Increase the Outputs that Matter

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Hey, my friend. It's Brendon Burchard. And welcome to a special episode of the Brendan Show. In this episode, I'm going to play for you a section of the audiobook of my book, High performance habits. How Extraordinary People Become that way. And I'm gonna play for you a practice that will ultimately help you become a higher performer in anything that you're doing, whether it's related to your health or your career or other positive life outcomes. This is the practice that will really serve you. And I'm gonna be releasing a series of these so that you can get a taste of the book. But also whether you have the book or you don't have the book, you can put these practices into your life to develop the habits that matter the most. That's ultimately what my book is about. Has become so well known for high performance habits is the result and the findings of the world's largest study of high performers ever done. Over 190 countries reporting in over 2 million data points, an unbelievable amount of.

Research over a three year period with.

Me and academic research teams to find the strongest correlations we could of which habits led to long term success. And they were also healthy, they were also happy, they also had positive relationships. And that's the magic of it.

All right?

High performance isn't just about getting ahead for achievement's sake. It's ultimately about a distinction of a new way to strive so that you do reach the next level of success. But this time you do it more sane, healthier, more happier and you enjoy the process. You can succeed long term. That is what this book is about. It tells you exactly which habits make the most difference. And we break it down each habit into three different practices. Now, this audio excerpt today for you is one of those practices. And please just listen, follow the prompts, put this either mindset or philosophy or tactic into your life and you'll see a total change. So I'll be releasing a series of these for you in upcoming weeks and months right here on the Brendon show. And tell you what, if you like this, you're welcome to go get the audiobook on Audible or anywhere else where you download your audio books and you know, it's whatever it is, 1216 bucks for that. Or if you want the deluxe audiobook version which comes with additional training, additional interviews and an online course along with it. If you want that, you can, you can actually get it for free when you order a hard copy book from us@brendon.com habits so just listen to the practice. If it resonates with you, put it into play. If not, no worries. Keep listening to the Brendon show. You'll find something that's useful, but if it really resonates, go to brendon.com habits and get your copy of the book from that site so that we can give you the free deluxe audio edition of the audiobook. I think you're really going to enjoy this and as always I want to thank you all for supporting my message. I deeply believe that as each of us develops deeper motivation and starts practicing these high performance habits, not only can.

We change our life, not only can.

We reach longer term success and be less stressed and crazy and enjoy the process this time, but we can change the world.

The right habits changes your world ultimately.

Changes other people's world. Without further ado, please enjoy this excerpt of high performance How Extraordinary People Become that Way.

