Leadership

Physically Mastering Wealth Series

TWS 27 | Physically Mastering Wealth

Is it possible to physically master wealth? For the first part of the Physically Mastering Wealth Series, Patrick Donohoe discusses why understanding how habits are formed and how behavior is conditioned helps in creating more wealth. It’s all about figuring out what works best and leveraging your resources to produce optimal results. And then doing it again and again. Want to learn more? Tune in for more insight on how you can make creating wealth a habit!

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Physically Mastering Wealth Series

Part 1

One of the driving forces of human beings is freedom, which infers financial freedom too. Several years ago, I set out to discover how any individual, regardless of their financial situation, could evaluate their finances in five minutes or less and have a firm date when they could achieve financial independence. The latest version of this calculator, which is free for readers, can be found at TheWealthStandard.com/calculator. The calculator is going to take you just a few minutes to complete, and it’s going to provide you with a specific financial independence date. Go check it out.

This episode is picking up on something I discussed last time, which is the idea of physical mastery. We show up to life doing pretty much the same thing day in and day out. It’s how we’re biologically wired. There’s so much going on in society now. Information, ideas, opinions, stimuli from every different angle. Look at our phones and how distracting with all the things that we can do. If you want to make progress when it comes to your wealth, you have to understand how habits are formed and how behavior is conditioned.

Without that, it’s going to be a challenge. Ultimately, that leads to taking excessive risks and risks always end in failure usually, especially if you’re taking consistent risks like that, and ultimately will lead to new condition behavior. Hopefully, if you’re learning those lessons, but taking proactive actions will allow you to start to pick up on other people’s failures and discoveries so that you don’t have to necessarily take too much risk and put failure on the line and obviously unintended consequences of that failure.

We’re going to get into 1 of the 2 primary ways in which Wealth Building occurs. I want you to consider this as a possibility for yourself. This is based on my experience. I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to meet lots of different people, experience a busy business, and see not just my own myriad of failures but also those of others in different businesses and industries, etc. These are the conclusions that I’ve come to. They’re not necessarily these absolute conclusions that will not evolve. Of course, they’re going to evolve, but I wanted to talk about the first, which is leadership and operational leverage.

It all boils down to leverage. I want you to consider the possibility that making more money, being wealthier as far as producing income is in proportion to the leverage of your time, number one, and then also relationships with other people. In other words, the idea that sentence is making a bigger impact with the time that you have. The biggest challenge is that 99.9% of us have been conditioned to do the opposite.

If you want to make progress when it comes to your wealth, you have to understand how habits are formed and how behavior is conditioned. Click To Tweet

Let me give you a story. This is a conversation I had with a younger guy, cool guy, good energy, lots of ambition, but he made a comment which points to what I’m trying to get across in this episode. He said first off, he managed a small supplement store of a bigger conglomerate. They were growing successful. He loved his job. He loved being healthy, working out and physical conditioning. He made a comment which he told me everything. We had a longer discussion and went into the details of it.

He said that he couldn’t leave his store for long to go to an event, be away for the weekend and take a day off. He can’t leave because the employees are or assistant managers will mess it up. They’ll screw it up. They won’t do it the way that he does it. In that, this is how most of us are conditioned because we’re raised in the US school system wishes, which is based in the Prussian system.

The Prussian system was designed to train factory workers as well as military soldiers. It’s for us to just follow orders or tasks. We’re not taught to necessarily be a leader. We’re taught to we’re a manager and tell people what to do. This is a huge example between the idea of management and leadership managers manage tasks and tell people what to do they usually use the tactic of fear to do it. That’s what society continues to condition in the political realm, in the school educational system, as well as in Corporate America.

That’s a big difference because that’s not leadership. Leadership initiated more training and conditioning then instead of disciplining somebody, it’s coaching them and continuing to train them until proven processes and principles gave become part of their makeup. It’s been conditioned into them where they would do what you would do. They would do what has been proven to be done. In this case, in this story, processes weren’t documented, training did not revolve around proven and successful processes or principles.

That’s why it led to this very awkward manager-employee relationship, which usually never progresses. This is where I want to highlight how valuable it is to understand the idea of leadership because if this manager of one store, he understands why his store was one of the most successful ones in the territory. He knew what it took to run a successful business.

Those processes, he held them close to the trust because there was so much meaning there. It was him. He was validated. He felt important because he was successful. The idea of leadership is not keeping that to yourself. The idea of leadership is training others to do exactly what you would do to get that success.

TWS 27 | Physically Mastering Wealth

Physically Mastering Wealth: Consider the possibility that making more money, being wealthier as far as producing income is in proportion to the leverage of your time relationships with other people.

 

What does that have to do with leverage? If you have one store that’s successful, that’s being run by somebody doing things the way that you would do them, then two stores are possible, then 3, 4, and 5. Let’s say that a district is comprised of five stores. If you’ve done five stores, now you can do a district. If you can do one district, you can do 2, 3, 4, 5, or 10. Now you’re upwards of dozens of different shops that you as a leader are able to have stewardship over it because you have conditioned into employees, proven processes and proven systems.

This obviously supplement stores, but this applies to all industries. The technology industry has mastered this just because of how complex that world in that industry is. The more you understand leadership and how much you can leverage time by employing proven tactics, proven strategies, now you can control a host of resources and subsequently make a lot more money.

I’m going to keep going with this idea of operational leverage because our world is evolving rapidly and people are looking for ways in which they can be more efficient all the time. You don’t have to go out and necessarily invent it. I looked at really two things in the business world that create an immense amount of leverage. The first is the media. The second is technology. It’s the same idea as you’re looking for ways in which you can do more with the time that you have.

Let’s use an example of a story. We’re doing a live event. Zoom-wise, there are a couple of people that are doing the event. It’s basically training that I do a couple of times a year for other financial advisors. I have done this with a partner of mine for years. First off, the business that I run is very different than the typical financial services, financial planning practice because we’ve done it for many years virtually through webinars. This was before webinars even popularized. Before video webinars, we used to go to a meeting.

Adobe Connect is another one that we used way back in the day. It’s super clunky software, but we didn’t have people come into our office, but the typical financial practice is that they went to people’s houses. They had people come into their office. It’s inefficient in my perspective. We were always told, “You can’t do that.”

People will never do that. They’ll never do business with you unless you build that face-to-face relationship. Even early on, we had compliance departments flying out to our office gate because they were like, “No way you can’t build a relationship with somebody. You can’t do business with people without seeing them face to face.” It was a very challenging time.

Obviously, it’s been adopted by a lot of different businesses these days, but my point is it’s very difficult to go from what you’ve been doing to something that’s new. This is why conditioning is so important. Physical mastery requires repetition, but even during COVID, because with this advisor group, I had been talking to them for years about virtual business and meeting with clients over webinars, the technology was easier. Conditioned behavior is like, “No. I can’t do that.”

COVID forced it. This is usually how behavior changes. Either it’s a conditioned change, very strategic we condition change or there’s a massive disruption that forces change. If you think you need to change something, it’s going to continue to compound, grow and fester until you’re forced to change. Might as well rip the Band-Aid off right now.

There’s two things in the business world that create an immense amount of leverage. The first is the media. The second is technology. Click To Tweet

COVID comes on and people start to see, “I can do Zoom webinars. I can do this and that,” before they had to conduct a conditioned behavior to do things a certain way because that’s where they found success. Obviously, it makes sense, but at the same time, this is the idea behind Zoom being hugely beneficial because now you can have 5 meetings a day instead of 2. You can meet with dozens of more people who don’t necessarily have to come to your office in coordinating schedules, getting time off, getting a babysitter and the list goes on.

The idea of just having technology of being able to communicate with somebody face to face across the internet, massive leverage is possible because of that and lots of businesses experience it. That’s just an example because there are technologies everywhere. They are essentially finding ways to replace predictable things that you are currently doing manually. I’m not saying that you replace people as a whole. There are theories around AI and robotics doing that.

I don’t want to go that far. What I’m saying is that there are inefficiencies in how you manage your time. The most valuable time that anybody has is spent in front of other people, like engaging in meaningful conversation, but there’s lots of other stuff that takes away from that, whether it’s paperwork, documentation, appointment reminders, how you do the actual meetings or taking notes.

I can keep going on with examples, but there are technologies that are coming out that allow you to spend more time in the most meaningful things, begin to look for it, and incorporate it into your system and your rhythm. Technology is the first thing. Media is the second thing, whether it’s video or podcasts. When you do a video, you do it once you spend an hour doing it, “I’m going to do this podcast for 15 or 20 minutes.” It can be listened to by one million people, but I only spent 15 to 20 minutes on it. That is leverage.

I have another story. I have a good buddy who is successful in a specific construction niche because he was able to find a foundation raising. When a foundation settles and cracks, he found a very efficient process that was developed in the Midwest that he went out and learned and then brought to Utah. Now he has locations in Northern and Southern Utah where he has these systems that he’s used to raising the foundation and do it inexpensively as well as efficiently quick.

It’s what he’s done to train his staff. He started to use media. He’ll record how this machine is operated, how you do a phone call, how you go out and do a bid. He found all the different successful ways in which he did it, and then he’d created media that trained staff in order to do it. That’s another form of media being an ideal way to leverage the most predictable things because he found that time and energy were being spent in training. Leaves doing it manually every single time. There were certain things in training that were predictable that he had to do over and over again.

He started to use media as leverage so that he could spend his time doing more meaningful things. There are lots to unpack here. I’m not going to do it in this show because there are so many different examples, but building physical mastery around the idea of leadership is for you to constantly be finding ways in which you can be more valuable with the time that you have.

It creates massive wealth for people you look at, whether it’s district managers or executive-level positions. They understand operations and leadership of people, so that with the time that you have, you’re able to have stewardship over lots of different production because you understand the dynamics of leadership people, relationships as well as proven and successful processes.

TWS 27 | Physically Mastering Wealth

Physically Mastering Wealth: Building physical mastery around the idea of leadership is for you to constantly be finding ways in which you can be more valuable with the time that you have.

 

I’m going to give you some books. You guys can go check out the show notes on TheWealthStandard.com for some of the best books that are out there. I mentioned a lot of this stuff in my book, which is Heads I Win Tails You Lose and get a free copy by just going to the website under the resources tab. There’s a couple of other Cameron Herold. I’ve known Cameron for several years. He has several books on this. One of the first ones was Double Double, but he has other ones called Meetings Suck. He has a Vivid Vision. He’s a great author. It’s very easy to read books and understand. They have actionable things that you can do.

Another one, a couple of books by Jocko Willink, Dichotomy of Leadership. It is an awesome book. He also has Leadership Strategy and Tactics, which is a field manual that gives you playbooks of how to find opportunities to better lead your team instead of just managing them. There’s Traction by Gino Wickman. This is a way in which you can incorporate processes into your business and find successful processes and have your team replicate those processes.

The CEO within another great book that I’ve come across, and then most of the stuff by John Maxwell is absolutely incredible. That’s part two, which is production leverage. You are producing wealth which I believe is the one you have the greatest return and there are infinite possibilities, but you have to understand the ideas of leverage.

Find ways in which you ingrain that in your mind because your body and mindset is pretty much influenced to do the exact opposite because that’s how we have been raised in this United States society, under this hierarchical management-driven, fear-driven, whiplash-driven society, and that’s not the way to lead. That’s not how you create leverage. Next episode, we’re going to talk about financial habits, some of the few things you can do to institute financial habits that will create wealth. Thanks for reading. We’ll see you back next episode. Bye.

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How To Bring Your Life To The Next Level

RTW 43 | Commercial Real Estate

 

We will not succeed if we simply stay where we are and refuse change or improvement. But trudging the path to the next level of your life means facing your anxieties, financial challenges, and personal issues. To address this, Patrick Donohoe presents his course, The Wealth Standard, which focuses on helping people embrace a better version of themselves. He concentrates on getting rid of the thoughts that limit our beliefs, finding your true value as a worker, and looking at leadership from a brand new perspective. Self-fulfillment can only be achieved if you know where you are leading your life, and it starts by transforming yourself.

