Jay Papasan:
This week, I’m chatting with Chris Ducker. He’s my friend, a serial entrepreneur, and also a best-selling author. His new book is called The Long Haul Leader, and I got to read the advanced manuscript. The book is coming out tomorrow as of the dropping of this podcast, and it is filled with lots of synergies with The ONE Thing. We talk about how we can set a sustainable pace, how we can honor the different areas of our life, not just focus on productivity and work. There’s a lot of alignment here and lots of ahas.
And if you listen carefully, right after the break – I love it – he goes into a very simple three-step framework where you can eliminate a lot of stuff that isn’t serving you in your life. You can amplify the stuff that is, and also start adding back the things that are missing. So, there’s some simple practical frameworks in this episode from someone who has pushed to the edge of burnout while trying to succeed at a high level, the lessons he’s learned that he can impart to you, and we all could use to hear again and again. So, let’s dive into this episode with Chris Ducker.
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Chris, I’m so happy to have you on The ONE Thing show. Welcome.
Chris Ducker:
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jay Papasan:
I’m so excited about your upcoming book. It comes out tomorrow. And in terms of when this podcast is landing, I got to read an advanced copy. I read it from cover to cover in one weekend. So, great job. I’m really excited to dive in and share some of these ideas with our ONE Thing listeners.
Chris Ducker:
Thank you, man. I appreciate you getting through the entire book in that short space of time. Clearly, I did something to keep you connected to the words, if nothing else.
Jay Papasan:
You tell great stories, and as a ONE Thing advocate, I’m looking, I’m trying to spread those ideas in the world. So much of your message resonates with the things that we’re battling. You know, we have a lot of folks struggling with the busyness trap. We like to say, we serve a lot of doers who need space to dream, and you give some really practical frameworks for entrepreneurs and busy leaders to kind of find that space to be a whole person and do it for the long haul.
So, like, that’s the question. I don’t know exactly what question you ask and answer to write this book, but when I look at it, without compromising our vision for our life, how do we set a sustainable pace for ourselves and our teams, so we can achieve those goals without unnecessary side effects, right? So, like there’s a line in the ONE Thing, we wanna do things for more effect without side effects, as in burnout and all of the other illnesses. So, talk to us a little bit about like, what’s the long haul leader vision?
Chris Ducker:
Well, yeah, you know, the vision, the big vision is to try and eradicate entrepreneurial and leadership burnout, plain and simple. I hit a very, very bad burnout in 2021. I was diagnosed with depression, anxiety. I was put on an antidepressant medication for 12 months. Phase three, adrenal burnout failure. My adrenal glands were creating zero cortisol, which we know is our stress hormone. And so, I was in a really deep dark place at the time. And I was able to get myself off those medications and to feel better about where I was at and what I was going through and all the rest of it.
But here’s the crazy thing, the really crazy thing. When that happened in 2021, we had had the best year in business for probably the last five or six years running up to that point. We are fundamentally an education business. We were doing a lot of things online, but also a heck of a lot of things offline. So, we took a lot of our offline business and brought it online in the middle of the pandemic. And obviously we were doing very, very well because everybody was upskilling, upleveling themselves online at the time.
So, we’re having an amazing year. You would think I would be over the moon and happy and ecstatic and all these kind of things, but actually I was a bit of a wreck. And we came back from our… we have an annual sabbatical as a family every August. We came back, I turned on the computer, I looked at my computer screen for 10 minutes, I turned it back off, and walked out of my office, and I didn’t go back in there for another three weeks because I just wasn’t ready to get back to it.
Jay Papasan:
And because people haven’t read the book, you were gone for a month. So, you had a month away from work and you came back and you still couldn’t go.
Chris Ducker:
Yeah, exactly. So, you know. And the fact is you start looking at things and I realized right there and then pretty much that burnout is not a badge of honor. You know we’ve been sucked into this kind of hustle culture society type of mentality of “Go hard, hustle mode, switch on,” and all that kind of stuff but really what it is is a warning sign that you’re leading wrong, you’re living wrong. And we’ve glorified exhaustion, unfortunately, as a society for way, way, way too long. And truly, the ship is about sustainability. It’s not about sacrifice.
Jay Papasan:
You know, I think a lot of my listeners know, I kind of rage against the hustle culture.
