Craig Ballantyne — The Habits To Get More Done and Make More Money #TheOnePercent

This is the end of day, end of day line. You're gonna do three things at the end of the day that are gonna help you become more productive, more successful. And the more that I work with entrepreneurs, the more that I realize those that are as detailed as possible in the planning part of this are the ones that have the greatest success. So I like to describe entrepreneurs as people who. You've got so much stuff going on in your head. It's like as if I came over, I pulled back your cranium, I took one of those old school jigsaw puzzle boxes and poured all 1,000 pieces into your head and I put your cranium back and I walked away. And all that clutter is in there, Right? We've got all these things we want to do. It causes a lot of stress, cause a lot of anxiety. So how do we fix that? Well, the first part, there's three parts to this exercise.

It takes one free person to create change. This is the show for are the creators of the Free world. This is capitalism.com and we are the 1%.

Please welcome Craig Valentine.

Thank you for being here, Craig. Thank you, thank you. How you doing? How you doing? Good, good, good, good. All right, who here has like 10 pages of notes so far? 20 pages, 30 pages. Good. I love competitive entrepreneurs. You gotta have more pages than everybody else. This is fantastic. Now, on the other hand, who here is a little bit worried about finding time to get all of this done when they go home and still have time for their family? Okay, here's the thing. You don't find time for anything in life. You make time, okay? It's not like your time is hiding under the bed collecting dust with your ab rocker. Okay? We don't find time. We have to make it. And so what I'm going to help you do today is find time. I'm going to help you build what I call a perfect week formula. It's the type of stuff that I've been helping Bedros and Joel do over the past couple of years so that they have more time for what matters, not only in their business, so that they grow faster as they talk about scaling with you this afternoon, but also so that they have more time for their family and themselves. So we're going to go through this and if I can help you make 10 more hours in the week, would you be interested in that? Great. So in addition to this, I'm also going to teach you a little bonus exercise that will help you do that. You guys okay with the free bonus? Good. Love it. Love it. First, real quick story about myself. As my intro mentioned, I did have crippling anxiety attacks. So back in 2006, I literally went to the emergency room twice thinking I was having a heart attack. In fact, the second time it happened, it actually lasted for six weeks straight. So for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for six weeks straight, it felt like I was having a heart attack. I had tingling from the top of my head down to the end of my fingertips, tight chest, elevated heart rate. I couldn't breathe properly and I didn't know what it was. Fortunately, I was able to overcome that. But it made me realize I had to put a whole lot more structure into my life. Because at that point in my life, I actually had total freedom. I had built my turbulence training business that allowed me to quit my job as a personal trainer and gave me total freedom in my life. Or at least that's what I thought. But I realized I had what's called the paradox of freedom. I had too much freedom. I was working all the time with no boundaries. And I know that as you sit there, you can relate where sometimes you're like working till 11 o' clock at night. Where did that time go? It's because you didn't have the boundaries in place to be successful. And so what I decided to do back when I had that anxiety attack, I did what anybody would do. I bought a dog. I bought a dog because I read that buying a dog and petting a dog would actually help you get rid of your anxiety. And so I bought a dog. I did yoga and meditation. I did qigong, which is standing meditation. All these things turned over every rock. And it helped me take back control of my life by putting more structure into my life. So I know what you're thinking. Oh, man, structure. I don't want more structure. I've already got these rules with my business. I've already got rules from the government on taxes. I've already got too many rules and too much structure in my life. But here's the thing. Structure equals freedom. Structure allows you to get everything done that you want to to do in your business. And there's a guy who says it much more eloquently than me, a guy named Paulo Coelho, a very famous best selling author. And he says this discipline and freedom are not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent. Because without discipline, you would sink into chaos. And that's what happened to me back in 2006.