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How To Bring Your Life To The Next Level

I’m grateful to share some thoughts with you. It’s been a while since I made an episode, especially a solo one, but I’m back. I’ve spent time developing and creating content for the new digital course that has officially launched. You guys can get more information about that course by going to Go.TheWealthStandard.com/freedom. What I like to do is talk a bit about the course, how I came up with the content, but then also unpack and dive into some of the primary themes in the responses you gave me through your candid feedback, as well as thoughtful responses to questions. That’s where I’ll start because the course is something I could have assumed I knew what you needed, what you would have valued, what was holding you back in your particular situation.

I’ve done that in the past. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This go-around, I decided to get responses from you to understand your world, what holds you back, and what are some of the obstacles that you’re facing. I’m humbled by the hundreds of responses I received. It made me dig down deep to understand the true root cause of those challenges, obstacles and limitations that are holding you back. What I discovered is that these are some things that have held me back in the past. These are parts of the human experience. We’re faced with similar obstacles, at the same time, the situations are all different.

I’m grateful to you. I’m grateful to have been able to think through the way in which the curriculum is created and the exercises were formulated. If you want to take your life to the next level, then this is a course that is for you. It has a 30-day money back guarantee. If you buy it and you hate it, don’t like it, too intense, too much information, I didn’t even give you all the information at one side to stagger it out week upon week because of how much is in there, but I’ll give you your money back, no questions asked. What I’d like to do is get into a couple of the primary themes that I saw in the responses that you gave me. I believe that this will give you insight into how I developed some of the information as well as exercises.

RTW 43 | Commercial Real Estate

The Next Level:  Today’s society wants things quick and fast, and with the snap of a finger or a click of a button.

 

A Year of Disruption

Thank you for investing your time and your energy. It says a lot about you and it means a lot to me because I’m inspired by those who are driven, those that are seeking information to improve their lives. I’m grateful to you. 2020 was a year of disruption. This season has been disrupted, especially here in Utah, and we weren’t able to gather as we have in the past. It makes you think about how grateful you are for the things that you have, because when they’re taken away, that provides that polarity. 2020 has been full of those opportunities. I hope you have passed your weekend grateful and had a wonderful experience. I haven’t done an episode in a while. Many of you know that I have been working on a digital course since I’ve been neck deep in recording, re-recording, and it’s been a great experience. This go-around has been different because of your involvement. I had reached out to a number of segments of the audience and pulled them, and requested feedback and answers to questions. This go-around, I wanted to create content, create a course that served you at a higher level by addressing your primary concerns, your anxieties, the things that are holding you back the most from achieving that next level of life, that financial freedom or financial independence that you and everybody else is ultimately seeking.

Your responses were heartfelt and your candor was incredible. I’m appreciative and grateful for that. What I’d like to do is give you a snippet of what the course is going to entail by addressing one of the patterns that I’ve seen throughout the responses. These are patterns are everywhere and they’re in greater magnitude these days. I believe we live in a society that wants things quick and fast with the snap of a finger or a click of a button, and looking at freedom and achieving that level of life, and then continuing to achieve it because it is not a one-time event. It’s challenging for most because they see it as a possibility, whether it’s what they see on social media, whether it’s what they read in books.

That pursuit and desire is amplified. I have had the fortunate opportunity of working with a lot of people with their personal finances. I’ve come to these conclusions or these realizations that ultimately, money is a part of the equation, but it is not the primary variable to freedom and independence. Hopefully, that comes out in what I’ll talk about. There are practical strategies, things to do, things to do differently, things to stop doing, things to start doing, but there is a mindset shift that is necessary. The variables or the components of that mindset shift will be evident because not only do I want to go through a specific response to a question. The question being, what are the primary obstacles that are holding you back from living a life at the next level? It pertains to a person, but you can substitute any obstacle that you have, where you stand in a specific place in life.

RTW 43 | Commercial Real Estate

The Next Level:  If a business wants to grow, it has to innovate and find better ways to meet the needs of their customers.

 

There is a future that you desire and you yearn for. There’s a gap or an in-between. There is what needs to take place in order for you to be at that level. Our psyche often times puts these barriers in place and prevents us from taking risks because naturally we want to avoid fear, and that fear is embedded in our DNA. Mostly it’s irrational at the same time because it’s built into us. It’s challenging for us to rationalize being able to confront it and overcome it. Let’s get into this example. I hope you find some meaning and some value in it. The course is life. Version one is up. I plan on doing lots of iteration and that’s why I kept the price point on the course low so that I can get a bunch of users experiencing it, giving feedback with both the exercises that are there, as well as the content and continue to iterate and make it even more valuable.

You can go check out version one. If you buy this first version, even though the price is going to go up in the future, you can get all those different versions, those upgrades for free, but you can go to Go.TheWealthStandard.com/freedom. This is the obstacle that I’m going to be addressing. The question, what are the primary obstacles that are standing in the way between where you are now and where you want to be in the future, that life at the next level? This specific response was short but I saw this pattern in dozens, if not more of the responses, and there were hundreds of responses. This one was, “I don’t have a business. I am an employee.” These are obstacles you can replace whatever obstacle you have as you ask yourself that question, what is the primary thing that is in the way of me achieving that life at the next level? “I don’t have a business, I’m an employee.”

There could be a multitude of meaning within what they have responded. I’m going to get into a few of them, but it’s an obstacle. The first thing is having a business. If that is the barrier that’s in the way to achieving an amazing life, business is a masochistic and risky way of doing it because the majority of businesses do not succeed. The majority of business owners who get divorced lose their relationships with their kids. They put huge investments and lose those investments, and put people’s lives on the line.

Money is a part of the equation, but it is not the primary variable to freedom and independence. Click To Tweet

Achieving Financial Independence

It’s stressful. I’ve been in business for several years and almost going out of business a number of times. There’s a deep desire inside of me that pushed me through and had me persevere through some challenging times where I wanted to be done, but going to life at the next level as business owner, there are even more opportunities and possibilities to achieve financial independence and meaningful life by being an employee. That’s what I’m going to focus my attention because in the end, I believe that successful business and being a successful employee have same dynamic. The only difference is scale, because a business provides a service. An employee provides a service. If a business wants to grow, they have to innovate and find better ways to meet the needs of their customers.

If it’s an employee, it’s a great way to innovate where you can look at the service and the value you’re being paid for, and find ways to improve the value to reach and meet the needs of the person that’s paying you. It’s a different perspective. Sometimes employees look at this entitlement where they should receive a raise for doing nothing. You can flip that and ultimately get even more money through bonuses, raises and position increases. They allow you to make more money and with that additional money, it’s making investment. It’s saving and establishing what I define as financial independence. For those of you who have read the book, you are familiar with this. It’s when 50% of your income comes from the cashflow of investments. The other 50% comes from doing meaningful work on your terms.

Fifty percent can be established by making a lot of money as an employee, but along the way, the resume you build, the human life value balance sheet that you create by your experiences, by the relationships and the network you’ve built can position you to spend twenty hours a week doing meaningful work, and being paid a multiple of what you are paid now. That’s what I’m going to get into because the dynamic, the components, the variables of success of both a business and an employee are the exact same thing. The only difference is scale but I’m going to give you some ideas as far as scale is concerned and how to scale yourself as an employee. The first thing I’m going to do, and this is where I took a direction with a course based on the responses you gave me, because there are many different tactics, strategies, ideas, advice and insight I could give you, but unless there is a breakthrough with your psychology, then all you’re going to be doing is looking for what’s wrong.

RTW 43 | Commercial Real Estate

The Next Level: 50% of income comes from the cashflow of investments. The other 50% comes from doing meaningful work on your terms.

 

Limiting Belief

You’re going to be trying to find this confirmation bias, it’s finding the evidence of why your obstacle and what you’ve stayed as your limiting belief is true. Until you can start to question the validity of your limiting belief, no solutions are going to resonate. That’s where I’m going to start. There are some exercises in the course that facilitate the breakthroughs that you can have in order to look at yourself, your beliefs, and your limiting beliefs differently, creating empowering beliefs, and positioning your psychology so that you can be open to the slew and myriad of opportunities that are all around you. I’m going to use a simple example, but there are much more deep and profound experiences within the course that you are going to find fascinating. These are the experiences that I’ve had over the last few years that have given me tremendous breakthrough in my own personal life and my own happiness in my business.

I replicated those for your benefit, but I’m going to go through one. If I was talking to a client, an employee, a friend, my wife or my kids, and we were having a conversation about something that is holding you back, what I would first do is to address the feelings and emotions associated with that limiting beliefs. In this case, the limiting belief is, “I have to have a business. I’m an employee. I have to have business in order for me to be free.” When you think about that, financial independence and life of the next level isn’t possible because in order to do that, you have to have a business. You have to do your own thing.

How does that make you feel? The response is, “I feel held back. I feel frustrated. I’m not motivated. I’m challenged.” I would follow up with, “When you feel this way, do you even want to pursue anything that could potentially get you there? The answer is, “No way, I don’t even want to take that first step.” When you tell yourself this story that you have to own a business in order to be financially independent, in order to achieve the next level of life, you have all the information and you’ve pulled everybody. Do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that that statement is true? That in order for you to be financially independent and live a life of the next level, you have to own a business.

Unless there is a breakthrough with your psychology, all you're going to be doing is looking for what's wrong. Click To Tweet

This is where the eyes roll sometimes, but that’s intentional because what it does is it gets a person to say that “No, I don’t have all of the information. It could be possible that life of the next level is there, and I don’t have to own a business in order to achieve it.” First, it interrupts the belief or that confirmation bias. We’re looking for information to validate what we already believe. What this does is it opens our mind to this new opportunity that it is possible. Simply saying the words that, “I don’t have all the information. It could be possible.” It’s associating the emotions with it. The emotions are those agents of confirmation.

The emotion is if it were true that you didn’t have to be a business owner. You could be an employee to achieve that level of financial independence. How does that make you feel? That’s when they say, “I’m optimistic. I feel that it’s possible. I believe that there may be somebody out there that can help me or give me some insight or give me some information for me to believe that even more.” That’s where it starts. That’s the first domino that needs to be knocked down in order to start positioning strategy. That’s where limitations are concerned and why I positioned the first part of this digital course as breaking through the limiting beliefs.

Following that up with the actual strategies, a person can pursue to make changes, to make adjustments, to get more information, and to execute on that information. I know that if I started with that like I have in the past, most individuals are not in the mindset. They don’t have the psychology of making changes. In one episode that I did, the biggest fears that people have are being wrong and having to change. This is one of the exercises that could potentially work. In this digital course, there are a few other exercises that help you navigate through some of those limiting beliefs and start to replace them with empowering beliefs. Let’s get into solutions because psychology is one thing, but if you’re open to new possibilities and to having additional information, change is likely not to occur.

Value As An Employee

RTW 43 | Commercial Real Estate

The Wealth of Nations

A business and employee are similar. They both provide a service of value in which they’re paid for. The only difference is scale. In a business, multiple people are involved. A famous definition of scalability is by Adam Smith when he talks about the pen factory in his book, The Wealth of Nations, where he identified that one person making all the different parts of a pen and putting it together has a certain amount of output at the end of the day. If you divide that labor, the division of labor, where multiple people are involved, each of them is responsible for one piece of the assembly, then you’re able to have scalability. The output is a multiple. That’s the idea of scale. There’s scalability possible for an employee, but you first have to identify the value that you provide as an employee. We’re all wired to look at ourselves and to come to a determination of why we’re valuable, rarely do people step outside of them and define, “Why does an employer think I’m valuable? What do I do? What is it about what I do that I’m paid for?”