Practice 1 increase the outputs that matter Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient ways. What should not be done at all. Peter Drucker if you want to become extraordinary, you need to figure out the productive outputs that matter in your field or industry. Eminent scientists produce more important papers than their less known or less effective counterparts. Mozart and Beethoven became great not only by their genius, but also through their productive output. The same goes for Bob Dylan. But Louis Armstrong? The Beatles? In its highest performing years, Apple launched products that were hit after hit. Babe Ruth took more swings than his contemporaries, just as Michael Jordan took a lot more shots and Tom Brady threw a lot more passes. Seth Godin cranks out blogs, Malcolm Gladwell cranks out books and articles. Casey Neistat keeps Uploading those YouTube videos, Chanel keeps the fresh designs coming and and Beyonce keeps dropping great albums. High performers have mastered the art of prolific quality output, what we call pqo. They produce more high quality output than their peers over the long term and that is how they became more effective, better known, more remembered. They aim their attention and consistent efforts toward PQO and minimize any distractions and including opportunities that would steal them away from their craft. This point seems almost universally lost in a world where people spend over 28% of their work week managing email and another 20% just looking for information. People spend eons of time on worthless activities, say creating folders and organizing their email, even though these have nothing to do with real productivity. Yes, sorry, your elaborate email folders aren't helping you. A 2011 study of 85,000 actions by 345 email users found that people who create complex folders are less efficient in finding what they need than those who simply use search or threading. I bring up email because achievers almost universally blame it for their poor productivity. But email per se is not the problem. The real culprit is our very orientation to work itself. Real work isn't replying to everyone's false emergencies, shuffling paper, deleting junk emails, posturing to look good, or attending meetings. Real work is producing quality output that matters. Part of your job is to figure out what relevant PQO means to you. For the blogger, it might mean more frequent and better content. For the cupcake store owner, it might be discerning the two best selling flavors and expanding distribution on just those two flavors. The parent may choose to increase the frequency of free time and great experiences with the kids. The sales rep might go after more meetings with qualified prospects. The graphic designer might pump out more gray images. For the academic, it might be the quality of the curriculum in classes where or the number of published papers or books. Figuring out what you are supposed to produce and learning the priorities in the creation, quality and frequency of that output is one of the greatest breakthroughs you can have in your career. Look back to almost any business icon and you see a turning point in their career and wealth, which came about when they discovered their pqo. For Steve Jobs, it was dumping a bunch of products from Apple's list so he could focus on massively scaling fewer products, which would change the world. For Walt Disney, it was ramping up production of movies. In the modern digital era, some of the greatest success stories are those who simply enabled others to share more original and prolific content. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, for example. Wherever PQO is found, it seems that breakthroughs in wealth Followers I left a corporate consulting job in 2006 because I couldn't find fulfillment in the outputs that were being rewarded. When I looked to the partners at my old employer, the PQO was basically how many big clients they signed per year. Though a lot of wonderful things came with that. The ability to do deals, change things. I just didn't connect with the idea of dedicating my life to a career built on deals. For a guy. At my lowly level, the informal culture supported a PQO of project hopping, getting on as many projects as we could so that we gain perspective, expand our network, and get paid for extra travel. Again, there were other benefits to all this, but I just didn't connect. Very little of the end game at that job resonated with me. One of the great realizations of life can come from discovering that the outputs you are being compensated for are not exciting or fulfilling. When that realization comes, it's time to honor that truth and make a change. I chose to quit and begin my career as a writer, speaker and online trainer. I saw the outputs of those efforts creating content for inspiring and empowering others as something that would be meaningful to me. The issue was I had no idea how to start or what specifically to do. Like a lot of people new to the expert industry, I thought I had to figure out the writing industry, the speaking industry, the online training industry. I made the mistake of going to dozens of conferences to try to figure out each of the industries without realizing that they all were the same career of being a thought leader and had similar outputs that mattered most. For almost a year, casting about with no clarity on which outputs really mattered, I was a mess. I was trying to write articles for magazines and blogs, begging people to let me speak to their groups and hoping to get paid, spinning my wheels, learning 100 online marketing ideas. Then one day sitting in a cafe, I realized I'd spent all day working but had nothing really to show for it. I thought, not one thing I've done today is going to advance my career or be remembered by me or anyone else. Ten years from now, I still remember that conversation in my head. If you're honest with yourself, you want to create things that matter. You want to know that a good day's work produces something worthwhile, something that will be part of your important contributions to others and the world. Something that shows you care about your craft. Of course, I realized that not every day would be a magical, perfect day where every task I did was earth shaking. Monumental. We all have activities that have to get done that don't make us feel like legends. Taking out the trash isn't adding to your body of great works, but it has to get done. What changed the trajectory of my career that day was deciding on a single page what my PQOs would be. If I was going to be a real writer, then my productive output needed to become books. This audiobook you're listening to. It's the sixth I've published since that day. Two more unreleased manuscripts are waiting in my drawer. This says nothing of the thousands of emails, blog articles, sales letters, and social media posts I've written, but my main effort is books. Wayne Dyer, a mentor and dearly missed friend, wrote and published more than 30 books. I'm just a beginner, but I know my PQO and that gives me what Wayne would have called the power of intention. I decided that if I was going to be a professional speaker, my PQO would be the number of paid speaking gigs at a certain booking fee. I stopped all wasteful conversations asking people to give me a chance to speak and started building marketing materials and videos like those of other speakers who were getting booked at the levels I wanted to reach. I knew that if I was going to be an online course trainer, a relatively new career back in 2006, then my PQO would be curriculum, training videos and full online courses. As I shared in the chapter on clarity, I stopped trying to learn every new marketing technique that came along and put my full effort into creating and promoting online courses. The rest, they say, IS history. Nearly 2 million people have enrolled in my online courses or video series, and my free instructional videos about how to live a fully charged life have been viewed over 100 million times. If I hadn't figured out my PQO, I would never have had the blessing of reaching all these students. I would never have had been named one of the most successful online trainers in history by Opera.com or to make Success magazine's list of the top personal development influencers for so many years. Please know that I'm not sharing this to impress you, but I am sharing it to convey the the tremendous power of deciding what your PQO is to be and going for it. The results in my career are not because I'm particularly special or talented. They happen because I honed the focus for the PQOs that mattered in my career and gave those outputs my obsessive attention and dedication continuously over the long term. I cannot emphasize the importance of this strategy whenever I have to help a client increase high performance. Quickly discovering what output they should be creating is one of my go to strategies. No matter what topic or type of deliverables they decide to get productive toward, I have them reorient their entire work schedule toward that endeavor as quickly as possible. I want them spending 60% or more of their workweek oriented to PQO. In my experience over this past decade, that 60% figure seems to be the sweet spot where real results start happening for a person's career. For most people, the other 40% ends up in such buckets as strategy, team management and the everyday tasks of work or running a business. I spend 60% of my work week on writing, creating curriculum for online training, and filming videos. The other 40% goes to strategy, team management, industry relationships and and customer engagement, which includes social media and communicating with students. The 40% is really just the things that support or facilitate the 60% the prolific quality output not everyone has my career, of course, and the golden proportion of 60:40 is not feasible for everyone. But the goal isn't to do what I do, it's to find your best allocation of time and stick to it the best you can. I'm tenaciously consistent about my 60 40, and whenever it drops below that, I know I'm not producing my best. If these time allocations sound extreme, please note that this is very different from the advice of those who tell you to go all in and give one of your passions 100% of your time. Such guidance is patently absurd anyway. We can't give 100% of our time to anything. Certainly not if we're working with other people, caring for our families, or trying to make a big impact. There's always going to be a percentage of time we must give to working with or leading other people, managing and administering the details of our jobs, and yes, email. My point is you can't shirk those things, but you can and must strategize and maximize your time working on outputs to that make your career important and influential. Why don't more people focus on producing prolific quality output, especially given that they still have the 40% allocation for dealing with the inevitable obligations of work? The most common excuses is delusion's a better word are Procrastination and perfectionism. Despite how familiar we are with blaming procrastination, it's not a real thing. Procrastination isn't a part of the human psyche. It's not even a personality trait. It's also not a result of poor time management skills that can easily be pointed at. Instead, researchers have found that procrastination is really a motivational problem. It's an issue that arises because you're not working on things that intrinsically matter to you. In rare cases, it can be about anxiety or fear. Fear of failure. But far more often it stems from working on things that don't excite you, engage you, or matter to you. That's why finding a PQO you can get behind is so important. If you love what you're creating or contributing in the world, you'll experience less procrastination. Whenever I tell people to create more output, inevitably I run into the perfectionists. They say things like, well, Brendan, I can't just put more stuff out there. I'm a perfectionist. I have to know that it's absolutely right and we'll be loved. Perfectionism, though, is just a delay. Logic fancied up to look respectable. The reason people don't finish more things isn't perfectionism. It's that they rarely even begin or they get tangled up in doubt or distraction. If someone were a true perfectionist, they they would at least have completed and released their work. Since the very act of perfecting something comes only after it is completed, released, and then improved on. We could all find reasons why it's hard to be more productive. But rather than spending any more mental power there, let's just get to work. Let's remember what's most important. Let's focus. Let's produce real things that we're proud of. Let's be prolific and change the world. Performance Prompts Number one the outputs that matter most to my career are two. Some things I could stop doing so I can focus more on PQO are number three. The percentage of my weekly time I will allocate to PQO is and the ways I'll make that happen are.

