Increasing Focus & Overcoming Distractions

In today's world, people are getting fatigued far quicker than they ever used to. And it seems like while they're doing a lot, they never seem to get a lot done. If you ever felt that way, everybody, welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. We're so excited to have you here. In this episode, Dan Kennedy and Lee Miltier get to talk about how people split their focus, what are the main causes of fatigue that comes by that, how it confuses people, and then how we can be able to concentrate better and overcome distractions in order to increase your speed of implementation and overcome obstacles. This is an episode that you should be focused on. Let's get started.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Hi everybody, it's Lee Mills here and welcome to the GKIC Diamond Call. For those who might not know me, I head up the Peak Performers Implementation Coaching Program, and I've worked with Dan for over 20 years on many projects, and we are great friends, so we hope to have a lot of fun today. Our call today is one that I'm very excited about, some of my favorite topics: focus, concentration, overcoming obstacles to achievement, and the speed of implementation. So everybody, welcome Dan Kennedy. We are live. Hello, Dan.

Hello there.

Okay, my first question is about focus, and you and I talk privately all the time about how confused we are about how many people have a problem with their productivity, and it's because they're spending their time on the wrong things. So the question is, would you share with us some of your observations on how people can change that mindset of focusing on things that will make their bank accounts a lot more plumper?

Well, you know, there's 3 observations, I guess. One is that it seems ever increasingly that people choose not to be present where they're present.

Right.

And so consequently, Every time you're splitting your attention, you're getting less than 100% from anything and giving less than 100% to anything, and the results are good to tell. I mean, it's my most recent peeve, which I've told you about, which in 35 years or so of speaking is my first experience with this. Was everybody at the event I was just at in Anaheim, about a third of the room sitting there literally the entire time with their smartphones held aloft, all aimed at the screen, either photographing or videotaping the images appearing on the screen. And anytime I took an image off, the phones would all drop. And then as soon as I put another image on, all the phones would go back up in the air again. Now my contention is that you actually can't do that and focus at all either on what's being said or more importantly what you are thinking about as a result of what is being said that might convert to some sort of actionable item you would use for your business. So that's really my first observation is hardly anybody's present where they're present. Including in their workspace.

Okay, Dan, can I say something? Do you think that the people who are throwing those phones up at the— and it was on your book tour last week— that they're throwing the phones up because they think, oh, that's important, so I'll go ahead and record it, and then I will be able to think about that and digest it later, but they'll really actually never get around to it later?

Actually like to give them that much credit. But for the most part, I don't even think it's that. I think it's a combination of things that are far worse. I think it's, oh look, everybody else is doing something, so I better do it too. Which of course, the more people are doing something, the better a reason it is not to do it. Since the majority is always wrong, particularly about anything that has to do with money, uh, or, or the making of it. I think it's because I have these things, I am compelled to use them, which, you know, a great principle is just because you can doesn't mean you should, right? Uh, so, you know, I think there's just a lot of monkey see, monkey do, and a lot of because the technology I own has these 512 capabilities, I have to use all 512 capabilities of, of this thing or I'm not happy. I think there is a certain amount of a variation of what you said, uh, of it's easier to record it than it is to think about it and make relevant notes and process and organize information. I think you're 1,000% right that for the most part, nobody's ever going to make any use of it. And as a matter of fact, it would be actually difficult to do so because like in this instance, if all you have is the slides and you really don't have the presentation, for the most part, since it's not a book, it's slides, you're going to have difficulty making any use of it, you know, 3 days, 5 days, 7 days, 10 days, 15 days after the fact.

Well, and if I might add some humor here, you know, I come to all your seminars and it's very hard to even read your slides in person, much less to read them through a tiny little screen.

Well, perhaps the technology will enlarge it or make it clearer, you know, who knows.

Good luck with that.

