Jay Papasan:
You already know what to do, so why can’t you just do it consistently? The gap between knowing and doing is where so many entrepreneurs and high achievers get stuck. And today, we’re going to explore the patterns that keep us trapped in that gap.
Now, last week, I covered the lone wolf syndrome. We went a little deeper in this idea that while many of us want to go fast alone, we actually tend to be more consistent when we do it with others or even around others. The research is really surprising.
Today, I want to go deeper into three other patterns that in the thousands and thousands of hours we spent training entrepreneurs and high achievers, we’ve seen these patterns really stand out. They’re the patterns that keep us in that gap. We know what to do, but we still can’t do it. If you’re interested in breaking that down, let’s go a little deeper today
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Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan. And this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results
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Jay Papasan:
So, before we dive in, let’s talk about what we mean with patterns. So, you’ve come a long way to get where exactly where you are today, and the challenge is the patterns of behavior that drive your actions on a day-to-day basis and a week-to-week basis just aren’t getting you where you wanna go. That’s why we keep slipping up and falling back on the same old patterns, and they keep stopping us in our tracks, and it’s very, very frustrating. But the first thing we wanna do is talk about what those behavioral patterns define and what they don’t define.
So, it’s very, very true that how you behave, your patterns of consistent behavior, are absolutely gonna define your outcomes. That’s what defines the results that we get on a day-to-day and a week-to-week basis. The mistake we see is, a lot of times, we think those patterns, that behavior, defines ourselves and our identity, and that is not helpful at all. So, we wanna separate the pattern from the person. You are not your behavior, even if you are behaving that way regularly. That defines the results we get, not who we are.
So, the first step, let’s again separate the pattern from the person. We wanna let go of any embarrassment, any shame that we may be feeling about why we keep slipping up and making the same mistakes and finding ourselves back at square one.
Here’s the reality. We have to grow to change, and all growth happens outside of our comfort zone. So, even though you keep repeating these mistakes, it doesn’t mean that you’re permanently flawed. It just means you haven’t learned yet. We have to then get uncomfortable for a while to learn those new behaviors, so we can go to the next level.
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Jay Papasan:
So, pattern number one, you’re not as clear as you think you are. Again and again, we talk about, “What’s your one thing? What’s your one thing?” And a lot of people have a fast answer. And I know for many, many years, that was a great relief for me because we spent four and a half years researching this book, and I kept asking the question, what if people don’t know the answer? And to my great surprise, as we went on the road and taught the book and we got into training rooms and different companies and one-on-one with our coaching clients, if they stopped long enough to ask the focusing question, most of them know the answer, and they feel a little guilty for not doing it.
The challenge is their answers are general, they’re not specific. And let me break that down. We go into this all the time in our group training around the First Domino. What we don’t know is actually kind of where we start. What is the first thing that ignites our progress towards the big thing we know we need to do? And this seems like, I don’t know, maybe too much nuance for a lot of us, but there’s a big difference between eating well and what we have to do to eat well.
So, an example, our head coach often cites, he really was trying to focus on his diet, and he couldn’t seem to make it stick. He kept falling prey to shortcuts and I don’t think he actually did fast food, but that’s where a lot of us slip up. And we started working together on it, and I started asking him, “So, what are you doing to set up yourself that you’ll eat well this week?” And he actually thought he would move backwards. Instead of thinking about his plan for the day, he would have a plan for the week. And he’s like, “Okay, I will meal prep on Sundays. And that way, I’ll have bought the food and prepared the food, and it’ll just be so much easier for me to eat the right food.”
And unfortunately, that still didn’t stick. He had to go even further upstream from his dinner plate. And what he discovered for him, for him to eat well, that was his one thing for his health at that moment in time, he actually had to plan his meals for the week. When he had planned his meals, what are we gonna eat on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? The kids are going out that night and staying at a friend’s house, so what are the adults gonna eat? If they did a menu plan for the week, they would then shop and meal prep, and everything tended to flow from there.
And so, that specificity, I generally know what my one thing is, but I don’t know how to start it, is often a huge gap. And sometimes, it takes a coach, a trainer, someone in the room to kind of help us walk through the steps – I call it going upstream from the thing we want to do – to find the thing we need to do to make that happen.