Chris Ducker:
Good.
Jay Papasan:
And we’ll get into it. You talk about these time-based challenges. And I interviewed your great friend, Pat Flynn, and he called it the Power 10. So, we’ll hit that in a little bit. Like you have to sprint sometimes as a leader, as an entrepreneur, but how do we do that in a way that we don’t end up sick with broken relationships and all the other things that we ultimately wanna avoid. And they don’t show up until it’s like the signs that it’s coming can sometimes be so close to the precipice, it’s hard to hit the brakes.
Chris Ducker:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So, I look up and I hear all of that. And my first question for you is as a leader, setting the pace for my business, or my team, or just leading myself, how do I know what sustainable looks like? So much of us, like you talked about this hustle culture, we’ve been rewarded our entire lives by how much we can do. People are like, “Man, Chris, you can really get *** done.” That’s unbelievable. Like, maybe your boss didn’t say that to you, but not exactly that way, but it’s true. We’ve been rewarded and people look to us, and say, “Man, I can’t believe you got that done in one weekend.” So, it’s been reinforced our whole life that this is a skill. And what we tend to do is go to that muscle first.
And I think you quoted, is it Alex Charfin that said that, you’ll have to correct me. He’s a mutual friend. He said, like, the easiest and it’s kind of the cheat is that you just tell an entrepreneur to work harder and longer, right? Because that’s the muscle they know how to use and just like, “Oh, just work harder.” And I just feel like it’s such a disservice to people to go there. How do we know if we’re too slow or too fast?
Chris Ducker:
Well, I think, you know, obviously, that timeline or that feeling of too slow, too fast, it’s very, very different for every person on the planet, right? You can go hard and fast for maybe a lot longer than I can and vice versa. You know, we can stay a lot more focused on projects for shorter periods of time. And we know that focus eventually dwindles.
So, my goal is not to hustle harder. My goal is to last longer. Hustle might get you to the end of a launch or to the end of a big busy period or something like that. But it’s the habits that you create in your lifestyle and not just at work, but also in your “personal life” as well. They are gonna be the things that ultimately help you end up lasting.
So, building a business, building a career, managing people, leading a team, whatever it might be, all of that stuff is fantastic, but it shouldn’t break you over time. And likewise, please hear this warning, you don’t need to break in order to take a break. If you feel like you’re tired and exhausted, then you should take a break from being tired and exhausted, you know.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, I mean, if you don’t schedule a break, you will get an unscheduled one. That’s the way I say it, because it’s just true, right? We have to rest. So, in your journey, you set some kind of non-negotiables for your life around sleep and diet. And for our ONE Thing listeners, the only page I have memorized is page 114 in the white hardcover. We talk about all the areas of our life that we have to address, our spiritual life, our physical health, our relationships, our hobbies. And you checked so many of those boxes in this book. Just tell us really quickly, where did you start? Like, “You know what, I’ve got to start putting the same effort I do at work into these other areas.” Where did you start?
Chris Ducker:
The big thing was I’ve been a pretty big learner for most of my life. And I think you must continue to learn in order to continue to lead effectively. So, learning new things is not something that I’ll avoid. Like, if I know I need to learn something, I’ll spend some time learning as much as I can about one particular subject.
For example, I took up wildlife photography just recently and I had no idea how to use that camera, no idea at all. And I was getting frustrated because every shot that I was taking at that beautiful little blue tit in my garden was blurred and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I could either try and learn quickly to be able to rectify that problem on my own by reading books and watching YouTube videos and all this kind of stuff, or I could just hire a wildlife photographer to come to my house for the day and teach me how to use the darn camera, which is what I did.
So, you know, you mentioned Pat and kind of just-in-time learning and lean learning and all that kind of stuff. So, the big thing for me was I knew that I was gonna have to up-level me first. And it hit me pretty quickly, Jay, that self-care is not selfish. It’s actually a strategy. For people who wanna do really well in life and in their careers, self-care has to become the number one most important thing for them. So it was doing things like-
Jay Papasan:
I’m just gonna repeat that for you. That’s a great line. Self-care is not selfish, it’s a strategy. That is brilliant.
