A Minute to Think with Juliet Funt: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:28Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. busy work. And today for Nation, we will talk about busyness tricks people into thinking they're productive when they're just active and how to say it out loud, how to create verbal accountability and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Juliet and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software, say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.

1:10Juliette, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I believe that there's such a thing is enough success. And I don't hear that very often. I think that success, I've heard success is a mountain that gets higher as you climb it. And I have found many times I have to stop on the mountain and say, there may be another view, but this one is really nice. And finding ways to do that gets more and more important. I'm finding as my success gets broader and as my years get longer. And so I think when is enough is a success question that I will throw on the table.

1:52I'm really looking forward to this conversation today. And I already am agreeing with a lot of what you're saying, but I still have a lot to learn. I mean, right now, I do feel like in a lot of ways, I'm personally doing that where I work five days per month. And people are like, well, if you worked double or triple or quadruple that, like I used to, by the way, of course, you'd have much more success. And I was like, well, I'm kind of loving the success I'm having right now. I'm here in Puerto Rico. I've got a dog. I've got, you know, a great life. I've got a lot of hobbies. And so it's really interesting.

2:26And I'm really interested to have this conversation with you. And as I mentioned, Fire Nation in the intro, we're talking about a minute to think. And I just want to ask you why, Juliette? Why did you write the book, A Minute to think. Well, I want to hear more about your five-day month. We might loop back and flip the mic on you in a minute. But first of all, I will answer to say that it's been about 20 years that I have been a tourist in corporate America. I have never worked a corporate job, but I've spent about 20 years meeting the people that do and watching just a really sad and staggering amount of tolerated misery in the name of this is my job.

3:10There's people in the book we talk about, one of my favorites, Mindy, we call the peanut butter manager. We call her that because she has given up on the idea of eating lunch such a long time ago that she just works with peanut butter on her desk because that's how she keeps her blood sugar up and doesn't pass out, and that is instead of lunch. And there's a guy named Pete who follows her really closely in the same chapter. And this man was fascinating. He taught EMTs how to manage stress. They do these things called stress inoculation exercises where they push them and push them getting ready for real life and death things.

3:47But this guy had a day job. And when his day job company was bought by a big one, he ended up with 200 emails a day. His home life and his work life became completely blended, he ended up in the ER with trouble breathing from stress. And I've met a thousand of them, a thousand of these people who don't know how to take a minute, not only to think, but to step back or to recuperate or to orient themselves toward better work. And I thought it was time to put the ideas that I've seen working over that 20 year period down on paper. And you're the expert here. So I'm definitely just kind of going off of what I feel like I've experience and what I've heard from other people is people are scared sometimes to just give themselves a moment to do nothing.

4:30It's like they're fearful of that because if I'm not doing something right now, then I must be doing something wrong because of course there's always something to do. There's more books to read. There's more emails to answer. There's more social media posts to post. There's always more and more and more and more. And doing nothing for people can be really, really challenging, really scary, at least in my experience. And so that's why I want to talk about white space? Like what is white space and what does the lack of it cost both organizations and specifically people, individuals? Yeah. Let's start with, let's go even a little broader.

5:04Let's go to the foundational metaphor that leads us to white space, which is that of building a fire. And this is how we begin the book. It's how we begin a lot of conversations that if you build a fire, you can have great dry wood, good pine needles, crumply newspaper. You can have everything you need, but if you skip one critical ingredient, your fire will never ever ignite. And that ingredient is space. It is the space in between the combustibles that takes a little spark and draws it into a fire. And this metaphor is the same for our work, for our personal lives, and for the spark, I believe is in each and every person.

5:48I don't know why this one image sticks in my head, but I always imagine someone on the very first day of their very first job, standing in front of the closet, picking what to wear. This innocent, sweet moment of, I am ready to make a contribution and here I go. And that is that spark. And then you walk in the door to regular work and then that spark is extinguished by emails and meetings and decks and paperwork and protocols and BS and all the things that weigh down wonderful, earnest people. And so the space, we call it white space, is the time with no assignment in your day. It could be two seconds, 30 seconds, two minutes or an hour, but it is the open space that oxygenates you and your ideas and your spark.