So, I’ll give you a quick example from my own life. Every single week, I have to write a newsletter, “The Twenty Percenter,” that goes out to, I don’t know, 12,000-13,000 people right now. And that’s been something I’ve been doing for almost four years. And for me, it’s not just blocking the time. What I have to do is I have to have my key ingredients. And I wrote about this. I think I did a whole podcast on things I learned from the first three years of writing the newsletter, and I referred to it like my trainer, he says all Tex-Mex is just the same four ingredients prepared and mixed up in different order. You can have soft tacos, you can have hard tacos.
Well, I know the core ingredients that I have to have to write. I need to have an idea. I usually need to have some research, a story, or a quote. So, for me, going upstream, I have to be constantly collecting the ideas, the stories, the research, the quotes, so that when I sit down, my ingredients are there, and I just have to figure out which combination sounds really appetizing that day. So, that’s my process for writing a newsletter. I could generally say, “Write your newsletter.” That wouldn’t be enough. I had to go upstream and build a few core habits so that I could do that fifty-two times a year for four straight years.
I was working with one of my executive coaching clients. And to this person’s credit, we looked at her calendar and boom, every single morning there were two to three hours blocked for her number one activity. And this person was in sales. And so, it was lead generation. They were gonna lead generate for two to three hours every single morning.
Well What surprised us, and I started poking around with questions, is, “So, tell me what that looks like. What exactly are you doing?” And that was where the gap was. They didn’t identify the actual activities they would do to lead generate. And I have been in sales for a very long time, folks. The number one and two things, you can just switch them out and interchange them, that stop people from reaching out to their database is they don’t know who they’re gonna call or they don’t know what to say to the people they’re going to call.
But if you can check those boxes, kind of like Jordan with planning his meals for the week, who am I calling? What is it I’m going to talk about? Most people can then get on the phone or work their text or work their DMs or work their emails, however they choose to do their lead generation. But you had to go upstream and be very specific. So, the fix for us was to start saying, “So, on each day, let’s identify specifically the activity you’re going to focus on, and we’re gonna work upstream to know where you have to start.”
So, when you sit down in that beautiful time block to do your one thing, you actually have the core activity, usually something really small. Who am I gonna call? I’m gonna identify 25 people I’m gonna text today, and I’ll have to say this because we’re part of this company, you’re gonna do all these activities in a TCPA compliant manner. Thank you very much. But we go upstream, and we’re gonna figure out the specific thing that we have to do to start our one thing.
So, the big idea here is so many people say, “I know what my one thing is,” but they’re not as clear as they think. The core activity you need to do is, I know generally what to do. Can I get more specific? Can I go a little further upstream, so that once I start, boom, I’m off to the races? That first step is often the hardest, folks, but once we sit down and start working, a lot of times, we get lost in the work, and we just keep going. So, figuring out that first step is incredibly important. That’s why we built the whole training program, The First Domino, to help people identify it and build a habit of doing it.
So, that’s pattern number one. You’re not as clear as you think, and that’s why you show up and you kind of know what to do, but you can’t do it because you’re missing some key ingredients.
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Jay Papasan:
Pattern number two, you’re chasing information instead of committing to a system. So, I see this all the time, and it’s one of my favorite quotes. It’s from the author and entrepreneur Derek Sivers. He said, “If information was the answer, we’d all be billionaires with six-pack abs.” And that’s good for a chuckle. I get it, and it is clever and witty, but it’s also true enough that it kind of makes us go, “Oops, I feel seen right now.” Because it is always the thing to look for the shiny new object. We’re going to conferences, we’re watching webinars, you get on YouTube, and your favorite marketing guru says, “Stop doing it the old way. Do it the new way.” And we start always looking for the new solution instead of actually mastering the solution we have. And there’s a delicate balance here. I’m not gonna say, “Let’s go back to the dark ages and do it the old way.” There are better ways, but we have to be very reticent to switch.