Chris Ducker:
Yeah, it really is. And the moment that kind of clicked with me, and I started saying it all the time to everybody I was talking to, because I figured the more I said it, the more I’d start to truly kind of take it on board and believe it. So, I went down the route of hiring a nutritionist for the first time in my life, even though I ate, what I thought, pretty “clean.” I went down the route of working with a naturopathic doctor. I went down the route of hiring a PT to kind of make sure that I was doing the right type of exercises and all this kind of stuff. But the big thing for me was sleep.
Jay Papasan:
There we go.
Chris Ducker:
That was the biggest thing for me, without a doubt. I was your quintessential night owl. I loved watching my movies in the evening and binging on Netflix and all that kind of stuff. And I realized actually that, yes, it’s fun to be able to kill a little time like that. And what I thought was de-stressing wasn’t really de-stressing at all. I was making life worse because I wasn’t getting enough rest. I’m now the guy who at some point will say to my wife, “Darling, turn off the light, stop reading the book. It’s time to go to sleep.” And she used to be the one to do that. So, it swung in the complete opposite direction.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. You’re a birdwatcher and you go to bed early. Like how to say I’m getting old without saying I’m getting old, right?
Chris Ducker:
No.
Jay Papasan:
No. I’m joking.
Chris Ducker:
I know, I know, I know.
Jay Papasan:
You’re leaning into your hobbies. I love that you started with sleep because of all the things that you said, that’s the one that just takes you changing you, right? Changing some of your habits. You don’t have to pay for anything, right? Like we’ve gone so far in our family. We went out and got a eight sleep because my wife was at that stage of life with hot flashes and stuff. And so, like we went all in because that foundation is so important. When you get enough rest, you have the energy to go do the things you need to do in life.
And so many of the people listening to this, maybe they’ve got small kids, and so they hustle at work, they’ve got to go pick up the kids, take them to soccer practice, do all the things. They have dinner, they clear the dinner, they have to put their kids back to bed 17 times, right? “Oh, I need this. Oh, I need this, a glass of water.” And then, they really should go to bed. But I think the rationale for a lot of our listeners is they like, “I just need some me time,” right? And what a great way for me to turn off my work brain is to watch Department Q on Netflix or whatever the show is I’m into. And like my work brain does turn off, but I’m also looking at those lights that will drain my melatonin and it’ll actually take me longer to get into deep sleep.
So, we actually have to change our schedule a little bit for that me-time, but it could start with getting the energy to do more work more effectively during the day by getting our sleep. So, it is a short-term trade-off. I’m gonna manage my sleep. That’ll allow me to perform better, and I might find that I have more me-time because I’m getting sleep, not less.
Chris Ducker:
Well, and we found out, you know, we did a lot of research for this book. This is my third book. I did more research on this book than I had in my other two books combined. It’s a sensitive subject for a lot of people. I wanted to make sure that things I was quoting, the things I was talking about, the ideas I was sharing, the opinions I was going over were solid. That’s the word. They were solid. They were checkable and gettable and all that kind of stuff.
Jay Papasan:
Well, thank you ’cause a lot of authors don’t take that ethic. So, thank you for doing that.
Chris Ducker:
Well, I appreciate it. It was a lot of hard work. I’m not gonna lie. But I know I wrote a better book because of doing it, and I can also say… and I was talking with our mutual buddy Michael Hyatt a couple weeks ago when we were hanging out. Michael actually wrote the foreword for the book as well. And I was chatting with him about this and I said to him, “You know, I feel like I’m a different person than I was when I started writing this book.”
By the time I finished it, I’m a different person. It was almost like therapy writing it, you know, sharing the ideas and going through all the personal stories and all the rest of it. But when you bring up energy as a word, I want to just pinpoint on that for a second because I used to say, and I’ve been quoted a gazillion times on this, I used to say time is our most valuable asset as an entrepreneur.
And right away back to my first book Virtual Freedom 2014, I said that for the first time, right? Actually, I tweaked it now. I’ve changed it. Energy is our most valuable asset as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as someone that wants to build something amazing and serve in an amazing way. And so, if we think about the fact that entrepreneurs burn bright, however, the flip side of that coin is without care, without looking at things like sleep and creating more energy in our day, etc., etc., they’re not going to burn for very long. So, we might burn bright, but we’ve got to make sure that we’re burning for as long as we possibly can as well.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, I don’t want to be a rock star with a “handsome corpse.” I’m not going for that route. You know, they talk about that. So, before we go to break, let’s just put a nutshell on this. The goal here is to build a sustainable pace. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to hustle at different times. We’re just going to do it more appropriately, more wisely.