This comes down to doing an audit of the different tasks and responsibilities and where you spend your time during the day. There are tasks that are meaningless or tasks that have low value. There are the tasks and the value that you’re paid for. In the process of doing this, you’re starting to look at yourself as the customer or the client. The patron looks at you, in this case, it’s your employer. This is a key to business. Peter Drucker says that to grow a business, you have to have focus on two things, innovation and marketing. Innovation is constantly finding even better ways to serve and meet the needs of your customer or client. Marketing is getting people to do more business with you. Looking at employee and employer relationship, this is where you start to understand the needs of the employer. What are they trying to do? What’s their revision? Were they trying to achieve? What are they trying to accomplish? How can I do something potentially different to bring even more value to them? If you go through this process as an employee and bring that success to a business, you’re going to have a much higher likelihood of being a success in business.

You might as well figure out how to do it as an employee first. I look at being an employee as one of the most incredible ways to experiment and to do things that potentially could be incredibly risky as a business, but doing it as an employee, there’s more agility and resilience because you can try things. If it doesn’t work, try something else. The worst thing is you can get a slap on the hand or get fired, but then you can go find another position where as a business, there are people’s jobs that are on the line. There are expenses, leases and other commitments that you’ve made that are on the line. Whereas an employee, there’s more resilience associated with experimenting on the ways in which you can create even more value. Coming from an employee, it’s finding leverage in the tasks that you’re already doing and defining all the different things you do throughout the day and what you’re paid for. As you look for more ways to scale, that’s an easier way to scale.

Identify yourself as the asset, find out why you're paid, and figure out how to make that asset even more valuable. Click To Tweet

Looking at it from a position standpoint, are there other positions that you would be better at, that you could be paid for? This is going to, what’s your skillset? What’s your experience? What do you love doing? That’s going to give you those nuggets where you can start to look for other positions, whether it’s inside the company that you’re with or within the employee base of another company. Nonetheless, it’s starting to identify yourself as the asset and find out why you’re paid and figuring out how to make that asset even more valuable. There’s an eBook that I wrote a number of years ago before my official book came out and it’s essentially how to invest in a $50 million asset, which is you.

A Look At Leadership

What it does is it shows the math behind instead of getting a 3% raise per year, which is customary, you get a 10% raise per year. That 10% doesn’t come about by entitlement. That 10% is going to come about by you being more valuable and demonstrate that in the digital course as well. Let’s segue into an essential variable or dynamic of a successful business. It’s also an essential component of a successful employee. This is leadership. We are conditioned in our society to look at leadership from a hierarchical perspective. There is tenure within the public-school systems. There is the vice principal, the principal, the superintendent, the same structure exists in government. In corporations, the same structure exists.

We get this idea that leadership is management, but I believe that management in and of itself is a horrible way to get leverage. Leadership-focused management is an empowering way. Management is getting people to do things whether it’s usually by a stick. Rarely it’s a carrot, but I believe that even stick and carrot are limiting. There is a way in which you can empower people to do good work. Leadership is a huge opportunity because the majority of employees are conditioned to look at leadership as a hierarchical management structure. I think that’s limiting. It’s figuring out how to hone in on your leadership abilities, your ability to involve others in projects and get scale. Use that division of labor dynamic. This could come from reading books and taking courses. It’s the experimentation side of things. It’s learning how to be a good leader, finding mentors whether it’s direct or indirect, and incorporating their style of handling meetings, their style of executing projects or being part of a project.

RTW 43 | Commercial Real Estate

The Next Level: Focus on the areas that you’re best at and allow others to fill roles that they’re best at.

 

The leadership dynamic is huge because it’s empowering people, especially in our day and age, when you have a fleeting employee base, where employees are jumping from company to company for a 2%, 3%, 4% raise. Maybe a little bit more benefit here. What’s going to keep them is good leadership, which is caring, empathy, but also instilling in them a desire to do good work and even more good work after they’ve done the initial good work. Leadership is huge because that’s when you can work in teams and get way more done. You can focus on the areas that you’re best at, and allow others to fill roles that they’re best at.

A Meaningful Life

That right there brings about a greater output. That is essential for scaling as an employee. I know a lot of people that make high six figures and even seven figures in the employee world. This is where sometimes research into, what is the maximum income that you can earn in your position or a position that you desire? What does that look like? Start to define what is inside of the gap between where you’re at right now, what you’re paid for and what a person at that caliber is paid for. All along the way, you’re making more money. The point is it’s not to solely reliant on your profession to achieve that end result, that financial independence or a meaningful life.

It equips you to, number one, establish an asset base that is providing cashflow that covers your lifestyle. Second, it’s to be able to evaluate what you’re doing inside of your work as an employee and always, either find ways to have more enjoyment, success, achievement and fulfillment. If you don’t, you have a lot more latitude because of how you’ve established your assets to either move to a consultant position or to a part-time position. Move from company to company, if that environment is not suitable to the terms and conditions you set up for yourself as far as defining a meaningful life and a meaningful career.

In the end, retirement is a flawed idea, which is 100% living off your assets. We’re wired to create value. We’re wired to contribute and improve the lives of others and in the process, improve our own lives. That’s a natural occurring energy that keeps us alive, happy and fulfilled. Without it, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, fulfillment is unlikely. Looking at the continual pursuit of improving yourself as an asset, whether you own a business or not is going to be vital to achieving this financial independence, whatever that next level looks like for you. This is where it all end. Even if you get to that 6, 7 figures and you’re a highly valued or highly paid employee, it doesn’t mean that you have to stay in those positions. You can look at consultant positions and being on boards.

You could be part-time. You could be a contractor or a free freelancer, and do work from anywhere in the world on your terms. That’s where a big piece of the course comes is to help you define what are the terms. What is the criteria? What is life of the next level look like? You can define that first and have that end result always in your mind. More often than not, people don’t necessarily come up with a clear definition of what they’re after or the results that they want. They go through the motions on a daily basis without the milestones that are necessary to get to that end result. The clarity that one can get from establishing that ideal life and a life on their terms is powerful.

Unequivocally, I see individuals coming to the conclusion and realization that to live life at that level, it doesn’t require what they thought it was going to require. It’s a lot easier. At the same time, this is a process. There are many people that are struggling because of our environment. I empathize with that. I understand that there is disruption. At the same time, there are incredible opportunities for those that exercise the fortitude of a healthy and abundant mindset because opportunities are everywhere. Thanks again for reading. Thanks for investing your time into educating yourself. Hopefully, this message has resonated with you. Go check out this new course called A Path to Financial Independence. It’s at Go.TheWealthStandard.com/freedom. Next, I’m going to be tackling another insightful obstacle that many of you had expressed in relation to achieving that life at the next level, and that is taking time and money away from family. In this case, wife and children. It’s the confidence to commit more time and money into a business, but also keeping spouse and children in mind. That’s what I’m going to tackle next. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

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The Pursuit Of Wealth And Human Behavior

 

How you see wealth affects how wealth arrives at you. At its core, it is the human behavior that drives the kind of wealth we will have. In this episode, Patrick Donohoe talks about why wealth is in direct proportion to your human behavior. He discusses the importance of identifying your reasons for pursuing wealth, taking us into the results, the purpose, and the action plan. At the end of the day, everything is about how we understand ourselves. Follow Patrick as he explores the ways we manifest ourselves into the wealth we’re seeking after.

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The Pursuit Of Wealth And Human Behavior

Thank you for reading this episode. I’m grateful that you’re here. I hope you have enjoyed the last couple of shows. I’m excited to share it. There’s a lot on my mind and I feel it would be beneficial and helpful to you, readers. I’m going to get into my topic. My topic is, I would say a summary of a lot of the episodes that have been done and it speaks to the individual regardless of what stage of life you’re in. The topic is how your wealth is in direct proportion to your understanding of human behavior, starting with your own? I look at the pursuit of wealth and the reasons and purpose behind it, the actual results that are desired. Oftentimes it’s narrow, especially for me and the pursuits I’ve had in life.

The reason why I say that is an understanding of what it is you’re after first is paramount. What you’re after is a status or signaling, meaning you want to achieve wealth because of how it makes you look or how it positions you in the pecking order of the hierarchical order. I feel sometimes that’s a good igniter potentially at the same time, it’s not a lasting igniter and I’ll give you an example. I’ve had the opportunity and fortunate to have met, consulted, and advised hundreds from thousands of people. In conversations with a client of mine, he is successful in business. Investing incredibly well for himself and that was not necessarily the result that he wanted, but he didn’t realize that until it was too late. He achieved so much more than his parents and siblings. He got to a point where he had wealth that would last beyond his lifetime and his kids’ lifetime, but he lost his marriage and relationship with his kids. There was a huge concentration on achieving a financial and wealth outcome, concentrate on financial wealth. It was not until the end where he realized that the results he wanted were to have his money, provide a certain lifestyle, and experience with his family. It’s important to understand the results upfront. I feel that there’s always a drive behind what we’re after and identifying what that is will help us to better prepare.

The results are important first. The purpose of the results is second. Third, it’s the action plan behind it. Human behavior, as you can see, it’s the understanding starts with understanding yourself, being self-aware. I look at the lifestyle that we all get to live in the United States in this day and age and comparatively speaking to those that lived 200, 300, 400 years ago, we’re celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing on Plymouth Rock and the lifestyle that those individuals led are incomprehensible to us. If you’ll understand the history there they had an incredibly rough time coming across the ocean, as well as surviving in those first few months, the majority of the party died. I look at the lifestyle we live now and how things are progressing. We are fortunate. We have the technology, sustenance that continues to be cheaper and cheaper, communication, experiences, movies, entertainment that’s endless, and yet a lot of people are not satisfied. They want more and I include myself in that. The reason why I wanted to do this show is it helps me articulate and create some accountability for myself by understanding what I want.

Pursuing comfort will end up making us uncomfortable because it's in the uncomfortable situations that we grow and find meaning. Click To Tweet

Understanding the result that’s what I want. Is it signaling and status, or is it truly to live a lifestyle that is fulfilling and meaning? I get to number one, understanding of human behavior, your own, but then understanding human behavior, the others’ behavior. What makes them tick? Why did they act? I feel there are a couple of examples that are timely. Number one, it’s, what’s going on with the quarantine, with COVID, the divisiveness of our culture, politics, I would say also it’s demographic divisiveness, the young versus the old that’s going to grow as well potentially. I look at what’s being done to combat this and I’ll first talk about the government and their intervention into human behavior. Based on the quarantine, the shutdown, people not able to go to work, there was a Band-Aid of unemployment benefits and stimulus. I believe that Band-Aid stifled what I feel is one of the most incredible aspects of human behavior, which is figuring out solutions during difficult times, but when a safety net exists, that safety net prevents that innovation and growth. Although I understand why the government did what they did, I also understand that human behavior where we shine as a human was prevented and we’re not going to understand the opportunity costs of that.

At the same time, I look at the unintended consequences of keeping people at home and specifically the unemployment benefits that were spread almost equally throughout the entire country that gave some people more than they needed, some people less than they needed. Also, what it did is it provided a choice and the choice was to either accept those benefits and not go to work, or to not accept those benefits and to continue working. Those that had opportunities to continue to work did not in many cases. There was a financial incentive to not work and that is also something that is paradoxical where our natural tendency does not experience difficulty, challenge, hardship, and pursuing comfort. At the same time, pursuing comfort will end up making us uncomfortable because it’s in the uncomfortable situations that we grow and find meaning. It’s interesting to see what’s going on in markets and with employment. I look at the unintended consequence associated with a stimulus with unemployment benefits is companies are figuring out how to operate more efficiently. You have companies that are operating remotely now. I know Facebook announced that they will have 100% remote employment until the summer of 2021. Google, Twitter, and a lot of other companies are doing the same thing.

There are also companies that I would say do not have deep pockets like those tech companies that are understanding that they can operate, be more profitable without office space or less office space, as well as not hiring back. Employment is coming back. There was a jobs report that almost two million jobs were added back, so unemployment is at 10%. At the same time that is a healthy number. There are businesses that are gone for good. Looking at what’s to come, we don’t know, but I would say what gives you signals? What gives you signs? The identification of opportunity is by understanding human behavior, understanding what people are going to do. I look at the understanding of this, markets, freedom, and independence but my understanding is not the same as others. Looking at what’s going on with regards to divisiveness, I see capitalism being demonized. I understand why, at the same time I look at when it comes to those that have, and those that don’t have. There is an overwhelming influence to punish those that have, and to reward those that don’t have to create equality. Equality is not based on equal opportunities. Equality is based on outputs, and that is extremely unfair. Equality of input, I understand. Equality of output, that is where it goes sideways because in the end, financial wealth is a function of results and value if done honestly and ethically.