Too much freedom, no structure, no discipline. And the next thing you know, I Had those anxiety attacks. So what I decided to do was I decided to put the structure into place. Right now you have a page in front of you. On one side, you have a done Perfect Week formula. Don't be intimidated by all the lines that are on there. On the other side, you have a blank one. And I'm gonna walk you through that as we go through the next hour to help you build this, to make 10 more hours for you so that you can either stop doing a whole bunch of stuff and have those 10 hours free, or you can stop doing a bunch of stuff that you shouldn't be doing, which a lot of us are doing. We're doing things that we should be delegating to somebody else or simply stop doing in our business. And Therefore, you'll have 10 more hours to spend on the most important stuff. So you have across the top. And don't worry about my bad handwriting. You have that in front. I'm just gonna knock off some boxes as we go through this. So this is called the Perfect Week formula. After I wrote the Perfect Day Formula, which was my first book, and then I started working with so many entrepreneurs like yourself, I realized I wrote the wrong book. I wrote the wrong book with the Perfect Day formula because not every day looks the same. Not everybody's life looks the same. And so I needed to come up with a new system to help you guys build this out. And it's going to again, allow you to get more done and make more time for what matters now. I first started building this out because of Bedros. So Bedros and I, we do a lot of stuff. Who here is actually watching Empire Podcast show or two? Oh, great. You guys are awesome. So we have a podcast, we talk back and forth. We film it down in Chino Hills where he has his Fit Body Boot Camp headquarters. And every Wednesday, doesn't matter if we've been filming all day, doesn't matter if we've been running a mastermind. At five o' clock on Wednesday, as you'll see on that filled out page, it's date night for Bedros. It's a non negotiable. And so at 5 o', clock, it doesn't matter if we had been doing the filming. It doesn't matter if we've run the mastermind. He'll look at me and he'll go, hey, buddy, you're on your own tonight. And it doesn't matter if we're driving down the highway, he'll just kick me out of the car. And that's It, I'm on my own. Sometimes he actually has me babysit his kids. That's me, babysit his kids because it's date night for him and Diana. He builds his travel around this. He builds everything around this because it's the most important thing in his life.

Now, what most of us do as entrepreneurs, right, we try and fit in the important stuff. We try and find time for the important stuff. And it never happens. It never happens. A lot of entrepreneurs that I work with, they say, craig, I want to have more date nights. And I go, how often do you have date night? They go, once a month. And I go, how often do you want to do it?

Date night? That is, how often do you want to do date night? Well, it's the same question, I guess, right? And so, so they say every week. Okay, if you want to have date night every week, what's the solution? It's actually really simple. You start with a blank slate, which is the blank slate you have on the one side, and you fill in what matters first. So you see a little line, a little phrase across the bottom of the page and it says, build your business around your life, not your life around your business.

Joel has a hundred million dollar supplement company, has two young kids, and he still has dinner with them every night. Bader's has 700, 800 franchises with fit Body Boot Camp, maybe it's even more. And he still gets home for dinner with his family every night, has time for his son to play ping pong with him every night or guitar or whatever. They're playing time for his daughter every night.

Because he makes time for what matters. So as you see there, on Wednesday night, it says date night. And I want you to think about what's like one of the most non negotiable big rocks that should go on that calendar that you're missing out on right now. And so what we're going to do is we're doing a little exercise where we're going to build this perfect week for you so that you can still be super successful in your business, but also take back control of the time that has been getting away from you. So right now you're gonna take that blank page and you're gonna find one thing. It could be date night. It could be something that's been missing from your life for a long time. Man, I just wish I could get back into to dance or to seeing some of my friends again. Because I know, I know from living the hard way that, man, the older I get, the more I have to plan in fun.

I'm 43 years old, I've been doing this for 25 years almost. And the every single year that I work too much, it gets harder in order to get back into making time for friends. Okay, so one thing. Take that blank sheet and put down. It could be date night, it could be a hobby. Just fill in one block, doesn't matter what day, doesn't matter what it is, but put something on the calendar that's really important to you.