I certainly don't know, nor care to know. But it is, you know, it's completely contrary to the idea of focusing to get specific information or provoked ideas that you are going to put to use. My second observation would be that people consistently put themselves in environments where it's very difficult to focus. It doesn't say Starbucks office, you know, above the coffee shop door, and people who are trying to use that place as their office are foolish. But there's a lot of that sort of thing going on. And then third, I think it's very hard for people now, focus may not be the right word, but core in your question, to differentiate between what is relevant and significant and most potentially useful to them and just the great ocean of information and ideas and sort of chatter going on all the time, 24/7, flowing to them that they are compulsively checking on and miring themselves in. And you and I had a conversation the other day about LinkedIn, and I don't want to pick on LinkedIn, But there are people spending 4 and 5 hours a day watching the ticker tape of comments and indulging in conversation on that particular media. And I imagine many of them are doing it at the same time that they think they are doing work. Very few humans are capable of such a thing. So I just think there's huge numbers of people who are living extremely unfocused business lives. And all the way from the associations they choose to engage in, the conversations they choose to engage in, the information they choose to access, and how they choose to process it and use it. I mean, even to the point that, you know, just a room full of books is not, I mean, it's better than a room full of television sets, but in and of itself, it's not much better. And so often, probably 3/4 of everything that goes through my hands that is printed information, only a few pages out of an entire magazine, or out of an entire book, or a paragraph out of a newsletter survive and migrate to a file or to be sent to somebody or to be acted on, and the rest of it as quickly as possible disappears, or I wouldn't have rooms, by now I'd have warehouses. And I think most people are really not that discriminate about anything that is passing through their hands, eyeballs, ears, their computer screen, and so they are just completely unfocused.

Well, one of the things that I've noticed, Dan, and we have talked about, is the fatigue, and people are exhausted in life. They are stretched to the limit, and part of that is because they have no discernment of where they're focusing. They're letting anything, whether it's the news or someone else's problems or life situation or the newest gadget, distract them because a lot of them They feel like if they're just busy, they're actually getting something done.

Well, you're right about the fatigue factor. I mean, you know, you hear it increasingly, and I didn't hear it at all until about 7 or 8 years ago, this whole, I just get too much to read. I got something from a relatively smart guy, but I got a fax this week asking for something that was mentioned in the April newsletter, which he is just getting around to reading.

Oh my.

Now, first of all, he's not going to get it from me because April to me is ancient history. Correct. Uh, so, you know, lots of luck.

You don't even know what you said in April.

No, of course not. Uh, but, but the very fact that the envelope, you know, stayed sealed until August. It's almost— it's arrogance on my part, but I assure you, many less important things than mine got his attention. And so you're right, people are just swamping themselves and then feeling both, you know, overwhelmed and fatigued. And they're getting a lot more information about unimportant and personally insignificant things than they need to even be cognizant of what's going on. I mean, so knowing that, um, that there's a drought and it's going to affect corn prices, um, and all of the financial ramifications of it possible, uh, is one thing. But unless you're a farmer, you really do not need 2 and 3 hours a day of news coverage about the drought. Um, gossip. I mean, one thing, one piece of information about somebody may be interesting, but now talking about somebody who you have no connection to, who you make no money from, who is not going to make you any money, talking about their life or their business or their problems or other people's opinions about their lives and their businesses and their problems, however many minutes of that is in your day, it's very hard to see any kind of payoff from that. I think the other thing implicit in your question, which I've talked about for a long time, is people absolutely confuse activity with productivity. And a lot of people do it, if not consciously, if they do it subconsciously, it's for the same reason. They do it simply to make themselves feel better., and they prefer that to making themselves more productive. And so the confusion is self-induced for emotionally satisfying reasons. To be totally fair, a lot of people in my businesses deliberately encourage people to confuse activity with productivity. Because most people are never going to be productive. And so if you're making your living in an environment where you need a bunch of people to feel like they've earned gold stars, you can give out more stars if you create that confusion. I mean, the very first time I saw it was very, very young in, in the multi-level marketing thing I was involved in, where you got sales achievement awards but for what you bought. I mean, not necessarily what you sold. So everybody's getting a particular dollar amount pin. It's couched as a sales achievement award, but in reality, most people bought and used the stuff. They didn't sell it. But because it's called a sales achievement award and you're getting it pinned on you and everybody is applauding everybody who got one, pretty soon people actually do think they sold something, and they totally confuse activity with productivity. So all of that's going on, and it produces not only fatigue and overwhelm, but it actually produces a lot of confusion in people's minds.