So, I’ll give you an example. When we were building this company, I was working with my co-founder, Geoff Woods, and we had been working a model for about 18 months, and we were getting very consistent results. We were adding, I think, a thousand to two thousand emails a month with our webinars. Like, we were capturing a new audience. We had worked out a system on how to get them into our training funnel. Like, the business was operating really well.
He spent some time with another entrepreneur that had a bigger business, had been around longer, and that entrepreneur started saying, “This is how I do it.” And I don’t remember the details, but I remember Geoff coming back and saying, “Hey, I want to change our business model.” And I said, “Great. Tell me what you want to do.” And he walked me through the vision for adopting this new system.
And this is something that got ingrained with me working with my co-author for all of these years. Once I adopt a model and I get really good at it, I’m gonna be very hesitant to jump on to whatever’s new. It’s gotta be so much better than what I’m already doing that it is clear that the old way is going away. It can’t just be novel and new. And entrepreneurs, let’s face it, we like novel and new things, so this is something we really have to resist, chasing that new idea, that new system, instead of mastering the old.
So, the way I walked Geoff through the conversation is like, “Do you remember when we started this model, how bad we were?” He goes, “Yeah.” And we struggled to figure it out, and it took us months and months until we start hitting on the different cylinders until finally, like we’re cooking with Crisco. This model is working. It’s working for our customers. It’s working for us. It took us months to get there. And now, we’ve been running for maybe the last year, and we’ve been reaping the rewards of all of that first effort. Well, if we jump to this new system, it’s like going from we have a master’s degree in our model, we’re going to the first grade in this new one. It looks great, but we have no idea of the challenges we’re gonna face implementing it until we do.”
So, there is gonna be a real trade-off. We won’t just be taking a step backwards. We may be putting our growth on pause for four to five months while we work it out. And then, we have to ask the question: Is it really gonna put us on a higher growth trajectory than we currently are? Do you really, really believe that that’s going to be true? And he wasn’t sure. And I said, “Then, let’s not go back to first grade until we’re sure. Feel free to research it if we want to test it on the side, but we’re not going to abandon the model we have to go chase a shiny new one.”
And so, that’s that principle of being kind of AI, whatever the hot thing is, cold plunge for your health. We wanna jump into the new fad. And we may be surfing from fad to fad to fad, always getting a fresh start, but always going back to first grade. So, we’re never really getting the kind of mastery that we talk about in the book. We wanna be on the path to mastery.
So, my admonition to you is maybe stop chasing new information and commit to the model you currently have. Make a radical decision that’s like, “Look, I’m not gonna switch until I’m already really good at this. And when I’m really good, then I will have the information to know what might be slightly better. And then, I will also be cautious about it.” So, we just don’t wanna throw out the baby with the bathwater just to say we’re doing something new.
But that is a place to hide, folks. We start something new, it is new, so we have an excuse for failing. And if we just constantly do that, we can always be announcing that we’re doing this brand new thing, the brand new me, the brand new you. It’s exciting and it sounds fun, but we might just be running in circles.
So, again, we have to be a little hesitant to go chasing new information and new models and a lot more committed to being good at the ones we’re already running. That, if you can implement it, will serve you well. And guess what? That’s one of the keys to being consistent. We’ve built the rhythm, we’ve built the habits, we’ve built the behaviors. That is hard to do, but now we get to benefit from it for years to come. So, be slow to move to a brand new model. Master the one you have.
I guess one caveat on all of this is maybe you’re not even conscious of running a model. So, the thing here to do is set a clock, give yourself a week, two weeks, 30 days, whatever’s appropriate for the size of your business and say, “You know what? We need to actually document what we’re doing here and call it a model and run it.”
So, go pick one, the best one you currently have available, and then commit to running it for a while. Think about it like if you had a teenage kid, and you want them to start practicing the piano because you’ve got generations of pianists in your family and you know they’re probably gonna be good at it and will love it eventually. You’re not gonna let them quit after the first lesson. You’re gonna say, “Nope, we’re gonna stick with it for a while.” Give them a chance to get good, so they can actually enjoy it. We wanna take our own advice.
So, if you’re thinking of figuring it out for the first time, pick the best one that’s currently available to you, and then commit to running it long enough to know whether it really will or won’t work for you and your business.