All right? So now the next thing, the next thing that I want you to do is I want you to take a look at the Sunday. The Sunday is very important because right now you're thinking, well, how the heck am I going to be able to do this every single week? And one of the things that I learned from this guy named Robin Sharma, who here has read a Robin Sharma book, I read the monk who sold his Ferrari at age 25 had a huge impact on me. It's a really fantastic book. So Robin Sharma is a very wise sage and he explains that every Sunday morning you should do something that he refers to as a beautiful planning session. Now if anybody plans their week out, usually they're waiting until Sunday night. So they're stressing all day about it. Oh yeah, I gotta plan my week out tonight. And then they rush through it and it's not a thorough job. And when you don't have that detailed planning, that's when things start to fall apart. So he encourages you to do that. 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Because once we get through this exercise, you'll have a very good template. And then every Sunday morning you can fill in the details, you know, because your kids activities are changing, your hobbies are changing, your travel is changing, but you'll have a fantastic, fantastic template. And so you add that in on Sunday morning. And you can see right before that, I suggest that you do a bit of weekly reflection. So you got your planning here on Sunday morning. A beautiful planning session where you don't rush through it and then you have some reflection on Sunday morning. Now here's why I want to teach you an exercise called watching the movie of your life. Watching the movie of your life. You can do this daily, but make sure you do this weekly. And so it's simply this, you look back at your calendar and you look at what you wanted to achieve and then you run through what you actually did. And I actually do this daily. And here's how this would look. So let's say, okay, I sit down at about 7 o' clock maybe before dinner, right after dinner. And I look at my calendar. Okay, this is what I want to do. I want to get up really early in the morning. I get up at 4 o' clock in the morning. You don't have to get up at 4 o' clock in the morning. But I get up at 4 o' clock in the morning. I want to write first thing in the morning, 90 minutes. And then I want to go and walk the dog or go and do meditation and do a little bit of that stuff. And then I want to prepare for my team meetings, have great meetings, have a workout at lunch, then after lunch, I usually do podcasts, I do filming, I do all that sort of stuff. And I want to end the day early. And let's say I want to get to bed early that night because I have an early morning flight the next day. Alright, great, that's the plan. Now what actually happened in my life, this is the watching the movie of your day, the movie of your week. So I'd sit there and go, okay, great, I got up on time, I didn't hit the snooze button. I did my writing great on time, did a little bit of meditation and then I went for a walk. And then after the walk, I got on Instagram, got on Instagram, screwed around too much. The next thing you know, I rush through the planning for my meetings. Rushing through the planning for my meetings led me to be not fully prepared for my team meetings. And they could tell, they could tell. And I know this because I've done this. And then the rest of the day went great. And now it's 7 o' clock and I definitely feel like, oh man, I'm not gonna be able to fall asleep tonight cause I had too much caffeine in the afternoon. And when you do this little exercise, whether you do it on Sunday morning or whether you do it every single day, which I'll teach you in a second now you can start to do a little bit of what I call, you know, what we all call scientific method, cause and effect. We start to pair. I did this, this happened. And when you start to do that, you have that self reflection, introspection and self awareness. That's when you can start to make the changes in your life. It's much like running a split test on an offer. You have data, you have like, here's what we did, here's what happened. Same with our lives. Here's what I did, here's what happened. I go to Burger King at lunch every day and at 2 o', clock, I fall asleep in my chair. Most people go through their entire lives and don't make that connection. But you have to. You absolutely have to, because that allows you to be a high performer. And I look at every single entrepreneur as an athlete, as like a professional athlete. And one of the things that we do is we, first of all, we don't give ourselves enough breaks during the day. We don't, you know, correlate our food intake and how we perform. But I mean, look, you know, LeBron James doesn't play 48 straight minutes during the day. No, he takes breaks. They have halftime, they have quarter time TV timeouts because they know that in order for him to perform at the highest level, he has to have those rest and recovery. And so we usually put too much into our days. But if we go through this exercise and we become 1% better in using our time every day, then now we can become more productive, get more done, make more money, and have more time for what matters. So this self reflection on Sunday morning then sets up our planning. Now, you see, as I filled out, it's kind of like my example on a Sunday is that I have in there something called device free time. Listen, I'm as guilty as anybody in here of checking Instagram too much. But when I do these device free times, sometimes I'll go an entire day without any electronics. No phone, no laptop, no television. And it's a great mental reset. It helps you build the habit for resisting that stuff during the rest of the week. Now, if this terrifies you, the idea of not checking your phone for an entire day, start with three hours. Take back control over the phone. Because if you feel like you're addicted to it, it's not your fault. Because every single day, I like to tell my clients this. Every single day, you wake up and 150 PhDs from MIT wake up and go to work at Instagram. And it's you versus them who's going to win. They work every single day to make you addicted to that thing. Just like our best food scientists in America work for Doritos to make you addicted to Doritos. And you're never gonna win that battle. So you have to play a different game. You have to set the rules. All right, so I put a little device free time in here and then family dinner. So now the next thing that I want you to do and think about, you've got the Sunday morning planned out.