Well, I think that leads right into our next topic, which is all about concentration. Sadly, it appears that some people even brag in our world that they have ADD, or that they laugh when you make a joke on stage about chasing shiny objects syndrome. So what are your thoughts and strategies for people to be able to concentrate better?

Well, I think that sort of the extension of what we just talked about is that you have very little stick-to-itiveness. So there's a lot to seduce us, just as there is a lot to confuse us. And so now there's 24/7 news, for example. So if you turn your computer on, most people have a news feed coming across their screen. They have bookmark sites to instantly go see what's going on. The conservatives go to the Drudge Report every 2 minutes. The liberals must go somewhere. I have no idea where they go, but I'm sure they go somewhere.

Everybody's checking the weather, you know, channel 25 times a day, which is always inaccurate.

Well, it's always wrong. And for the most part, for most people's activities, what difference does it make? They're going to go do what they need to do you know, anyway. And so, you know, like, I watch the financial news usually during my 30-minute lunch break, as I did today, and the financial news that I actually wanted to see was interrupted 3 times in 23 minutes with breaking news about the hurricane that isn't going to be a hurricane in Tampa that may or may not affect the Republican convention that I'm not attending next week. Now, you know, I didn't need— I actually wanted to know whether Disney stock was up or down. I mean, and And so, you know, really, do you need any of that? And so similarly, now in business, first of all, there's a portfolio of media to manage that is dizzying. You know, somebody recently just asked me about promoting a book and what— and if I could give them a list of all the things online that they might do to promote a book. Well, you need a book to make the list of all of the things you might do online to promote the book. And at some point you've got to make some decisions about how many of these things you can effectively manage and which ones you are going to deliberately ignore. And so I, my entire life, have chosen things to ignore.. And I find increasingly that people aren't making that choice about anything, and they're trying to pay attention to everything, and there's simply too much to pay attention to. And then there's no sticking to anything long enough and diligently enough to actually get results from it. Now that's less an indictment of people on this call probably than people in general. I mean, so I've had phone calls all day and I'm happy to say that, you know, most of the clients I'm talking to are actually pretty focused. They're certainly focused when they're on the phone with me at least, but they're reasonably focused in what they're doing. I talked to a brick-and-mortar business operator in a fairly difficult business. Who's up 30% year to year in one aspect of his business and 100% in another aspect of his business, and he's pretty narrowly focused on 5 productive things to do that drive that business and pretty good about ignoring everything else that gets waved in his face. And so most of the highly successful people are more like this. But man, the temptation, you know, to just flip from thing to thing to thing to thing, and the peer pressure, because here's the new hot thing everybody's doing, and so you should do it too. I mean, I was just in a room not too long ago with an entire team of people who are working on nothing but mobile marketing. And there's 56 things they can do in mobile marketing. And challenged to demonstrate an economic payoff from any of this, no one could claim the $100 bill I put on the table for the challenge. But enormous amounts of time and energy and resources are being devoted to this. And so I think, you know, one kind of concentration is what are the things that are within a number that we can manage that are going to be and are reliably and demonstrably most productive and in a business sense most profitable. And then from a personal concentration standpoint, you can't be wide and thin. You have to pick a few things to be vertical and deep in. And so again, I sit with people who are engaged in a particular business and in, in that category of business, not even in marketing. Their historical knowledge is about 12 months, 18 months long, and one of the things that dooms them to is a lot of reinvention from scratch of stuff that either has been consistently and utterly disproven and will be a blind alley that they now much march down and smack their head into the brick wall unnecessarily. Or a lot of reinvention of— from scratch of things that have been proven, for which there are very good models to follow. And, and instead, they're, they're trying to build the model all over again from scratch, almost like you want to get from Virginia Beach to Chicago today, so you round up some some tree leaves and twine and go out on the beach and start trying to build yourself an airplane. I mean, you know, we're sort of past that. Uh, somebody has already figured that out, and there's no merit badge in refiguring it out from scratch. But when there's no depth of knowledge, that's exactly what a lot of people do.