So, before we jump into the next pattern, let’s take a quick break. I will see you on the other side.
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Jay Papasan:
So, pattern number three is the one that we probably talked about more than anything else on this podcast, and it’s the 80% masquerading as the 20%. And just for a refresher, if you’re new to the book or the podcast, we’re talking about Pareto’s Principle, that 20% of what we do will get us 80% of the results that we seek. Instead of trying to do everything, let’s identify the things that matter most, the 20%. And in this organization and on this podcast, we keep asking, “What’s the 20%?” until we get to the number one thing, the activity that will drive our results. That’s the core principle here.
The challenge is, and we wrote about this in the book, it was a Bob Hawke quote, “The things that are most important don’t always scream the loudest.” I’ve seen that Instagrammed all over the world. The things that are most important don’t always scream the loudest. That’s true in life. So much of what we’re dealing with, we’re dealing with it right now because we think it’s urgent.
And a lot of the times, as Coach Jordan would say, “Our urgency is hallucinated.” Nobody is waiting at their computer for you to reply to that email. They’re gonna check it when they check it. But this idea that as things show up on our desk, on our computer, and on our screens, we have to respond to them in real time, that’s just kinda craziness. That’s that busyness trap that all of us can fall into, where we’re just staying busy instead of being thoughtful about our work.
So, the 80% that, it’ll masquerade as the 20% because it says, “I’m urgent. You have to handle me fast.” It is a fire that we feel like we have to put out. Frankly, 90% of the time, I see entrepreneurs, they do it in the moment ’cause they don’t wanna have to remember it, and they don’t have a system for remembering it either. And the solve for this for most people is find a system, a to-do list app, whatever it is, where when things come in, you can push them into the future when it is appropriate to do them.
I have 50 systems for this. I have a to-do list that’s available wherever I am. If you don’t know this already, there’s not a messenger system that you can’t mark a message sent to you as unread again. That’s a simple way. Like, just ’cause you opened it doesn’t mean you have to reply to it. Take a look, say, “This is not important,” mark it as unread, come back to it later. Figure out whatever system you need to remove the artificial urgency that we create around tasks that just don’t matter.
The other reason that the 80% masquerades as the 20% is the sense that we’re gonna disappoint people. People are asking us to do things. And again and again, when I try to get under the hood in a one-on-one conversation, why is it that you actually said yes to that? We’re afraid that we’re gonna damage a relationship. And it’s just imagined, folks. The reality is when you’re working with other people in an office environment, in a co-work space, in your family, you name, on a soccer team, I don’t care, people are gonna ask you things, and you have a right to say yes and no, and people are saying no to you every single day.
Go look in your inbox. Go look at the last RSVP you sent out for your watch party or whatever it was. People RSVP no, and you don’t take it personally. A lot of times, when someone cancels that happy hour or that lunch, we’re actually relieved because we have too much on our plate. So, we have hallucinated urgency, it’s imagined, and we also have this hallucinated or imagined disappointment that we’re creating by saying no. We have to get past those barriers, so that we can start focusing on the things that actually matter.
And most of the time, the cure for both of these is to just pause. If you ask the question, “Hey, is this gonna matter in 10 days, much less 10 years?” a lot of times you realize the thing that just landed in your inbox or in your DMs is not really important. You just need to set it aside and deal with it later.
I did a whole episode on this idea of Parkinson’s law, that work will fill the time that you give it. If you’re not working on a time block calendar, you’re just gonna get lost in your inbox. It’s a little time machine. You’ll go in and you’ll wake up whenever someone knocks on your door. It’s just a place we go, like scrolling, to get lost. What we want to do to remind you of the big takeaways is your most important work, you give big blocks of time. You want to get lost in the important stuff. But if it’s trivial stuff like responding to emails and social media DMs and to your text messages, set a timer, give yourself 20 minutes, and do as much as you can.