6:41There are a lot of uses of white space, but if you were to just identify the single most critical use of white space, what would that be? Ooh, that's tricky because there is one use of white space that's what everybody thinks of first. So I'd have to decide if that's the most critical. What everybody thinks white space is for is for rest and recuperation, that recuperative pausing that we think is really super important. But it's only 25 % of the ways that professional people use this space. They also use it to reflect and to step back and to create. So I would say post-pandemic or wherever we are, mid-pandemic, you'd have to say that the recuperative pause is probably, if I was triaging you on a gurney running into the emergency room, I'd think most people right now need some recuperative white space more than anything else.

7:38But that's not going to be enough to make this something that you do forever in your business. You have to acknowledge that when you have space, it is also the time. Jack Welsh used to have an hour a day where he sat and looked out a window. Every single day, this hard, driven leader, Phil Knight of Nike, used to have a chair in his living room just for daydreaming. And that ideation, cooking, following an idea, if we don't put that on the table as probably parallel in its importance, then we'd make this too much of a wellness tool, which it only partially is. What a powerful thought, Fire Nation, of just sitting and doing essentially what a lot of people might define as nothing.

8:25But of course, you are doing something very meaningful. And I mean, the fact that some of those individuals that you mentioned dedicated their incredibly valuable time. I mean, those people could probably put tens of thousands of dollars an hour to the rate of their time. We're doing that just speaks absolute volumes. We're going to be talking about a lot of important things, including the hidden cost of busyness when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Okay, let's talk about a platform that's completely changing how entrepreneurs are running their business, and they are also our featured partner, HighLevel.

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11:25The wailing of loons, kids laughing while tubing around. in the warm sunshine, peeking through the trees. Now, to make trips like this happen, every year we work really hard. Running a business from the road isn't always easy, but location independence has always been a high priority of ours. We love to travel and we love the freedom of being able to pack a bag and hit the road on our own terms. And while we're away, we always consider making some extra money by hosting our home on Airbnb. If you're like us and value location independence, then think about it. While you're away at the lake, the beach, the mountains, or in the desert, your home could be working for you rather than sitting empty.

12:03It's a great way to make some extra cash to put towards your next home project, bucket list goal, or future vacation. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host. Julia, let's talk IRL. Is white space an easy concept to grasp for people in real life? Well, they have a lot of misconceptions about it. And in fact, I think that you had one in just in the way that you languaged it. So let's let's break apart this sentence you said twice, which is doing nothing or this phrase. If you took an MRI scan of your brain when you were sitting and looking out of a window with no activity, you would see that your brain, the default neural network of your mind, which is where all the important stuff is cooking, is colorful and on fire with activity at that moment.

12:58When we make time, if you have time on your calendar that doesn't have an assignment, it's not time that is empty. You'll notice in the definition, and we've spent 20 years playing with the specific definition, time with no assignment means it does not remain empty. You go. You go places. You go to thoughts. You go to empathy. You go to ideation. You go to iteration. You go to self-care. You go to places in that time. But if it has an assignment, you never have the liberty to go. So there are three main misconceptions of white space. One of them is that it remains empty. One of them is it has to be a particular length.

13:44Some people think that white space should be hours of executive time, a half an hour, an hour. That's very luxurious. But white space can also be really, really super short. It can be seconds that the pausing can change what you're up to. And then the third misconception is that white space is primarily for rest. And we talked about this, that there are actually four ways we use this time. People misconceive it only as a wellness tool, as a restful period. That's definitely one application, but not the only. I'm really glad you did clarify that. And one thing that I was kind of brought to mentally as you were speaking is the fact that every night when I go to sleep, I put on my aura ring.

14:30And when I wake up in the morning, it shows me my levels of deep sleep, my levels of REM, my levels of light sleep, my restlessness and all these things. And, you know, a lot of people may think that when they're just laying in bed and, you know, they're sleeping that everything is shut off. But in fact, I mean, the brain is like working, like it's going, like there are things that are happening, dreams are happening, this and that. So it's really interesting to think about that type of concept. And you talk a lot about this hidden cost of busyness. What do you mean by that? Well, there are layers to that.

