Lack Of Focus Is Keeping You Unsuccessful | Ep 806

0:00I had this attorney tell me this when I was 21. One, I said, I'm in, I've been working so hard. And she said, she just looked at me and laughed. And she said, you don't even know how to work. And it was such a jarring moment for me because she was a partner at this firm. And I was trying to impress everybody. And I thought I was like, you know, doing a gung-ho job. And she just laughed at me. She was like, you don't even know how to work. She's like, it takes you 10 years just to learn how to work. I feel like now looking in retrospect, I can absolutely agree. My capacity has improved. But the way to improve that capacity is to start eliminating the things that currently drain your focus right now.

0:32I've seen this consistent theme amongst people inside the community, and I want to talk about it, which is this is something that has happened at multiple stages within my business career. And it's extended seasons of saying no. If we define focus as the quality and quantity of things that you turn down or say no to, then to be the most focused person, you would literally do nothing but one thing. And so I hear many of you say that you want to focus more, but you haven't really even defined what it is. You think it's going to be about like trying harder to look at your screen when most of focus is actually the active removal of things that drain attention.

1:21And so what happens is kind of like value is created by removing all friction. Focus is created by removing all distraction. The most focused people, it's not that they have willpower that you lack, they have removed the distractions that you have. And so I remember this talk with a friend of mine who's an Olympic coach. And he was saying the difference between people who win the gold medal and kind of the other competitors, people look at them and say, I wonder what they have that I don't. But more often, it's what do I have that they lack? In those instances, it's typically an off switch. But it's also what are the things that I'm doing with my time that they aren't?

2:03Fundamentally, it's not even that they're getting a higher return for the time they're putting in. They're just simply putting in more time. And what feels incomprehensible for you is that you could put more time into whatever you're trying to pursue right now, but you can by removing things. One of my favorite quotes is that the heaviest thing in the world isn't iron or gold. It's an unmade decision. That's a quote from me. So man, super deep. But for real though, you probably have a few decisions that you need to make. And one of the big fallacies around decision making is that it takes time to make decisions.

2:38And it really doesn't. You make decisions in an instant based on information. And so by the way, for those of you who sell, when someone is in this kind of like, I need to think about it. It's like, what do you need to think about it? And what information would be required in order to make a decision? Some of you need to define the variables of what would make this a yes. And alternatively, if you don't know, then what would make it a no? And then you can reverse engineer the yes. And so in either circumstance, some of you need to focus by eliminating the unmade decisions in your life by simply making them.

3:14And there's this big fallacy at all levels of business of the perfect pick, which is that you're going to be able to somehow pick perfectly, most decisions have to be made with imperfect information. And oftentimes, if you have perfect information about an opportunity, the opportunity has expired. And so one of the things that makes opportunities opportunities is the risk inherent in incomplete information. And so sometimes you just have to move and learn along the way. And so one of the easiest visuals I have for this is the mist, is walking through mist, right? As you walk through mist, the next few feet are always become clear to you.

3:56And when you walk your way up a mountain, and now imagine a mountain that you're walking through mist, right? You keep walking, you keep taking the next step. You might get to a maximum and be like, wow, this is a mountaintop. But then you see a little bit further because the mist and you realize you're at a subtop and you have to take a few steps down. But the thing is, is that you'll always be further away than the people who are trying to plot the perfect path from the bottom of the mountain without being able to see the top. So you'll always be able to have better perspective after taking action, after taking motion.

4:24The reason that this has been top of mind for me is that the big growth periods that I've had in my life in terms of finances have typically followed or at least happened concurrently with periods, extended periods of what I call seasons of no. What's interesting is that I'm sure this has been studied in research. We know that people are significantly less effective when they try to do multiple things. So multitasking, you're significantly less effective when it comes to output per unit of time. You switch back and forth and it kills your efficiency by like 75%. If we consider our leverage as the difference between what we get for what we put in, then skill is a great lever on work.