Deviating just slightly, you and I had this conversation recently about taking advice from broken people. Do you remember?

Yeah.

Okay, so let's just talk about that for a second because you've kind of alluded to it in something you've just said about, you know, people trying to reinvent the wheel and going down the wrong paths. Speak of how important it is to actually take advice from, you know, real information instead of just anybody's, oh, I advertise on Facebook or I advertise on this, and, you know, the real, you know, getting the real deal?

Well, so at first there's a distinction between information and advice, right? Just like there's a distinction between fact and opinion. And I try— I'm not always successful, but I try when I am talking to people or writing, I try to distinguish for them when I am citing facts and when I am citing my own opinions, when I'm wild hair guessing. I try and make those distinctions. Not everybody who writes or speaks does so. And so often making those distinctions is left up to the person who, who is the recipient. A lot of people don't even make that distinction in their own thinking. So when people are telling me things about their business, they are commingling their opinions with facts, and I have to try and sort the two out because facts are facts, but opinions are subject to to, uh, to being wrong, to verification, uh, and to change from one day to the next. And so the same with advice versus information. There's a difference. I mean, if I'm giving you advice, that may be information-based, and it may be purely opinion-based. It may be regurgitated from somebody else's opinions. So if I tell you that if you have joint pain in your knees and you should drink— it would be really cool if you drank a glass of cod liver oil and a glass of aloe vera every day, it would be smart of you to ask where that advice is coming from. Is that personal experience? Did I read it somewhere? And if so, did I read it somewhere credible? Or did I read it from some health site on the web that Charlie's running in his mother's basement? You know, so I've given you advice, but you need to kind of know what the advice is based on. And often, if we're in a relationship with somebody, friend, neighbor, relative, coworker, or worse, in a relationship where we're paying someone, to give us information and advice, we often start with that person pretty narrowly and we let it get broader and broader and broader, and we look to them for more and more and more advice, and we really don't question what the hell the advice is based on when it's being given to us. The broader context now is association, which, you know, who and what we engage in in association matters a great deal in terms of productivity. And so there are a lot of people who have democratized all this, and the internet has helped, as you pointed out. So the barriers to entry to be a dispenser of information, to being an advisor, all of the media filters the editors. So, you know, to get on and be seen as, say, an expert on NBC TV, uh, 20 years ago was a pretty damn arduous and rigorous process, and not very many people got through that portal. Uh, today, to get on a cable news show as an expert on a particular subject. That's a much less discriminatory process. And to get onto the internet and be positioned that way, there's no, there's no filters at all. And one appears to be just the same as the next. A lot of people, I know people who are in 5 mastermind groups, for example., and if you carefully and objectively evaluate the qualifications of the 5 people leading them as well as the people in them, it's abundantly clear that one is far more useful than the other, and yet they equate them. And back to your earlier point, their fatigue from doing too much of it will ultimately cause them to exit either all of it or exit it almost randomly rather than by ranking qualifications, credibility, authority, experience, you know, and so forth. So has information and opinion has gotten confused, all the way from news media, where really we don't have news media, we have opinion media, all the way into our world. And it's gotten democratized. That's been a good thing in many ways for those of us who sell the stuff. It has not necessarily been a good thing in many ways for those who consume the stuff.

Well, one of the things that I always ask myself when I try to be conscious is what is their agenda?

Yeah, well, because a broken person is making themselves feel less broken by dispensing advice.

Yeah, they want to be a hero. Exactly. And they normally have low self-esteem and anything they can do to get the pats on the back. So you have to be very careful. In fact, Dan, you and I have talked about health professionals and, you know, how sometimes broken they are, and yet we're going to them for advice.