15:04So in the kind of plain old business sense, I know you have a lot of entrepreneurs, but we do a lot of corporate stuff. And so in the corporate world, busyness tricks people into thinking that they're productive when they're really only active. And that confusion between activity and productivity costs companies millions and millions and millions of dollars. And the way that we know this is we ask regular human beings with regular jobs, what percentage of your emails are a complete waste of time? What percentage of your meetings do you feel you're neither contributing or benefiting? What percentage of your reporting is completely beyond the tactical necessity for anyone at the company, but you have to write it anyway?

15:45And then we dollarize those hours reported using salary data. And what we find out is it's usually about, we call this the million for 50 number, it's usually about a million dollars of annual waste for every 50 human beings in an organization. So just staying busy and following this false god of constant activity costs, inopportunity costs in wasted talent time, millions and millions and millions of dollars. And that's kind of the superficial cost because it's the simplest one. There's a human cost. There's a cost to creativity. there's a cost to uh wellness and mental health that we're all seeing now and now there's this gigantic cost in uh acquisition and retention of teams because i just got off the phone before you i told you we were back to back with a huge company attrition is crushing them because and he said to me on the call i'm sitting in front of the legal pad with the notes still on it it's always the best people that leave.

16:51And that is because they don't want to work in mindless tasks anymore. They want to go somewhere where the basic nature of work is more like placing tiles in a mosaic, where it's calm and focused and each move is important. And if you can give people that, they don't need signing bonuses and vacation stipends and gluten free snacks and all the crap that we're trying to throw at people to not quit right now. They need the basic experience of work to be different. The best people always leave. I mean, how soul crushing must that be? I'm staring at the legal pad. Yeah, for these people that are trying to run these companies.

17:33I mean, it's crazy. I mean, I don't know if you've ever read. Because they have choice. They have more choice. They have more choice and it makes sense. And they don't want to do nothing. They don't want their time to be wasted. And I'm actually reading the book Atlas Shrugged right now. And it's kind of a similarity there where all the best people are finally just giving up because they essentially have been beaten by the quote unquote system. And it's just so sad to see that. And I also loved the whole concept you talked about being productive versus just being active. And one thing that I've always liked to say to my audience is, are you being productive?

18:07And by productive, I mean, are you producing the right content, the right products, the right results for your business? Because if the answer is no to those things, then you're just being active. You're just being quote unquote busy. And workers, Juliet, continue to go through massive change right now. And more is coming, if we're being honest. So how can we ground ourselves to deliver great work despite these massive upheavals? Before I answer that question, I'm sitting here staring at your little Skype picture with Puerto Rico behind you and thinking about your dog and your leisure and your five-day month.

18:41Yeah, that's me. I think that it would be remiss if we left cost, if we didn't talk about the fact that busyness follows you home and it comes home on your shoes and you track it in the door and you miss joy, you miss your kids, you miss simple pleasures, you miss the morning sunrise. You miss so much when that metronome of busy is coming home with you. And so let's just make sure that we hit that as a cap on the cost because there are things that people can do about it. And maybe that rounding out of cost will further motivate us to begin to do things. So if I had a regular overloaded entrepreneur wheeled in in front of me and I said, where do I start?

19:29We would start with the simplest thing. And we talked about this a little bit at the beginning, which is permission. and when we were it was funny when we were editing the book my editor who was so wonderful and I would go through the book and you look for repeated words because different authors love I happen to love the word spectacular apparently I use it too many times so you'll say oh there's word search the whole document there's seven spectaculars we got to the word permission and there were 31 mentions of the word permission in this very average length manuscript and I said I can't believe.