We want to make sure we have time for family. Doesn't matter if you have a Family or not, friends can be part of your family. What I want you to do on the calendar right now is fill in time for family. Remember, we are building our business around our life and not our life around our business. That's a huge distinction. That's like making time versus finding time. So build your life. Build your business around your life, not your life around your business. I have a client who has kids that are 12 years old, 12 and 13. He knows that the clock is ticking. In five years from now, they are not going to be able to have family movie night. So that's why I have that on the calendar. Every Friday, this guy plans family movie night. They all turn their phones off at 7 o' clock because he knows he maybe has a year left of this and this is what matters to him most. So if you want to have family dinner, if you want to have family movie night, if you want to take the kids to topgolf on Saturday afternoon, or you just want to have family time on Saturday afternoon, put that on the calendar now. Okay, take another minute. Put your family stuff on the calendar. We're not talking about any work yet. Family time next.

And if you're young, single and social, put that stuff on the calendar instead of the family stuff.

All right, we'll come on back. Now, the next thing that we're going to do, again, we're not putting work on the calendar yet. We are going to put taking care of ourselves. So if you want to work out, as you see on that sheet that I filled out, there's workouts across the page. Most of us, a lot of us want to work out more. We want to get more exercise, even if it's a walk outside, even if you're like, I never want to go to the gym. This is stupid. I hate going to the gym. That's fine. But it sure helps getting your butt off the chair for a little bit. So plan that into the day. And if you want to get massages, plan that in as well. Again, these are non negotiable big rocks. They go on the calendar first. And when you do this, when you put the date nights on, when you put the workouts in, when you put the massage on Thursday afternoon in, when you have the family movie night, when you have Sunday off, when you only are allowed to work a couple hours on Saturday, it's like taking a little kid bowling. When they put the bumpers up right, the kid can't make a mistake and neither can you because you put all this stuff on first and now you're forced to get more great work done. You're not going to screw around on Instagram, you're not going to screw around on Facebook, you're not going to mess around checking your stats a million times. You're actually going to get the work done because you have a limited amount of work time to deal with. So real quick, put some workout time on there, put any of the massage time on there, any of the stuff you need to do to take care of you. Okay, 30 seconds to do that.

All right, next thing we're gonna do is something that I resisted. I resisted this next piece of advice for seven years. And when I finally took it, it gave me more all day energy than anything I'd ever done before. And at the time I was very healthy guy, I was eating right, I was exercising all the time, I was a personal trainer. But when I did this next thing, it was the biggest game changer for my all day energy. And it was simply, we're going to put three lines on the calendar. Next, we're going to put your wake up time on the calendar. You're going to put your bedtime on the calendar and then you're going to put another line above that. The thing that I did that gave me more energy, allowed me to get more done every single day was going to bed at the same time every night and getting up at the same time every single day. And I know that's the worst advice, like you don't want to hear anything, you don't want nothing to do with that advice. I know, I know. But the most important part of this is trying not to deviate from your wake up time. If you sleep in on the weekends, you know, it's so hard to get to sleep on Sunday night, and then it's Monday, Tuesday, you're dragging your butt. So first of all, just write a line across the top, your best wake up time for you. Then write what time your bedtime is and then we're going to solve another major problem, which is.

