Get LASER FOCUSED for 2024 (in 18 minutes)

0:00Hey, what's up? It's Sean. Quick note, this episode, I am going over something that's a very important topic, and I think it's a great episode. but if you're listening to this on iTunes or Spotify, you're not going to be able to see the images because I basically hand drew a bunch of diagrams of the frameworks that I'm talking about here and I hold them up until you can see them on camera and honestly, they're pretty good. I spent a lot of time on this, tens of minutes, let's say, but no, in actuality, it's actually pretty useful and I think the diagrams help it a lot. So for this episode, I would strongly recommend you go to YouTube so that you can actually see what I'm talking about.

0:32Otherwise, it might get a little funky if you're just listening. You're going to be trying to imagine what I'm talking about, but it's a lot easier if you just go to YouTube. So enjoy this episode and go to youtube.com or the app and then just type in My First Million. You'll see it right there up top. Very easy. And check it out. You can do anything, but you can't do everything. And that is what I want to talk about today. Ruthless focus, laser-like focus for 2024.

1:03I put my all in it like my days off on the road. I have not been great at focusing in the past. In the past, I have let myself get distracted. I have let myself set a goal at the beginning of the year. And by the end of the year, I check in and I'm like, where the hell, what did I do all year? Why did I drift? And it's not something malicious. It's not like a total fail, but it's just this drift that I didn't like. And I wanted to get better. I'm going to show you what works for me. How do you get more focus? How do we get the laser-like focus that all the great ones exhibit? whether it's in sports and you see Kobe Bryant completely obsessed in entertainment.

1:37You see Mr. Beast is completely locked in and obsessed in business. You'll see somebody like Mark Zuckerberg laser focused on one thing trying to make that happen. And they don't let themselves drift the way the rest of us do. So here's the little visual. This is you. And this is all the things that you might do. So this is, you know, some news thing that's going on the election. This is Love is Blind season five. this is that investment somebody wants you to do this is um that email you got from that person who wants to do a call and pick your brain this is that side side hustle that's not really going to go anywhere right that's all the things and then the blur thing is the thing you actually want this is the thing that you would feel proud of at the end of the year if you made this happen and so what we need is laser-like focus we do not want the cone to be wide i'm going to show you how we do that.

2:28So first thing you want to do, this is a before and after of how you can operate. And again, we have all the possible things that we could be saying yes to. And you want to think about your yes threshold. So let's write that out. This is your yes threshold. And before Or it might be, you know, here. So you might have your yes threshold right there. And what you're doing is you're saying yes to anything above that line. If it's below that line, you're able to say no, but you're able to say yes to everything above that line. And the after, all we have to do, the first thing you have to do is simply acknowledge, bring your awareness to how low your yes threshold is and raise it.

3:16Raise your standard for yes. And so instead of saying yes to things that are pretty good, maybe interesting, might be worth doing, pretty cool, you take your yes to a hell yes. That is the easiest thing you can do. So we're going to raise the yes threshold, right? We're going to take it from here up to here. And, you know, this sad guy becomes this happy guy and he's taller. So you get two inches of height at least and your yes threshold is even higher. All right. So that's the first thing you do. Bring your awareness to where's my bar today and take my yeses to only doing hell yes things. That doesn't mean you don't do it.

3:53If somebody, you know, if your friend comes and says, we're going to Costa Rica and it's going to be amazing, that might be a hell yes for you. Go for it. But make sure you have a premium quality on your focus and what you're willing to do. All right. Next thing, time management. You may have seen this as a famous Paul Graham essay that I've turned into a cartoon. and the Paul Graham essay is basically showing the difference between a maker oh wait I have these flipped okay yeah hold on let's reverse that this is a manager's schedule this is what their calendar looks like and this is what a maker's schedule looks like this is the artist right somebody who's a builder and so for a lot of people they have this 9am, 9.30am, 10am 10.30am, 11am, 11 oh I'm double booked oh shit and they end up just in a puddle of tears they are overwhelmed their stress, they sort of busy themselves to death.

4:42Why didn't I get everything I wanted to done in life? Why didn't I achieve my goals and my dreams? Because I was too busy. Like, listen to that sentence. That doesn't even make sense. You didn't do the things you need to do because you didn't have time because you filled it with other crap. And so most people by default, especially people in jobs, you will be default opted into a manager's schedule. What you want to do is switch to a maker's schedule. A maker's schedule is basically long interrupted blocks of time. Usually in the morning, you need at least two and a half hours of uninterrupted time.

