you can do anything but you can't do everything and that is what I want to talk about today ruthless focus laser-like focus for [Music] 2024 I have not been great at focusing in the past in the past I have let myself get distracted I have let myself set a goal at the beginning of the year and by the end of the year I check in and I'm like where the hell what what did I do all year why did I drift and it's not something malicious it's not like a total fail but it's just this drift that I didn't like and I wanted to get better at I'm going to show you what works for me how do you get more focused how do we get the laser-like focus that all the great ones exhibit whether it's in sports and you see Kobe Bryant completely obsessed in entertainment you see Mr Beast he completely locked in and obsessed in business you'll see somebody like Mark Zuckerberg laser focused on one thing trying to make that happen they don't let let themselves drift the way the rest of us do so here's the little visual this is you and this is all the things that you might do so this is uh you know some news thing that's going on the election This is Love is Blind season five this is that investment somebody wants you to do this is um that email you got from that person who wants to do a call and pick your brain this is that side side hustle that's not really going to go anywhere right that's all the things and then the blue thing is the thing you actually want this is the thing that you would feel proud of at the end of the year if you made this happen and so what we need is laser likee focus we do not want the cone to be wide I'm going to show you how we do that so first thing you want to do this is a before and after of how you can operate and again we have all the possible things that we could be saying yes to and you want to think about your yes threshold so let's write that up this is your yes thresold and before it might be you know here so you might have your yes threshold right there and what you're doing is you're saying yes to anything above that line if it's below that line you're able to say no but you're able to say yes to everything above that line and the after all we have to do the first thing you have to do is simply acknowledge bring your awareness to how low your yes threshold is and raise it raise your standard for yes and so instead of saying yes to things that are pretty good maybe interesting might be worth doing pretty cool it needs to take your yes to a hell yes that is the easiest thing you could do so we're going to raise the yes threshold right we're going to take it from here up to here and you know this sad guy becomes this happy guy and he's taller so you get two inches of height at least and your your yes threshold is even higher all right so that's the first thing you do bring your awareness to where's my bar today and take my yeses to only doing hell yes things that doesn't mean you don't do if somebody you know if your friend comes and says we're going to Costa Rica and it's going to be amazing that might be a hell yes for you go for it but make sure you you have a premium quality on your focus and what you're willing to do all right next thing time management you may have seen this is a famous Pam essay that I've turned into a cartoon and the pogram essay is basically come uh showing the difference between a maker uh uh oh wait I have these flipped okay uh yeah hold on let's reverse that this is a manager schedule this is what their calendar looks like and this is what a maker schedule look like this is the artist right somebody who's a builder and so for a lot of people they have this 9:00 am. 9:30 a.m 10: a.m. 10:30 a.m 11 a.m. 11 oh I'm double booked oh and they end up just in a puddle of Tears they are overwhelmed their stress they sort of busy themselves to death why didn't I get everything I wanted to done in life why didn't I achieve my goals and my dreams because I was too busy like listen to that sentence that doesn't even make sense you didn't do the things you need to do because you didn't have time because you filled it with other crap and so most people by default especially people in jobs you will be default opted into a m a manager's schedule what you want to do is switch to a maker schedule a maker schedule is basically long interrupted blocks of time usually in the morning you need at least two and a half hours of uninterrupted time usually three is ideal a break where you're going to lunch exercise go for a walk play with your kids walk your dog whatever you do and then another uninterrupted Sprint for some people the real great ones they have a another break and then they have a third night Sprint but you know you don't have to do all that um you need to switch to this maker schedule and so the maker schedule is the one thing you could do with your time where in the same number of hours you can get more done why because when you get into these interrupted blocks of time you get into flow States and you're able to actually lock in on uh knocking out one whole thing without distractions without checking your emails without being pulled into a call or a meeting about this and about that you're able to to to lock in and so whether you're an engineer and you want to build a product you want to code something or you're um you know you're trying to be an Entertainer you need to write chapters of your book or uh a YouTube video that you're making or you're just trying to come up with a new idea not letting yourself your your day get split I call this the uh the zebra calendar where you're just Stripes all day that is the next thing you need to do to enable yourself to come up with great ideas right you are setting up your environment so the first thing we did was we raised the threshold of yes to a hell yes so that we're just saying no to things that clears space the next thing is we do the maker schedule versus the manager schedule so that you have uninterrupted time blocks where you can be your most creative productive self okay next thing now we're going to Clarity so this is something I stole from assana Asana created this thing called The Clarity uh the Pyramid of clarity and the Pyramid of clarity goes as follows at the top here you have your mission and the mission is your big the reason your organization exists it's the reason you're even doing this it's your big why and so let's say you're Elon Musk your mission for SpaceX might be um you know make humans an interplanetary species a multiplanetary species um or for Tesla for him it might be get the world off of using you know fossil fuels and get them to a electric future right so that's the big vision for what you're doing now you break that down you say so you write that out and by the way little Pro tip because when I first write about this I was like wow that makes total sense you got to have this big audacious Vision but let's say you're not building rockets and going to space or you're not trying to get the world off of fossil fuels to a fully electric energy um system you you know you might just be building a