I can never get to bed on time.

I know how that works. You know, you like, you want to go to bed 11 o' clock or midnight, and the next thing you know, it's 12:30, 1 o' clock and you wake up really tired the next day and you go, oh my gosh, tonight I'm gonna go to bed early or at least on time. And then that day rolls around and all this stuff piles up and the next thing you know, it's 11:30, 12:30 and you're getting to bed late. So who here uses a reverse alarm? Who knows what this is? Okay, reverse alarm is simply exactly what it sounds like. It is an alarm that goes off an hour before bed. One of my clients calls this Amish hour. This is where you turn off all your electronics. Okay? You're not allowed to use your iPhone. You're not allowed to use your laptop. You're now allowed to watch Netflix. Nothing. And then you're pretty much left with almost nothing to do, right? You can talk to your kids. You can hang out with your spouse. You can take a shower, you know, prepare your lunch for the next day. You can do all this stuff and read a book, and the next thing you know, you get to sleep on time. So it's another one of those bumpers and boundaries that we put in place so that we follow a better schedule and we have better energy for the next day. You see, there's another line on here. This line is what I call the cutoff line. And it's probably the most important part of this page. This is the end of day, end of day line. You're gonna do three things at the end of the day that are going to help you become more productive, more successful. And the more that I work with entrepreneurs, the more that I realize those that are as detailed as possible in the planning part of this are the ones that have the greatest success. So I like to describe entrepreneurs as people who. You've got so much stuff going on in your head. It's like as if I came over, I pulled back your cranium. I took one of those old school jigsaw puzzle boxes and poured all 1,000 pieces into your head, and I put your cranium back, and I walked away. And all that clutter is in there, right? We've got all these things we want to do. It causes a lot of stress, causes a lot of anxiety. So how do we fix that? Well, the first part. There's three parts to this exercise. And the first part is called a brain dump. A brain dump is where you take a scrap piece of paper, and you're just going to write down all the things in your head. It's like taking all those jigsaw puzzle pieces and putting them out over the table. And when you do that, you feel like the weight of the world is, like, going off your shoulders.

So what you'll do at the end of the day could be at your end of your work day. It could be before dinner, it could be right after dinner. You just write down all the things you have to do the next day, all the people you have to contact, all the errands you have to run, all the stuff you have to do, and you'll feel great just getting it out. Now the second part is a lot of people get to this point, they'll do a priority to do list, right? We'll do, okay, these are the three most important things I have to do the next day. Good. You might organize the rest of it, but at least you know what you're going to do. Because if you do your to do list in the morning, you're already too late. Because in the morning you have the greatest willpower, discipline and intention. And if you're making to do lists in the morning, you're using your most important time. And that line that in the morning you have the greatest discipline, willpower and intention comes from scientific research. It's in this book called when by Daniel Pink, which is.

The science behind when to do everything.

And so again, if you're making your list in the morning, it's too late. You got to do it the night before. And the more detailed you are, the more success you're going to have. Now, most people get to that point. But the third part, the real secret in this is what I call doing a little bit of process planning. So I stole this from a book called Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. And they're talking about, how do we make habits stick? How can, you know if we want to do something, how can we make it actually stick instead of falling back into old bad behaviors? And their answer was, make it as easy as possible to do the right thing and make it as hard as possible to do the wrong thing. And their example was simple. A lot of people want to exercise first thing in the morning. They wake up, they go, oh my gosh, my exercise clothes are all the way across the room. I'll just go back to bed. And so they said, why don't you just put the exercise clothes beside the bed, or if they're clean, wear them to bed. And then you wake up, you got them on, you're like, oh my God. Well, I'm half done, half begun. Alright, so if we do a little bit of planning for what we need to do the next morning, then it becomes easier to get into that becomes easier, less friction for us to become more productive. So I'm a writer and one of the things that I do, obviously in the morning is I write for an hour, hour and a half sometimes. But if I go down to the computer and I say, well, you know what? I gotta write chapter two for the book today. And I open it up and there's a blank screen there. It's going to be hard for me to write. I might get writer's block. But if I put together five bullet points the night before, it becomes much easier for me to write the next morning. So whatever it is that you have to do the next day, you know your top one, two or three activities, do a little bit of work the night before to set you up for success the next morning. So if you do those three things during this cutoff time, this end of day time, you'll be very successful.