5:09Meaning if work we define as output, then the more skilled person for the time they put in will have more output. So skill equals leverage, work equals output. The more skill you have, the more output you get. And so if you can get more output, then it means that choosing to do fewer things is in and of itself a skill. And I think I bring this up because some of you are like, man, I'm not that focused. But the thing is, is that the focus isn't a trait, it's an action. And you can do this on a repeated basis so that you can become more focused by simply exercising focus. That means choosing to make unmade decisions so that you can resolve them, knowing that they may be imperfect, but you have the ability to course correct along the way.

5:49There are very few decisions in business that are truly irreversible, and especially when you're starting out because the stakes are so low. And so you're not making bets that are so big. the biggest periods of growth in my life have occurred when I committed wholeheartedly to periods where I would do nothing else. And so currently, I'm actually in one of those periods right now, which is why it's partially top of mind for me and also in reading some of the comments that you guys put out there. And I think the big thing that people miss is that it's a trade-off. One of the issues is that basically people have a preference problem, which is that they want these results their way.

6:31They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the outcome, but they want to change the variables that create the outcome. They want a six pack, but they don't want to do the workout and the nutrition plan. But they're like, but I want the six pack. Can I change the nutrition plan? Can I change the workouts and then I'll get the six pack? And the answer is obviously no. And so the thing is, is that some of you have come to this world with the desire, you know, my world, whatever, with the desire to get those outcomes. And I applaud you for that. That applause is short-lived if you want to change the variables.

7:05Most of you have a huge deficit in work capacity. My point around this, and I'll give you a fitness example because a lot of people wouldn't understand it and then I'll translate it back to work, like knowledge work. Whenever you work out, you damage a muscle and then it overcompensates and you recover and you get a little bit stronger, right? That's kind of the basic idea. Okay. So think about like digging a hole. You put more dirt back in a little bit, a little bit comes on top. That little bit extra is kind of the hypertrophy is the game. Okay. So work capacity itself is that people understand it that way.

7:37And so then people have this fear of overtraining, comma, overworking, right? They're like, I don't want to work too much, right? I don't want to work out too much. I'll damage myself too much. But the missing variable that people have when it comes to building muscle just as much as it comes to working is that your work capacity itself is trainable. Meaning, if you're an athlete and you train and you damage the muscle and then it grows, you actually, over time, your ability to withstand the work improves. Meaning, you can add more volume without overtraining. Your recovery capacity to put dirt back in the hole actually speeds up.

8:15You get a bigger shovel that can move more dirt faster. I had this attorney tell me this when I was, I was about to say a child. When I was 21, I said, I've been working so hard. And she said, she just looked at me and laughed. And she said, you don't even know how to work. And it was such a jarring moment for me because she was a partner at this firm. And I was trying to impress everybody. And I thought I was like, you know, doing a gung-ho job. And she just laughed at me. She's like, you don't even know how to work. She's like, it takes you 10 years just to learn how to work. And I remember thinking, you know, being a little bit disheartened by that at the beginning.

8:43But I feel like now looking in retrospect, I can absolutely agree that my ability to work itself has improved. My capacity has improved. But the way to improve that capacity is to start eliminating the things that currently drain your focus right now. And so then all of a sudden you realize once you kind of like have the bare naked truth of your calendar in front of you, you have nothing else left, and then you still are struggling to stay focused, then you can begin the work on your work capacity. The big piece, number one, is the unmade decisions. You want to eliminate those by making them. The second big piece is that you want to eliminate the things that are not the work, right?

9:29And so a lot of people obsess about, you know, morning routines, things like that. You want to eliminate all that stuff. The next category is going to be relationships and hobbies, all right? And so some of you guys may have hobbies. And I want to be clear, there are hobbies that are basically function is rest. So if your work output per unit of time over a long period of time, and I want to be clear about this, you can always work more in 24 hours if you only had 24 hours to work. You shouldn't sleep, you shouldn't do anything, take a ton of stimulants, and you'd work more. But over a week, you lose productivity.