e-commerce business that's designed to enable your lifestyle to be really great because you wanted money and you didn't have money right like whatever it is the key here is honesty because you can write a fancy Mission but if it's not your honest Mission it's not going to help it's not going to do anything won't have any emotional resonance so what I try to do is I try to be honest about the mission so for example with my company we are building a a company that is going to enable us to have an amazing lifestyle us the owners of the business have an amazing lifestyle we only have a couple of people in the business it's all owners and we want to have a lifestyle where we can do what we want when we want with whoever we want and only work on projects that are you know intellectually fascinating for us Crea aely challenging for us and so we write that that's what we're doing that is the mission of what we're trying to build we're building a vehicle that enables that um from there you want to go down to the one-year goal okay so this is the the mission might take 10 years it might take 20 years but then you break it down to the one-year goal where do we need to be at the end of the year for this to be a smash success and specifically I set two goals so I have the uh what I call the goal and then I have the floor goal and so I set kind of a range here because I don't like static one you know single goals binary goals because you're then you're you're like should I just be super ambitious but then I might be disappointed or should I be conservative but then I feel like I didn't push myself so I set both I set a f goal and a floor goal the floor goal means you would be disappointed if it didn't reach this level meaning um this would be a solid win below that you kind of feel like ah man really we we didn't we didn't get there and the FIA goal is we're high-fiving we're toasting to our I can't believe this is how good it turned out and so you want to kind of set that range for yourself and say all right we have a minimum and then we have sort of a Target that we're going to shoot all right everyone a quick break to tell you about HubSpot and this one's really easy for me to talk about because I'm going to show you a real life example so I've got this company called Hampton join hampton.com it's a community for Founders doing between 2 million all the way up to like $250 million a year in revenue and one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these cool service and so we have a lot of Founders who have high net worth and we'll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask but provide a lot of value so things like how much the founders pay themselves each month how much money they're spending each month what the payroll looks like if they're optimistic about the next year and their business all these questions that people are afraid to ask but well we ask them anyway and they tell us in this Anonymous survey and so what we do is we created a landing page using hubspot's landing page tool and it basically has a landing page that says here's all the questions we asked give us your email if you want to access it and then I shared this page on Twitter and we were able to get thousands of people who gave us their email and told us they want this survey and I see did they come from social media I can see did they come from Twitter from LinkedIn basically everywhere else that they could possibly come from I'm able to track all of that and then I'm able to see over the next handful of weeks how many of those people actually signed up and became a member of Hampton in other words I can see how much revenue came from this survey how much revenue came from each traffic Source things like that but the best part is I can see how much revenue came from it and a lot of times it takes a ton of work to make that happen HubSpot made that super super easy if you're interested in doing this you can check it out hubspot.com the Link's in the description and I'll also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the landing page and how it worked and everything like that I'm just going to do that call to action then and it's free check it out in the description all right now back to MFM okay what's the next level of this now you have your overall mission clarified and I'll show you an example in a second you have your one-year goal where we want to be a year from now and that's what you're going to work backwards from so then you work backwards and you say okay in order to achieve this one-year goal what do I need in terms of people what do I need in terms of product and what do I need in terms of finances three categories and so you break the one-year goal into the this is the output to the inputs so for example for my e-commerce company we had a one-year goal and we said we're going to try to go we're we're going to try to double Revenue we did about 17ish Million last year we're g to try to get to um you know over 30 this year so we said what do we need in terms of people well I needed to hire a CMO because today I was doing it I'm not the best uh CMO for for that business I'm not full-time on it so we we set some people targets we need to hire an amazing CMO who's done this before uh we needed to hire a website developer who's going to do XYZ right so you write down what are your people gaps then you have your product gaps so what does the product need to be able to do in order for us to hit our goal so for example when Elon launched Tesla he set a product goal and he was like how do we make a car that is um I think it was like faster than a Porsche and um better for the environment than a Prius faster than a Porsche better for better than a Prius right better for the environment than a Prius and that is a prodal that is a benchmark that we are trying to achieve is it faster than a Porsche and is it more is it better for the environment than a Prius and so similarly you want to set some product goals for yourself um for for to achieve your one-year Mission and lastly is finances so you know do you need Capital um you know by by default people think they do you should question that assumption um Beyond just how much money do we need to do this might be your margins or might be your unit economics we need to bring the cost down to this in order for this to work because we want to be profitable and today we're unprofitable and So within each one of those you've now broken your one-year goal into the the different um input input metrics that if you did those correctly it would lead to the one-year goal and then from there you just break it out by month you say all right in January okay what are we going to do well we need to chip away at the people goal the product goal and the finance goal so let's break those into a digestive chunk and now all of a sudden it's like you know uh let's do 20 interviews and and try to find you know two great candidates for the the CMO role or whatever it may be and so then you go month by month and every month you check in you you check in on the whole pyramid