Last thing about this, who here has young kids? Okay, you probably have experienced this where you're end of your workday and the kids get home from school, or maybe you work at an office and you're going home to the kids and you still have work on your mind. You have your phone in your hand and work on your mind, and you know it's not the best and you know the kids notice and you don't want this to happen anymore. So we came up with this cute little thing for my clients about how to fix this. There's two parts to it, actually. So if you do work outside of the home, or if you have a home office and you leave the home office and you go out and you get attacked by the kids, and you know they're high energy and want to spend time with you, you need to make that mental transition. So the first thing that I did for one of my clients, he owns a gym, he drives home. As soon as he gets home, two young kids attack him. He's not in the mood for it, is we have him listen to a song on the way home that reminds him of time with the kids. It just totally gets him from work dad to super dad mode. So he walks in the door and now he's much more present. But the magic in this is when you go in the door, when you leave your office, you have this little ritual with your kids. And you might just have this with your partner as well, but it's cuter with the kids. So my clients go in, the young kids come over and they take mommy or daddy's phone and they put it in the phone bed or the phone box, okay? It's this little ritual that we do every night. Walk in, hey, Laura, we're going to go and take the phone, we're going to put it in the phone bed. And one of my clients, his daughter plays the piano and she plays A little lullaby every time he comes in. They made a little bed out of an egg carton box and they have a little blanket and they put the phone in the phone bed. And it's cute, right? But then he's present with them for 30 minutes and the next thing you know, the kids are off doing something else. And it's that 30 minutes. It's not three hours, it's just 30 minutes of present time is exponentially greater than three hours of this time. Okay, so that's another thing that we do at the end of the day. Now the next thing I want you to do is we're going to plan out our morning routines. And on the, on the page there, you see, there's the phrase nui. Who here is familiar with Stephen Covey's four quadrants?

The four quadrants are like this.

What's this stand for?

Urgent and important. Checking, emails, getting back to people, stuff that has to be done. But if we spend our entire lives in urgent and important stuff, we never get the real stuff done. This is activity. And what's this stand for?

Non urgent but important. This is where the magic happens. This is the accomplishment in life. This is the writing of the sales letters, the creation of the funnels. This is the getting back to people. And so these are the most important. Obviously we don't want to spend any time in non urgent or non important urgent stuff, which is like checking to see how many points LeBron got last night. Doesn't matter. And non urgent and non important, obviously we stay out of there. But the non urgent important is where the magic happens.

And that's why I suggest that you do this work first thing in the morning when you have the greatest willpower, discipline and intention.

So I used to be a personal trainer. I did not like being a personal trainer. I wanted to stop being a personal trainer. But I was a personal trainer from 6:00am until 11. Then I had a two hour break and then again from like 1 to 2 until 7:00 o' clock at night. And we all think, oh, when we get home, especially those of us that might still have a side job, oh, when I get home, I'll just work on it at night. Good luck. It takes more discipline to do it at night than it does to do it in the morning. So at age 25, I was getting up at 4:30 in the morning. I was working on my online business for 15 minutes a day. And in 18 months it set me free because I was doing the non urgent important work first thing. And I know a lot of people, they love to get up and do all this self care stuff. They want to do yoga and meditation and gratitude journaling and freeform journaling, interpretive dance all before like you know, 8 o' clock in the morning. And the next thing you know their morning routine has become this three and a half hour perverse form of procrastination. And they wonder why they're not getting ahead in life. And it's because they're not making the time for for the non urgent important work.