5:11Usually three is ideal. A break where you're going to lunch, exercise, go for a walk, play with your kids, walk your dog, whatever you do. And then another uninterrupted sprint. For some people, the real great ones, they have another break and then they have a third night sprint, but you don't have to do all that. You need to switch to this maker schedule. And so the maker schedule is the the one thing you could do with your time where in the same number of hours you can get more done why because when you get into these uninterrupted blocks of time you get into flow states and you're able to actually lock in on knocking out one whole thing without distractions without checking your emails without being pulled into a call or a meeting about this and about that you're able to lock in and so whether you're an engineer and you want to build a product you want to code something or you're you know you're trying to be an entertainer you need to write chapters of your book or a YouTube video that you're making, or you're just trying to come up with a new idea, not letting your day get split.

6:10I call this the zebra calendar where you're just stripes all day. That is the next thing you need to do to enable yourself to come up with great ideas, right? You are setting up your environment. So the first thing we did was we raised the threshold of yes to a hell yes, so that we're just saying no to things, that clear space. The next thing is we do the maker schedule versus the manager schedule so that you have uninterrupted time blocks where you can be your most creative, productive self. Okay, next thing. Now we're going to clarity. So this is something I stole from Asana. Asana created this thing called the pyramid of clarity.

6:45And the pyramid of clarity goes as follows. At the top here, you have your mission. And the mission is your big, the reason your organization exists. It's the reason you're even doing this. It's your big why. And so let's say you're Elon Musk, your mission for SpaceX might be, you know, make humans an interplanetary species, a multi-planetary species. Or for Tesla, for him, it might be get the world off of using, you know, fossil fuels and get them to an electric future, right? So that's the big vision for what you're doing. Now, you break that down. So you write that out. And by the way, a little pro tip, because when I first read about this, I was like, wow, that makes total sense.

7:26You got to have this big, audacious vision. But let's say you're not building rockets and going to space, or you're not trying to get the world off of fossil fuels to a fully electric energy system. You might just be building an e-commerce business that's designed to enable your lifestyle to be really great because you wanted money and you didn't have money. Whatever it is, the key here is honesty. Because you can write a fancy mission, but if it's not your honest mission, it's not going to help. It's not going to do anything. It won't have any emotional resonance. So what I try to do is I try to be honest about the mission.

7:55So for example, with my company, we are building a company that is going to enable us to have an amazing lifestyle. Us, the owners of the business, have an amazing lifestyle. We only have a couple of people in the business. It's all owners. And we want to have a lifestyle where we can do what we want, when we want, with whoever we want, and only work on projects that are intellectually fascinating for us, creatively challenging for us. And so we write that. That's what we're doing. That is the mission of what we're trying to build. We're building a vehicle that enables that. From there, you want to go down to the one-year goal.

8:25okay so this is the mission might take 10 years it might take 20 years but then you break it down to the one-year goal where do we need to be at the end of the year for this to be a smash success and specifically i set two goals so i have the uh what i call the f yeah goal and then i have the floor goal and so i set kind of a range here because i don't like static what you know single goals binary goals because you're then you're you're like should i just be super ambitious but then I might be disappointed or should I be conservative but then I feel like I didn't push myself. So I set both. I set an F.E.I.

9:00goal and a floor goal. The floor goal means you would be disappointed if it didn't reach this level. Meaning this would be a solid win. Below that, you kind of feel like, man, really, we didn't get there? And the F.E.I. goal is we're high-fiving, we're toasting to ourselves. I can't believe this is how good it turned out. And so you want to kind of set that range for yourself and say, all right, we have a minimum and then we have sort of a target that we're going to shoot for. okay, what's the next level of this? Now you have your overall mission clarified, and I'll show you an example in a second.

9:30You have your one-year goal, where we want to be a year from now, and that's what you're going to work backwards from. So then you work backwards, you say, okay, in order to achieve this one-year goal, what do I need in terms of people? What do I need in terms of product? And what do I need in terms of finances? Three categories. And so you break the one-year goal into the, this is the output, to the inputs. So for example, for my e-commerce company, we had a one-year goal and we said, we're going to try to go, we're going to try to double revenue. We did about 17-ish million last year. We're going to try to get to over 30 this year.

