Hey, what's up in Sean? Quick note this episode. I am going over something that's very important topic and I think it's a great episode. But if you're listening to this on iTunes or Spotify, you're not going to be able to see the images because I basically hand drew a bunch of diagrams of the Frameworks that I'm talking about here and I hold it open so you can see them on camera and they're honestly, they're pretty good. I had a lot of time on this tens of minutes. Let's say but now in actuality it's actually pretty useful and I think the diagrams help it a lot. So for this episode, I would strongly recommend
You go to YouTube so that you can actually see what I'm talking about. Otherwise, it might get a little funky. If you're just listening your try to you're going to be trying to imagine what I'm talking about, but it's a lot easier if you just go to YouTube. So enjoy this episode and I go to youtube.com or the app and then just type in my first million. You'll see it right there up top very easy and check it out. 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 2024. I feel like I can rude.
We're out of nowhere. I could be what I
want to put my all in it like a days on 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 a check-in and I'm like where the hell what what did I do? All of your 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. I'm going to show you what works for me. How do you get more?
Focus 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's completely locked in and obsessed in business. You'll see somebody like Mark Zuckerberg laser focused on one thing trying to make that happen and they don't let themselves drift away. 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 you know, some news thing that's going on the
Shin This is Love is Blind season 5 this is that investment. Somebody wants you to do. This. Is 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-like focus, we do not want the cone to be white. I'm going to show you how we do
that. All right. It's time for a little
I'd break
every wonder what a unicorn eats for
breakfast. Okay, I don't actually know but I do know that 20% of all unicorn startups are using HubSpot and for good reason how spots all-in-one platform loves up your sales marketing and support plus they have a huge collection of resources to help start up scale and with the hub spot for startups program. You can save big on your first year to see if you're eligible to save on HubSpot go to HUB spot.com startups. 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.
Rush Hold 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 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 can 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 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 yes has to only doing hell. Yes things. That doesn't mean you don't do it somebody, you know if your
And comes and says we're going to Costa Rica. It's going to be amazing. That might be a hell. Yes for you go for it. But make sure you are 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 as a famous Paul Graham essay that I've turned into a cartoon and the Paul Graham essay is basically showing the difference between a maker of these flipped. Okay? Yeah, hold on.
Let's reverse that.
This is a manager schedule. There's what their calendar looks like and this is what a maker schedule look like. This is the artist by it somebody who's a builder. And so for a lot of people they have this 9 a.m. 9:30 a.m. 10 a.m. 10:30 a.m. 11:00 a.m. 11:00. I'm double-booked. Oh shit.
And they end up just in a puddle of Tears. They are overwhelmed or stressed. 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 want 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 manager's schedule. What you want to do is switch to a maker schedule and make your schedule is basically long interrupted blocks of time.
Early 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 they have a third night Sprint, but you know, you don't have to do all that
you need to switch to this maker schedule. And so the maker schedule is the one thing you can do with your time. We're in the same number of hours you can get more done.
Why because when you get into these unwrapped and blocks of time you get into flow States and you're able to actually lock in on 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 lock in. And so whether you're an engineer and you want to build a product you want to code something or you're you know, you're trying to be an Entertainer. You need to write chapters of your book or YouTube video that you're making or you're just trying to come up with a new idea.
Not letting yourself your day gets split I call this the 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 raise the threshold of yes to a hell. Yes so that we're just saying no to things that clear space. The next thing is we do the maker schedule versus the managers of schedule so that you have uninterrupted time blocks where you can be your most creative productive self.
Alright everyone a quick break because I
want to fill you in on a little experiment that I'm doing. I've got a new project. It's called money-wise. It's a personal finance podcast for high net worth people or young people who are on their way to becoming high-net-worth when I made a little bit of money. I didn't even know how much money I should be spending. Each month should be 10,000 30,000 50,000 and I didn't really have a lot of people to ask so I create a podcast called money-wise because I wanted to figure out what are some of the things that people who have a lot of cash and who have a high net worth. What do they do with it? The first episode is with the friend of mine. He sold his company for 200 million dollars when he was 30.
Years old he gets super transparent about his monthly expenses his portfolio how it impacts is happiness everything. So I want you guys to check it out. It's called money-wise. That's one word. You can find it on my Twitter bio on the sampar or you can just type in money-wise on Apple Spotify and YouTube. All right back to the Pod. Hey, let's take a quick break to tell you about the HubSpot podcast network. If you like podcast like this. You should check out some other cool podcast one is called business Made Simple. It's hosted by Donald Miller and is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast Network.
And what he does is he makes it easy to take the mystery out of growing your business. There's an episode that you should check out called what you should put in a job description to get the perfect higher and in this episode. Donald Miller looks at the whole hiring process and how important it is to emphasize both the the positive attributes and the drawbacks to Future candidates and you'll learn why being self-aware as leader will help you avoid hiring disasters. So check it out. Google is such a business Made Simple wherever you get your
podcast. Okay next thing that we're going to Clarity so
This is something I stole from Asana Asana created. This thing called The Clarity 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 your Elon Musk your mission for SpaceX might be, you know, make humans and interplanetary species a multiplanetary species or for Tesla for him. It might be get the
Hold 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 so you write that out. And by the way little Pro tip because when I first read about this, I was like, wow that makes total sense. You're gonna have this big audacious Vision, but let's say you're not building a rocket to go into space or you're not trying to get the world off of fossil fuels to a fully electric energy system you you know, you might just be building an 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 is you can write a fancy Mission, but if it's not you're honest mission is not going to help so I'm 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 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 could do what we wanted.
