If You Want To Master Productivity, Listen To This | Rory Vaden EP 737

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show. Today's episode is all about unlocking the power of your mind. Having a growth mindset is one of the most crucial decisions you can make in your life. Mental toughness can allow you to respond instead of react, to be in control instead of out of control, and give you the endurance you need to follow your dreams.

0:33There is a new type of thinker that has emerged that is, we call them a multiplier. Because most people are trying to manage time, right? Like you even hear this, you go, I need, you know, I need to be better at managing my time. But you know, what's funny about that is there is no such thing as time management. There is only self-management, right? You cannot manage time. There's their time ticks on second by second. I can't fast forward time. I can't stop it. I can't pause it. And so what we're what this conversation really about is managing ourselves, managing our decisions, managing our use of time.

1:13But even that is kind of a is a first shift that needs to happen is it's not like I'm this helpless victim that is subject to the world around me who is unfairly blasting me with all this stuff. No, you're in charge. Like you, everything that exists in your life, you either said, you said yes to it in some way. So it is your responsibility and you created the problem, but that also means that you are in charge of fixing it, that you have the power to change it. But what we started to realize is that most of what people have learned and think about time management is wrong. It's wrong because we have been taught to think about time in a very linear way.

2:02And the world today is much more like multi-dimensional. Era one time management thinking was very one-dimensional. We refer to era one thinking as efficiency. So that was the strategy was I got 10 things on my to-do list. How do I crank them out faster? And time management, and productivity as a body of work really develops. Like it comes on in the scene in like 1950s, 60s. So, you know, it's the manufacturing era where it's conveyor belts and engineering and just doing things faster. That also reflected in our mindset was, how can I be more efficient? Now, efficiency is good. Doing things faster is great.

2:45The problem is that there is a point of diminishing returns to using efficiency as your only strategy for productivity, which is that no matter how fast we move, the amount of busy work always expands to fill the amount of time available. Right. So it's more like quicksand. It's just kind of like the faster you go or the more that shows up. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be fast. It's just not going to get you what you're looking for. In the late 80s, Dr. Stephen Covey wrote a book that changed the world And Dr. Kaveh pretty much single-handedly introduced a new era of time management thought that the world refers to as prioritizing.

3:28But we would classify prioritizing as era two thinking, which is still to this day the predominant strategy that most people use in terms of how they think about time. And so here's what prioritizing is. It's to focus first on what matters most. Prioritizing is as important today as ever before. Mm-hmm. There's no shortage of books on time management. There's no shortage of apps. There's all these tips and tricks and tools and technology that exist to help us with this problem of feeling so busy, and yet the majority of us are still overwhelmed. Right. So what we started to notice in these ultra-performers that we now refer to as the multipliers is that they are doing a different type of thinking.

4:16It's like evolution. Like their thinking has evolved. For almost all of them, it was subconscious. And they weren't even aware of it. Not even aware of it. It wasn't something that someone taught them to do. They did it instinctively, you know, like instinctually. They figured out and most of them couldn't explain it. They couldn't explain it to me and they couldn't explain it to most people if they said, why are you, how are you so productive, right? Like, how do you become a billionaire in 10 years when, like, most people work for 40 years and they can barely retire? The next level of results always requires the next level of thinking.

4:58So, era three time management is multiplying. It's not efficiency. It's not prioritizing. It's multiplying. And it's all based on what we call the significance calculation. So it's really, it's not, it's adding on like Dr. Covey's work as an example. So he, you know, presents this two-dimensional figure, like a square, where the y-axis is importance and the x-axis is urgency. But what multipliers are doing is they're making a third calculation, which we call significance. And so here's the difference. Urgency is how soon does this matter? Most of us live in a world of urgency. It's all about what needs to be done right now.

5:41Importance is different. Importance is how much does this matter? But significance is even different still. Significance is how long is this going to matter? What is the impact of this activity in the future? 10 years out, 20 years out. Even 10 days out, yeah. It is breaking free of the paradigm of one day and instead thinking about tomorrow and the next day. And the significance calculation changes everything. The way you multiply time is by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow.

6:29you've been told your whole life time is the one thing you you can never get back it's the one thing you can never get more of one day is finite and we're all limited by the same 24 hours that's exactly the problem is most of us think about our activities in the paradigm of one day we wake up and we say what's the most important thing i can do today and it's not that that's a bad question It's just not the question that multipliers ask. Multipliers don't say, what is the most important thing I can do today? Multipliers ask, what are the things I can do today that create more time tomorrow? What are the things I can do now that make the future better?

7:07You're literally breaking free of the urgency paradigm of just what matters right here, right now. And you're introducing the significance paradigm of what is going to have impact over the long haul. Right. For most of us, it's not just our calendar and our inbox and our to-do list. It is our underlying feelings of guilt and fear and anxiety and worry, as well as ambition and our drive to be successful and feel valued and important and to make impact in the world. These underlying emotional drivers dictate how we spend our time and the choices that we make as much as anything on our to-do list.

7:48when we're profiling all these people, I was doing interviews and I told one of the multipliers, I said, I don't like this one. I, I got to where I am by being a yes man, by like doing a lot of things and doing them well. And like saying yes to meetings and meeting people all the time. And, and they said, Rory, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And I was like, Oh, okay. Um, and here's what they said. They said, you're trying to go through life without saying no, which is admirable because you're a nice guy. But what you failed to realize is that you are always saying no to something. Anytime you say yes to one thing, you simultaneously are saying no to an infinite number of other things.

8:34So even when you think you're saying, yes, everything is important to me. No, nothing is important to you. Nothing is important enough for you to focus on and you don't have a method for for focus and focus is power most of us are losing because we're wandering we're meandering through a bunch of insignificant trivial tasks feeling productive when when really we're just diluted anything you create a process for today saves you time in the future. If I set up a process for it or a system, or if I write code, if I take the time to set it up today, then tomorrow the system or the process is doing the thing instead of me.

9:19So it's multiplying time. Most of us are aware that those tools exist. It's so ironic because the two excuses we would use for why we haven't automated things is we would say, either I don't have the time or I don't have the time or the money. Those two excuses we would use for not automating something are exactly the opposite of how it is when you make the significance calculation.

9:56I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.