Chris Ducker:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
And we’re gonna manage our energy, right? This most precious resource. And through how we manage our sleep, our diet, our health, our calendar, our relationships, we can go through all of those if we get time today. But when we have to sprint, how do we do it? You talked about time-bound challenges. For the people who are like, “How could I possibly do a launch? How could I possibly make this business grow in the beginning?”, how do we manage the sprints we have to do?
Chris Ducker:
Well, first of all, understanding that’s exactly what they are. They’re sprints. And those periods of hustle, as we call it… and by the way, hustle is not a bad thing, right? Like the word hustle is not a bad thing. It just means working hard for a certain period of time. Hustle, however, is and should be a season in the way that you handle it, not the lifestyle, right?
And as the intro of the book, the title of the intro of the book, Hustle is a Season, Not A Lifestyle. So, going into those sprint seasons, understanding that’s exactly what it is, this is up to this deadline, this is me working to this particular KPI being hit, then pulling back and reenergizing, recalibrating, resetting, recharging, that’s the single most important tip that I can give to anybody.
How do I handle the next three months? How do I handle the next four months or the next three weeks or whatever it might be? Going into that hustle season knowing that it does have a beginning but it also has an end, and that should be celebrated, and then you pull back and recharge a little bit.
Jay Papasan:
I know a lot of entrepreneurs that work on a schedule where they will, as a team, sprint for 11 weeks and take the 12th week off, right? We have people that might go four-day week and take the fifth day off, which is something that you do as well. So, there’s lots of ways that can show up in your life, but those regular breaks prevent the “unscheduled break” that we started the episode with.
And for those of you who’ve been listening, you’ll remember in my interview with Pat Flynn, we kind of went crazy on rowing because my son was a rower, and I didn’t know that Pat Flynn was a rower, but it’s the same thing. A Power 10 is not a sustainable pace, right? It’s 10 strokes in a boat, but that’s what wins races. So, we have to do that maybe in the start or at the finish line of our projects but you’ve got to have that time bound idea. And this is… I’d just say, whether we hit the KPI or not, we’re going to take a break because maybe we fell just short but then we can get up and do it faster the next time.
Chris Ducker:
Yeah, 100%. And like, busy is a trap. Like anybody can fill a calendar, right? Like anybody can fill up a schedule but few of the things that we will put on that calendar just to be busy are actually going to create any meaningful results at the end of the day. So, don’t confuse motion with momentum.
Jay Papasan:
Oh, I love that. We say don’t confuse activity with productivity. They’re very different.
Chris Ducker:
There you go. Same, same, yeah.
Jay Papasan:
When you act on your priorities, you’re being productive.
Chris Ducker:
Absolutely.
Jay Papasan:
All right. So, with that, it’s a good little soundbite for folks. Let’s take a quick break and we’ll see you on the other side.
So, Chris, we kind of talked about the big ideas and your journey. I would love to dive into one of the models. It’s just kind of probably in the first 80 pages of your book, and I stopped and I read it and then I reread it. And you have a model for helping people kind of navigate some of the choices they need to make, and it’s called Stop, Stay, Start. Would you share a little bit about how that came to be and how it works?
Chris Ducker:
Yeah. So, the Stop, Stay, Start audit, as I call it, in terms of its longer title, is something that I’ve been doing-
Jay Papasan:
Which sounds great when you say it with a British accent, by the way. That’s just cheating.
Chris Ducker:
Yeah. I won’t try to do it with an American accent because people might tune out immediately. I started doing this myself and I didn’t actually call it the Stop, Say, Start audit, right? But I started doing this myself probably about a decade ago within my business.
There’s two exercises that I’m actually really well known for in the entrepreneurial space. The first one is something called My Three Lists to Freedom, which is also featured in the book. And that’s about sort of delegation and getting things off your plate. And then the second one is to stop.
Jay Papasan:
I don’t need to do, I don’t like to do. And there’s like, I remember that, that’s a good chapter. We’ll tease them, go read the book and get that, but it’s really helpful.