Okay, my friend, I hope you enjoyed that audio excerpt of my book Performance Habits. How Extraordinary People Become that Way again. If you really enjoyed that and you like the deluxe audiobook version for free, go to brendon.com forward/habits. Get the book through that site and we'll go ahead and give you the deluxe audiobook version of the entire book for free at no cost. As my thanks for ordering through our website. I want to thank you as well for supporting my message. You know, we really started this worldwide product performance conversation. We've got dozens of companies and major organizations who have bought the book in bulk, who are sharing it with their teams and employers, employees who are sending their people through our assessments, who are getting all the tools that we built around this book. We're changing the conversation about performance in major organizations and small businesses around the world. And if you'd like to support that, just pick up a copy of the book, get some amazing results, tell us your story, and we'll try to get out there the best way that we can. It's an honor to serve each and.

Every one of you.

I began this journey to decoding what it really takes to become a high performer. Now, gosh, 20 years ago in my life. So having it all come together in these set of practices in high performance habits has been quite the journey. You know, the last 10 years of my life being a high performance coach and, and then this last three years of academic research to prove it all out, at least to find what the data suggests and leads us to in terms of the Strongest correlations. I know you're going to love this book. So for those who already got it, thank you. Keep sharing the message because if you'll post on social media high performance habits of you listening to this episode or reading the book every single day and week, we are still out there giving away all expense paid trips, giving away swag t shirts, cups holders, free online courses. It's my students. We're celebrating you. So just go post on social media, tell us what you thought of this episode and just again, use highperformancehabits and thebrendonshow so that we know you listen to us on the brendon show and we'll go ahead and try to find you and give you some free gifts. We can't do it for everybody but we're out there consistently doing it and I mean, I've already given away, I don't know, 50 to $100,000 worth of stuff just this month already. So it's been pretty active and I thank you all. All of our students who've made this the best stellar all of our students who supported the message, all of our students who've committed to their continued education, their personal growth. I'm honored to be on that path with you. So thank you again for supporting the brendon show. Thank you for supporting high performance habits. I look forward to seeing you out on the road someday. Until then, remember, you can change your habits and change your life. If you're going to practice any new habits, practice the ones in high performance habits and as always, go out there every single day of your life. Live fully, love openly and make your difference Today.