Well, it's the classic fat doctor who smokes. Exactly. And, um, and people getting financial advice from their brother-in-law the butcher, uh, who may be a very good parent to 10 kids, but, you know, his, his house is upside down and he barely gets a light bill every month. And yet, presented with some financial opportunity, they will ask their brother-in-law the butcher what he thinks about it. And you're 1,000% on in that most people never question what the other person's conscious as well as subconscious agenda is when they are— particularly when they're dispensing advice and/or dispensing criticism. Of you or of others, when they're engaging in opinion in any way, shape, or form. If somebody doesn't have a conscious agenda, it's almost certain they have an unconscious agenda. And so, not that that necessarily invalidates what they are saying or opining about, but it has to be considered in evaluating what they are saying opining about, you know. So for example, if a, if a psychologist who lives across the street from you with a private practice in your town is ripping Tony Robbins from one end to the other, some of what he says may or may not be clinically correct. It may or may not be factually accurate. It may or may not be justified. But it's a safe bet that a great deal of his ire about Tony is born of envy rather than of critical analysis. Pretty much in every field, there's somebody you can mention. Who sets all of the people low, much lower on the pyramid off. Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil, same category. Exactly. Um, and so just about every category, you know, you can play that game. And in just about every community, you can play that game. In every business field, you can play that game. And it's a pretty clear demonstration of the fact that if not consciously, somebody has subconscious agendas that have nothing to do with the purity of the opinion, the view, the belief, or the advice. And that extends to just about everybody and anything.

Okay, with time, let's go on to our next topic that we promised, which was overcoming obstacles for achievement. And, you know, we all know there are literally dozens of distractions every day— problems with staff, vendors, family, home. Not to count that, you know, the media is brainwashing us daily that life as we know it is coming to an end. We have our own bad habits that get in the way of actually being productive or getting any profit work done. So, you know, Dan, I know you've written all these no-BS books on time management and things, but give us some things that people could be aware of not to let the obstacles get in their way of actually achieving something?

Well, the list you rattled off is almost all, can almost all be lumped into a category of artificial obstacles. And so there are also real obstacles. And so, you know, a real obstacle to productivity, my co-author in the Trust book, Matt Segulo, I talked to earlier today. He's in about the third week of rehab and recovery from some significant neck surgery and some significant back problems. And he's genuinely slowed in what he can do, and he's genuinely distracted. If you have ever been in you know, sort of unrelenting pain, it is disruptive to focus. And so in the short term, he's a guy who's coping with a real obstacle. You want to go more drastic down a road like that for 4 years on the big success events I spoke at, we often had Christopher Reeve as a guest speaker. I remember. And now there's a guy with, you know, real obstacles. I mean, it's a 2-hour ordeal just— or it was a 2-hour ordeal just to get him out of bed and get him able to be able to move anywhere, let alone do anything. And so, you know, people have real obstacles. They have real capital limitations in business and so forth. Many real obstacles, particularly if you set the physical aside. Often stay larger than they need to be and have more power because people accept no, you can't far too easily than they should and do not explore multiple alternative paths to get to the same place. My favorite, one of my favorite stories is the Kenneth Cole story, which I'll tell badly in order to tell it briefly for those who— but for those who haven't heard it, everybody, if they think about it, knows the Kenneth Cole shoe and fashion empire now, retail stores, catalogs, products, et cetera. And Cole's story is when he was first launching his shoe line for Fashion Week in New York, you can buy exhibit space in several different venues, but it is extremely expensive. They had no money, and so he got the bright idea that it would be cool to just place an exhibit in a, like, a motorhome or a truck and literally commandeer some sidewalk space in between all the hotels and all the exhibit areas and, and catch everybody as they went to and from. And but upon— so he found a truck he could rent from a buddy, but then when asking how you went about getting a permit from the City of New York to do this, everybody in the trucking business told him you can't. And when he called the City of New York, he was told nobody gets a permit in order to park a truck on a street in the middle of Manhattan. For 4 days, and he was good enough to call several times and ask the same question to several different people. And upon being told no every time, he finally said, well, if anybody was going to get that kind of a permit, uh, how— who would that be and how would they get that permit? And somebody finally said the only people who ever get that kind of a permit are companies producing movies. Hence The company today, if you go look, is still called Kenneth Cole Productions because he solved this problem by putting a sign on the truck that said Kenneth Cole Productions. I love this story. And getting some guys with video cameras with no film in them to standing around filming the movie, The Birth of a Shoe Company, and catching people in between hotel and exhibit halls and guiding them through the truck and having them participate in the birth of a shoe company. And he wrote, I forget how many hundreds of thousands of dollars of orders and launched his company. Now, arguably, I mean, you could say he cheated if you want, but the more important moral of the story is that when somebody told him that something couldn't be done and that was impossible, he did not immediately accept that as the final verdict. And so most people give real obstacles a lot more power than they have by accepting them as the final verdict. The other category where you started, which I call artificial obstacles, that are essentially either all of our own making or all of our own imagining. So they often exist and have power because we give them attention, focus, and concentration.