TWS 56 | Wealth And Human Behavior

Wealth And Human Behavior: One of the most incredible aspects of human behavior is figuring out solutions during difficult times, but when a safety net exists, that safety net prevents that innovation and growth.

 

All people are wired differently and some are motivated to do a lot of work. Some are brilliant and can work in teams. Others don’t do and therefore people want equality of output based on inequality of input. That’s destructive and harmful to a growing and innovative economy. If you want more information on that, you can go and read the episode I did, it was 2018, maybe 2019 about capitalism. I understand there’s a definition difference with people not understanding necessarily what capitalism truly means. They confuse it with other ideas but I look at now there’s a war going on. Those that understand the principle and the true nature of what a capitalist society brings are their voices is being drowned out and that’s unfortunate. At the same time, I’m hoping that it provides an opportunity through disruption for those too to understand at a different level. The youth now have that opportunity. It’s going to be interesting to see how things play out. The last thing I want to talk about is when you understand human behavior, when you understand how people respond to certain events and activities, what it does, it puts you in the position of opportunity.

Number one, it’s the opportunity to provide value to serve, to help. It’s the opportunity to purchase assets at discounts and make a profit. It’s an opportunity to start a business and merge with another business because in the end, all human beings have their short-sightedness and they make mistakes. During times of massive disruption, that’s more prevalent. I look at something that is important to me, which is trying to figure out what’s going to happen in the future. What are the likely outcomes so that I can understand what to do? On the video, you can see that Wayne Gretzky is above my right shoulder. I have that up there not for the reason I’m going to explain but I had that up there because Wayne Gretzky was an average build, speed, strength, yet he understood his environment better than anyone, and that’s what made him good. That’s a whole other episode, but he has a statement that is glib and over and used all the time, which is, “It’s not about where the puck is. It’s where the puck is going.” If you understand human behavior, you’re going to be able to identify where things are going and with regard to jobs, employment, and in college.

This is on my mind a lot because my kids are at home. I’m sympathetic to all of you out there. They’re trying to navigate kids being home, even more, their education, the experience they have keeping them occupied and productive. There are many distractions and I know it’s a full-time job to keep kids on point. I did a webinar with a good friend of mine, Tom Wheelwright. Tom and I talked about the drive parents have to provide for their kid’s futures. I look at the love and care I have for my children and also kids that are not my children, whether it’s good friends of mine, my niece and nephews. I have one niece and everyone else’s nephew, although those are boys. The care and love I have for them and their wellbeing instinctively makes me want to provide for them. Give them what they need, whether it’s shelter, gifts, or an awesome birthday or Christmas experience. On one part, I understand where that motivation comes from I feel I am putting my kids in a worse situation because they don’t experience much scarcity. They experience a lot of abundances. That’s the case with most children these days.

Life is not linear. It is volatile, and the volatility and the challenge allow people to rise to the occasion and figure their life out. Click To Tweet

The reason why I’m saying that is with regards to wanting what’s best for our kids, education-wise, we are following a cognitive bias of status quo. It’s what society says is the right thing to do. It’s what everybody else is doing. I look at our pursuit of education for our kids and this education continues to be less valuable, relevant and is essentially going to set our kids up for more unlearning in the future than learning. This is what I’ll end with and this comes to human behavior. If you know where the puck is going, what people trend too, and what they try to do collectively, then hopefully this will resonate. I’ll make that statement first, which is if you think about 400 years ago, the Mayflower landing on Plymouth Rock until now, all innovation and human behavior have been to the hierarchy of needs that I’ve spoken about in numerous episodes. It’s to figure out a way to provide for the most efficient way possible, food, shelter, clothing, your physiological needs, and that I would say, the expense as far as physiological needs are nil. You go to safety, providing a safe environment then you go to relationships. Look at the social media movement and how much people thrive on understanding the lives of someone else and how driven they are to spend enormous amounts of money and time being involved with other people’s lives, even strangers through social media and where that has gone.

The next level of the hierarchy of needs is the self-interest or ego, self-important, self-awareness, there are a lot of different subcategories to that. This is also prevalent in social media where it is a platform, so people can feel important. That is a natural drive that we all have. All of these areas are continuing to get less expensive. The future as far as our sustenance and our safety, there’s innovation, there’s money, resource, mind, and ideas going into energy, transportation, computing power, and robotics. The list is endless, which is going to drive down the cost of sustenance. What this does is it puts human beings in the position of the careers, jobs that no longer exist in the future. As Tom and I were talking on this webinar, as I prepared for it and thought about it, I identified some areas of employment and industry that are timeless. The pursuit of these, especially by children, kids, is going to be infinitely more valuable than any formal education will provide. The first thing I talked about which is leadership, understanding how to work in teams, especially how to work with people that are strangers that may have a different cultural background. That’s huge. Being able to do that effectively allows the leverage and maximization of individual gifts, abilities, and talents so that they all come together like a puzzle, individual pieces.

It’s profound when a team works together when they have a leader that is able to motivate, empathize, and give vision to an objective. The second thing is sales and communication. Being able to communicate a point, being able to find what a person wants and give them what they want. I would think within sales and communication, copywriting, creative writing storytelling is some of those subsections. Marketing is a fascinating science and it applies to everything and we’ll apply it to everything. I’m almost done with the book by Brian Kurtz, who is a marketer that started out in the ’70s and is still marketing now. He has gone through all the different platforms and mediums of marketing, yet teaches in his book Overdeliver timeless principles of marketing that have not changed even though technology and platforms have. Computer programming, everything is driven by computers yet there is rarely meaningful education and understanding by those that teach in the formal education system. It’s improving. At the same time, computer programming does not require elementary school, middle school, high school, or college. There are six-figure positions, both from a consulting, freelancer, self-employed standpoint and the demand and need is growing yet, the amount of education that goes into it in the formal sense is it’s nowhere.

TWS 56 | Wealth And Human Behavior

Wealth And Human Behavior: It’s profound when a team works together, and they have a leader that is able to motivate, empathize, and give vision to an objective.

 

A computer program, it could be application development. It could be UX and UI design, User Experience, User Interface design, which is essentially how we experience technology. Computers are essentially running everything whether it’s a website, it’s hardware or its software, computer programming in the future. I’m even going to take some fundamental courses because computer programming has to do with thinking models and understanding how a sequence of steps and events relate to certain outcomes. It’s a fascinating science that I’m going to dive into a little bit. I also believe that within marketing, within computer programming is the understanding of how relationships are formed, both professional relationships and friendships. There is something worth researching, which is the 12 Levels of Intimacy. Ryan Deiss who’s the Founder of DigitalMarketer.com sold me on something and it hit me smack dab in the middle of my forehead and it’s the 12 Levels of Intimacy. He didn’t come up with this. This is by someone that has long passed, but it talks about the steps and stages a relationship must go to, or else it’s considered harassment or assault if you skip steps.

Many people skip steps in relationship building. The 12 Levels of Intimacy is profound and it’s helped me to understand the relationship with my wife, better relationship with my children, and strangers, where relationships have to go through steps. If they don’t, then it’s considered a turnoff. It could even be harassment or assault. It’s fascinating to understand how people experience relationships in that degree of psychology. The final thing that I’ll say is social media. Social media is here to stay. It’s a part of business and relationship building. Although there is a lot of evil and bad things that happen on social media, there’s a lot of good that’s created. That is going to continue to be flushed out. Typically, the principle is what ends up being the equilibrium. At the same time, it’s going to oscillate back and forth into the evil, bad, to the good and profound but social media is part of the business. Branding, relationship building is here to stay yet it’s not taught in schools. It’s not taught in the formal sense. My charge to you through all of this is understanding human behavior at a different level is in direct proportion to the amount of wealth you’re going to have. It’s not financial wealth. It’s also your experience of life. We live in a blessed time. At the same time, we are experiencing challenges that have never been experienced in the past.

This is how life is where it is not linear. It is volatile and the volatility and the challenge allow people to rise to the occasion and figure their life out, figure problems out. I look at, what I’ve studied, what I’m intrigued by, what I’m fascinated by is our experience of life and what we wake up and do every day. How are our habits formed? How are our passions created? How did we start to identify what fulfills us and makes us happy? This is the last thing I’ll say and even though I say this, I’d be lying to say that I practice this all the time. It’s difficult to practice, but there are three degrees of relationship. The first degree is a selfish relationship. The second is horse-trading or exchange base. That means that you’re in a relationship as long as somebody gives you what you want, you’re willing to give them what they want.

The key to the ultimate fulfillment is being able to be motivated all the time by blessing the life of somebody else. Click To Tweet

The final, I would say the more enlightened level is unselfish. The others’ needs are your needs, but they come first. This is the key to the ultimate fulfillment, being able to be motivated all the time by blessing the life of somebody else, whether it’s a spouse, partner, friend, child or colleague where you put others’ interests before your own and try to serve them at the highest level possible. That ultimately seems counterintuitive, at the same time service always brings more fulfillment than self-service. It is the ultimate self-service if you think about it. Thanks for letting me riff. I appreciate it. I hope you learned something. It helped me to express myself and understand what I’ve been reading and thinking about. I appreciate those that have read and I would love to hear your feedback. Hit me up on social media, email at Hello@TheWealthStandard.com. I’d love to hear from you. Continue to have a positive mindset. Look for opportunities to find ways in which you can help others. I know it’s going to improve your overall wealth, success, fulfillment, and happiness. That’s it. We’ll see you. Take care.

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Top 5 Financial Actions You Can Do During Times Of Crisis (Part 1)

TWS 45 | Financial Actions

 

We are right smack in the middle of a crisis, and we are yet to see some ripple effects that will profoundly impact almost every aspect of our lives. Now is the time to be prepared and take some essential financial actions that will allow you to seize the opportunities that come once the worst is over. In the first episode of this two-part series, Patrick Donohoe elaborates two of the five things you can do to make the best, financially speaking, of the opportunity the current crisis presents. He talks about having the right state and mindset and creating a structure from which you can anchor your goals on. Join in and be prepared to make the best out of the situation and thrive in the post-crisis world.

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Top 5 Financial Actions You Can Do During Times Of Crisis (Part 1)

I’m doing this one solo. There are going to be two parts. The first part is going to be probably number 1 and 2 of what I consider the Top Financial Actions to Take During Times of Crisis. Part two will consist of the Final Three Actions During Times of Crisis. I felt it was important to speak about this. The guests that I’ve had on before, we’ve all spoken to what’s going on with regards to COVID-19. The disruption to the economy. As I’ve had some time to digest, to think about, what is going on? What are the ripple effects based on this rock in the water? How long is it going to last? What are they going to be? What to pay attention to? I’m finally ready to start speaking to that. Things that you as an audience can do to prepare yourself to capitalize on the situation. That’s what I’m going to start into. There are a lot of updates that we’ve been making through the show. We’re creating our resources page for you. You can find it at TheWealthStandard.com. It consists of some of the businesses of guests that we’ve had. It also consists of courses that I’ve done. Let’s go ahead and get into it.

As I look back the world has changed dramatically and it’s happened quickly. I remember 2008, 2009 where I was in some pretty rough shape. I was starting a business and having the financial crisis in sue, it felt quick. It was one week after another week, and it continued to get worse then it gets better. It was one step forward, three steps back. I look at where we’re at as a society and it’s been interesting. It’s easy to talk about the things that you can’t control. It’s easy to put blame on media. It’s easy to say this or that regarding where the virus came from and what China did or didn’t do? What the president should or shouldn’t have done? There are many things that we focus our attention on that we have no control over.

