Codie Sanchez argues you can change your life in three days by deciding faster and acting immediately. She uses Amazon's 70% decision threshold, Navy SEALs training, and Elon Musk examples to show how rapid execution beats perfectionism. A five-minute rule for small tasks and cutting meetings are the concrete moves.
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What if everything you want is on the other side of three days? This is mountaineer Cillian Jornett setting a world record by climbing Mount Everest. Not in 60 days. In three days. Twice. Then we got the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of the most iconic books ever written. And the entire first draft was written in three days. You don't need a year. You need three days to change your life. We're gonna break down how people do it, how you can steal their homework, how to take your one year goals and put them into a matter of days. It comes down to one thing. Moving fast. But how do you actually do that? Well, you copy how the most successful people in the world move more quickly than you do to achieve their goals. So here are the simple frameworks they use. That if you inserted it into your life, will make you quicker than 99% of people. And to prove just how much can be done in three days, I'm doing something I've never done before. But you will have to wait to end the end. First UP is the 7030 rule, which means stop aiming to be perfect and start aiming for progress. This framework is so effective, Jeff Bezos built his entire empire on it. He's doing pretty fine. He calls it the two way door concept.
Most decisions are two way doors. You pick a door, you walk out, it turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in and pick another door. Some decisions, they really are one way door decisions. Those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully.
When Amazon launched One Day Delivery, they didn't want the perfect logistics. They started with about 70% confidence, refined the process as they went, and quickly dominated the market. Bezos even said himself most decisions should probably be made with around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90, you're being slow.
Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions. So it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity.
The Strategic Management Journal found that companies making quick decisions outperformed those that delayed progress over perfection. But make it data. Next time you're stuck, set a timer, give yourself 30 minutes to gather information and make the call. Do I have 70% of what I need? If the answer is yes, you go for it. You can always pivot later. I love this one. It'll help you get what needs to be done. The Navy seals use this in every single framework that they do. I should know. My husband was a Navy seal. It's a concept called goal shielding. Think of it as like Marie Kondo ing your priorities, you ask yourself for each task. Is this critical, essential or enhancing? Critical is you don't have a tire, you can't drive a car, it has to be fixed now. Essential is you're not out of gas, but you're kind of close, so it's a priority enhancing. You'd like to have a supercharger for your car, but you don't need to have it. Author one of my favorite books, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has a great line on this. The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. Seems obvious. Nobody does this. See where you can save three minutes or five minutes or 10 minutes and those minutes become hours and days and weeks. That is how you make time. Use this framework, you'll quickly find yourself with more time, less stress, fewer emergencies that aren't really emergencies. I'd start by trying to do this with your own to do lists. Look at every task and ask which one is this? Watch how much lighter your schedule gets when you focus on the first two categories and nothing else. Have you ever felt like you're frantically working but at the end of the day you've accomplished nothing? That's what I call the delusion of doing meetings, endless planning, asking for advice to make you feel productive. These are just busy work and doing the thing is going to take you a lot further than listening to the hundredth book or podcast about doing the thing. You're still not doing it. Elon Musk, most productive man on earth, is known for running his companies like this. When Tesla was built its first gigafactory, for example, they didn't even wait to finalize the design before they started breaking ground. They started construction. Then they figured things out. The result? They beat their competitors to market and have become a multi billion dollar company. I heard another saying they use in the military that I love, which is a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. Stop thinking. Start doing the five minute rule. If something takes less than five minutes, do it now. The people that are the fastest to reply are nearly always the most successful people I know. I've also found that if it takes 30 seconds, you should really do it now. I am a psychopath about my time. I am not going to respond to every in five minutes, but I am going to make sure that if there's a task that I could do during a meeting immediately I'm going to do it. This is the Reason why a lot of times people go, how do you get stuff done so quickly? Because I never wait for the end of the meeting. When you say you're going to do a thing, it takes less than 30 seconds or 5 minutes. Do it now. This is how you don't let the small get in the way of the big. It's what's called opportunity cost. Right time. Thinking about doing the five minute task rather than actually doing it. That turns into the five minute task. Every time you notice a quick task replying to a message, putting something away, just do it. Especially if you don't want to do it. Famously, Mark Twain said, if you're going to eat a frog, eat it first thing in the morning. If you're going to eat two, eat the big one first. Elon Musk has a strict no meetings rule at Tesla and SpaceX. The basic rule for the meetings is that unless somebody is getting enormous value from the information they're receiving, they should not be there. If something needs to be discussed, he picks up the phone. Period. Which is fascinating. Like this Harvard Business Review. They show that executives spend 23 hours a week in meetings. And we all know most, most of that isn't needed. Next time someone invites you to a meeting, ask yourself, can this be solved with a quick call? Can it be solved with a slack? Challenge yourself for one week. Try replacing every non essential meeting with a 10 minute phone call. If you've never read this book, you must. This is one of the biggest lessons in the book. The less meetings you have in your life, the better. Not only will you save time, but you'll also leave space in your day for the stuff that actually matters. Not ones that are totally unnecessary just to prove that somebody's actually working to prove quite how much you can do in three days, I am doing something I've never done before. I am hosting a three day event which will be all about buying businesses and how to accelerate decades into days through business acquisitions. By the end of it, you guys will know everything you need to know about how to buy a business. You'll go deeper than anything we've ever talked about and you won't have to start a startup and make no money. You could actually buy a business that already makes money.