Chris Ducker:
There you go. It is really helpful. And, actually, as a company, we do that as a team every six months. We do that twice a year because it’s super important.
Jay Papasan:
Wow.
Chris Ducker:
Because regardless of how great your SOPs are and your processes and your dashboards and all the rest of it, you all do get sucked into doing things that you shouldn’t necessarily be doing day to day. So, that’s why we still do the Three Lists to Freedom exercise a couple times a year.
Jay Papasan:
Do you do the Stop, Stay, Start frequently as well?
Chris Ducker:
Stop, Stay, Start is definitely an annual thing. We have-
Jay Papasan:
Annual.
Chris Ducker:
We have our annual planning meeting, which is like a two day retreat as a team in usually October, early November each year. And we pretty much kick off with that every year. And that kind of gives us an idea to be able to kind of look back at what’s worked and what’s not and kind of what we should be doing moving forward.
Jay Papasan:
That’s driven by three fundamental questions, right?
Chris Ducker:
Yeah. And they’re really simple questions. Really simple questions for people to kind of sit and ask of themselves. And I think that’s one of the reasons why people don’t spend the time on it the way that they should, because it seems like it’s too easy. But what you get out of the exercise can be absolutely either (a), life affirming; (b), totally validating from a business perspective; or (c), a little bit scary when you think about what comes out of it. So in a nutshell, do you want me to run through it real quick?
Jay Papasan:
What’s not working, I’m paraphrasing, your wording was better. Well, what’s not working, you list those things out. Those become your stops. What is working, right? You list those things out, those become stay. Like those are going to stay in my work life, my calendar. And then, I love the last one, what’s missing. And those are the things we need to add or start. Did I get it within 80% margin?
Chris Ducker:
Yeah, 95%. You’re getting not quite an A plus, but an A. I’ll give you an A for it. There’s one thing I want to point, though, on the second column, and it’s very simple. Get a piece of paper, two lines, three columns, do it right now. I even actually did this with somebody on a napkin when I was at… I might get slated in the comments here for saying this, I went to the Cheesecake Factory with somebody on my recent trip to the United States for iced tea and a slice of cheesecake one afternoon. But we actually did this on a napkin at the Cheesecake Factory.
Jay Papasan:
There’s a lot of fans of the Cheesecake Factory, myself included. I don’t go frequently, but it is a nice little treat.
Chris Ducker:
Yes, there you go. So, we’re sitting there and we’re going through this exercise and the Stay column, that second column… so Stop, column number one, everything that you’ve been doing, business, life, relationships, whatever it is, that is just not working, that has to be stopped. The actual definition of insanity is continuing to do something the same way and expecting a different result, right? So, that has to go into the Stop column.
The Stay column, though, there’s a little caveat to what you said. If it’s working, it stays. Yes. But don’t let it land there and stay there on its own. Another thing that I do with my coaching clients quite a lot, I call it the offer advancer, where if something’s working well, if you’ve got an offer that’s converting relatively well, that’s going to stay, clearly, we’re not going to get rid of it, but can we tweak things a little bit? Can we maybe bring in a few little micro moves, as I call them, those little 1% advances, a little 1% changes that make things just a little bit better because you get a whole bunch of those 1% micro moves, and now, you’ve got compound interest in play and everything becomes so much better.
Jay Papasan:
We’re gonna plus this stuff that states on our calendar, like we should do a little bit more of it, we should do it a little bit better. How can we make that even better than it is today?
Chris Ducker:
Yeah. And by getting rid of a whole bunch of stuff in your Stop column that has stopped working or doesn’t work anymore, that allows you time. And that brings us onto our third column, which is, like you say, the stuff that’s missing, that Start column, right? So, if we’ve got 100% of extra time because we’re stopping a whole bunch of stuff. 20%, 25% that’s in your stay column. You tweak. Those little things are working well.