I got caught up in that and I get it. These are some dire times and often when we start to hear statistics and soundbites, it engages this unconscious part of who we are and we start to react to things. I’ve caught myself to that a number of times. At the same time, the guests that we’ve had on and what we’ve talked about, as well as some of the material that I’m reading, videos that I’m watching with a lot of time to study and reflect that I didn’t necessarily have before. I’ve come to at least conclusions to the point of, “What can you do to influence your life?” Some things that you can do, you can control things to be aware of so you can make the best of this and you can capitalize on this opportunity.

Firstly I’m going to dive into is, we’re going to be experiencing some ripple effects. What’s a ripple effect? Ripple effect is, a drop us a stone in the water or rock in the water. You can even have an earthquake under the ocean and you have a tsunami. There’s obviously a spectrum of how big a ripple could be, the magnitude of a ripple. We don’t realize that it wasn’t an earthquake of sorts. It wasn’t a pebble or a rock in the water. It was an earthquake. The earthquake waves are still coming. Some of the statistics that represent this is, if you look at quarter one January, February, and March, we only had disruption to the first quarter in the latter part of March. If you look at productivity, there are different measurements of productivity of people.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a couple of them. It was down in quarter one by negative 2.5% which is huge. You have the velocity of money not to get into the complexities of it. When I spend $1 at a coffee shop, the coffee shop then pays their employees and the employers spend money, and then the businesses that the employees spend money. There’s this money multiplier. M2, which is one of the common ways to measure the velocity of money has also gone down significantly, and the stimulus that is done. Whether it’s quantitative easing since 2008, whether it’s what they’re doing now, it’s not working at all. It’s keeping things at bay.

Humanity rises in times of massive disruptions. Click To Tweet

We had some employment figures out, which were shy of 15%, but it didn’t take into consideration some critical weeks. There are estimates that unemployment’s 20%, 25%, maybe even more when you count underemployed in there. GDP is going to take a massive hit because nobody’s out. Nobody’s spending. That right there is going to be a big indicator as to how severe, what the magnitude of this earthquake is. The psychological impact that we’ve experienced. I was talking to my parents, they live in Massachusetts and it’s different here in Utah. I’m from Connecticut, partly from Massachusetts. There’s a term called “maskhole” and it’s coming out when it comes to the masks.

My dad got shootout by these old ladies when he was standing in line and he goes down the wrong aisle or doesn’t go the right way in the aisle. The psychological damage where people are afraid. Whether there’s a reason for that or not, it’s the fact that there is psychological damage associated with people washing their hands, wearing a mask. There are some psychological things that are going to inhibit business, whether it’s theaters, transportation, going to stores in general, people interacting, which is going to have long-term effects. You also have travel. We’ve become this connected world.

This idea of globalization where different countries are doing different tasks. We’ve created a global supply chain because of it. Demand comes from this country, but yet a piece is manufactured in China, in Europe, in South America, Africa and everything comes together. That’s all been disrupted. The earthquake is hit but we haven’t seen the waves. We’ve seen some ripples or maybe some signals as to what’s coming. There are many different reasons why we could be concerned for all of this. These are things that are outside of our control. On this show, I’m going to keep repeating this, it’s based on things that are within our control, having the information that we have.

It’s powerful to look at this from how I view things because I’ve gone through some difficult times, but these are difficult times and nobody’s ever gone through. It will be interesting to see how humanity rises to the occasion. We’ve talked about the idea of creative destruction. Joseph Schumpeter, the idea that, “When there are massive disruptions, humanity rises.” Humanity is going to rise. I know that they’re going to rise. They’ve done it for millennia, they’re going to do it again and figure out ways to be more efficient, ways to create a product, and ways to create the new ways of being entertained and the list goes on and on.

The biggest thing I would say is as this disruption occurs, it’s in a person’s mind as far as what they think something means. The meaning of things is being created by the populous and collective. That’s why it’s important to have your own individual perspective information, trying to prove and disprove not just your opinion, but other opinions so that you can come to the truth. If you could do this, it is known that these are the times where the greatest opportunities are. There’s a field of study called Behavioral Economics, which talks about how people behave around money. It relates to everything.

TWS 45 | Financial Actions

Financial Actions: The psychological impact associated with this crisis is going to have long-term effects on business and human interaction.

 

It’s behavior in general as far as stimulus and then the response, what a person does given a set of circumstances that they are exposed to. There is a curve. The curve that I’m going to post is the investor mentality, but I’d also say it’s the business mentality because, during these times, there’s a story going on in people’s minds. We’re going to go back to the way it was. We’ll be able to hang on for a month and then we’ll do a lot of business and be able to pick up there. Businesses are going into the hole. It’s hanging on, hoping that things come back. This curve states that the point of maximum financial risk is where there is maximum euphoria. The whole idea of nobody buys low and sells high, everybody buys high and sells low.

I often post at my other company Paradigm Life our eLearning in our courses called the Dalbar Report. Dalbar is an independent research group. It studies the average returns people receive. It’s mainly alluding to the impact of human behavior when it comes to rates of return, not necessarily market indexes. These emotional stages that you euphoria where everyone thinks everything’s amazing this is leading up to 2020. 2019 was an amazing year for people, investors, markets, businesses, capital, and liquidity. This is the next stage of the curve, which is anxiety and denial. There’s some anxiety now. You started to see sell-off, but there’s like, “I need to get back to work.”

You see people protesting. Denial that this is going to have a long-term impact. Fear is the next stage and then it’s desperation. These three are the ones to pay attention to, denial, fear, and desperation because they can oscillate back and forth. After desperation is panic. I don’t think we’ve seen desperation yet. There’s the next stage, which is the capitulation. Maybe the investment and this business isn’t right for me. You start to see people file bankruptcy and retire early. You have despondency and between despondency and the next phase, which is depression, this is the point of maximum financial opportunity.

State And Mindset

There are other perspectives as far as this is concerned but this curve is consistent with how humans behave. Most of our behavior is unconscious. It’s pre-programmed and we operate in a similar way. That’s why this field of study has been created. That is number one, as far as what you can do to prepare yourself to capitalize on this opportunity, which is state and mindset. I consider this being the watchman at the gate of your mind. What does that mean? I’ve tried to structure the way in which I lead, do podcasts, speak, show up for my family, and show up for myself, is in a sequence. The sequence is state, story and strategy.

State is something I’ve discussed in the show. State is a function of our physical well-being, where we’re focused, and the language that we use. It’s how we describe things. There’s a difference between like, “Crap,” and “Wow, this is interesting.” Even though it can be applied to the same situation. I also look at focus. It’s what I have, not what’s missing. What I’ve gained, not what I’ve lost. You can look at anything, any situation, any circumstance, and find that there is something you will gain from it. This is all unconscious, at the same time most people gravitate toward what they’ve lost. For me, what I’ve focused my attention on and improving is my leadership capabilities, my leadership state.

With the right mindset, you can look at any situation and find something that you can gain from at the moment. Click To Tweet

Being in a zone so that I show up for my team, the audience, and my family because I know that most people are not going to respond in a strategic way. They’re going to respond in a carnal instinct way. How do you do this? First off, you’re going to recognize that there’s going to be way more bad news than there has been already and a lot of it is going to be economic. The economic is going to cause even more ripple effects. It’s a main ripple effect and then multiple ripple effects. As some of you know who’d been reading, when we started to shut down, I sent my office home when we had an almost 6.0 magnitude earthquake. I was here in the office. I was the only one. The building was shaking and swaying back and forth. It was crazy.

The reason why I brought that up is that there have been aftershocks and there’s still going on. It freaks my wife and dog out. For me, I look at, “We’re going to get a lot of aftershocks.” When the earthquake hit, we’re going to have a tsunami, ripple effects, and aftershocks. Those are going to carry ripple effects as well. The worst has not been seen yet in my opinion, from an economic standpoint. I look at being prepared, being in the right state of mind, is going to position you to create a tremendous amount of value for people and capitalize on some amazing opportunities. People will identify leaders more in this environment than in any other environment. In the euphoria environment, it’s difficult to stand out as a good leader.

In times of crisis when difficult decisions need to be made, that is when true leadership steps up and is identified. It’s the yin and the yang. The more severe the state of things in the environment, the more it creates like, “That person is an amazing leader.” The other end of the spectrum is also extended. We’re seeing murders, suicides, home invasions, and tons of crime. People are going stir crazy. The emotional intelligence that exists in people is low. What that does is present a huge opportunity for you to step up as a leader and help a lot of people with who you are in the state that you’re in.

The idea of state leads the story. When you’re in the right state when you’re looking at the glass half full as opposed to half empty. What you have versus what’s missing, what you’re grateful for as opposed to what you haven’t been given or what you deserve or you feel entitled to, it’s also one of those ideas of words because words describe what our story is. What words are we using? Are you using unbelievable or are you using, “This is horrible?” Unbelievable is a word that can connote whether good or bad. At the same time, it doesn’t have the tone or the psychology piece to it to be bad. It’s carefully choosing your words.

Being the watchman at the gate, not letting those thoughts come in, knowing how to position yourself so you can do something about it. The final thing that I would say in regards to a state in mindset is another sequence. The state that you’re in, your physical well-being, what you’re focused on, the language that you’re using, the story that you’re telling. What is going on? It’s disruption. This is a great opportunity. I have a lot of opportunities to serve. Finally it’s strategy. It comes down to the how. First define what the how is, what is the outcome that you’re looking for?

TWS 45 | Financial Actions

Financial Actions: Being in the right state of mind is going to position you to create a tremendous amount of value for people and capitalize on amazing opportunities.

 

You start to create your game plan based on that, but you don’t create the game plan before you’re in state and then have the right story associated with it. The final thing is, another sequence that I’ve been using a tremendous amount, especially when it comes to financial advising, are principles, processes and products. Principles are laws of sorts. Gravity is a principle of nature. Honesty is a principle of morality. You also look at other principles when it comes to finance, interest rates, and evaluations. There are principles out there that can be identified. There are also principles of commerce exchange, exchanging with one another, exchanging your services and getting something in return. You also look at principles in people.

Structure

People are the true assets. I look at relationships as some of the most valuable assets. Its processes, which is the structure of things. This is going to be number two. Number one is state in mindset. The reason why I want to use structure is because there’s only so much energy we have during the day. It’s an allotment of energy and keeping yourself healthy, keeping your head and I’m going to get into some structure and some strategy as far as how to do that. Being able to have energy focused on the dynamic. Not the approach reoccurring or recurring, but the dynamic, it’s powerful. That’s why structure is powerful because you can set yourself up so that you don’t have to think about things.

Things are done in a certain way. You have a routine, you have habits that allow for all the energy to be focused on dynamic things the day-to-day decisions that you maybe didn’t have to make the day before. The decisions for an opportunity, new content, and ways in which you can be a better leader and do those things. It’s establishing essentially a structure so that all of the routine things you do on a daily basis are pre-programmed. You don’t have to waste your energy on that. An example I heard maybe to illustrate this point is, when we get up in the morning with an alarm clock, the buzz when that goes off, it ignites in every human being an adrenaline rush.

Our DNA associates that sound the same way you would associate being attacked by a Saber-toothed tiger 10,000 years ago. When that happens, it jars us out of bed and expands the majority of our adrenaline, testosterone, those chemicals that have our body respond that way are expended for the day and they’re gone. There’s a strategy there as far as waking up with peaceful music, which doesn’t necessarily waste those valuable chemicals that you expend and allows you to apply those at different points during the day. What I would challenge you to do is, start to establish a structure for this summer. The next few months are critical. Some of the hardest times are going to come after the reportings from Q2 or quarter two ends in June. The reports usually come out mid to end of July. Creating all of this now is going to prepare you. When a lot of these things go sideways, you have structure, you’re not trying to figure it out then. It’s optimizing your energy.