10:04So we said, what do we need in terms of people? Well, I needed to hire a CMO because today I was doing it. I'm not the best CMO for that business. I'm not full-time on it. So we set some people targets. We need to hire an amazing CMO who's done this before. We needed to hire a website developer who's going to do X, Y, Z, right? So you write down, what are your people gaps? Then you have your product gaps. So what does the product need to be able to do in order for us to hit our goal? So for example, when Elon launched Tesla, he set a product goal and he was like, how do we make a car that is, I think it was like faster than a Porsche and better for the environment than a Prius.

10:43Faster than a Porsche, better for better than a Prius, right? Better for the environment than a Prius. And that is a product goal. That is a benchmark that we are trying to achieve. Is it faster than a Porsche? And is it better for the environment than a Prius? And so similarly, you want to set some product goals for yourself to achieve your one-year mission. And lastly is finances. So do you need capital? By default, people think they do. You should question that assumption. Beyond just how much money do we need to do this might be your margins or might be your unit economics. We need to bring the cost down to this in order for this to work because we want to be profitable and today we're unprofitable.

11:20And so within each one of those, you've now broken your one-year goal into the different input metrics that if you did those correctly, it would lead to the one-year goal. And then from there, you just break it out by month. You say, all right, in January, okay, what are we going to do? Well, we need to chip away at the people goal, the product goal, and the finance goal. So let's break those into a digestible chunk. And now all of a sudden, it's like, let's do 20 interviews and try to find two great candidates for the CMO role or whatever it may be. And so then you go month by month and every month you check in.

11:52You check in on the whole pyramid. You say, all right, as a reminder, our mission is X. By the end of the year, we're trying to do Y. In order to do that, we need to do these three things internally and then the score will take care of itself. And so to get there, we need to break this out month by month into what mattered last month, did we achieve it, and what matters this month. You do that for 12 months straight, you are going to stay on track. There will be no drift.

12:18Well, guys, when it comes to banking, the only time I feel truly happy is when I'm using Mercury. And that's today's sponsor for the show. That is the banking product I use for not one, not two, but actually eight of my businesses. I have eight Mercury accounts. I just went and counted. I use it for every one of my companies. It's an absolute no-brainer. Over 200 ,000 other fast-growing, ambitious companies use Mercury. It's one place you can go where not only you can, of course, have your money there, but you can send invoices. You can pay bills. You can create reimbursements for your team. Pretty much all of your financial needs can be housed under Mercury.

12:50And the product is beautiful to use. And the reason why is because it's a product that was not made by finance people. It was made by a founder, Ahmad. He's been on this podcast before. And he used tons of products as a startup founder. And this is the one that he wished he had. And I actually reached out to them to become a sponsor for this show because I'm such a big fan of it. So if you need a banking product for your startup, use Mercury. You will not regret it. It's amazing. For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.

13:20Last thing I want to share with you. I stole this from my friend, Joel Oman. He's a listener of the show. And I hope he's okay with me sharing this. I'll ask him. But he said he shared this simple slide that he made for himself. And I loved it. It was a killer slide. It was one slide that gave him clarity on what is he trying to do and how is he going to get there. And I like the way he framed it. So I want to share it with you. So he had his goal, the mission that I called it on the last page. And his goal was to build a creatively fulfilling cash machine. I just love that. Creatively fulfilling cash machine.

13:57And he said, well, you know, I've done each of them individually. You know, I've built successful businesses, cash machines. And I've built, I've done things, you know, he wrote like a fantasy fiction book, right? Something that was creatively fulfilling, but didn't make any money. And so he's like, this time, my mission is to do this. Because if I did this, I would be blissed out walking into work every day, right? I would be at my happiest in terms of my professional goals. And so set a goal for yourself like this. And you want to use this as a bar for resonance, right? You know, this is not a generic off-the-shelf goal, like be successful or make money or whatever, right?