The rest of that, 75%-80%, that’s where the fun begins. That’s where you get to start all the stuff that you’ve been procrastinating on. The projects at work, you’ve always said, “Oh, that would be a great idea if only we had the time to do that.” You know, that’s the “Oh, if I only had the time to write a book and put 25 years of my career into a manual to serve tens of thousands of people around the world. If only I had the time to do that.” Well, now you do. So, start doing that. “If I only had the time to spend more time with my spouse, my partner, my loved ones throughout the middle of the week instead of just being that kind of routine of work, dinner, sleep, work, dinner, sleep all the time,” you’ve got the time, go ahead and start doing that. And this one exercise can be a complete game changer if you engage with it properly.
Jay Papasan:
I admired it immediately. We do some of this in our work too. The number one objection we get for any kind of change that we recommend in our coaching or group coaching or training is, “I don’t have time.” So, the Stop functions as you’re making time while also eliminating things that aren’t serving you in this season. So, like we have a group coaching exercise we do and it’s like, we’re just like… I think it’s aiming big. Some people think it’s aiming small, but we’re just trying to free up four hours in a week. Could I give you a half day? If you had a half day back, how much could you do? Could you go from saying, “One day,” I’ll…” to “Day one, I’m doing…” right? How do we go from one day to day one? And it’s like a little short journey, but it all begins with making space.
So, I just thank you for doing that and starting with the Stop because that is how we make space to plus the things that are working and lean into them. And all those things that we wish for now have space to show up. That’s what… everybody listening, you can too become a birder and all of those things. Like I always confess, Chris knows this, we got a bird feeder and my wife and I started obsessing of what kind of bird is that? And I was like, “Oh man, I’m here, I’m there.”
Chris Ducker:
The thing is that a lot of people, when you talk about hobbies, let’s go down that rabbit hole just very, very quickly here because hobbies and pastimes is one of the four major focuses in our framework of what we call our Life OS or Life Operating System. So, I came about with that because obviously our computer’s got an OS, our phone has got an OS. Like, why can’t we have an OS? Why can’t we have an operating system? And so, the big thing with hobbies is people feel guilty. They feel guilty about it.
Jay Papasan:
Oh, those are silly childish things. That’s what kids do, Chris. Not a serious business person like me.
Chris Ducker:
Right? I was like, “Oh, why would I waste my time watching birds, or painting, or gardening,” or you know, whatever. You love rock climbing, jumping out of planes and skydiving, like whatever you enjoy doing, why would you waste time? That is not time wasted. That is time really, really well spent because there was a recent survey, I believe in Forbes, don’t quote me too much on that because I’ve read a lot of material recently on this, but there was a recent survey that I consumed. I was insanely impressed by this number that between high-level executives and entrepreneurial types that spent a minimum of just two hours a week on their hobbies and pastimes, particularly more so if they were creative hobbies–so, things like painting, knitting, crocheting, music, that kind of stuff–if they were put just two hours a week into their hobbies, they would be up to 30% more productive in their work life.
Jay Papasan:
It’s a deposit in you. I mean, I think this falls under in some ways, self-care, right? Just like any kind of pause does, but there’s so much research. We did some research. The third area of The ONE Thing before you get to work is your personal life. And that’s where we put hobbies. Where do you make time to do just for you?
And I think it was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, don’t try to spell that word, he wrote about flow, this idea of getting into the flow. There are two places we then do the flow. When we’re challenged and incredibly fulfilled at work, like we’re operating at the edge of our abilities, and the other place was our hobbies. And so, that state of being “in the zone,” you lose track of time. It is such a special state to enter into. And there’s only two parts of our life where we get to play there, work and our hobbies.
And so, I wholeheartedly endorse this. Like you tell some great stories like Winston Churchill. Oh, he didn’t do much. He just wrote all those books, stopped a war, whatever. He was also a pretty avid painter. I knew that from reading Gretchen Ribbon’s book but I didn’t know it before then, I had no idea that one of the greatest soccer players of all time, Beckham, was like a Lego enthusiast and would spend his mornings building Lego sets. I mean, that’s crazy.
Chris Ducker:
Not only an enthusiast, a complete Lego nut. Like his wife, Victoria, will come down at 2 a.m. in the morning and he’ll be making you know the latest Disney castle or something. And by the way all his kids are grown up. He’s not doing this for his kids. He’s doing it because he loves spending time with those lego bricks and building cool sets out of it.