Craig Ballantyne who wrote The Perfect Day Formula is applicable. Some of you maybe had your routine and it wasn’t necessarily as valuable as it should be. Revisiting daily routine, structuring your day, and your priorities. Perfect Day Formula from Craig Ballantyne is ideal for that because Craig is a genius at that. He’s done that with many entrepreneurs and business owners. It’s a short book and it’s simple. Perfect Day Formula as a resource there where you can start to structure your day and you systematize the predictable. There’s a saying that we started using with my other company Paradigm as how we’re operating and what we’re looking for as far as opportunities are concerned. It’s a saying by the Four Seasons Hotel, which is called “Systematize the predictable so that you can humanize the exceptional.” What that means is, it’s all those routine things that you do on a daily basis. It’s the setup structure for those things. One way in which I have re-evaluated my goals to finalize the redo of some of my annual goals. The way in which I’ve done that is using what’s called the Wheel of Life, which is a self-assessment.

Identify the areas where you can make the biggest difference and create your goals and routine around them. Click To Tweet

The Wheel of Life is essentially a wheel in which you rate the different aspects of your life, your physical well-being, financial well-being, mental well-being, spiritual, relationships and physical situation. You rate yourself there and it starts to help you evaluate where the areas are that you can make the biggest difference in. You start to create your goals and your routine around that. This is important because the goals that you may have set, they’re probably not realistic anymore given that the environment has changed, at least not all of them. That’s why I’ve reevaluated all of my goals. Looking at establishing where those goals are, that’s going to help propel the daily routine.

Craig talks about it in The Perfect Day Formula, you can start to chip away at some of those goals and have something simple to do on a daily basis and make those micro improvements toward the end results. The morning routine as far as structure is concerned is huge. I’ve redone my morning routine. I come to an office and there’s nobody here. It’s completely quiet and dark. Everybody’s working from home. We have a daily standup with my team, but it’s given me the opportunity to not have any distraction or disruption. I always get the knock on the door when I’m in the middle of something. I don’t turn people away. It’s one of those things where it’s allowed me a lot of time too to be consistent with some of the things that I find valuable.

What I started using is a neurofeedback device called Muse. Muse is a feedback part of meditation. What it does is it allows you to see where you’re at when it comes to your mindset. It’s not expensive at all. I do it on a daily basis. What it does is it shows you where your brain activity is with sounds. When you’re active, all over the place and thinking about this and this, you’re in an active mindset and it measures that by the severity of weather in the environment. You have to wear earphones associated with it, but you’ve got the desert, the rainforest, and the ocean. There’s one that’s general sounds, but when you are active, not calm and not focused, the weather is all over the place. What it does is, the weather and it gets less severe and calm the calmer you get. Eventually, you have birds that start chirping when you are calm and in the zone.

There are days where I don’t get any birds or 1 or 2. There are days where I get 50, and this is in a ten-minute timeframe. What it does, it gives you feedback so that you’re not telling yourself stories. It gives you actual feedback so that you know where you’re at and you know how much time and attention you have to focus on your meditation, your gratitude getting in the zone. That’s one thing that I’ve started doing. Now that I have my goal is getting restructured, I’m sitting back and once I’m in the zone, I start to ask myself strategic questions.

These questions, you don’t have to ask them all in one day. I usually ask 1 or 2 per day. I learned this from Keith Cunningham, Keys to the Vault and there are a few other books that he’s written. The questions are insightful and asking yourself these questions in the wrong state can be catastrophic. That’s why being in the right state, doing meditation, getting in that zone is powerful. The questions are like, “What do I want? What in my control is preventing me from achieving that? What don’t I see? What if I’m wrong? What is the result that I would be ecstatic about? How can I make the biggest difference? How can I be the best conversation on somebody’s day? Who do I need to call? Who do I need to write? Who would benefit from a conversation with me?” This is a big one. Maybe a whole thinking session dedicated to this. “Why am I paid? What must I believe about myself to be paid more? What are the ways I can go above and beyond what is expected that I am not paid for?”

TWS 45 | Financial Actions

Financial Actions: Structure is powerful because you can set yourself up so that you don’t have to think about certain things.

 

Here are a few others. “What is the least amount I can earn and live an unbelievable life? What am I spending money on that is not producing the result I want? If I could devote time to one thing, what would it be? What about if my life gave me tremendous enjoyment many years ago but doesn’t now? Is there an opportunity there?” These are a few. These are profound, insightful questions that you can find online. It may not feel like it’s that significant, but asking yourself these questions creates tremendous breakthrough and insight as to where opportunities are. The reason why I wanted to start here these first 2 of 5 things to do in a financial crisis, is because being in the right state, having the right mindset and then structuring your day so that all the different routine, things that you do, don’t expend any unnecessary energy. It will position you for making the best decisions given what’s going on.

The next three are going to be cash and cashflow, dry powder and investments, and assets. I wanted to cover this again because it sets the stage for where the opportunities are, as well as a dry powder, which is more opportunity fund. If you are familiar with the language I use in the book, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose. Finally, investments and assets and we’re going to revisit the financial, the behavioral economics curve when it comes to most the collective state of mind. Where in that state of mind are the best opportunities and the worst opportunities to make a decision or take action on something? Thank you for reading this episode. I will talk to you next time. Take care.

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The Entrepreneurs’ Formula To Execute Business Information With Craig Ballantyne

TWS 31 | Execute Business Information

 

As we near both the end of the year and this show’s season on entrepreneurship, host Patrick Donohoe brings in with Craig Ballantyne, a remarkable guest who talks beyond theories and information about entrepreneurship and goes straight into the implementation, integration, and execution of those information. Craig is a bestselling author, a coach, and the founder of a multiple seven-figure fitness empire and more. Today, he talks from his information wisdom and experience wisdom about establishing an entrepreneur’s drive and passion for his business, correcting efforts that burn them out, and getting rid of bottlenecks and forming some new beliefs. He also shares the key thing that he has discovered among successful entrepreneurs as they continue on their journey this coming 2020.

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The Entrepreneurs’ Formula To Execute Business Information With Craig Ballantyne

My guest is Craig Ballantyne. He’s a good friend of mine. I’ve known him for several years. First, it’s an incredible interview. This guy is so smart not just because he has the information, but because of how easy he’s made it. He’s been on the show back in 2017. You can read that episode as well. Craig figured out an easy way through implementation and there are these little things that get in the way. I know that if you guys read some of the details, you’re going to get a lot out of it. Make sure you get the book. He has some online stuff too that you guys will benefit from because we’re going into 2020 where we can take the ideas that come from other episodes. We take the ideas and lessons from 2019 and have a better you in 2020.

We are right at the end of this intense season on entrepreneurship and I hope you guys are excited, especially going into the New Year. We are essentially having some reset especially 2020, some iconic year. I have no one better to be on the show than this guy, Craig Ballantyne. First of all, Craig is the author of The Perfect Day Formula. He is also the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Unstoppable and The Perfect Week Formula. He also does workshops. He’s a coach for entrepreneurs and business people. He is also the founder of a multiple seven-figure fitness empire, Early to Rise, and more. Craig, it’s amazing to have you on. I wanted to have you here because I’ve talked a lot about information and ideas and had guests on that talk about the power of having your own business, being an entrepreneur, and what that can do to your life. At the same time, it’s all been information. I wanted to talk about the implementation, integration, execution of information.

You probably don’t know this as well. Our meeting was super serendipitous. It happened at a point in my life. I went to your workshop right after Christmas in Denver. The day that I left that workshop, I went to the Denver Hospital. My brother lives in Denver and my niece was diagnosed with cancer. My niece is the same age as my oldest daughter. Thankfully, she’s a survivor, totally in remission. That year, I could use expletives, the right lane that year for me both from a business and a personal perspective. I look at what’s transpired since then and I put much credit to what I learned from you both in that workshop as well as the Perfect Life Retreat down in San Diego. Thank you sincerely, Craig. You’ve made a huge difference. I appreciate all you do. I know you’ve continued to preach your message. I’m excited to have you on so that you can impart not just information wisdom, but your experience wisdom with the audience. Welcome.

It’s going to be a lot of fun. One quick point on that is you take a look at almost everybody in life and there is an inflection point. You call it hero’s journey where if you don’t go through the down, if Luke’s parents didn’t get killed, if the hobbits don’t get kicked out of their little hobbit world and have to go on the journey, there’s no journey. There’s no greatness that comes out of that. You went through yours. I went through my anxiety attacks. Tony Robbins went through being broke. Brendon Burchard went through his injury. My friend went through traumas. Everybody does. You got to come up the other side and you come out stronger. If anybody’s going through something whether it’s marital problems, financial problems or whether it’s like, “I’m not at my best self,” you fight through it. In a few months or a year from now, you’re going to be in a great spot.

It’s the duality of life. There’s a saying that I came across which talks about the depth of sadness or the depth of experience from a negative standpoint that gives you the ability to experience that on an even deeper level on the other side of the spectrum.

My shirt says 11/10. The reason why I made it is because when you went through the program with me, one of the things as we do these weekly accountability updates and I always ask my coaching clients, “On a scale of 1 to 10, what was the last week?” I’ve found that there are three types of people. Let’s start with the negative person first. I call them panic button hitters. Let’s say a person in their company left, they got a refund request and they’re like, “It was a 1/10.” I’m like, “If that week was 1/10, what are you going to rate a week when something bad happens?” There are normal people who rate it between 7 and 9 every week. I then have this group of people who it’s a 16/10. When theirs is 12/10 or 11/10, I know they’ve had a bad week.

After doing this for so long because I’m naturally the guy who would rate everything 7/10. “I made $1 million.” It was 7/10. “I got hit by a truck.” It was 7/10. I’d always be in that melancholy state. I decided, “I’m going to make my new baseline 11/10.” I’m going to have that new mentality that every day above ground you’re grateful for. When we got on a call, you said, “Things are amazing.” I’m like, “That’s an amazing answer.” I got to say amazing more often. I got to be that 11/10. It’s a mindset for everybody reading, the duality of life. Even if it’s a bad day, I’m still grateful for the chance to have a bad day. It’s always 11/10. That’s the new baseline.

Nature doesn’t work on a straight line. Nature is everything. You have storms and your different weather patterns. We know that internally, but then when we’re in the experience because most people don’t necessarily anticipate how they’re going to react to certain circumstances. It becomes difficult at the moment.

It’s easy for you and I when it’s somebody else going through it to say, “You’re going to get through this. You’re going to be okay. It doesn’t matter if it’s a family illness or if it’s a financial loss or whatever it is.” We always say, “We know you. You’re strong, you’re going to get through this.” When it’s us and we’re emotionally attached to the problem whether it’s a team member who’s outstayed their welcome on the team and we should have had a conversation with them a few months ago, but we dread that conversation. You’re going to get through it. You have to be emotionally unattached from your problems. Look at them with outside eyes in an objective manner. All those things that seem like big problems become less of a problem and something to go and fish right away. I’m sure you’ve read Traction by Gino Wickman or his book How to Be a Great Boss.

I haven’t read that one.

When you emotionally detach from your problems, they will become less of what they are and go away. Click To Tweet

He’s got a great phrase in there. If you need to have a difficult conversation with somebody or let somebody go, it’s 36 hours of pain. Most people avoid that 36 hours of pain and will go through another 36 weeks of pain, of passive-aggressive, hiding it, not leaning into the conversation. It’ll go on and on. You got to suck it up and go through the 36 hours of pain. It’s going to be a difficult conversation. There’s going to be some emotions, but if you don’t do that, things are going to get worse. This is not just related to letting a team member go or something in entrepreneurship, it’s the same with negative environments or negative people in our lives. We got to have those conversations and step-up to be the best person. It’s easy for us to tell somebody, “You got to go and have that conversation.” When it’s our turn to have that conversation, it’s not easy.

The emotional attachment is huge. That’s where this notion of correction. There’s a concept in economics called the S-curve where you have compounding and growth, but then you have a plateau and even a decline. During that, you’ve grown, but at the same time, you’re still trying to use the same principles and the same processes as you’ve used before. They’re not working. It’s this re-characterization of what the purpose is so that you can have another growth curve. The same happens in life. You see what’s happening and you experienced it emotionally, deal with it. You have to learn to get over that and then you start to rebound again.

