Chad Silverstein (speaker) reflects on lessons from his decade in YPO entrepreneur forums: members practice ‘experience sharing’ and consistently carry notebooks. He argues that successful, high-performing entrepreneurs keep pen-and-paper notebooks or digital tools (mentions Trello, Evernote, Asana, Upbase) to capture insights, maintain to-do lists, and prioritize by circling the top 1 (or top 3) tasks each day to avoid distraction and ensure progress. The piece emphasizes building a personal ‘playbook of productive actions’ aligned with one’s purpose.
Chapters
For over a decade, I was part of an organization called ypo. And what YPO is, is they take entrepreneurs number ones or number twos in any system, and they put them into what's called a forum. And in that forum of anywhere from eight to 10 people, you get together once a month and you do something called experience sharing. So if you're selling your company and you want to learn from other people who have sold their company or have experienced something in that world, you get to hear the experience of other entrepreneurs who have gone through something similar. There's a lot of wisdom, a lot of knowledge gets shared in these mastermind groups. And it's a real special organization. And the one thing that I remember always saying, no matter where I was, whose office I was in, which group I was part of, is that everybody always showed up with pen and paper. Everybody had a notebook, and it wasn't a notebook that was only showing up at these meetings. Highly successful people write things down and have lists of things to do and check them off and get things done. You know, they always say that if you want to get something done, find a busy person to get it done, because busy people are just busy getting things done. And that's a real special quality that people have when they could just knock things out. Now you have to make sure that what you're doing has purpose and it's aligned with your ideals that you're pursuing so that you're not just doing all the time. But again, for the most part, when people are successful and they're high performers, they. They are really busy getting the job done, whatever that means, and having your process. What we like to say in our leadership program is your playbook of productive actions. You don't need anything crazy. I've used software, I've used everything from Atrello to Evernote Asana, and I use something now called Upbase. That's really cool. There are tons of tools that you can have. None of them matter. All you have to do is find something that works for you. But the. There's no substitute for carrying a notebook, capturing insights, writing out lists of things that you need to do and to take it to another level, having your list of things to do and then starting your day off, circling the most important thing to get done and making sure that you do that before you do anything else, or your top three priorities to make sure that you accomplish those things before you get to everything else so that you don't become easily distracted. But again, there's something to be said. Why so many entrepreneurs, why so many successful high performers all carry a notebook? Why all of them have these to do lists? Why they're just knocking things out day in and day out. So the question is, what's your playbook of productive action? And how are you handling your process for how you get things done? How quickly and how much do you knock out in a day? And how much of that is focused on the most important thing? The most 1, 2, 3 most important things on your list so that you don't get easily distracted and take yourself off track from what? What needs to get done. Highly successful people know how to get things done. Do you.