10:01And so my point here is that you not rest. You should work as much as you possibly can and then rest as efficiently as you can so they can resume work at max output. And so for you, if gardening is a thing or playing video games is a thing or whatever, I see that as separate from playing video games as getting in the way of work. If you work first and then you allow yourself to reward yourself with video games at the end of your workday, that actually does two things. It actually gives you a reward for work and it gives you rest, which is nice. And so I would encourage some of you guys to put off extended periods of time before the thing that you might want to do more.

10:42And I want to kind of disclaim or decry actively the idea that everything that you're about to embark on, whatever season you're in, is going to be fun. The vast majority of the things that I do every day aren't that fun. I do enjoy what we build. And so if you want to build this big chateau, this big castle, laying bricks not that fun digging moats not digging trenches not that fun like cutting wood nailing it in not necessarily that fun but when you have a castle and you get to live inside of it you're like this is pretty dope but the thing is just like so people have this big conflation area right between the thing that they want to get and the process of getting there it's just it's a very pithy soundbite to say like you should just you know never never work a day in your life again if you do what you love.

11:29But no one does what they love all the time to do the things, to get the things they want. And I just like, I'm actively about this. Zooming back out with regards to business owners in different seasons, right? Is that when I was a consultant, so this is all the way back to when I had my job. And so for some of you, this will be relevant. I didn't really go out at all. I would spend four hours a day after my workday doing practice problems for the GMAT, which was what I thought I was going to do as my next step was take the GMAT and go to Harvard and then kind of like go the NBA route. And then that's all I did.

12:06I took 100 % of my discretionary time and put it into acing the GMAT. And then once I realized that the GMAT wasn't going to be the next path, I then drove across the country that eliminated friends, that eliminated family, that eliminated anyone who knew me. And then I started a gym and I pretty much lived at the gym. I, by default, created an environment of focus because there was nothing else for me to do. For that next chunk of time, I was just dedicated to making this gym work. And that also meant that during that period of time, I didn't read general business books. I didn't read, I wasn't watching motivational videos.

12:46All I did was just look at how do I get more members? How do I sell better? How do I price? All of my focuses are on the run problem that I had. And so many of you have a specific problem that you know you need to solve, and yet you're not allocating all the resources in your discretionary time and effort towards solving it. What's interesting about this is we've seen on the 100, which is the little group that Kirby and I are running as a side project to see if we can do anything different on onboarding. And inside of that group, I think we've had 86 % of people make a dollar. Is that correct?

13:20Yeah. And so 86 % of people have made a dollar. And then I think something like 60 % of people who had never, had never made a dollar. So we had three cohorts inside of there. We had people who had made money on school, but wanted to compete. We had people who had made money outside of school. So business owners in general, who've made a dollar, and then they'd never made a dollar on school. And then we had people who'd never made a dollar anywhere. And so those are the three cohorts. Now, cohort number one, people who'd already made money in school, all of them have made money. So that's 100%.

13:48Of the people who made money elsewhere and then came on to school, do you know what the percentage is there? 100%. The reason that that second category is so important is that it demonstrates that there are skills that when applied to school, like basically school is a great platform to immediately be able to build a business on. And so then it's like, okay, what other skills must a beginner learn? and this is what we're trying to figure out, is like, how many of these extra skills does someone have to come in with that we can eliminate so that someone can be successful? And so right now, I think it's, do you know what the actual percentage is on the third box, people who had never made a dollar?

14:2762%. So 62%. Okay. Some of you who are new here would hear that and be like, man, I want to get into that. The thing is, is that most of the times, the stuff that we've actually covered in there, we've actually, it's already, we've already covered it. And so you think that there's a secret and there really isn't. And so I think the thing that really separates the people who have made money or more money is the expectation of the effort required. And I think this is where a lot of people struggle because it's really that your expectation can be a hundred X off. Like I've seen expectations truly off by a hundred times.