The same happens in the gym. You’re talking physiology 101. You’re talking to hockey training 101 from back in the day. You go and you skate or you squat or whatever and your legs are sore the next day. If you don’t go through that, they don’t get stronger. You don’t get fitter. If you practice halfheartedly, you’re left behind on when the actual game comes around. You have to go through that S-curve where you got better but got worse at the same time. When you recover properly, you super compensate what it’s called in physiology and you come back. The next thing you know, you’re playing for the New York Rangers like a certain stud here.

Let’s get into the topic. You have had an incredible entrepreneurial journey and even better, you’ve been able to experience thousands of other people’s journeys. You’ve seen common patterns. Let’s talk through your formula, where you establish this passion and drive to help and transform lives with being able to have a way in which you can simply execute on ideas on business and life in general.

One of the things that drove me from a young age as I got frustrated seeing whether it was family members or other people not getting ahead as quickly as they should have. I then spent the rest of my life since then trying to figure out the fastest way to success. First of all, it was in the fitness world. I went into fitness because I loved hockey and I wanted to be a strength and conditioning coach in the National Hockey League. I started writing for Men’s Health. I then got into creating programs online for people because I saw a lot of people are going to the gym and then I get these emails from people like, “I don’t have time to spend nine hours a week in the gym.” My mind was blown. I was like, “What do you think you have to do to be in the gym nine hours a week to lose weight?” I was showing people how to do it in two hours a week maximum. That was what set me apart from many people and I built that business.

TWS 31 | Execute Business Information

The Perfect Day Formula: How to Own the Day and Control Your Life

Around 2006 and 2007 when my business started taking off, it was like, “I got to do something about my own life. Otherwise, I’m going to be working twelve hours a day, seven days a week and I can’t be doing that. That’s not healthy. That’s not what I want,” all that stuff. I wanted to start building what I call an intelligent business. What’s an intelligent business where you’re doing the things you love, you’re building up a team? It took me a long time to make the full transition from fitness to business coaching. I was able to make that over time. You were part of the journey and a lot of great people like you, written the books from the experience of it. It was all driven from how can we help people get more in less? It’s all about efficiency for me, but efficiency and doing the right things because there’s a whole other world where people are efficient and productive at doing things that don’t matter. That’s one of the biggest wastes of time in life.

You have these natural laws of how things work and there’s a lot of opposites sometimes. In 2018, we bought this used golf simulator in my office. I bought Jack, who’s five, a little set of clubs. I was taught that golf was a game of opposites. It’s not the best story about how strong you hit your swing. It’s about your whole body movement, but also it’s the inside out. In order to hit left, you want to hit the ball going right. It’s an interesting thing. I often reference Seinfeld opposite George when George does the opposite completely. Things start to work out. The less is more concept huge for me. When it comes to the entrepreneur and they have ideas, drive, and passion. What is it about the efforts that often get them to burn out? How do we correct that?

One of the things I’m seeing a lot with the influx of everybody’s got a podcast and the morning routine focus is that people have turned a lot of great things, things that are helpful, into perverse forms of procrastination. I use that phrase in The Perfect Week Formula book. For example, I’ve had clients send me messages at 7:30 in the morning and they said, “I’ve been up since 5:00 AM and I’ve done meditation, gratitude journaling, freeform journaling, yoga, and exercise. I haven’t gotten anything done and I’m all stressed out because I got to go to work.” I’m like, “You did all these things,” and they’re all good things in and of themselves. At some point, you got to draw the line and you got to go, “If they’re that important to me, I’ll do some of them later.”

You do a short routine to get your mind right. This perverse form of procrastination is stealing time from people’s lives. I talk a lot about it in the book because I quote Daniel Pink’s book. It’s called When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. He says, “You have the greatest willpower, discipline and intention first thing in the morning.” If you’re getting up and doing nineteen things before breakfast and there’s an article in Inc.com called the 14 Things Successful People Do First Thing in the Morning. It takes 4.5 hours to go through that entire routine because someone made fun of it. If you’re doing that, you’re going down rabbit holes.

In the book, I talk about the farm boy morning miracle routine, to paraphrase from Hal Elrod, our friend. The farm boy morning miracle is I grew up on a farm. What does a farmer do? The farmer gets up and they go to work. They go and do something substantial that has to be done. They feed the cows because the cows don’t have a day off from eating. They definitely don’t take a day off from eating. Most entrepreneurs, “We’re going to have some habits, rituals, and routines.” If you’re finding yourself with way too much busy work and not enough accomplishment, it’s time to take an evaluation of that. The second thing on that side of the equation is that people are over-consuming information. I love books and I don’t like listening to podcasts because I only like to read my content. I don’t like to watch videos and I don’t like to do audio. I’m a little strange. “I listen to Ed Millets. I listen to Patrick’s. I listen to Craig’s. I listen to Craig and Bedros. I listened to Jen Sincero. I listen to Rachel Hollis.” Slow down here. You’ve consumed and gathered all this information and that’s great. If you are not implementing and executing on the information, you’re a walking library. There’s not a lot of money in libraries, unfortunately.

One of the biggest wastes of time in life is being efficient and productive at things that don't matter. Click To Tweet

I would urge people reading to do an audit and this is a great time to do that. In fact, one of the exercises in the book that I talk about is the billionaire time matrix. It was a worksheet that I invented Christmas 2018. I invented this worksheet because I had a chocolate lab. He was 12.5 years old and he died in August of 2018. When you have a twelve-year-old chocolate lab, they’re like a piece of furniture that needs a twenty-minute walk a day. It’s a little time. He passed away. It was sad. After a couple of months, I’m like, “I sit on my butt way too much here. I need to go and get some walks. I need a new dog. I miss the dog.” Having a puppy that needs three hours a day outside is exponentially different than having a twelve-year-old chocolate lab. At Christmas time, I’m like, “My schedule would not allow me to have a puppy. Let me figure something out here.”

At Christmas time, I love to sit around and not do any work and think. I came up with this exercise, four quadrants, four questions. What do you hate doing? Think about this. Do this with a pen and paper. Sit there and think, “What do I hate doing? What do I hate doing in my business?” It might not be that you can stop doing the things that you hate, but you can rearrange your schedule. What I have found, Patrick is that I was doing sales calls in the morning or I was doing coaching calls in the morning.

The morning is my magic time for writing. I hated it. Not only was I missing out on that 30-minute block or hour block, I was also thinking about it the night before. I was ticked off. I was like, “I got that call. What was I thinking?” I’m losing mental energy. I’m thinking about it during non-work time. Instead of it being an hour-long call, it’s 2 or 3 hours of mental bandwidth because I’m doing something I hate at the wrong time. All I had to do was get a Calendly link. Calendly is one of those things where you set up, schedule times, and not allow anybody to book in my morning. I fixed that problem. It opened up my mornings to accelerate all my other greatness.

I have more time for the dog. That’s just one question. The second question that I have people ask is what you should stop doing? What should your team stop doing? If everybody stopped doing this and we all have stuff in our businesses where if nobody did it, the business wouldn’t suffer. In fact, the business would get better. It goes in our personal lives as well, with gossiping or watching five Netflix shows a night instead of 1 or 2. If you stopped doing it, life gets better and nobody takes it up. It’s not delegated to anybody. It’s not replaced with anything else. Stop doing it. For me, when I wrote the first book, I was doing everybody’s podcast. I had to. I had to learn how to tell my stories, become a better speaker, all that great stuff and sell the books.

It gets to the point of diminishing returns. There’s some young kid in England who has ten listeners and you’re like, “I was once like that young kid. I want to do that kid show to be a great guest for him.” You got to draw the line. You can’t do every kid who’s doing a podcast in his mom’s basement who has twenty listeners. Otherwise, I’m doing sixteen hours of podcasts a day and I don’t get ahead in life. I had to stop doing small podcasts of audiences that weren’t a good fit for me. It’s unfortunate, but you can’t do everything.

It’s a principle of focus. You have this distribution of energy throughout the day. Sometimes there’s a higher distribution in the morning, mid-day, end of the day depending on the situation. I’ve heard all the theories. It’s determining what you’re best at, where you’re good at, what you like doing and focusing efforts there. You use the 2 to 3 hours of the deep work. I did the magic time. It could be in the afternoon. It could be mid-day. It’s essentially taking inventory of your day to determine what that time block is.

That’s one of the time journal exercises, which is another thing that I described in the book and it’s another great exercise that when people match their energy, their focus, and their major activities. All of a sudden, you can go from working twelve hours a day to getting more work done in 7 or 8 hours a day. When you get everything, the stars align, the dots are connected. It’s classic self-reflection. It’s the same with your diet. You could follow somebody else’s restrictive diet and then all of a sudden if you knew about your own physiology, about the things that help you feel full and the things that got you into trouble, you could probably eat more calories on an individualized diet, feel satisfied, lose more weight and be healthier because you aligned what works for your body, energy levels, likes, and dislikes.

That’s essentially the way it is for everything in life. That’s part of this exercise. Those are the first two. I’ll go through the other two. In the bottom left quadrant of the four questions is what is not your job? That’s the question. In this case, we don’t stop it and not delegate it. This is a case where we identify something that you’re doing that you’ve either hired somebody else to do or that it’s simply not your job and you have to go and get somebody else to do it. There are two ways of looking at this. For me, I was doing some sales calls because I was like, “That was a referral or this is an important major client. I don’t want to lose them.”

I was like, “If I’ve hired a good sales guy,” and I got a great sales guy and he’s a great person, “I shouldn’t be taking the calls. I should be coaching him up to the point where he can take on any call.” I put my efforts somewhere else and then he took way more sales calls and it’s been a win-win. I was doing some other stuff where I’ve hired these people on my team. I came from a blue-collar background where when my mom finds out that I don’t do half this stuff and all these other people do these things, she’s like, “You can’t do this. You’re better than that stuff.” Not that she gives me a hard time, but she doesn’t understand it.

The other thing is on the personal side. If there are female entrepreneurs reading, I want you to pay attention to this one because for guys, it’s easy. I’m like, “I’m not cooking at home. I’m not doing this. We’ll be fine to get a person to come in and do the laundry. I’m not doing that. I’ve got a business to run.” For most women, there are societal things there. I have a lot of female entrepreneurs who struggle. If my mother-in-law found out that I didn’t make all the sandwiches, do all the laundry, and make all the dinners while I’m still trying to run my business, there’d be a lot of stress.

It's interesting how quickly things can take off for people when they are able to get rid of the bottlenecks. Click To Tweet

Here’s the thing, I say to them, “You weren’t put here to clean the house every week, to make every meal, and to cook every dinner. It’s okay. I give you permission to let that stuff go because you were put here to run a business.” Imagine Oprah like, “I can’t do a show now because I’ve got to go and do the laundry or everyone’s going to think I’m a bad person because I don’t do my own laundry.” That’s not how she thinks. She only does what she can do. She finds somebody else to not only do the personal stuff but to come in and make sure that the catering for the guests is great and the audience has great gifts to give away and all that stuff.

We find what’s not our job and we get rid of it so that we can go back to that 5% as my friend Bedros calls it or your unique ability as Dan Sullivan calls it. Everybody’s got it. The one thing Gary Keller and you do it. Finally, the last one is what your distractions are? We all have them. Social media is my number one distraction. I got to set up boundaries to stop myself from wasting time on it. Some people watch too many television shows or it’s time for you to give up watching too many pro sports. Once you get past the age of 27, you got to let that go because you’re older than most of the players. That’s when I let it go because I thought, “This is ridiculous. I’m getting emotionally involved in a game that I’m not even playing in.” It’s those types of things. Good exercises of mental thought because you’ve opened up all this space to do what matters. That’s where you move mountains in your life.

There’s something I’ve thought about quite a bit, which is the idea of uncertainty. There’s the saying, “The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty that you can comfortably live with.” It’s establishing essentially some certainty associated with your life of the foundation, whether it’s boundaries and rules that you establish yourself. These aren’t rules imposed on you. These are establishing rules, establishing processes, establishing ways of doing things. It’s the idea of constantly growing the area of your life that you’re best at and should be focused on, which is not going to be the same now as it will be in three years or a year. It’s that constant refinement of what you’re doing because in those zones is where you essentially establish the most fulfillment. It’s the stuff that you love doing. It’s that degree of uncertainty that you’re able to start focusing on and pushing the limit because you have the certainty associated with your foundation in check.

