4 Ideas We've STOLEN From Our Guests

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1:52Hey everyone, welcome back to High Performance. Today, we're going to share with you the things that we've been told by our guests that we've stolen and we use in our own lives. Those things where someone's come on the show, said something that has just really resonated with us. Not only have we used it, but we know the impact that it's had as well. So as always, alongside me is Damien Hughes, my co-host. Let's get straight into it then. The first thing from a guest that you've stolen. What is it and who's the guest? Dr. Peter it here is two phone method and I stole that with glee and it's made a huge difference I would say the thing that I struggle with the most by far um is is is working more than than I should and I think that I just have to be constantly at war with myself over this and constantly setting boundaries and you know for example like having two phones has been a very big help.

2:49This was something I just figured out a year ago, maybe less, which was, oh my God, if I just got that second phone, I could still have a phone with me if I want to be able to take pictures, if I'm out with my kids, if I'm, you know, like, unfortunately, like now half the electronics in the house, I'll work off the phone. You know, there's like an app for that. So I could still have that, but not have the phone. Right. So that, that became a very powerful tool. What did that do for you? Oh, it was so fantastic. It made such a difference. So that's Dr. Peter Attia there sharing his idea about just taking two phones when you're in your leisure time.

3:25And I heard him talk about that and I thought I need to have this in my own life. So why did it resonate with you in the moment? Well, because often when I'm away on holiday with the family, it's about trying to mentally switch off and just recharge. We often spoke about that idea of Formula One is one in the pit stops, not on the track necessarily. So trying to refresh effectively is really good. And yet having my phone with me, I've got my email on it, but you need your phone when you get like QR codes in restaurants or you want to take pictures of the family when you're out and about. So I find the temptation of responding to an email that comes in just almost too difficult to resist.

4:07And yet then I can see the frustration in my wife's eyes when I'm saying, oh, I just need to respond to this. And it sort of eats away on that valuable time. So when Peter said it, and it was so simple, I just hadn't thought about it. I just, just take a second phone out to get the benefits of the QR codes, take the pictures, people know how to get hold of you if you separate, but without the imposition of the interruption of work ideas. So I've done it. And I think there's a couple of things that have come from this, Jake, that I've done to share. One is my wife recognized that I was trying to do something differently.

4:39So I wasn't just saying I want to switch off. She recognized I was prepared to invest money in buying a second phone and so she encouraged me more rather than get frustrated which then created a more fertile atmosphere of wanting to do it but secondly you just realize how much of that noise of responding to emails text messages whatsapps just does start to eat away on the mental resources you have so that you're not completely present in the moment so it's only when it's not there do you appreciate just what it takes from you. So I've used it and I advocate it and pass it on to as many people as I can because we're lucky enough on this podcast.

5:21We interview so many amazing guests, but I sometimes think that getting all these ideas is like having money in the bank. Unless you invest it and do something with it, it's actually not that useful. So this is one that I can't advocate highly enough. What's your one? Okay, I am going to go for, well, probably the person I reference so much when I talk about the guests that had an impact on me, James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. I'm going to share a clip that he gave us about being better at saying no. Here it is. If you just think about like each day has a certain amount of surface area where you live those 24 hours and things happen, you know, somebody comes up to the door and they knock on it or people send messages to your inbox or you receive something in the mail.

6:07You know, it's very unlikely if you keep living days that you're not going to have distractions creep in. That's just kind of part of how the cycle of life works. And so you need to develop a system as that inbound increases for handling and filtering all of it. Sometimes it requires like a really extreme move. Like in my case, once the book took off, um, for the first couple of years of my life or first couple of years of my business, um, I would answer every email that came in. Sometimes I was even sending emails like I was, you know, somebody signed up to the email list for the first like 10 ,000 subscribers, which was usually just, you know, 50 a day or something like that.

6:45I would send emails out and say, Hey, thanks so much for signing up. Like really excited to have you here. And then you get over 10 ,000. You can't do that anymore. So then you just respond to the inbound that comes in and then you get over a hundred thousand or 500 ,000 or whatever it is. And then you can't respond to the inbound anymore. So now the whole inbox is just shut off and it's just on an autoresponder. And I don't love that solution, but I needed an extreme filter like that because otherwise there was no time left to write the next book or to do the thing that got people to come in the first place.

7:14So you kind of have to be continually upgrading your filter for what you say no to. Okay. So the reason why that matters to me, and it's the bit that he says at the end there, because I think I'd always, I always knew that you should try and say no to stuff. And I always knew that not saying no was causing me problems. So I kind of had the answer, but for some reason I wasn't able to utilize the answer. And I think that you're the same. I think loads of people that listen to this show and are part of the high performance community also feel the same. They know that they need to say no more, but they're not sure how to do it.