Yeah, because this is what everybody talks about every day.

Yeah, and it's what they pay attention to, and it's what they indulge in, and it's what they're affected by. And in many cases, it's anticipated events that are never to occur anyway. Now, that's not to say that you do not want to be, um, aware You don't want to be walking down dark alleys whistling with money in your pocket and no weapon. That crosses the line into stupidity. But you don't necessarily need to know every statistic about every crime that's ever occurred in a dark alley in Chicago in the last month either. And so there's an awful lot of allowed distraction that really becomes obstacle that is not an obstacle at all. And so there's a lot of that, and it really comes, I think, now connecting all the way to something as simple as time management. A lot of it comes because, although people protest the exact opposite, they actually have too much damn time on their hands that is not committed to specific benchmarks of achievement and deadlines that must be met by the hour, by the quarter of a day, by the half a day, by the end of a day. Because if they were under enough pressure, they would not engage in a lot of this.

Don't you think that most of this is just really excuses?

Well, I think it, it can be. I think it is also just succumbing to what seems to be normal behavior. So you take something as simple as probably less than 20 times in a calendar year do I ever have a telephone conversation with anybody other than pure social, friend, for which there is not a predetermined completion time. And maybe all of the social stuff accounts for the 20 times a year. So most people— for most people, that's utterly abnormal behavior. And, and, and so most people are simply not under enough pressure that they have to modify that behavior. It so happens I work under a hell of a lot of pressure, so I can't really let a phone call with a client that could be done in 20 minutes expand to an hour while we talk about the drought and the baseball game and the, I really do not have time for it. And I think most people allow themselves to have time for it. They don't have enough that has to be done by 2:15 and by 3:15 and by 4:15 and by Wednesday and by Friday. So they aren't under enough pressure. And in fact, a lot of people actually try and escape pressure rather than create pressure for themselves. Consequently, they also don't train people. So, like, it's a minor thing, but my horse trainer partner has baseball tickets to the Indians-Yankees game Friday night, which when I drove Tuesday night, because he knows Pete is a big Yankees fan, asked me if Pete would like to have the tickets. So happens it's Pete's birthday on Friday. So I made a very quick phone call to see if he wanted the tickets. He wants the tickets. Claire's going to drop the tickets off for me. Now, what Claire does is he puts the tickets in an envelope, puts them in a cardboard box, and puts them on my porch, and then leaves a message that he has left the tickets on the porch. What most people would do, of course, is just show up whenever he showed up, ring the doorbell until you came and answered it, give you the tickets, but also engage in a 15-minute conversation about God knows what. And everybody would engage in the 15-minute conversation about God knows that's completely unnecessary. He knows better, and I've trained him to know better. He's not only a business associate, he's a friend, and under certain circumstances, I'd be happy to have a 15-minute conversation with him about God knows what, but not in the middle of a day that I have choreographed to the nth degree, and I have things that have to be done. So now I have people trained to interact with me in a manner that facilitates my productivity. And I just think most people, some people, you're right, use all of the bad behavior and the poor management as an excuse now. But I think a lot of people really, the excuse-making comes after the fact. And the behavior is engaged in because they don't have themselves self-managed under enough pressure to perform, aren't really trying to accomplish enough, aren't really achievement-oriented enough to do anything but drift with the winds of the day.