you say all right as a reminder our mission is X by the end of the year we're trying to do y in order to do that we need to hit these we need to do these three things internally and then the score will take care of itself and so to get there we need to break this out month by month into what's what's What mattered last month did we achieve it and matters this month you do that for 12 months straight you are going to stay on track there will be no drift last thing I want to share with you I stole this from my friend Joel Omen he's a listener of the show and I hope he's okay with me sharing this I'll ask him but he he said he shared this um this simple slide that he made for himself and I loved it it was a killer slide it was one slide that gave him Clarity on what is he trying to do and how is he going to get there and I like the way he framed it so I want to share it with you so he had his goal uh the mission that I called it on the last last page and his goal was to build a creatively fulfilling cash machine I just love that creatively fulfilling cash machine and he said well you know I've done I've done each of them individually you know I've built successful businesses uh cash machines and I've built I've done things you know he wrote like a fantasy fiction book right something was creatively fulfilling but didn't make any money and so he's like this time my mission is to do this because if I did this I would be Bliss out walking into work every day right I would be my at my happiest in terms of my professional goals and so set a goal for yourself like this and you want to use this as a bar for residance right you know this is a this is a not a generic offthe shelf goal like be successful or um make money or whatever right like set it set it for real so maybe for some people it's make six six grand a month um so that I can quit my job make six grand a month out of my business so I can quit my job and be totally independent not have to worry about how I'm going to pay the bills right I could be stressfree and then it's only up from there and write that whole thing out write it out in a way that has some emotional uh pull for you that it's a compelling picture all right so the second thing then you have your output right so what are the you know that's kind of like I said the one- year goal right so in order to do that we might need to do the following two things now here's the part I liked best when he says I say yes to blank and I say no to blank so for example let's say for this podcast I you know have a goal which is I want to I want to be one of those people that inspired me when I was coming up that is very much why I do this podcast because growing up I remember when I was in college somebody gave me a book called The 4-Hour Work week and it blew my mind at the time I never thought about half of the concepts in there and I was like just insight after Insight page after page of inspiration and story and I just said that's how I want my life to be I said I called it catching the 4H hour fever like I read that book and for four hours I went into a fever dream and I replanned everything in my life that was very impactful for me thank you Tim Ferris um there have been other moments like that Tony Robbins and others where I've had these um people who created content that really shifted my thinking that made me have more clarity more insight more motivation more Firepower to go do what I wanted to do and so my goal with this podcast is to do that okay well great what do I need to say yes to in order that to happen well we break that big dream down to a one-year goal and then we break that one-year goal down to the things that we're going to have to opt into so for example for this podcast you might say well I'm gonna have to sit down consistently week after week doing my absolute best to create the most compelling content out there the best wisdom for entrepreneurs and when I do that I am I'm saying yes to doing my best and knowing that the numbers are not going to change every week that it might look flat for a long time that I'm going to do that for years and I will not be discouraged I say yes to doing that input even though the the numbers will take a long time to build up right so that's what I'm saying yes to what's the second thing I'm saying yes to well for this year for example we wanted to bring on higher profile guests we booked a bunch of Tim Ferris coming on we booked uh Tony Robbins and a bunch of others and so I said yes to doing something I didn't like to do guest Outreach I hated begging people to come on my podcast and all that I just I don't know I don't like when people ask me I didn't want to ask other people but I said I got to say yes to that I got to say yes to the discomfort and the ego of continuing to follow up with people and try to get them to come on the podcast and what do I say no to so what are the things I have to say no to well I have to say no to starting a company I sit on this podcast every week and I come up with ideas for businesses I got to say no to actually going and doing them because if I now I'm a CEO of a startup I'm not going to be able to achieve this this goal so I have to say no to some very compelling good ideas that would make me millions of dollars write that down right so what are the other things I have to say no to I have to say no to avoiding hard conversations I have to say no to um my old habit of blah blah blah right I thought this was a very very useful thing because it had both the it was it was all about self-awareness this is a self-awareness game what is the goal that motivates me to get out of bed every single day and chase this above all other possible things I could be doing with my time and my talents second what is it about me that I know I'm going to have to consciously force myself to say yes to and say no to to and here it's the things that are not easy for you you don't want to write the things that you already say yes to that are already just uh you know trivial for you it's it's your nature to do that it's here you identify what's against your nature and and write that down so that you're very clear in what you need to do and to me this is how you can do anything you are Limitless right you nobody can tell you that you can't do that thing but you can't do everything right so that you can do anything but you can't do everything is a very powerful idea and it's gives you that focus is a superpower people say that but they don't tell you how you focus so I hope today you learned a little something from Uncle sea about how you actually Focus this is something that frankly I'm still a beginner at right I'm I'm maybe a blue belt in the in the game of focus um but I do know that it's important and because it's important I'm working at it and I wanted to share with you the things that I'm doing that that tend to be working for me the things that have helped me make some progress maybe there's some more things out there I'd love to hear from you what works for you in the comments but uh that's it that's the episode [Music]