7:47And I think what James said that changed my approach to how to do it was when he said, you need to continuously upgrade your life. So therefore you upgrade the things that you now say no to. So I love this idea that every day you get a choice to either repeat or to evolve. So if I'm saying yes and no to the same things I was saying yes and no to two, three or four years ago, well then where's the evolution? Like almost saying no is a demonstration to me that things are different to six months ago or a year ago. The things that Jake would have said yes to in 2018, he wasn't saying yes to in 20, well he was saying yes to in 2021 or 2022 because we hadn't had this conversation.

8:26But certainly what I'm saying yes to in 2024 is not what I was saying yes to in 2023. Because I now think to myself, well, hold on. Like, I know that if I say no to that, then it means I can say yes to something else. Let's have your next lesson. Well, the next one is Richard Osman. I really loved this conversation with him because in preparation for the interview, I read his books, the Thursday Murder Club series and his latest one of Resolve Murders. And I just, I can see the skill that he's brought to writing these bestsellers, which just intrigued me. So I was interested in how he managed to balance all of that with doing his TV shows, his own podcast series, and the myriad of other demands.

9:10And he gave us such a brilliant answer. Let's listen to him explain it. I mean, some people can write eight hours a day. I get it. I couldn't do it. After two hours, I'm done. My brain is absolutely out. And we all have different brains. I just, I'm very goal oriented. I'm word count oriented. The way I write, I try and write a chapter a day. I have shortish chapters, 1500 words, something like that, which I find fun to read as well. If I'm reading books, I like short chapters. And so I'm super goal oriented, which is I'll go upstairs and I will write a chapter and then that will be done. And I find that easy.

9:48And I know that the book is 90 ,000 words. My books are around 90 ,000. And so I know I can obsessively keep up with the word count and know where I am and all of that kind of stuff. But it is, I'm not coming downstairs until I finished a chapter, but the chapter is not going to be 10 ,000 words. So it's not going to, you know, it's, I know that that's, I never thought I'm going to spend two hours. I go upstairs, I write a chapter and it turns out that that roughly takes me around two hours. Sometimes it's a little bit less, sometimes it's a little bit more, but I won't come downstairs until that chapter is done.

10:18So that's how I get through that. And writing, you have to have something psychological to get you through it, otherwise it would drive you insane. So I assumed that Richard was a workaholic and I remember sort of like stumbling in and asking him that and he was like, no, I don't. I set a 1 ,500 word limit, I do the work and then I stop. And I think we've spoken about this in previous episodes of how your brain works in absolutes, the idea that if you set yourself huge, big, ambitious goals or you set yourself smaller, more modest goals, your brain releases the same amount of doping whether you hit the big one or the more modest one.

10:57So lowering the bar rather than raising it and focusing on doing small amounts of quality work are far more helpful. So we've been working on a new book idea over the last six months or so and setting myself that limit of doing 1 ,500 words a day and really enjoying the process of it and trying to find a way of craft, and trying to find a way of crafting the sentences that make it enjoyable and accessible are far more helpful. So that's a simple idea, but I think people can relate it in any aspects of their life. You know why I think it's powerful for you as well? Because I think it's a small enough goal that you go, well, I know I can do it today.

11:37But it's also a big enough goal that you can go, well, I've done it, so I'm not going to do any more. Because I know the kind of person you are, you can be sitting there at midnight and Geraldine's, you know, put the kids to bed or had dinner on her own or something. And it's like, where's Damien been? So I think it's really powerful for you. And I also think it's an important message because I do think that in this, you know, world of the entrepreneurial grifter and like, you know, pushing yourself to the limit, there's too much messaging about, look how much I get done in a day. Like high performance, high achievers are not people doing 100 ,000 times more than everybody else.

12:11They're the people that are working smarter, not harder. And I think that's important. So go on, have you got one more? Yeah, well, it kind of plays into the smarter, not harder thing. You know, Shane Parrish changed my life with a two-minute conversation. And I know, you know, on podcasts, people go, I changed my life and you hear it all the time. This genuinely did. So I will sort of let the moment play out and then we'll talk about it afterwards. So here's Shane Parrish, the author of the Farnham Street blog and the brilliant author, when he joined us in high performance and we spoke about my diary.

12:42So how many priorities do you have? Loads. So if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority, right? So what's happening for you is if I can't distinguish my top two or three priorities from everything else, then that's how we tend to feel. Yeah. So one of the symptoms... That's because I feel I have to give my everything to everything. Yeah, but you can't give your everything to everything. And when you try to give your everything to everything, the first thing to go is you. And what I mean by that is you start sacrificing your health, your sleep. You start sacrificing your mood, your workouts.