Want when we want with whoever we want and only work on projects that are you know, intellectually fascinating for us creatively 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 from there. You want to go down to the one your goal. Okay. So this is the mission might take 10 years. It might take 20 years, but then you break it down to the one year ago. 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 what I call the eff. Yeah goal. And then I have the floor goal. And so I set kind of a range here because I don't like static what 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 just be disappointed or should I be conservative but then I feel like I didn't push myself. So I sent both I said it Fe a goal and a floor goal the floor gold means you would be disappointed if it didn't reach this level me.
This would be a solid win below that you kind of feel like when really we didn't reading get there and the FBI goal is were high-fiving were toasting to our so they 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.
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 your work backwards you say.
Say okay in order to achieve this one your 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 your 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 going to try to double Revenue we did about 17 ish Million last year. We're going to get to over 30 this year. So we said what we need in terms of people wine.
Needed to hire a CMO because today I was doing it. I'm not the best CMO for that business. I'm not full time on it. So we set some people targets. We need to hire an amazing CMO who's done this before we needed to hire a website developer who's going to do XYZ, right? So you write down what are your people gaps? And you have your product gaps. So what is the product need to be able to do in order for us to hit our goal? So for example when Ilan launched Tesla, he said a product goal. He was like, how do we make a car?
That is
I think it was like faster than a Porsche and better for the environment than a Prius.
Faster than a Porsche better for better than a Prius right better for the environment a Prius and that is a product goal. That is a benchmark that we are trying to achieve. Is it faster than a Porsche and is it is it better for the environment than a Prius? And so similarly you want to set some product goals for yourself
for to achieve your one-year Mission
and lastly his finances. So,
you know, do you need
Capital by default people think they do you should question that assumption you beyond just how much money do we need to do? This might be your
ins 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 are unprofitable and So within each one of those you've now broken your one your goal into the the different input input metrics that if you did those correctly, it would lead to the one your 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 will and the finance goal. So let's break those into a digestible chunk and now all of a sudden it's like, you know,
Let's do 20 interviews and and try to find you know, two great candidates for the CMO rule or whatever it may be and so then you go month by month and every month you check in
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 why 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 mattered last month. Did we achieve it? And what matters this you do that for 12 months straight you were going
To stay on track, that 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 said he shared this this simple slide that he made for himself and I loved 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 the mission that I called 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 and I've built successful businesses cash machines and I've built I've done things, you know, he wrote like a fantasy fiction book write something as 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 blissed out walking into work every day, right? I would be at my happiest in terms of my professional goals and so set a goal for yourself like this and you want to use
Is this as a bar for resonance, right, you know, this is a this is a not generic off-the-shelf goal like be successful or make money or whatever right? Like set it up set it for real. So maybe for some people it's make six grand a month 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 stress free and then it's only up from there and write that whole thing out write it out in a way.
Way that has some emotional pull for you that it's a compelling picture. Alright, so the second thing then you have your output, right? So what are those? You know, that's kind of like I said the One You're Gold, right? So in order to do that, we might need to do the following two things. Now, here's the part. I like the 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 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 workweek and it blew my mind at the time. I'd never thought about half of the concepts in there and I was like just inside 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 for our fever like I read that book and for four hours, I went into a fever dream and I'd
replant everything in my life. That was very impactful for me. Thank you Tim Ferriss there have been other moments like that Tony Robbins and others where I have had these 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 for that to happen. Well, we break that big dream down to a one-year goal and then we break that one your
All 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 going to 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 have us 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. But I'm going to do that for years and I will not be discouraged. I say yes to doing that input even though the numbers will take a long time to build up right? So I'm saying yes.
What's the second thing I'm saying yes to well for this year. For example, we wanted to bring on higher profile. Guess we booked a bunch of big Tim Ferriss coming on. We booked Tony Robbins and a bunch of others. And so I said yes to doing something. I didn't like to do guests 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?
So what are the things I have to say? No to well, I have to say no to starting a company. I said on this podcast every week and I come up with ideas for businesses. I gotta 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 goal. It's 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 have to say no to avoiding hard conversations. I have to say no to my old habit of blah blah blah, right. I thought this was a very
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 and here it's the things that are not easy for you. You do want to write the things that you already say. Yes to that are already just you know trivial for you. It's your nature to do that. It's here you are.
Why what's against your nature and and write that down so that you're very clear and 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 as 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 Sean about how you actually Focus. This is something that frankly
I'm still a beginner at right. I'm a maybe a blue belt in the game of focus, 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 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 that's it. That's the episode. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to travel never looking back.