15:04This should happen in one one hundredth of the time. This, I should be able to get a customer. If I should reach out to five people, I figure I'll get one customer. When you really need to reach out to like 200 people to get a customer, and then you're like, oh, wow, that's a lot more people than I expected. And it's like, yeah, it is. And that first customer might pay you one-tenth what you thought, right? And so all of these things are expectation problems more than they are problems of, they are declarative knowledge deficiencies people don't know about, rather than procedural knowledge, know how to.

15:40I'm making this mostly because a lot, I just see this as this really monstrous recurring theme. It doesn't end. Like that season of cutting things off, I cut things off when I started, you know, when I did the GMAT to study for, to go to business school. Then I cut everybody off when I went to start my gym. And then when I started flying out and doing launches, I literally was flying around the country and saw no one. Like it's all I did. And I really stayed in touch with no one besides Layla, who was basically my partner in the business when we started it. There's a period where I'm in right now where I more or less have said I'm not traveling.

16:18I'm not speaking. I'm only taking podcasts if they fly to me, et cetera, et cetera. There are these things. And the easiest way to determine this is look at the time that you spend on a weekly basis and see everything that is not work. Look at the whole calendar. Look at every single box of yours that does not drive. And I want to be clear here. If work is the output, and money made is the output we're measuring for entrepreneurship, how does money get made? So money gets made by, at the most basic levels, converting attention into goods and services that are exchanged for money. That's it. That's the fundamental exchange that occurs.

17:05There's some person, you have to get their attention, and then you have to be able to transact with them to make an exchange. That's it. when I say look at your calendar and then determine how much work you're doing, if it's not something that's getting you more leads, getting you more traffic, getting more people to come to your site, opt in, get contact in, give you contact info, whatever, and or increasing the likelihood that they convert and or transact with you, aka you sell them something, or increasing the likelihood that they retain, they resell, they refer, or they leave you a review, the four R's on the back end.

17:47If the thing that you're working on when you look at your calendar does not relate to any of those big three buckets, which is basically a track, convert, deliver. If you don't have anything that's occurring within those three buckets, then this is not work. And so it is actually unfocused of you to have those things. And I would say it's most common at the beginner level to have these things. At the advanced level, it's that you fill your time with work tasks that are not the constraint of the business. And so it's the idea that you are doing things because you like doing them rather than because it's what's required.

18:26And so I'll give you an example. If I, for example, love, I love marketing. Fine, right? That's what it is. So if I spend more time generating leads for my business, but my constraint of my business is my sales guys, I don't have enough sales guys to take the calls, then me generating more leads adds potential to the system, but not throughput because I'm limited by the number of sales guys. And the same would be true if I then increase the number of sales guys, but then I didn't increase my number of customer success or my delivery team or inventory forified product. The issue is that in the beginning, you just work on a lot of stuff that's not work and you call it work.

19:06Later on, you work on a lot of things that are work, but are not the work that needs doing. And so it's a minor difference that happens. And I'm telling you, this happens at all stages. This happens at a million a year, a million a month, a million a week, all the way through. I've seen this across the board. So you're not too advanced to hear this. And I say this because this is something that I struggle with every day is like, is this the most important or highest leverage thing that I could be using with my time? And I think many of you are simply spending the vast majority of your time not working.

19:40You think you're working, but you're actually not. And I had a guy email the other day, because I spent a day with a higher level group of business owners. So it was like five to 35 million was the room. It was 10 guys. And so like decent sized businesses. And he wrote this very nice email back. And he said, the biggest lesson that I learned was like, I had heard of this amount of work ethic. He was like, but Alex didn't leave the room for 11 hours straight. And he didn't stop the whole time. And he said, I'd never actually seen it. I'd never seen it. Right. I bring this up just because you have so much more in you that you can only tap into by removing everything else.