20:00She said, no, no, no, don't touch that one. Because that one, that is the subliminal message we need to hear over and over and over and over that life is short. The thinking is a valuable tool that you deserve to be rested and fortified and ready to do good work. And so that permission is where I would just bathe them in that permission before we even start a particular or tool or tactics because entrepreneurs, and I'm one of them, we have this free floating guilt. And it was like a shark that stops moving and we all of a sudden feel terrible. Why am I just sitting here? I'm sure I could be blogging or posting or something to fill this minute.

20:40And so that permission is kind of where we start. And then the next place to begin with, just baby steps is to look for training wheels, experiences of white space. Now, what this means is when you open your eyes before you go out of bed, take a tiny strategic pause in that moment before you leap out of bed and just sit there and wake up and think about the day. Just orient yourself for 60 seconds, 30 seconds. I have a day in front of me, this one and only Tuesday in my one and only life. And when you do that, you start the day differently. You could take another tiny pause when you sit at your desk.

21:26What is this day going to bring? What should I be touching? Am I just going to maniacally pound on email before my butt is even in the chair? Or can I actually make a plan. And then look through the day for places where forced white space is served to you on a silver platter. There are a lot of times waiting for a computer to power up, waiting for something to load when you're waiting in line, when you're on hold on a conference line. These are places where the world is offering you white space. And if you fill it by looking down at the phone, you waste it, but if you acknowledge it as a gift of a pause, you could sit back.

22:08You could look out at a tree. You could think really deeply about what you're about to do. Maybe you're about to make a hugely important sales call and your ego tells you you can go from Zoom to Zoom to Zoom to Zoom to Zoom to Zoom and be equally effective, but maybe if you had five minutes of strategic pausing in between each one of those calls, you would show up as a phenomenally different person. And so we just take these little sips and that is how we begin. That was hypnotic. Thank you for that, Julia. It really was. I almost like lost myself there. And you might have had a long silence had I not kind of brought it back together at the end, realizing that, you know, we're actually having a conversation here.

22:47And it's just such great content all about a minute to think. And I'm going to start doing that in the morning. I mean, I want to sit up and think for a minute that I want to sit down at my desk and think for a minute. And this all brings us back to the title of your book, which is A Minute to Think. So bring us home. Beyond what we've already talked about, which is a ton of great value bombs, what does Fire Nation need to know about this book? Where can they pick it up? And then we'll say goodbye. Well, wherever great books are sold, or even wherever bad books are sold, you can pick it up on all your regular channels.

23:23But you can have the first chapter for free if you come to our website at juliettefun.com. and there's great resources there. There's a quiz you can take called the busyness test that will orient you to your own temperature in terms of busyness and give you some quick tips about what to do. So we'd love to have you as part of our community, but Amazon and all the good old places will have it as well. And I guess just one takeaway from the book, you know, again, beyond what we've already shared, that you think would be a great place to kind of send Fire Nation off into the sunset. Let's talk about a boundary around work, because we're entrepreneurs in a pandemic, which means that there are no edges anymore.

24:02It's just a deck of cards, work on one hand and life on the other hand, that's been shuffled together. So here's a quick little tip. When you want to clock out at the end of the day, now you have to first decide that you want to clock out ever, but when you do, trap yourself in a promise. Here's what this means. Let's say you say, I'm going to be done at seven. You just say out loud in front of anyone that you are around in your home, well, I'm done for the day. Just casually, oh, done for the day. Oh, time for dinner. I'm finished. No more work for me. And when you say it out loud, you have now created verbal accountability.

24:39And if you live alone, you can text it to a friend. You can even say it out loud just for your own ears to hear. And it is much harder to go back 45 minutes later and sip from that laptop again when you have stated work is over. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with Juliet and JLD today. So keep up the heat. Head over to eofire.com, type Juliet in the search bar. Her show notes page will pop up with everything we've talked about. Your major call to action, julietfunt.com. Get over there, get the first chapter for free. Take that amazing quiz.

25:17that's f-u-n-t.com juliettefunt.com juliette thank you for sharing your truth your knowledge your value with fire nation today for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side thank you hey fire nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by juliette and fire nation successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals that's why i created the freedom journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in a hundred days and we're talking step by step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies?

26:00Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Thank you.