Okay, well that leads into our next topic, which is the speed of implementation, which you are clearly the king of. So before we go to questions, let's talk about implementation.

Well, it's good to do something you know something about and know how to do. That's helpful. So I'm often amused when, you know, I hear, that somebody's in their third year of working on their book, which, you know, really, assuming you know, um, your subject matter, um, like a couple of weekends max, um, and consider that really analogy for a lot of what people do. So things that should be— that there's a much smarter person available to do X than you, assuming you have sufficient size and scope of opportunity, you ought to go find that person and get them to do that. I mean, I often say that as a copywriter, my best clients are people who could actually do it themselves. They have the skill, they would just be slower at it, they might get a marginal bump by collaborating with me, and they have some other skill that is of extremely high value to them that they could be devoting the time to. And so paying me a princely sum to do my thing is a better bargain for them for 3 different reasons. And you see a lot of people investing their time in things they're not very good at or don't know anything about and not using their time to do the things they know a lot about or are very good at. I think the second speed factor is what we were just talking about, is really how much pressure you put yourself under to be fast. And so most people just don't operate in that kind of an environment. If anything, they try and avoid it. And so they invite, probably welcome, and certainly accept all sorts of interruptions and distractions and stops and starts during the time that they are working on X, Y, or Z. They put themselves in environments where all that kind of interruption can go on. And so, yeah, for example, people, people never really believe me about the internet thing. So, you know, they, they're here and they're, you know, looking for an internet connection.. And, and so that's not what I use a computer for. I use a computer to do work, and so it's not hooked up to the giant pipeline of distractions. So I can't be distracted by an email from somebody telling me about the surfboarding squirrel on YouTube that I have to go look at immediately.. And I can't go look at the surfboarding squirrel on YouTube because I'm not even connected to the surfboarding squirrels of the world. But, you know, a lot of people are. And so they are, you know, again, seminar behavior. So nobody's using breaks anymore to go off in a corner and think. About what they just heard, or to engage with 2 or 3 other people about what they just heard, or to hunt down and create contact with somebody who just stood up and said something incredibly intelligent, or who was showcased. None of that's going on. But everybody's— and they're not using the breaks to smoke much either, which actually did not preclude the other That's not what anybody's doing. They're immediately using the breaks to dive back into their electronic devices and check their texts and send their texts and check their tweets and send their tweets and update their Facebook and check email and on and on and on and on and on. And so it's very hard to get to speed. I mean, just try and get to and sustain 70 miles an hour, uh, in your car on an open road, but stopping, uh, every 6 feet and starting over. But that's what most people do in their work. They are constantly stopping and starting over and stopping and starting over and stopping and starting over. And so, you know, roughly 50% of the racehorses race with some variation of blinders on. There's a reason for that. They really don't need to be looking at the squirrel in the tree or the duck on the lake or the shadow on the wall or the people in the grandstands. They need to be focused on what they're doing. And if we let them look at all that stuff, they're profoundly slower. Focus begets speed, just as speed begets focus. So I think most people do themselves enormous disservice and then wonder why either they didn't get anything done or how long it took them to get anything done. And again, if they If they sort of look around at how everybody behaves, and which is a basic tenet of mine, and you knew none, nothing, and you never heard any of this, you could figure it out by reverse engineering. I mean, you could look at how everybody else behaves and rule that out because, you know, the 1%, 99% thing is very real. It's not a political construct. It is reality. And so 99% of the people, and therefore 99% of all their behavior, is unproductive and unprofitable. Otherwise, this thing would be weighted the other way around. It would be 99% on top of the pyramid and 1% on the bottom.

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