And it doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re enjoying it and it’s filling you up with good vibes, good feelings, that is going to transfer into all the other areas of your life. It’s just, it’s inevitable. It’s just one of those things that we should be engaging, accepting, and bringing on board a heck of a lot more in what we do, even more so for super successful people as well. I just feel really, really passionate about the subject of hobbies.
Jay Papasan:
I think that it’s from the word creativity, right? It’s creative hobbies. I think, also, like, we could… maybe we’ll play sports and we’re also building relationships because we got our pickleball team and that we hang out with afterwards. It could be your health, right? A lot of sports that are our hobbies also become a relationship in health. Like there’s a lot of ways to line up those dominoes.
But I think if people are too one-dimensional, if they show up every day, and they work, and they think about work when they’re not at work, I think that it narrows the range of the ideas they’re ever gonna have for their business. And it’s crazy that you would never think, like, I’ve gotten some of my coolest ideas for business in these other areas. You look and suddenly that’s where inspiration lies sometimes and we have no idea why.
Chris Ducker:
I couldn’t agree more with you. And you know, I’m just a big believer, also, that your business ultimately should support your life. It shouldn’t swallow it up. Like so, if your business feels like a black hole or your career feels like a black hole, and you’re in this kind of tailspin, it’s time to realign. Like that’s a message from the universe right there. It’s time to realign. You got to design a career, design a business around the life that you want, not the other way around. We have a lot more control on these things than we actually think we do.
And a lot of that unfortunately is we’ve consumed through media and all the rest of it. You know, I believe it was a very very famous rapper that I can’t remember the name of from back in the day probably said something to the effect of you’ve got to check yourself before you wreck yourself. And I think we all need to be checking ourselves a little bit more regularly than most people do.
Jay Papasan:
I think we you write a lot about time. We’re running out of time, but like you take a month’s sabbatical every year. You work four days a week. And I think a lot of people would say, like I did the math, I’m sitting there reading, it’s like, well, at most he’s working at about 176 days a year, compared to most people that are working 250 plus. I think people underestimate that constraints actually make us think better and we actually prioritize harder. When we limit the time we will give work, it forces innovation. I think constraints like that, and not everybody here can say, “Well, hey boss, I’m not working on Fridays anymore,” but I do think when we limit the time we give to work, it makes us more effective in the time we do give work.
Chris Ducker:
Absolutely. I could not agree more with that statement. And like I said, you know, busy is a trap. Impact should be the target, not just filling your calendar with a whole bunch of stuff.
Jay Papasan:
You got it. All right, well, we’re getting to the end of the show. Obviously, I have like actually two more pages of notes we could play with, so maybe we’ll have to do this again. But thank you for writing this book. I think a lot of entrepreneurs and leaders desperately need it. They probably are listening to this and knowing that they’ve got the symptoms, that they are not setting a pace that’s good for the long haul, that they need to maybe make changes, and you provide a lot of really practical frameworks. What’s one challenge that you could offer our listeners that maybe they could do between now and next week’s episode, a small start to kind of getting into this process?
Chris Ducker:
If we go back to the Stop, Stay, Start audit, and don’t even do the entire exercise, just do the stop part. Just do that one part, that one thing right there because that will allow you to realize that, actually, it’s okay to stop doing stuff that I shouldn’t be doing anymore because they’re not working. If something is not working, something is not bringing you joy, something is not working out for you, then more fool you if you carry on doing it. Simple as that.
Jay Papasan:
Thank you, Chris. This has been great. I can’t wait to see you again and congratulations on the new book. Everybody, go out there and buy it.
Chris Ducker:
Thank you, man. I appreciate you.
Jay Papasan:
Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode as much as I did. That’s an episode I’m probably going to have to go back and re-listen to for sure.
Next week, I’ve got a great guest, one of my best friends, Sarah Reynolds. She’s one of my wife’s partners and one of the top agents in the world. She has built a business over the last 10 years that this year will serve over 2,500 families. They work in 10 different markets with 180 sales agents on her team, and they will do north of 35 million in top-line revenue. She’s building this huge business. She’s married, she’s got three kids. It struggles with all the things that so many of us do, all the challenges of life, and she’s also got this amazing story around her health journey. So, I can’t wait to share it with you. Tune in next week for the amazing Sarah Reynolds of the Empower Homes team.
Disclaimer:
This podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts, and opinions of the guests 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.