So in my book Perfect day formula, I tell people, give me 15 minutes, give me 15 minutes first thing in the morning to work on that stuff that we planned the night before.

Right here. And you will be amazed at how you are able to change your life in 15 minutes at a time. 15 minutes six days a week is 72 hours. In a year it's two full work weeks working on the most important stuff that you will not find time for in here. Okay? So after I do my writing, I give myself the SC that stands for self care stuff. So that's the yoga, the meditation. I do a little bit of meditation, 10 minutes calms me down, I focus on my breathing. That's one of the things that help me overcome the anxiety. Massive change. And then I get on with my day. But I've already won the day because of this. And we've all had days where we get up with great intention, we have big projects and the next thing you know we get caught in that urgent and important and at five o' clock we go, man, I was so busy today, I got nothing done. And if you have a bunch of those in a row, that's when you start to lose the momentum and motivation that you need to keep on going. So as you can see, we have put all of this stuff on before we put our regular work on. And now I want to do one more thing before we do that. So this is where I'm going to save you the 10 hours.

So if you have a scrap piece of paper, what I want you to do is draw four quadrants here.

So in the top left and then put a little box down in each corner.

And the top left is where we're going to talk about the things that we hate doing in our business. What do you hate doing in your business? For me I hate doing calls in the morning, I know better. But I still put them on the calendar. I got one tomorrow and you dummy, why did you do that? I hate it because I think about it, I know that's the time of day when I should be getting my best work done, sometimes I still make that mistake. So write down what you hate doing in your business.

Because what we're going to do is we're going to find other people to do those things, or we're just going to change the schedule around the next thing. What should you stop doing?

What simply doesn't matter in your business. What are you doing? And we're all doing stuff on a daily basis that is not moving the needle ahead in our business. And we still do it. We still do it out of habit, out of compulsion. For me, it's going on small podcasts. I did 275 podcasts. I was interviewed on 275 podcasts to promote my book, the first book that I did. And it helped me because I'm actually a very introverted person. I have introverted tendencies, I like to say. And it helped me become a better speaker. It helped me tell my stories better. And so I needed to do that work, but now I don't. And every single day, I probably get asked to be on five podcasts. And if I go on a podcast that's an hour long, that has 500 listeners, and I go on it because I don't want to be that jerk who says no to somebody's podcast. Well, now I'm actually. I'm not just wasting one hour, right? I'm wasting the preparation time for it. I'm wasting that all day thinking, why did I sign up for this podcast, Right? That energy. And the next thing you know, each one of the podcast hours cost me two hours. What if I went and filmed two hours worth of YouTube videos? I have one YouTube video that's been watched three and a half million times. Do you think that would be a better use of my time to make YouTube videos than to be on a small podcast? Yes. So write down what you should stop doing because it does not serve your business in any way. You're simply just doing it. And then write down in this corner how many hours it will save you. If I stop doing morning calls, it's saving me two hours a week minimum. If I stop doing small podcasts, it's two hours minimum. The next box down here. What's not your job? What are you doing? That is not your job? We are all doing stuff that is not our job. Video uploads, video editing, all that stuff. And I'm Was. Was still doing video uploads to Instagram. I make my stories every day. It's actually a really great source of my business these days. But I don't have to be one who puts it up there. So I film them. I film them in a batch. I send them off to one of my team members. She puts my stories up there. But I was for a long time doing stuff that is not my job. Customer service, we've all got those things. Write that down. How many hours that's gonna save you? Sales calls. Another thing, I have a guy on my team who's my phone sales guy and I still take some of the sales calls. Now the best thing I have to do to fix that is train him better. I need to put my hours into training and then finally bottom right. What are the distractions in your life? Where are you wasting time?

Me, it's half an hour a day, in the middle of the afternoon or at the end of the day on Instagram. I could be doing something much better than going on Instagram. And when, when I get rid of these hours.

Next thing you know, you're saving 10 hours here. So you can either use these hours for your family, your health, or you can use those hours to put into more of that non urgent important work. All of a sudden, with 10 extra hours, if you had 10 extra. Who here, if they had 10 extra hours, could grow their business faster, right? Great. Great. So now we go back this page.