There’s an analogy there that is important for people to understand that should make some light bulbs go off. If you think back to 2007, that’s when the first iPhone came out. Imagine how different the iPhone operating system is now. They’ve gone through eleven iterations or even more of iPhones. That’s the same with our readers. When you started your business, you were the original iPhone. You then developed more high-income skills. You develop world-class capabilities as a leader and every year your operating system changes and improves. You have new parameters that you operate by.

One of the cool things I heard, I was reading some books about Warren Buffett and Charlie Monger. They have a thing that they try and do a challenge where they try and destroy one of their deeply-held beliefs every year. Maybe it’s about investing in a certain area like airlines or it’s about management strategies. They’re always testing their beliefs to either increase the strength in their belief or to realize like, “That may have been true before and it served us, but it doesn’t serve us now because something has changed,” or, “We got lucky because it wasn’t that true and we need to move on.” That’s how you build your operating system up and that’s how you build your world-class expertise in a certain thing. It’s only through getting rid, cutting the fluff so that you can focus on that thing that matters. That’s where you start to shine.

TWS 31 | Execute Business Information

Execute Business Information: If you are not implementing and executing on the information, you’re a walking library. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of money in libraries.

 

This is where we’re getting into the execution of things. With what you’ve written about, the workshops that you put on, you essentially are helping clients, people establish the purpose behind it, the foundational elements that will lead to what they’re going to execute. Maybe talk about some of the content of your book that helps in that regard, but then also some of the workshops, live events, and things that you put on around the world that help people to essentially establish like, “What is that belief that I have that needs to be squashed? It might’ve worked before my business. It’s not working as well now.” How do you establish that and then start to confirm some new beliefs?

One of the things we always want to ask people is what’s not working? What is not working in the business? What’s not working in your life? You have to do classic deeper dive in. “Our sales team is not working.” Why is the sales team not working? What’s the bottleneck? Is it the offer that you have? Is it a group of people that you have? Do you have the right people on the right bus in the right seats? Do you have the right systems for your sales? Do you have the right follow-up? Do you have the right leadership in place? There’s a whole bunch of things. You have to do a lot of Socratic questioning.

Maybe you get to, “We have great sales systems and processes. We’re always doing training. We have good follow-up. Our offer is as good as the last time. I see the problem is the culture within the sales staff. We had this guy and he’s been here for a few years. There are a lot of new people on. Our manager of the team is newer. He’s been with me since day one.” You then start to dive deeper and you go, “What would happen if he quit?” It’d probably be better. I got these two questions from Verne Harnish in his newsletter. When you think about somebody who’s not great, question number one is what would happen if they quit? How would you feel? What would happen if you had ten people like this on your team? I’m saying that might be an issue or it’s the leadership. We brought in a manager and we try to start a new style of leadership, but eventually by asking the questions and always looking at what’s the bottleneck? We’re flowing energy. We’re flowing leads. We’re flowing focus. It gets bottled up. What is it that’s bottling us up there? We can break free.

As soon as you break free and you can leverage that, all of a sudden your business can grow. It’s interesting how quickly things can take off for people when they are able to get rid of those bottlenecks. Is there a couple of questions that we ask everybody? No. It’s around that theme and then we have to get specific on it. We can do that for sales. We can do that for marketing. We can do that for leadership. We can do that for personal life. We can do that for our health. We can do that for our personal development. We can do that for everything. As long as you have that growth mindset and not a fixed mindset around everything in your life, then you will constantly evolve. You’ll constantly upgrade that operating system. The sky is the limit. It’s been amazing.

Our growth in our company’s been good. I have some friends who have skyrocketed, total moonshots in their business and you’re like, “Wow.” One of my bottlenecks, Patrick, to be brutally honest and vulnerable is that I don’t receive advice well. I have a big ego and I need to learn to take my ego and put it aside. I was talking to a woman named Shanda Sumpter, a successful female entrepreneur and business coach. She’s had rapid growth. We started off around the same spot. She used the word receiver. She’s become a better receiver. For a lot of us, when feedback is given, we’re good at resistors.

The more knowledge you have, the more dots you connect. Click To Tweet

It’s like, “That won’t work because I’ve tried that before. No. Where does that get us?” I was like that for a long time. I want to be a receiver of information and I want to resist saying, “I want to be right. I want to be the smart guy all the time.” Being right versus being a receiver are two different things. That’s what we all need to be. That will help you overcome bottlenecks in any area of your life. To our audience, whether it’s personal or professional, if you become a better receiver of information and less of a resistor and you’re willing to answer difficult questions, your world can change dramatically.

Do you see that ability to receive feedback, receive constructive advice about you as one of the common reasons why some of your friends and businesses are thriving? Is there something else that you would add to that?

The only modification I would add to it is from our friend Matt Smith. He says, “You got to be curious.” The receiver is a naturally curious person. They would go, “That’s interesting that you would give me that advice. Why would you say that?” Whereas the resistor, they’re protecting their ego and they might be curious. They might read lots of books and that stuff. If they’re a resistor to the information, they’re not curious about getting better themselves. I also see the more the person is studying leadership and the more that person is reading biographies and the more that person is checking out their competitors and reverse engineering funnels or whatever it is. It’s important to do that because the more knowledge you have, the more dots you connect. Be a receiver and be a curious person in life. That’s a great characteristic to encourage your children because you become curious about other cultures and be curious about that. I know it’s a great thing to be. You’re going to be overall a better person. The more that you can set aside your ego in life, the better off you’re going to be too.

I love Matt’s perspective on life. There’s a book we were discussing a few years ago around how the educational system in the business world of the West has created this idea of good and bad, right and wrong, or success or failure based on a grade or pay scale. I look at the curiosity side of things. We see ourselves in a certain way, the way other people see us. I’ve connected the same thing. That’s why I’m bringing up this point. I’ve listened to a lot of successful people talk about some of the things that are challenging to them and they were stuck. It was amazing. Everyone else understood where they were at. They didn’t understand what was in their way. It was typically them.

It’s that emotional attachment which we talked about way back at the start.

TWS 31 | Execute Business Information

Execute Business Information: Your world can change dramatically when you become a better receiver of information and less of a resistor.

 

It’s seeded. As much as deep working condition, new behaviors, we have conditioned behaviors from our childhood, from our upbringing, from our harder experiences. It’s difficult sometimes to revisit those, but they’re already there and it’s the unwinding or the untying the knot associated with where those are. First start with, I would say self-love, a self-belief and a realization that even the most successful people have jacked up beliefs. Warren Buffett and Charlie Monger, they’re doing it. The most successful people are doing that because they realize that there are things that they’re not doing perfectly. There are things that may have worked or are not working anymore. The first thing is to let down your guard and not necessarily be defined by other people, instead define yourself.

The more open and willing you are to that, it’s great. If you think about it in terms of your kids, your kids are naturally curious. The curiosity is drummed out of them because when you go into high school and you go into college, it’s right or wrong. Is it? It’s not the best place. The education system does fail the entrepreneur in that way.

As we conclude our thoughts and then I want to give you some time to talk about some of the stuff you have online, things you have on social media, events that you have coming up. We’re approaching this iconic year, 2020. Another decade and movies had the 2020 date in them. 2019, the end of the year. What have you discovered in successful entrepreneurs, those that you’ve worked with, you yourself? What are they doing in December 2019? What are some of those consistent things that you see or habits that people have to prepare for?

That’s the magic billion-dollar word, prepare. Patrick, the most common trait among the most successful people and the more that I work with people, the more I am blown away by how prepared the most successful people are. If you’re preparing for a negotiation, the billionaire has always done more preparation than the millionaire. Whether it’s the entrepreneur that’s leading a specific industry, they do more preparation the night before than their competition. For the people, most high performers have already done the preparation for 2020. We have the annual event that prepares us for 2020. We get all of our clients prepared well in advance. If you’re waiting until January 1st, it’s like waiting to make your to-do list in the morning when you have the greatest willpower, discipline, intention and you’re wasting that time on figuring out what you’re going to do in the day.

To our readers, if you are a little bit behind, get on it now because you have to be prepared to hit the ground running as quickly as possible and not kind of, sort of we have a plan for it. No, deeply prepared, step-by-step to get a fast response, to get a quick victory, to get momentum and motivation. When you have that in place, the results come faster. When you and your team see results, you start to work harder. It’s like going to the gym. If you don’t see results, you get down and you get out of there. If you see results, then you’re like, “I’m going back and I’m going to stay consistent with this.” Those are the people that stay with it.

The most common trait among the most successful people is their preparedness. Click To Tweet

I had a business coach and she was at Amazon, T-Mobile, and these big companies. I remember her once she was talking to me about annual planning. This was a decade ago. When she did her annual plans and presented it, she would start on the day after she presented on that one. I’m glad you’re saying this because that’s the thing. I would say those that are successful do have this idea of anticipation and preparation. They realize that not everything is going to go 100% plan. It’s that constant refinement as you’re executing. The preparation has done well in advance. That’s one of those characteristics that I value. I wish I could say the same for me all the time. At the same time, I recognize that pattern many successful people preparing well in advance.

I want to tie this up with a little book review. I’ve started reading a book called Eisenhower. It’s a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower. He spends most of the time talking about him as Supreme Allied Commander in World War II. There’s much that I didn’t know. They wanted to do the D-Day landings all the way back in 1942 and if they would’ve done it, they would’ve got slaughtered. They would have made many mistakes. They learned all this stuff by going through North Africa and then into Italy. They learned, “We don’t know anything.” They learned all about amphibious landings and all the preparation and planning that went into it.

For the Germans, it was a comedy of errors. Hitler sleeps until noon and no one wanted to wake them up on D-Day. That’s a great example of bad leadership. Those companies were like, “I don’t want to tell the boss, he’ll get mad at me.” That’s what happened to the Germans. It wouldn’t have saved them or anything. They had the absolute worst leadership on the German side and then they had all this planning and all these screw-ups from North Africa and Italy on their side, which then made them better for the day that they finally attacked France. It became the greatest military expedition of all time. It’s an amazing story and you can’t make this stuff up, but it applies so much to everything we talked about. I want people to understand every single person is messing up, but they’re planning in advance, they’re going to get punched in the face, they’re going to get up, they’re going to readjust course, and they never stop. To our readers, make that your mission for 2020.

Talk a bit about some of the resources you have other than your book. What are some online resources that you have, social media? What are some of the other things you’re doing to keep this mission moving forward?

We do a lot on Instagram. People that use Instagram, I’m @RealCraigBallantyne. We have a Facebook group called The Perfect Business Formula. It’s a free Facebook group. We’re putting great content out every day. We have the books and then The Perfect Day Formula Kit, which is my life’s work in a box that’s helped a lot of people like yourself. We have some programs that we help. We have online coaching, it’s called 2X – 10 Less. It helps you double your income and work ten fewer hours per week, which is another program that we’re helping. That’s our mass-market program to get as many people into our world and you can get all of these tools and systems so that they can make that big leap and big growth. If anybody wants to ever contact me, through those channels is great or Support@EarlyToRise.com. You can always email me there, too.

Craig, this has been amazing. I appreciate your willingness to come on. I appreciate what you do. It makes a huge difference and it’s a side of the entrepreneur business world that there’s not much of. The passion you’ve shown over the years is inspiring. I appreciate all the things that you continue to do because it is making a difference.

It’s interesting because it’s like you do financial stuff. You make smart decisions with your money and by talking about all this stuff, I have to push myself to live a better life every day, make the right decisions, walk the talk, talk the book, and all that stuff. It keeps me on the straight and narrow too. It helps me as much as it helps everybody. To our readers, I’m looking forward to hearing from you, giving you some tips, and that leverage point that can make a huge difference to overcome those bottlenecks for you.

Craig, it’s been a pleasure.

Thank you. Best wishes to all the family. We’ll talk soon. I can’t wait to hear about 2020.

Thanks, Craig.

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