13:15You start sacrificing the core things that determine easier hard mode. So now all of a sudden you start playing on hard mode and then everything gets harder and harder. And then it feels like a grind. And then you get set off by the slightest comment. And all of a sudden, what happens? You get multiplied by zero. All these things that you're trying to do and you're well-intentioned and you have all these interesting projects, but they can't all take the same weight on you. And if you're spreading your time, if you have 10 blocks of time a day and you spread them over 10 projects, that's one block of time a day per project.

13:47You're not gonna move very fast. I mean, you're gonna feel busy. There's lots of switching costs associated with that, but you're not gonna get anywhere. And so what you really have to do in this case, and I'm an advocate of this, and there's no judgment for how other people choose to allocate their time. I think you need to narrow things down to two or three priorities. these are my focus. And if building a relationship and maintaining that relationship with my partner matters to me, I should be able to see that in your calendar. So don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar.

14:23So what that conversation with Shane did for me is it reminded me that there are loads of things in my life that are important. Harriet, the kids, going to the gym with the three examples we used in that clip. There were lots of other important things as well. Yep. And those things that are important are always going to be trumped by the things that are urgent. So therefore, you have to give the important things that sense of urgency. You know, if twice a week I fail to give Harry at the time that I should, or I fail to take the kids to school, or put the kids to bed, or whatever, over the course of a year, that's 100 misses, right?

14:59Over the course of a lifetime, that's an awful lot of missed opportunities and missed moments. So therefore, those things are urgent, because I'm not going to have my kids at home for that long. I'm not even going to be alive for that long so I can't keep on thinking oh those things aren't urgent they're only important the important stuff actually is urgent because we don't get to do it for that long yeah I like that but there was a bit of a surprising reaction to me in that interview because I sat next to you when Shane did it because when we first started working together five years ago I remember like I'd say me and Jake are working together and people say oh what's Jake like and the example I always used to use and I've told you this was that I always said about your integrity, that when you were working on TV and there was the demands to be away a lot and you would always get home, even when I could see the inconvenience of you leaving late at night to drive through the night to get back and take the kids to school and things like that.

15:53And that was somebody that didn't just say family mattered. You role-modeled and demonstrated family mattered. So I could see it in your everyday reaction long before we met Shane. yeah but i think what that fact that the part of the story that that fails to tell is that that was basically slowly killing me trying to do everything right and i think that i tried i did do that and i'm really proud that i did do that but i also know that i did that when i was in my kind of mid late 20s to my mid late 30s early 40s right and actually that's a really important time for actually looking after yourself because your natural health and your natural resilience means you probably do do too much yeah so i could like i'm now 46 i don't think i could still be doing all of that travel all of that work all of that commitment and still be there be present for harriet and the kids and still focus on my own physical health so something was going to give in the end and he helped me to realize that actually i need to make that change now so having done it now two years on from when shame first sat down with that yeah what are the benefits you've found from doing it well it's just it's just greater connection with with people you know, it's in the diary.

17:00And I think that's the important thing. We don't diarize being with our kids, going to the gym, having an hour with our wife, going for a walk on a Sunday. And I think in some ways we kind of think that you're sort of failing at life if you need to diarize that sort of stuff, if you need to be kind of optimizing your marriage, but it isn't failing at all. It's being sensible because we've never lived in a time with so many demands. You know, our brains are still designed basically for cracking a nut open on a rock right and yet we've got this tidal wave of information every single day how are we not overwhelmed and confused and and utterly discombobulated by all this stuff so this is just a small thing that helps me and um hopefully it will help people that are listening to this but i think it's great isn't it just to pick up on four things that have worked for us it may well be that you know you're listening to this and it doesn't work for you maybe it does maybe you should just listen to high performance and try and work out three or four habits that you've picked up on because i think that's really what we're here for right absolutely it's not about telling people what to do it's telling people what to think it's teaching them how to think so everybody's situation is going to be unique to them and if i could give people watching this just one piece of advice it's if you listen to the four things that we've taken away they're all simple small actions that have led to benefits that we've shared and hopefully people go oh i can recognize that so you don't have to copy what we've said but you can copy the methodology of listening to these amazing guests picking up their wisdom their knowledge and experience taking a small strand of it and then giving it a go in your own life i don't know we ask a lot of you we release three episodes a week it's a lot to listen to.

18:41It's a lot to watch. It's a lot to process, but we honestly believe that it makes a real difference. And, um, you can be the very first to hear those episodes. If you download the high performance app, which is totally free, please keep on sharing the lessons you're learning from these conversations. Please keep on coming back for more. Please stick with us on this journey because high performance is, uh, as Damien said, often it is a journey. It isn't a destination and we're enjoying sharing the journey with you. We'll see you again soon.

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