There's just two last things I want to put on it. One, and I'm sure most of you have heard the phrase deep work. It's very similar to that non urgent important stuff. But deep work is the, I like to call it, magic time. Magic time is the time of day when you are more productive, more creative, more energetic than in any other time of the day. For me, it's in the morning. And most people, if you do a little bit of self reflection, if you watch the movie of your day, you'll identify when you are more productive, more creative, more energetic than any other time of the day. When you get into that flow, and I like to say you can probably get three hours of work done in an hour at that time of day. But what do most of us do? We squander it. We let it be sucked up by emails, by meetings, by phone calls. And so what you have to do is when you find that magic time, you have to dedicate it to your deep work. Okay? You dedicate it to the things that are gonna move your business ahead. If you can get, if you can get two 90 minute blocks in a day of focused work, that's much more than most entrepreneurs are able to do these days. So if you can get at least one, great. If you can get two, you're gonna get so far ahead of the competition. And then the last thing that I want you to consider as you build out these perfect week for you is that not every day has to look the same. If you're an entrepreneur, if you control your hours, if you control what you do, realize that Monday doesn't have to look the same as Friday. One of my clients, a financial Advisor, he has 24 financial advisors on his team. He's the head guy. And in the 18 months we've been working together, he hasn't worked a single Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Because he front loads the week. He front loads the week. So he'll work 12 hours on a Monday, he'll work 10 hours on him Tuesday, he'll work 8 to 10 on a Wednesday, he'll work 8 on a Thursday. And that way he has Friday, Saturday, Sunday off. And I follow that same sort of model so that you have whatever life you desire. This is the epitome. This is ugly. Sorry. This is the epitome of building your business around your life and not your life around your business. And when you take back control of your time.

Then you can make more time for what matters. Personally, professionally, you know what you need to do. You know what moves you ahead in your business.

Joel knows that it's writing his copy. That guy's world class. And if he did not make the time for writing the copy.

He'D never make the time to move the business ahead the way that he did. Same with Bedros. If he did not make the time for what matters at work and on the date nights and with his kids, he wouldn't have the great life that he has today. So that's what I encourage you to do. Make those 10 hours, make time for what matters, so that you have your business built around your life and not your life around your business. And so that you can grow your business faster than ever.

Hey, team, real quick, shameless plug here. If you've ever seen my company logo for capitalism.com, it's a red sea with a flame at the end. And the reason why that's the company logo is because I believe that our purpose as a company and my purpose as a leader is to light other fires. And that means creating content for entrepreneurs who go on to build great companies, Working with entrepreneurs to help them break through their plateaus and to invest in companies that really have a shot at breaking out. Teaching this stuff so that more success stories get created. I like to light fires. That's, that's what I'm here to do. One of the ways that I do that is inside of our monthly membership which is called the 1%. And inside there we send out a monthly newsletter which features case studies of success stories, what's working right now from some of the best people in the world who are doing this stuff or building businesses and investing the profits. And we feature business ideas that, that you can literally rip off and steal. We often even just throw keyword lists at you and say, go for it. Hey, we might even invest in this post in the community. You'll probably find an investor too. And the idea is to bring together investors, entrepreneurs, influencers in one place where we can light fires really, really quickly. We also have a year long curriculum that is made to help you build businesses, invest the profits, increase your profits, create the change you want to see in the world. You, you can't not change as a result of going through this. So you can find out more@capitalism.com 1 if you've been listening to the podcast and you're missing community, you're missing opportunity, you're missing connection, you're missing being a part of a movement that is going to make you a better entrepreneur. This is going to fix that for you. It also gives you discounts on our events and our other products. And it's more than worth 10. $10 for every dollar we charge. That's my rule as an entrepreneur. I don't collect a dollar unless I know I can provide 10. And this absolutely meets that. So that's@capitalism.com the number one. Hope to see you inside.

Sam.