14:35Like set it for real. So maybe for some people, it's make six grand a month so that I can quit my job, make six grand a month out of my business so I can quit my job and be totally independent, not have to worry about how I'm going to pay the bills, right? I could be stress-free and then it's only up from there. And write that whole thing out. Write it out in a way that has some emotional pull for you, that it's a compelling picture. All right. So the second thing, then you have your output, right? So what are those, you know, that's kind of like I said, the one-year goal, right? So in order to do that, we might need to do the following two things.

15:07Now, here's the part I liked best. When he says, I say yes to blank and I say no to blank. So for example, let's say for this podcast, I have a goal, which is I want to be one of those people that inspired me when I was coming up. That is very much why I do this podcast. Because growing up, I remember when I was in college, somebody gave me a book called The 4-Hour Workweek. And it blew my mind at the time. I'd never thought about half of the concepts in there. And I was like, just insight after insight, page after page of inspiration and story. And I just said, that's how I want my life to be.

15:44I said, I called it Catching the 4-Hour Fever. Like I read that book and for four hours, I went into a fever dream and I'd replanned everything in my life. That was very impactful for me. Thank you, Tim Ferriss. There have been other moments like that, Tony Robbins and others, where I've had these people who created content that really shifted my thinking, that made me have more clarity, more insight, more motivation, more firepower to go do what I wanted to do. And so my goal with this podcast is to do that. Okay, well, great. What do I need to say yes to in order for that to happen? Well, we break that big dream down to a one-year goal, and then we break that one-year goal down to the things that we're going to have to opt into.

16:21So for example, for this podcast, you might say, well, I'm going to have to sit down consistently week after week doing my absolute best to create the most compelling content out there, the best wisdom for entrepreneurs. And when I do that, I'm saying yes to doing my best and knowing that the numbers are not going to change every week, that it might look flat for a long time, that I'm going to do that for years and I will not be discouraged. I say yes to doing that input, even though the numbers will take a long time to build up. So that's what I'm saying yes to. What's the second thing I'm saying yes to?

16:55Well, for this year, for example, we wanted to bring on higher profile guests. We booked a bunch of Tim Ferriss coming on. We booked Tony Robbins and a bunch of others. And so I said yes to doing something I didn't like to do, guest outreach. I hated begging people to come on my podcast and all that. I just, I don't know. I don't like what people ask me. I didn't want to ask other people. But I said, I got to say yes to that. I got to say yes to the discomfort and the ego of continuing to follow up with people and try to get them to come on the podcast. And what do I say no to? So what are the things I have to say no to?

17:25Well, I have to say no to starting a company. I sit on this podcast every week and I come up with ideas for businesses. I got to say no to actually going and doing them because if I now am a CEO of a startup, I'm not going to be able to achieve this goal. So I have to say no to some very compelling, good ideas that would make me millions of dollars. Write that down, right? So what are the other things I have to say no to? I have to say no to avoiding hard conversations. I have to say no to my old habit of blah, blah, blah, right? I thought this was a very, very useful thing because it had both the, it was all about self-awareness.

17:57This is a self-awareness game. What is the goal that motivates me to get out of bed every single day and chase this above all other possible things I could be doing with my time and my talents? Second, what is it about me that I know I'm going to have to consciously force myself to say yes to and say no to? and here it's the things that are not easy for you. You don't want to write the things that you already say yes to that are already just trivial for you. It's your nature to do that. It's here you identify what's against your nature and write that down so that you're very clear in what you need to do.

18:28And to me, this is how you can do anything. You are limitless, right? Nobody can tell you that you can't do that thing, but you can't do everything, right? So that you can do anything, but you can't do everything is a very powerful idea and it gives you that focus as a superpower. People say that, but they don't tell you how you focus. So I hope today you learned a little something from Uncle Sean about how you actually focus. This is something that, frankly, I'm still a beginner at, right? I'm maybe a blue belt in the game of focus, but I do know that it's important. And because it's important, I'm working at it.

19:01And I wanted to share with you the things that I'm doing that tend to be working for me, the things that have helped me make some progress. Maybe there's some more things out there I'd love to hear from you, what works for you in the comments. but uh that's it that's the episode i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road let's travel never looking back

19:27all right this episode is brought to you by mercury they are the finance platform of choice for over 200 000 companies shouldn't be surprised because i use it myself for not one not two but i have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of. And then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

19:55It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really any type of entrepreneur you are, Let's say you're an agency. Well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

20:21For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.