ve got too much on my plate right now.”
Can you reduce the frequency? If you’re meeting every week with a group, can you meet every other week? And boom, that one hour a week now becomes effectively 30 minutes a week, right? And the best hack of all, there’s even a setting on Google Calendar called speeding meetings is to decrease, you know, the speedy meeting calendar? You use it. I love it. But you turn a 60-minute meeting to a 45 turn all of your 30-minute meetings to 20-minute meetings, and it shows up on your calendar weird, and people don’t know when to end them, but you’re actually shaving off a little bit of time from all of the meetings.
I can’t think of… it’s not Hawthorne’s principle, but there’s this idea that work will expand to fill the time you give it. There’s never been a 60-minute meeting that couldn’t be run efficiently in 45. There’s never been a 30-minute meeting that couldn’t be run efficiently in 20. And the wonderful thing about not having a lot of time is people don’t horse around. They just look up and say, wow, we’ve only got 60 minutes, or we’ve only got 45 minutes, or whatever you shortened it to, and people tend to be more on point.
So, just by downloading, by delegating, and by decreasing, I bet everybody here can buy back at least two hours in their week. Surely, you can find 20 minutes, and what are you gonna do with that 20 minutes? You’re just gonna date your 411. You’re going to date your goals. Sit down with your goals and remind yourself, what did I say yes to this year, this month, and this week?
Well, there you go. Hope you enjoyed that. Here’s your challenge for this week. I want you to use the 7-D Method, the ones that we shared, to identify blocks of time where you can maybe diminish what you’re giving them, fewer meetings, shorter meetings, you name it. You could delegate things. Whatever it takes, I would like you to identify a minimum of one hour using those methods that you can reclaim.
Next week, I’m bringing on my coach, the head coach for The ONE Thing organization, Jordan Freed, and we decided to tackle the four Ps of productivity. Not just the stuff that you read in the book, but how does he actually use it in coaching? What are the secrets to understanding how they connect to each other? Is the inability to say no actually connected to an environment that doesn’t support your goals? Find out next week.
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This podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts, and opinions of the guest represent those of the guest and not Produktive or Keller Williams Realty, LLC and their affiliates, and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, tax, or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty, or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or results from using the information.