20:22And I think that when I've had these big breakthroughs in my life, it's because I was willing to say no. And the thing is, is that the more things you say no to, the more painful it is. Like, man, I really love, I love fantasy football with the boys. I love going out on Friday nights. I'm not saying that you have to do it forever. I'm just saying you do it for now. You just do it for a season. because the thing is, is that these dedicated seasons is where sometimes you can pull four years of the future into your life in a matter of months, but you actually have to stick with it. And you have to do it for that period of time because you have to confront the discomfort of not knowing it's the unknown of figuring it out.

21:02And so a lot of you continue to think that basically because you want to avoid the pain of not knowing what to do, you think you will solve that pain by doing more research. But again, you're trying to solve something with declarative knowledge, learning about something rather than procedural knowledge, which is learning how to do something. And the only way you learn how to sell is by getting on the phone. The only way you learn how to run ads is by running ads. Fine, you can read an article or two, but I promise you, you'll learn significantly more the day you actually start and you'll look back.

21:35And for anybody who's a parent, I can imagine that you read a couple of parenting books and then you're like, it is not even close to what running, you know, to actually having a child is like. And to the same degree, those of you who are starting a business now, if you read some business stuff, it wasn't anything close to what actually running a business is like. The goal of this, if I have one call to action for you guys who are listening right now, is to remove everything that is not the work that moves the business forward. And at the advanced level, it's making sure that the work that moves the business forward is the work that moves the business the most forward per unit of time.

22:14I could have an improvement in CRO. That would be like if I split test my landing page and I get a 5 % lift. That's an improvement. I could try and work with the sales team to get them to close a little bit higher. That would be an improvement. But the biggest gains of my life came from asking the question or solving impossible questions, meaning, okay, what would need to occur in order for me to 10x this thing in a year? And then saying, what would have to be true? And then oftentimes, there's only like one thing that has to be true for that to happen. And if I know what that one thing is, then the next question is, given the resource, time, and money that I have available to me right now, is it reasonable that I could accomplish that one thing in the next 12 months?

22:59If the answer is yes, then the highest and best use of your time might not be the optimization, but might be the maximization or order of magnitude change that you do to get the outcome. So what I mean is you can only optimize something to 100%. You're never going to get 100 % conversion on your opt-in page. You're never going to get 100 % close rate. But you can 100x your lead flow. And so, again, I see this oftentimes, and I see this at different levels to be clear, But I'll see a business owner, you guys, you'll get stuck on like this obsession around tiny optimizations. And at some point, you just got to do an order of magnitude more.

23:40You just got to blow more through the top so that you can get a huge increase. And the only way that you'll be able to recognize that and dedicate the resources to it is to eliminate the hobbies, the people, the unmade decisions that are limiting you. and decreasing the time between once you know what you should do or need to do and actually beginning to do it. And I think that a lot of people spend too much time doing everything else because I think that the people who are the most focused, when you actually watch them, you would be astounded by basically how simple it is. It's just that it's very difficult.

24:22It's simple in that it's easy to understand, difficult in that it's hard to execute. If you watch someone write a book for 16 hours straight, they're like, okay, that's what writing a book for 16 hours straight is. But what you don't see is all of the prepping the table for the work that happened prior to and in the years leading up. So almost every billionaire that I know in my life maintains such a clean space, physically, and then more importantly, emotionally clean space. as in the people that they allow in their circles, they have one razor that they use to judge them, which is, does this person increase or decrease the likelihood that I achieve my goals?

25:01So does having this person in my life, does having this habit in my life, does having this phone call, does having this brunch, does having this weekend trip, does it increase or decrease the likelihood I achieve my goals? And I think that a lot of you in the beginning are so afraid, and to be fair, even as you progress, because it happens in levels, are so afraid of cutting things out because you have a fear that you'll never get it back. You have a fear that that cut is permanent. You have a fear that if you miss out on this fantasy football season, that you'll never get invited back. But there's two things that you'll have to remember, which is that one, a more capable version of you will have more doors that open than you do today.