If you set a time limit on what you’re doing around the “trivial stuff,” you’ll end up treating it like a game, doing as much as you can, and when the buzzer goes off or your time block ends, you’ll move to things that are more important. I find that to be very satisfying. I’m not lost in that world for a long time, but I also am not always afraid because I triage my email three times a day. I’m not kind of anxious that something’s waiting, like a bomb’s waiting on me. I know when I’m going to check it. And because I know that, I can chill and go check it at noon and at the end of the day.
So, I’ve taught that a million times. We just have to start implementing it in our lives. Otherwise, we will continue to fall prey to this idea that these distractions, the eighty percent, will get in the way of our core work. They’ll make us inconsistent, and they’ll keep us tripping over ourselves when we’re trying to get ahead.
So, really quickly, let’s just recap these three.
Number one, you’re not as clear as you think. A lot of times we know generally what to do, but not specifically.
Pattern number two, we have a tendency to chase new information instead of mastering the information we already have. We have a system that we could be working and getting better at, and we’re just jumping to the next thing.
And the last big pattern that we see again and again is that we allow the 80% to masquerade as the 20%. These are true distractions. And in hindsight, we always know that. We just got distracted. But what is that urge that gets us to jump into our inbox, to get into our DMs? Most of the time, we just have to manage ourselves and our environment, so we’re not even exposed to it. Figure out your path to getting unexposed to those distractions so you can focus on the important stuff.
So, I want to get a little bit deeper with what we’re talking about. What do all of these patterns actually mean, and why do we keep repeating them? So, before we transition to our challenge, I want to just address really quickly, we had the pattern last week, people trying to go it alone, the three patterns this week. Why do these patterns persist? What’s the meaning behind them that keeps them showing up in our life, besides the fact that they may just be a little bit habitual?
A lot of people, if you ask them, “What’s the number one way you self-sabotage?” They know the answer. It’s their phones, or it’s their environment, or it’s something else. They can name the pattern. What they don’t understand is what that pattern is doing for them.
So, I’ll give you an example. And in our coaching and training, what I’ve learned is, a lot of times, people who habitually procrastinate, they put off the things they know that matter. They keep pushing them into the future. What they’re doing is preserving hope. Here’s how it works. If you haven’t done it, you haven’t failed at it, and if you haven’t failed at it, you might still succeed. And you can keep pushing that thing that you’ll sign up for that course or enroll in that class or start that side business or whatever that thing is that you truly want to do, pushing it into the future, it’s a way that we preserve hope.
So, some of these patterns are actually protecting us in some way. And it helps to work with your coach or work with your friends or work with your spouse and really kind of understand, like, what is this thing doing for me?
And I’ll share, like, it was raw for me for a while. Here’s the guy who preaches against busyness more than anyone else. But I fell into a trap of busyness or even call it extreme productivity when I was dealing with the grief of a loved one. Those were really messy, uncomfortable emotions, and I would go to work to hide from them. And it took a coach to help me see that pattern, and it took some triggers in my work environment to realize, like, “Okay, all I’m doing is not dealing with the thing that I really should be dealing with, and it’s just a place to hide.”
So, was it protecting me in the short run? Yes. Was it helping me in the long run? No. And that’s why these patterns tend to kind of stick with us for so long. We have to stop and ask the question, “I know the pattern that keeps showing up in my life, that I allow it to happen. What is it actually doing for me?” So many bad habits like checking your phone, jumping into your emails, so many people, what their hope is, what it’s serving, is they get a chance to serve somebody. “I get to solve someone else’s problem today.”
And instead of solving their own problems, they keep jumping back for that sweet-tooth candy of answering an email, replying to a DM, or whatever it is that gives them a little dopamine hit, and it feels like they’ve done something good that day. But what it’s actually doing is just distracting them from the thing that actually matters most. They’re not mutually exclusive, folks. Some of these things that we want to do that are distracting us, we just have to partition them into the right places in our lives.
So, when we think about the patterns, maybe one of these really spoke to you. My challenge to you this week is, name the pattern that keeps showing up in your life that keeps you from doing your most important work. But then, ask the question, “How is this serving me? What is this pattern that’s holding me back? What is it protecting me from?” Think about it. Talk about it with your best friend. Talk about it with your spouse, your coach. I promise you that insight could be the key to eventually breaking the pattern so that you can break through.
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